At the Mountains of Madness
1964
At the Mountains of Madness
1964
A scientific expedition to Antarctica becomes something far worse than a simple survey of the unknown continent. When Dr. William Dyer and his team from Miskatonic University breach the ancient barriers of a colossal mountain range, they uncover evidence of a civilization that predates humanity by hundreds of millions of years. The murals tell a story that shatters every assumption about human supremacy. The creatures they find, the shoggoths, are not merely ancient but active, not merely alive but waiting. Dyer writes from the aftermath, his message a desperate warning: some knowledge comes at the cost of sanity itself. What makes this novella essential is not just its visceral horror but its quiet, creeping realization that the universe contains things beyond human comprehension, and that our brief reign on Earth is nothing but an footnote in a much older, far darker history.
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“I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“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.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“What we did see”
— H. P. Lovecraft
“Poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last -- what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, they were men!””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“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”
— H. P. Lovecraft
“Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train”
— H. P. Lovecraft
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,””
— H. P. Lovecraft
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Lovecraft, H. P.. At the Mountains of Madness. Lex, lex-books.com/book/at-the-mountains-of-madness-b6e6ffab-2ab9-48b9-8702-310b8a2d995f.Lovecraft, H. P. (1964). At the Mountains of Madness. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/at-the-mountains-of-madness-b6e6ffab-2ab9-48b9-8702-310b8a2d995fLovecraft, H. P.. At the Mountains of Madness. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/at-the-mountains-of-madness-b6e6ffab-2ab9-48b9-8702-310b8a2d995f.
