Archiwum
- Index
- H.P. Lovecraft Le Montagne Della Follia
- H. P. Lovecraft The Mountains of Madness
- Frederik Pohl Heechee 1 Gateway
- Ian Rankin [Jack Harvey 03] Blood Hunt (v4.0) (pdf)
- 1060. Way Margaret Zapisane w gwiazdach
- Heinlein, Robert A Waldo
- D341. Malek Owens Doreen U kresu tuśÂ‚aczki
- Asimov Isaac x8] Pozytronowy czśÂ‚owiek
- Bird Beverly Samotny śźeglarz
- C.S. Lewis L'Ultima Battaglia
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- gim12gda.pev.pl
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relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally looked down
at the snow and ice of the land route, wondering whether we could have attempted
the trip with the simpler equipment of earlier days. Somewhat to our surprise we
saw that the terrain was far from difficult as such things go; and that despite
the crevasses and other bad spots it would not have been likely to deter the
sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appeared
to lead up to wind-bared passes with unusual continuity, and upon reaching our
chosen pass we found that its case formed no exception.
Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and peer
out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even though we had
no cause to think the regions beyond the range essentially different from those
already seen and traversed. The touch of evil mystery in these barrier
mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their
summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in
literal words. Rather was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and
aesthetic association - a thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and
with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes. Even the wind s
burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and for a second it seemed
that the composite sound included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over a
wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave
mouths. There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as
complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions.
We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of twenty-three thousand, five
hundred and seventy feet according to the aneroid; and had left the region of
clinging snow definitely below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes and
the start of rough-ribbed glaciers - but with those provocative cubes, ramparts,
and echoing cave mouths to add a portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and
the dreamlike. Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the
one mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed to be half
lost in a queer antarctic haze - such a haze, perhaps, as had been responsible
for Lake s early notion of volcanism. The pass loomed directly before us, smooth
and windswept between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a
sky fretted with swirling vapors and lighted by the low polar sun - the sky of
that mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.
A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth and I,
unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced
through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged
eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last few feet, we did indeed
stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets of an elder and
utterly alien earth.
V
I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror,
and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay
beyond. Of course, we must have had some natural theory in the back of our heads
to steady our faculties for the moment. Probably we thought of such things as
the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the
fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps we
even half thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on
first approaching those mountains of madness. We must have had some such normal
notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred
plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular, and
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geometrically eurythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and pitted
crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its
thickest, and in places obviously thinner.
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation
of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient
table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to
habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago,
there stretched nearly to the vision s limit a tangle of orderly stone which
only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but
conscious and artificial cause. We had previously dismissed, so far as serious
thought was concerned, any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the
mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise,
when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at
the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial
death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of
squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable
refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark,
objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material
basis after all - there had been some horizontal stratum of ice dust in the
upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its image across the
mountains according to the simple laws of reflection, Of course, the phantom had
been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did
not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more
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