Archiwum
- Index
- H.P. Lovecraft Le Montagne Della Follia
- H P Lovecraft At the Mountains of Madness
- Jacques Vallee Dimensions A Casebook Of Alien Contact
- salon venecia 2
- 0915. Sullivan Maxine Dom marześÂ„
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- 002 The Old Republic Revan Karpyshyn Drew
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were nearly all dead, and the mammals were standing it none too well. To keep
on with the work of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of
the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land life - a thing
the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now
lifeless, and the upper sea had lost most of its denizens except the seals and
whales. All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.
What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new
sea-cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal
blackness? Had the subterranean waters frozen at last? To what fate had the
ocean-bottom cities
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H_%20P_%20Lovecraft.txt of the outer world been delivered? Had any of the Old
Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice cap? Existing geology shows no
trace of their presence. Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in the
outer land world of the north?
Could one be sure of what might or might not linger, even to this day, in the
lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth s deepest waters? Those things had
seemingly been able to withstand any amount of pressure - and men of the sea
have fished up curious objects at times. And has the killer-whale theory
really explained the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a
generation ago by Borchgrevingk?
The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for their
geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a very early
date in the land city s history. They were, according to their location,
certainly not less than thirty million years old, and we reflected that in
their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the cavern itself, had had no
existence.
They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation
everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around them, and a great
river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a
far-away tropic ocean.
And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens - especially about
the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake s hideously ravaged camp.
There was something abnormal about that whole business - the strange things we
had tried so hard to lay to somebody s madness - those frightful graves - the
amount and nature of the missing material - Gedney - the unearthly toughness
of those archaic monstrosities, and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now
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showed the race to have - Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last few
hours, and were prepared to believe and keep silent about many appalling and
incredible secrets of primal nature.
IX
I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a change
in our immediate objective. This, of course, had to do with the chiseled
avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had not known before,
but which we were now eager to find and traverse. From the evident scale of
the carvings we deduced that a steeply descending walk of about a mile through
either of the neighboring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy,
sunless cliffs about the great abyss; down whose sides paths, improved by the
Old Ones, led to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold
this fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of
resistance once we knew of the thing - yet we realized we must begin the quest
at once if we expected to include it in our present trip.
It was now 8 P.M., and we did not have enough battery replacements to let our
torches burn on forever. We had done so much studying and copying below the
glacial level that our battery supply had had at least five hours of nearly
continuous use, and despite the special dry cell formula, would obviously be
good for only about four more - though by keeping one torch unused, except for
especially interesting or difficult places, we might manage to eke out a safe
margin beyond that. It would not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean
catacombs, hence in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further
mural deciphering. Of course we intended to revisit the place for days and
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