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High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mound whose sides are wooded near the base
with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest, stands the old chateau of my ancestors. | For centuries
its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving
as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose honoured line is older even than the moss-grown
castle walls. |
These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under
the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded
and formidable fortresses in all France. | From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements
Barons, Counts, and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to
the footsteps of the invader. |
But since those glorious years all is changed. | A poverty but little above the
level of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits
of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in
pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the walls, the overgrown vegetation in the parks,
the dr... |
As the ages passed, first one, then another of the four great turrets
were left to ruin, until at last but a single tower housed the sadly reduced descendants of
the once mighty lords of the estate. | It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that
I, Antoine, last of the unhappy and accursed Comtes de C——, first saw the light
of day, ninety long years ago. |
Within these walls, and amongst the dark and shadowy forests,
the wild ravines and grottoes of the hillside below, were spent the first years of my troubled
life. | My parents I never knew. |
My father had been killed at the age of thirty-two, a month before
I was born, by the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the
castle; and my mother having died at my birth, my care and education devolved solely upon one
remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intell... | I was an only child, and the lack of companionship which this fact entailed upon
me was augmented by the strange care exercised by my aged guardian in excluding me from the
society of the peasant children whose abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains that
surround the base of the hill. |
At the time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon
me because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company. | Now I know
that its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line,
that were nightly told and magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents
in the glow of their cottage hearths. |
Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my childhood
in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted library of the chateau, and
in roaming without aim or purpose through the perpetual dusk of the spectral wood that clothes
the side of the hill near its foot. | It was perhaps an effect of such surroundings that my mind
early acquired a shade of melancholy. |
Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and
occult in Nature most strongly claimed my attention. | Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what small knowledge
of it I was able to gain, seemed to depress me much. |
Perhaps it was at first only the manifest
reluctance of my old preceptor to discuss with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to the
terror which I ever felt at the mention of my great house; yet as I grew out of childhood, I
was able to piece together disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip from the unwilling
... | The circumstance
to which I allude is the early age at which all the Comtes of my line had met their end. |
Whilst
I had hitherto considered this but a natural attribute of a family of short-lived men, I afterward
pondered long upon these premature deaths, and began to connect them with the wanderings of
the old man, who often spoke of a curse which for centuries had prevented the lives of the holders
of my title from much e... | Upon my twenty-first birthday,
the aged Pierre gave to me a family document which he said had for many generations been handed
down from father to son, and continued by each possessor. |
Its contents were of the most startling
nature, and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my apprehensions. | At this time, my belief in
the supernatural was firm and deep-seated, else I should have dismissed with scorn the incredible
narrative unfolded before my eyes. |
The paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century, when the old
castle in which I sat had been a feared and impregnable fortress. | It told of a certain ancient
man who had once dwelt on our estates, a person of no small accomplishments, though little above
the rank of peasant; by name, Michel, usually designated by the surname of Mauvais, the Evil,
on account of his sinister reputation. |
He had studied beyond the custom of his kind, seeking
such things as the Philosopher’s Stone, or the Elixir of Eternal Life, and was reputed
wise in the terrible secrets of Black Magic and Alchemy. | Michel Mauvais had one son, named Charles,
a youth as proficient as himself in the hidden arts, and who had therefore been called Le Sorcier,
or the Wizard. |
This pair, shunned by all honest folk, were suspected of the most hideous practices. | Old Michel was said to have burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to the Devil, and the unaccountable
disappearances of many small peasant children were laid at the dreaded door of these two. |
Yet
through the dark natures of the father and the son ran one redeeming ray of humanity; the evil
old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity, whilst the youth had for his parent a more
than filial affection. | One night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest confusion by the
vanishment of young Godfrey, son to Henri the Comte. |
A searching party, headed by the frantic
father, invaded the cottage of the sorcerers and there came upon old Michel Mauvais, busy over
a huge and violently boiling cauldron. | Without certain cause, in the ungoverned madness of fury
and despair, the Comte laid hands on the aged wizard, and ere he released his murderous hold
his victim was no more. |
Meanwhile joyful servants were proclaiming the finding of young Godfrey
in a distant and unused chamber of the great edifice, telling too late that poor Michel had
been killed in vain. | As the Comte and his associates turned away from the lowly abode of the
alchemists, the form of Charles Le Sorcier appeared through the trees. |
The excited chatter of
the menials standing about told him what had occurred, yet he seemed at first unmoved at his
father’s fate. | Then, slowly advancing to meet the Comte, he pronounced in dull yet terrible
accents the curse that ever afterward haunted the house of C——. |
“May
ne’er a noble of thy murd’rous lineSurvive to reach a greater age than
thine!”
spake he, when, suddenly leaping backwards into the black wood, he drew from his tunic a phial
of colourless liquid which he threw into the face of his father’s slayer as he disappeared
behind the inky curtain of the night. | The Comte died without utterance, and was buried the next
day, but little more than two and thirty years from the hour of his birth. |
No trace of the assassin
could be found, though relentless bands of peasants scoured the neighbouring woods and the meadow-land
around the hill. | Thus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the curse in the
minds of the late Comte’s family, so that when Godfrey, innocent cause of the whole tragedy
and now bearing the title, was killed by an arrow whilst hunting, at the age of thirty-two,
there were no thoughts save those of grief at his demise. |
But when, years afterward, the next
young Comte, Robert by name, was found dead in a nearby field from no apparent cause, the peasants
told in whispers that their seigneur had but lately passed his thirty-second birthday when surprised
by early death. | Louis, son to Robert, was found drowned in the moat at the same fateful age,
and thus down through the centuries ran the ominous chronicle; Henris, Roberts, Antoines, and
Armands snatched from happy and virtuous lives when little below the age of their unfortunate
ancestor at his murder. |
That I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made certain
to me by the words which I read. | My life, previously held at small value, now became dearer
to me each day, as I delved deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the hidden world of black
magic. |
Isolated as I was, modern science had produced no impression upon me, and I laboured
as in the Middle Ages, as wrapt as had been old Michel and young Charles themselves in the acquisition
of daemonological and alchemical learning. | Yet read as I might, in no manner could I account
for the strange curse upon my line. |
In unusually rational moments, I would even go so far as
to seek a natural explanation, attributing the early deaths of my ancestors to the sinister
Charles Le Sorcier and his heirs; yet having found upon careful inquiry that there were no known
descendants of the alchemist, I would fall back to occult studies, and onc... | Upon one thing I was absolutely
resolved. |
I should never wed, for since no other branches of my family were in existence, I
might thus end the curse with myself. | As I drew near the age of thirty, old Pierre was called to the land beyond. |
Alone I buried him beneath the stones of the courtyard about which he had loved to wander in
life. | Thus was I left to ponder on myself as the only human creature within the great fortress,
and in my utter solitude my mind began to cease its vain protest against the impending doom,
to become almost reconciled to the fate which so many of my ancestors had met. |
Much of my time
was now occupied in the exploration of the ruined and abandoned halls and towers of the old
chateau, which in youth fear had caused me to shun, and some of which, old Pierre had once told
me, had not been trodden by human foot for over four centuries. | Strange and awesome were many
of the objects I encountered. |
Furniture, covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the
rot of long dampness, met my eyes. | Cobwebs in a profusion never before seen by me were spun
everywhere, and huge bats flapped their bony and uncanny wings on all sides of the otherwise
untenanted gloom. |
Of my exact age, even down to days and hours, I kept a most careful record,
for each movement of the pendulum of the massive clock in the library told off so much more
of my doomed existence. | At length I approached that time which I had so long viewed with apprehension. |
Since most of my ancestors had been seized some little while before they reached the exact age
of Comte Henri at his end, I was every moment on the watch for the coming of the unknown death. | In what strange form the curse should overtake me, I knew not; but I was resolved, at least,
that it should not find me a cowardly or a passive victim. |
With new vigour I applied myself
to my examination of the old chateau and its contents. | It was upon one of the longest of all my excursions of discovery in the deserted
portion of the castle, less than a week before that fatal hour which I felt must mark the utmost
limit of my stay on earth, beyond which I could have not even the slightest hope of continuing
to draw breath, that I came upon the culminatin... |
I had spent the better
part of the morning in climbing up and down half-ruined staircases in one of the most dilapidated
of the ancient turrets. | As the afternoon progressed, I sought the lower levels, descending into
what appeared to be either a mediaeval place of confinement, or a more recently excavated storehouse
for gunpowder. |
As I slowly traversed the nitre-encrusted passageway at the foot of the last
staircase, the paving became very damp, and soon I saw by the light of my flickering torch that
a blank, water-stained wall impeded my journey. | Turning to retrace my steps, my eye fell upon
a small trap-door with a ring, which lay directly beneath my feet. |
Pausing, I succeeded with
difficulty in raising it, whereupon there was revealed a black aperture, exhaling noxious fumes
which caused my torch to sputter, and disclosing in the unsteady glare the top of a flight of
stone steps. | As soon as the torch, which I lowered into the repellent depths, burned freely
and steadily, I commenced my descent. |
The steps were many, and led to a narrow stone-flagged
passage which I knew must be far underground. | The passage proved of great length, and terminated
in a massive oaken door, dripping with the moisture of the place, and stoutly resisting all
my attempts to open it. |
Ceasing after a time my efforts in this direction, I had proceeded back
some distance toward the steps, when there suddenly fell to my experience one of the most profound
and maddening shocks capable of reception by the human mind. | Without warning, I heard the
heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges. |
My immediate sensations are
incapable of analysis. | To be confronted in a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the
old castle with evidence of the presence of man or spirit, produced in my brain a horror of
the most acute description. |
When at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound, my eyes must
have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld. | There in the ancient Gothic doorway
stood a human figure. |
It was that of a man clad in a skull-cap and long mediaeval tunic of dark
colour. | His long hair and flowing beard were of a terrible and intense black hue, and of incredible
profusion. |
His forehead, high beyond the usual dimensions; his cheeks, deep-sunken and heavily
lined with wrinkles; and his hands, long, claw-like, and gnarled, were of such a deathly, marble-like
whiteness as I have never elsewhere seen in man. | His figure, lean to the proportions of a skeleton,
was strangely bent and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his peculiar garment. |
But
strangest of all were his eyes; twin caves of abysmal blackness, profound in expression of understanding,
yet inhuman in degree of wickedness. | These were now fixed upon me, piercing my soul with their
hatred, and rooting me to the spot whereon I stood. |
At last the figure spoke in a rumbling voice
that chilled me through with its dull hollowness and latent malevolence. | The language in which
the discourse was clothed was that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more learned men
of the Middle Ages, and made familiar to me by my prolonged researches into the works of the
old alchemists and daemonologists. |
The apparition spoke of the curse which had hovered over
my house, told me of my coming end, dwelt on the wrong perpetrated by my ancestor against old
Michel Mauvais, and gloated over the revenge of Charles Le Sorcier. | He told how the young Charles
had escaped into the night, returning in after years to kill Godfrey the heir with an arrow
just as he approached the age which had been his father’s at his assassination; how he
had secretly returned to the estate and established himself, unknown, in the even then deserted
subterranean ch... |
At this point I was
left to imagine the solution of the greatest mystery of all, how the curse had been fulfilled
since that time when Charles Le Sorcier must in the course of Nature have died, for the man
digressed into an account of the deep alchemical studies of the two wizards, father and son,
speaking most particu... | His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes the
hatred that had at first so haunted them, but suddenly the fiendish glare returned, and with
a shocking sound like the hissing of a serpent, the stranger raised a glass phial with the evident
intent of ending my life as had Charles Le Sorcier... |
Prompted by some preserving instinct of self-defence, I broke through the spell
that had hitherto held me immovable, and flung my now dying torch at the creature who menaced
my existence. | I heard the phial break harmlessly against the stones of the passage as the tunic
of the strange man caught fire and lit the horrid scene with a ghastly radiance. |
The shriek
of fright and impotent malice emitted by the would-be assassin proved too much for my already
shaken nerves, and I fell prone upon the slimy floor in a total faint. | When at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind remembering
what had occurred, shrank from the idea of beholding more; yet curiosity overmastered all. |
Who,
I asked myself, was this man of evil, and how came he within the castle walls? | Why should he
seek to avenge the death of poor Michel Mauvais, and how had the curse been carried on through
all the long centuries since the time of Charles Le Sorcier? |
The dread of years was lifted from
my shoulders, for I knew that he whom I had felled was the source of all my danger from the
curse; and now that I was free, I burned with the desire to learn more of the sinister thing
which had haunted my line for centuries, and made of my own youth one long-continued nightmare. | Determined upon further exploration, I felt in my pockets for flint and steel, and lit the unused
torch which I had with me. |
First of all, the new light revealed the distorted and blackened
form of the mysterious stranger. | The hideous eyes were now closed. |
Disliking the sight, I turned
away and entered the chamber beyond the Gothic door. | Here I found what seemed much like an alchemist’s
laboratory. |
In one corner was an immense pile of a shining yellow metal that sparkled gorgeously
in the light of the torch. | It may have been gold, but I did not pause to examine it, for I was
strangely affected by that which I had undergone. |
At the farther end of the apartment was an
opening leading out into one of the many wild ravines of the dark hillside forest. | Filled with
wonder, yet now realising how the man had obtained access to the chateau, I proceeded to return. |
I had intended to pass by the remains of the stranger with averted face, but as I approached
the body, I seemed to hear emanating from it a faint sound, as though life were not yet wholly
extinct. | Aghast, I turned to examine the charred and shrivelled figure on the floor. |
Then all
at once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in which they were set, opened
wide with an expression which I was unable to interpret. | The cracked lips tried to frame words
which I could not well understand. |
Once I caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier, and again I
fancied that the words “years” and “curse” issued from the twisted mouth. | Still I was at a loss to gather the purport of his disconnected speech. |
At my evident ignorance
of his meaning, the pitchy eyes once more flashed malevolently at me, until, helpless as I saw
my opponent to be, I trembled as I watched him. | Suddenly the wretch, animated with his last burst of strength, raised his hideous
head from the damp and sunken pavement. |
Then, as I remained, paralysed with fear, he found his
voice and in his dying breath screamed forth those words which have ever afterward haunted my
days and my nights. | “Fool,” he shrieked, “can you not guess my secret? |
Have
you no brain whereby you may recognise the will which has through six long centuries fulfilled
the dreadful curse upon your house? | Have I not told you of the great elixir of eternal life? |
Know you not how the secret of Alchemy was solved? | I tell you, it is I! |
I! | I! |
that have lived
for six hundred years to maintain my revenge, FOR I AM CHARLES LE SORCIER!”
I. | I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing
why. |
It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated
invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting
of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. | Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will
seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left. |
The hitherto withheld photographs,
both ordinary and aërial, will count in my favour; for they are damnably vivid and graphic. | Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. |
The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures; notwithstanding a strangeness
of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over. | In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders
who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously
convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; and
on the other hand, sufficient influence to de... |
It is an unfortunate
fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates, connected only with a small
university, have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or
highly controversial nature are concerned. | It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists
in the fields which came primarily to be concerned. |
As a geologist my object in leading the
Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and
soil from various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by
Prof. | Frank H. |
Pabodie of our engineering department. | I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other
field than this; but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points
along previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached
by the ordinary methods of collection. |
Pabodie’s drilling apparatus, as the public already
knows from our reports, was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to
combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock
drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness. | Steel head, jointed
rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal
auger, and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to 1000 feet deep all formed,
with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry; this being
made possible... |
Four large Dornier aëroplanes, designed especially for the tremendous altitude flying necessary
on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by
Pabodie, could transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier
to various suitable inland points,... | We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season—or longer,
if absolutely necessary—would permit, operating mostly in the mountain-ranges and on the
plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott,
and Byrd. |
With frequent changes of camp, made by aëroplane and involving distances great
enough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount
of material; especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens
had previously been secured. | We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the
upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life-history of this bleak realm of ice and death
is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth’s past. |
That the antarctic
continent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life of
which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals,
is a matter of common information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy,
and detail... | When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would enlarge the aperture
by blasting in order to get specimens of suitable size and condition. |
Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper
soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed or nearly exposed land surfaces—these inevitably
being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the
lower levels. | We could not afford to waste drilling depth on any considerable amount of mere
glaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in thick clusters
of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. |
It is this plan—which we could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition
such as ours—that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow despite
the warnings I have issued since our return from the antarctic. | The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless
reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later articles
of Pabodie and myself. |
We consisted of four men from the University—Pabodie, Lake of the
biology department, Atwood of the physics department (also a meteorologist), and I representing
geology and having nominal command—besides sixteen assistants; seven graduate students
from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. | Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aëroplane
pilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless operators. |
Eight of them understood navigation
with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. | In addition, of course, our two ships—wooden
ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam—were fully manned. |
The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions, financed the expedition;
hence our preparations were extremely thorough despite the absence of great publicity. | The dogs,
sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in
Boston, and there our ships were loaded. |
We were marvellously well-equipped for our specific
purposes, and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp construction
we profited by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant predecessors. | It was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made our own expedition—ample
though it was—so little noticed by the world at large. |
As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbour on September 2, 1930;
taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa
and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. | None of our exploring
party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains—J. |
B. | Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and
Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic—both veteran whalers in antarctic
waters. |
As we left the inhabited world behind the sun sank lower and lower in the north, and
stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. | At about 62° South Latitude we sighted
our first icebergs—table-like objects with vertical sides—and just before reaching
the Antarctic Circle, which we crossed on October 20 with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we
were considerably troubled with field ice. |
The falling temperature bothered me considerably
after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigours to
come. | On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including
a strikingly vivid mirage—the first I had ever seen—in which distant bergs became
the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles. |
Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly
packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175°. | On the morning
of October 26 a strong “land blink” appeared on the south, and before noon we all
felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which opened
out and covered the whole vista ahead. |
At last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown
continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. | These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range
discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail down the east
coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound at the foot of
the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9′. |
The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaks
of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still
lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow,
bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of expose... | Through the desolate summits
swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held
vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide
range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly
terribl... |
Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings
of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly
fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred. | I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the
college library. |
On the seventh of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily
lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts. | Erebus and Terror
on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. |
There now stretched
off to the east the low, white line of the great ice barrier; rising perpendicularly to a height
of 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. | In
the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. |
Erebus. | The scoriac peak towered up some 12,700 feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print
of the sacred Fujiyama; while beyond it rose the white, ghost-like height of Mt. |
Terror, 10,900
feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano. | Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently,
and one of the graduate assistants—a brilliant young fellow named Danforth—pointed
out what looked like lava on the snowy slope; remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840,
had undoubtedly been the source of Poe’s image when he wrote seven years later of
“—the... |
I was interested
myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe’s only long story—the disturbing and
enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. | On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the
background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals
were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice. |
Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after
midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing
to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. | Our sensations on first treading
antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and
Shackleton expeditions had preceded us. |
Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano’s
slope was only a provisional one; headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham. | We landed
all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting
outfit, cameras both ordinary and aërial, aëroplane parts, and other accessories,
including three small portable wireless outfits (besides those in the planes) capable of communicating
with the Arkham’s larg... |
The ship’s outfit, communicating with the outside world, was
to convey press reports to the Arkham Advertiser’s powerful wireless station on
Kingsport Head, Mass. | We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer; but if
this proved impossible we would winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north
before the freezing of the ice for another summer’s supplies. |
I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early
work: of our ascent of Mt. | Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross
Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie’s apparatus accomplished them, even through
solid rock layers; our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent
of the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final asse... |
The health of our land party—twenty men and 55 Alaskan sledge
dogs—was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no really destructive
temperatures or windstorms. | For the most part, the thermometer varied between zero and 20°
or 25° above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to rigours of
this sort. |
The barrier camp was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline,
provisions, dynamite, and other supplies. | Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual
exploring material, the fifth being left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storage
cache to form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our exploring planes
were lost. |
Later, when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we would employ
one or two in a shuttle transportation service between this cache and another permanent base
on the great plateau from 600 to 700 miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. | Despite the
almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests that pour down from the plateau, we
determined to dispense with intermediate bases; taking our chances in the interest of economy
and probable efficiency. |
Wireless reports have spoken of the breath-taking four-hour non-stop flight
of our squadron on November 21 over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on the west,
and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our engines. | Wind troubled us only moderately,
and our radio compasses helped us through the one opaque fog we encountered. |
When the vast rise
loomed ahead, between Latitudes 83° and 84°, we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier,
the largest valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning
and mountainous coastline. | At last we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of the
ultimate south, and even as we realised it we saw the peak of Mt. |
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