If the sculptured maps and pictures in that pre-human[1636] city had told truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than 300[1637] miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence jut[1638] above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then, must have been tremendous beyond all known[1639] comparison—carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled[1640] by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls.[1641] Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their accursed slopes[1642]—and wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently.[1643] I recalled how their northerly end must come near the coast at Queen Mary Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson’s expedition was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed[1644] a measure of my overwrought condition at the time—and Danforth seemed to be even worse.
Yet long[1645] before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane our fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast enough[1646] range whose re-crossing[1647] lay ahead of us.[1648] From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously against the east, again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the damnable honeycombs[1649] inside them, and of the[1650] frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their foetidly[1651] squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave-mouths[1652] where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range.[1653] To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the summits—as poor Lake must have done when he made that early mistake about volcanism—and thought shiveringly of that kindred mist from which we had just escaped;[1654] of that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering abyss whence all such vapours[1655] came.
All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying furs. Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a very smooth takeoff[1656] over the nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry spread out as it had done when first we saw it—so short, yet infinitely long, a time ago—and[1657] we began rising and turning to test the wind for our crossing through the pass.[1658] At a very high level there must have been great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things; but at 24,000[1659] feet, the height we needed for the pass, we found navigation quite practicable.[1660] As we drew close to the jutting peaks the wind’s strange piping again became manifest, and I could see Danforth’s hands trembling at the controls. Rank amateur though[1661] I was, I thought at that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over his duties he did not protest.[1662] I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the[1663] walls of the pass—resolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountaintop vapour,[1664] and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses’ men off the Sirens’[1665] coast to keep that disturbing wind-piping from my consciousness.
But[1666] Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky.[1667] It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster[1668] by shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely—yet[1669] I am afraid that Danforth will never be the same again.
I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind’s piping and the engine’s buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly—and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition,[1670] and others, at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.[1671]
All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed[1672] mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, daemoniac[1673] glimpse, among the churning zenith-clouds,[1674] of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognised[1675] mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake’s camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.[1676]
He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about “the[1677] black pit”, “the carven rim”, “the proto-shoggoths”, “the windowless solids with five dimensions”,[1678] “the nameless cylinder”,[1679] “the elder pharos”,[1680] “Yog-Sothoth”, “the primal white jelly”, “the colour out of space”, “the wings”, “the eyes in darkness”, “the moon-ladder”, “the original, the eternal, the undying”,[1681] and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the “Necronomicon”[1682] kept under lock and key in the college library.
The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that its swirls of ice-dust[1683] may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest—and of course[1684] Danforth did not hint any of those[1685] specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance.
At the time[1686] his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single[1687] mad word of all too obvious source:[1688]
“ Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
Editor’s Note: The extremely involved textual problems surrounding this work have been discussed in my article “Textual Problems in At the Mountains of Madness,” Crypt of Cthulhu No. 75 (Michaelmas 1990): 16–21. I can here do no more than outline the central issues. HPL’s original A.Ms. and T.Ms. survive; but after the tale was rejected by Weird Tales in the summer of 1931, the T.Ms. lay dormant for years. Through the services of agent Julius Schwartz, the tale was accepted by Astounding Stories and published in the February, March, and April 1936 issues. HPL, however, had manifestly revised certain portions of his original T.Ms. (a carbon of which was probably sent by Schwartz to Astounding), especially in regard to the hypothesis that the Antarctic continent was actually two land masses separated by a frozen sea—a hypothesis disproved by explorations in 1
934–35. But there are thousands of other divergences between the original T.Ms. and the Astounding text, raising the question as to how many of these changes are also deliberate revisions by HPL or alterations by the Astounding editors. I have concluded that the great majority of these divergences are editorial, and that the original T.Ms. should in nearly all instances be followed.
HPL himself, when he noted the extent of the alterations (chiefly in the third segment), specified the nature of some of the changes in a letter to R. H. Barlow (OFF 335f.)—excess punctuation, the breaking up of his long paragraphs into two or more shorter paragraphs, alterations of scientific terms, etc. He went on to state that he spent days in preparing three “corrected” copies of the issues of Astounding, adding omitted passages and fixing erroneous paragraphing in pencil and scraping off excess punctuation with a razor. However, it becomes evident that HPL failed to correct a substantial number of errors—e.g., the Americanisation of his British spellings, elimination of hyphens in compound words, the erroneous capitalisation of species names (e.g., “shoggoth”), and so on—either because he did not notice them or because he could not be bothered to do so. I believe that two small passages in Section III (the first instalment) omitted by Astounding were not restored in HPL’s “corrected” copies because he failed to notice their omission. Also, because HPL was correcting the story using the A.Ms. rather than the T.Ms. (which was at the time unavailable to him), he unwittingly restored erroneous readings from his A.Ms. that he himself had revised when preparing his original T.Ms. These “corrected” copies of Astounding are, therefore, only of minimal assistance in the restoration of the text.
August Derleth of Arkham House, when preparing the text for publication in The Outsider and Others (1939), used these corrected copies, since he knew that the printed text was severely corrupt. Although this text is therefore superior to the Astounding text, at least in terms of paragraphing and other details, it still contains thousands of apparent errors. There seems little option to following the original T.Ms. except in instances where demonstrable revisions occurred (in at least one passage, HPL appears to have added a sentence in the carbon submitted to Astounding, correcting a printing error in his “corrected” copies). Even such a text can only be considered provisional.
Texts: A = A.Ms. (JHL); B = T.Ms. (JHL); C = Astounding Stories 16, No. 6 (February 1936): 8–32; 17, No. 1 (March 1936): 125–55; 17, No. 2 (April 1936): 132–50; Cc = HPL’s corrections in his copies of the Astounding serialisation (JHL); D = At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Arkham House, 1964), 1–100. Copy-text: B (with some readings from C and Cc).
Notes
1. fossil-hunt] fossil hunt C, D
2. ice-cap—and] ice caps. And C, D
3. vain.] vain. ¶ C, D
4. yet] yet, Cc, D
5. favour;] favor, C, D
6. impostures;] impostures, D
7. of] and B, Cc
8. myth-cycles;] myth cycles; C, D
9. overambitious programme] over-ambitious programme A, B; over-/ambitious program C; over ambitious program D
10. madness.] madness. ¶ Cc
11. nature] natures Cc
12. geologist] geologist, C, D
13. Prof.] Professor C, D
14. department.] department. ¶ Cc
15. this;] this, C, D
16. collection.] collection. ¶ C, D
17. artesian] Artesian Cc
18. hardness.] hardness. ¶ Cc
19. 1000] one thousand C, D
20. carry; this being] carry. This was C, D
21. fashioned.] fashioned. ¶ Cc
22. material;] material— C, D
23. secured.] secured. ¶ Cc
24. life-history] life history C, D
25. arachnida,] arachnidae, B
26. blasting] blasting, C, D
27. exposed . . . exposed] exposed, . . . exposed, C, D
28. levels.] levels. ¶ Cc
29. depth on] the depth of D
30. mere] more Cc
31. dynamo.] dynamo. ¶ Cc
32. follow] follow, C, D
33. department (. . .),] department, (. . .) B; department—. . .— A, C, D
34. I] myself, C, D
35. assistants;] assistants: C, D
36. mechanics.] mechanics. ¶ Cc
37. Atwood,] Daniels, A; Atwood B, C, D
38. ex-whalers,] exwhalers, C
39. manned.] manned. Cc
40. thorough] thorough, C, D
41. publicity.] publicity. ¶ Cc
42. loaded.] loaded. ¶ Cc
43. marvellously] marvelously C, D
44. Harbour] Harbor C, D
45. 2, 1930;] 2nd, 1930, C, D
46. supplies.] supplies. ¶ Cc
47. party,] party D
48. waters.] waters. ¶ A, C, D
49. table-like] tablelike C, D
50. Antarctic Circle,] antarctic circle, C, D
51. 20th] 20 A, B
52. ice.] ice. ¶ Cc
53. rigours] rigors C, D
54. including] included Cc
55. 26th] 26 A
56. “land blink”] land blink C, D
57. death.] death. ¶ Cc
58. Sound] Sound, C, D
59. fancy-stirring, great] fancy-stirring. Great C, D
60. looming] loomed C, D
61. water lanes,] water-lanes, A, B
62. slope.] slope. ¶ Cc
63. raging] raging, C, D
64. wind;] wind, Cc
65. terrible.] terrible. ¶ Cc
66. “Necronomicon”] Necronomicon A, B, C, D
67. seventh] 7th A, B, C, D
68. barrier;] barrier, C, D
69. 200] two hundred C, D
70. navigation.] navigation. ¶ Cc
71. scoriac] scoriaceous Cc
72. 12,700] twelve thousand seven hundred C; twelve thousand, seven hundred D
73. Fujiyama;] Fujiyama, C, D
74. ghost-like] ghostlike A, B, C, D
75. 10,900] ten thousand nine hundred C; ten thousand, nine hundred D
76. volcano.] volcano. ¶ Cc
77. slope;] slope, C, D
78. later of] later: C, D
79. “—the . . . pole.”] —the . . . pole. D
80. Danforth] ¶ Danforth Cc, D
81. “Arthur Gordon Pym”.] Arthur Gordon Pym. C, D
82. myriads] myriad C
83. fins;] fins, C, D
84. midnight] midnight, Cc
85. arrangement.] arrangement. ¶ Cc
86. antarctic] Antarctic D
87. us.] us. ¶ Cc
88. one;] one, C, D
89. cameras] cameras, C, D
90. outfits (. . .)] outfits—. . .— C, D
91. visit.] visit. ¶ Cc
92. Mass.] Massachusetts. D
93. 55] fifty-five C, D
94. windstorms.] windstorms. ¶ Cc
95. rigours] rigors C, D
96. semi-permanent,] semipermanent, Cc
97. supplies.] supplies. ¶ C, D
98. men . . . ships] men, . . . ships, Cc
99. lost.] lost. ¶ Cc
100. 600 to 700] six hundred to seven hundred C, D
101. Glacier.] Glacier. ¶ Cc
102. bases;] bases, C, D
103. breath-taking . . . non-stop] breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop [non-/stop D] C, D
104. engines.] engines. ¶ Cc
105. coast-line.] coast line. ¶ C [paragraphing error corrected by HPL]; coast line. D
106. south, and even] south. Even C, D
107. realised] realized C, D
108. 15,000] fifteen thousand C, D
109. 13–15th.] 13–15. A, D; 13th to 15th. ¶ C [corr. by HPL to 13–15.]
110. 8500] eight thousand five hundred C; eight thousand, five hundred D
111. sea-level, and when] sea-level. When Cc
112. places] places, Cc
113. specimens.] specimens. ¶ Cc
114. homog
eneous] homogeneous, C, D
115. somewhat . . . hypothesis.] radically different from the parts lying eastward below South America, which in all probability form a separate and smaller continent divided from the larger by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas. A, B; somewhat . . . report. Cc
116. chiselled] chiseled C, D
117. fragments—] fragments; A, B, C, D
118. molluscs] mollusks C, D
119. gasteropods—] gasteropods; A, B; gastropods— C, D
120. connexion] connection C, D
121. marking . . . diameter] marking, . . . diameter, C, D
122. deep-blasted] deep blasted A, B
123. aperture.] aperture. ¶ Cc
124. rocks.] rocks. ¶ Cc
125. 6,] 6th, B
126. wind which fortunately] wind, which, fortunately, C, D
127. develop] develope D
128. flights;] flights, C, D
129. explorers.] explorers. ¶ Cc
130. respect;] respect, C, D
131. foretastes.] foretastes. ¶ Cc
132. sun.] sun. ¶ Cc
133. flying,] flying D
134. 500] five hundred C, D
135. division, as . . . it.] division. A, B
136. comparison.] comparison. ¶ Cc
137. excellent;] excellent, B; excellent— C, D
138. lime-juice] lime juice C, D
139. furs.] furs. ¶ Cc
140. programme,] program, C, D
141. base.] base. ¶ Cc
142. deal, . . . daring,] deal . . . daring B, Cc
143. striated] straited D
144. Nature] nature A, B, C, D
145. belonged.] belonged. ¶ Cc
146. of] on B, Cc
147. 500] five hundred C, D
148. imagination;] imagination, C, D
149. revolutionising] revolutionizing C, D
150. geology.] geology. ¶ Cc