At the Mountains
of Madness
by: H. P. Lovecraft
The story is recalled in a first-person perspective by the
geologist William Dyer, a professor at Arkham's
Miskatonic University, in the hope to prevent an important
and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica.
Throughout the course of his explanation, Dyer relates
how he led a group of scholars from Miskatonic University
on a previous expedition to Antarctica, during which they
discovered ancient ruins and a dangerous secret, beyond
a range of mountains higher than the Himalayas.
A small advance group, led by Professor Lake, discovers
the remains of fourteen prehistoric life-forms, previously
unknown to science, and also unidentifiable as either
plants or animals. Six of the specimens have been badly
damaged, while another eight have been preserved in
pristine condition. The specimens' stratum places them far
too early on the geologic time scale for the features of the
specimens to have evolved. Some fossils of Cambrian age
show signs of the use of tools to carve a specimen for
food.
When the main expedition loses contact with Lake's party,
Dyer and his colleagues investigate. Lake's camp is
devastated, with the majority of men and dogs
slaughtered, while a man named Gedney and one of the
dogs are absent. Near the expedition's campsite, they find
six star-shaped snow mounds with one specimen under
each. They also discover that the better-preserved life-
forms have vanished, and that some form of dissection
experiment has been done on both an unnamed man and a
dog. The missing man is suspected of having gone utterly
insane and having killed and mutilated all the others.
Dyer and a graduate student, named Danforth, fly an aero-
plane across the mountains, which they identify as the
outer walls of a vast abandoned stone-city, alien to any
human architecture. For their resemblance to creatures of
myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, the builders of this
lost civilization are dubbed the "Elder Things". By
exploring these fantastic structures, the men learn
through hieroglyphic murals that the Elder Things first
came to Earth shortly after the Moon took form and built
their cities with the help of "shoggoths" — biological
entities created to perform any task, assume any form,
and reflect any thought. There is a hint that all earthly life
evolved from cellular material left over from the creation
of the shoggoths.
As more buildings are explored, the explorers learn about
the Elder Things' conflict with both the Star-spawn of
Cthulhu and the Mi-go, who arrived on Earth shortly
afterwards. The images also reflect a degradation of their
civilization, once the shoggoths gain independence. As
more resources are applied in maintaining order, the
etchings become haphazard and primitive. The murals also
allude to an unnamed evil lurking within an even larger
mountain range located beyond the city. This mountain
range rose in one night and certain phenomena and
incidents deterred the Elder Things from exploring it.
When Antarctica became uninhabitable, even for the Elder
Things, they soon migrated into a large, subterranean
ocean.
Dyer and Danforth eventually realize that the Elder Things
missing from the advance party's camp had somehow
returned to life and, after slaughtering the explorers, have
returned to their city. Dyer and Danforth also discover
traces of the Elder Things' earlier exploration, as well as
sleds containing the corpses of both Gedney and his
missing dog. They are ultimately drawn towards the
entrance of a tunnel, into the subterranean region
depicted in the murals. Here, they find evidence of various
Elder Things killed in a brutal struggle and blind six-foot-
tall penguins wandering placidly, apparently used as
livestock. They are then confronted by a black, bubbling
mass, which they identify as a shoggoth, and escape.
Aboard the plane, high above the plateau, Danforth looks
back and sees something which causes him to lose his own
sanity, implied to be the unnamed evil itself. Dyer
concludes the Elder Things slaughtered the survivors and
dogs only out of self-defense or scientific curiosity, that
their civilization was eventually destroyed by the
shoggoths and that this further entity has preyed on the
enormous penguins. He warns the planners of the next
proposed Antarctic expedition to stay distant from the
site.
