The Classic Horror Stories
Page 64
Pnakotic Manuscripts … Klarkash-Ton: the Manuscripts is HPL’s first invented occult manuscript, mentioned in passing in his early sketch, ‘Polaris’ (1918). The portentous Klarkash-Ton in fact jokily hides the name of HPL’s friend Clark Ashton Smith.
Magellanic Clouds and … Tao: the Magellanic Clouds are dwarf galaxies in the southern hemisphere, the source of speculation for millennia. Tao is the Chinese word for ‘path’ or ‘way’, but in the philosophy of Taoism is also the name for the fundamental, ungraspable essence of the universe.
Hounds of Tindalos: a homage to HPL’s friend, Frank Belknap Long, who published a story of this title in 1931 about immortal beings who inhabit the angles of time.
Yig: the snake-god whom HPL invoked in his revision of Zealia Bishop’s story, ‘The Curse of Yig’ (1928).
‘Pluto’: Pluto was named as the ninth planet from the sun upon its astronomical discovery in 1930 (it has since been recategorized as a dwarf planet). It was named in a competition by an 11-year-old girl in Oxford after the god of the underworld.
Rimbaud: Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), French Decadent teenage poet and gun-runner in Africa; HPL was probably thinking of Rimbaud’s notorious poem, A Season in Hell.
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
Written in 1931, this was a culmination of HPL’s fascination with Antarctic exploration. It borrowed from portions of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and was saturated in expedition literature from the Golden Age of South Pole exploration. It was rejected by Weird Tales which left HPL bereft. The editor turned the story down as too long and unconvincing, and HPL ruefully reflected in August 1931 that this might mean ‘the end of my fictional attempts. There is no field other than the weird in which I have my aptitude or inclination for fictional composition’ (SL iii. 395). He returned angrily to the rejection by Farnsworth Wright a year later, saying it ‘revealed such a purely commercial attitude … He has no sympathy with any story not calculated to please the herd of crude and unimaginative illiterates forming the bulk of his readers’ (SL iv. 53). Again, in April 1934, he wrote: ‘Its rejection by Wright in 1931 was a psychological setback doing much to freeze me into silence’ (SL iv. 402). Julius Schwartz, a friend trying to establish himself as an agent, then showed the story to the editor of the science fiction pulp magazine Astounding Stories, along with ‘The Shadow out of Time’. They were accepted, giving HPL a life-saving cheque of $595. It was published in three monthly parts in the spring of 1936. Nevertheless, HPL called it ‘a posthumous effort’ to a finished career (SL v. 224), and thought it displayed evidence of a ‘lack of general ability’ and a mind corrupted by ‘too much reading of pulp fiction’ (SL v. 230). For all this evidence of damage, it is one of his most accomplished tales and had a huge influence. A few years later, the new editor of Astounding, John W. Campbell, wrote ‘Who Goes There?’, the basis for the classic B-movie, The Thing from Another World (1951), although the film transposes the action to the Arctic.
The title is taken from Lord Dunsany’s short sketch, ‘The Hashish Man’: ‘And we came at last to those ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness, and I tried to struggle against the spirits of that frightful Emperor’s men, for I heard on the other side of the ivory hills the pittering of those beasts that prey on the mad, as they prowled up and down.’
The editor of Astounding Stories F. Orlin Tremaine cut up HPL’s long paragraphs for a faster rhythm throughout, and also deleted passages, particularly from the third and final part, to fit into magazine length. August Derleth restored most of the deleted passages, working from annotated copies of the published stories marked up by HPL, for the Arkham House publication of the stories. These deleted passages have been restored in this edition. STJ’s edition working from original manuscripts has also been consulted: his additions are noted.
As a geologist: details of this expedition in HPL’s later story ‘The Shadow out of Time’ allow the unnamed narrator of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ to be identified as William Dyer.
Dornier aeroplanes: the German company Dornier Flugzeugwerke specialized in flying boats in the 1920s and 1930s.
Ross Sea: discovered by James Ross in his Antarctic expedition in 1841, with the approach to land covered by the Ross Ice Shelf, known ominously then as the Great Ice Barrier.
Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd: the most famous twentieth-century explorers of the Antarctic. Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922) led several expeditions into the Antarctic and was knighted in 1909 for getting within 100 miles of the South Pole. He lost the race to the Pole itself two years later. He became a national hero for averting loss of life on the Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17. He died in South Georgia, preparing another trip into the ice. Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) was a Norwegian explorer who first reached the South Pole in December 1911, famously beating the rival English expedition. Amundsen also went on to reach the North Pole in 1926. He disappeared mysteriously in 1928 in a plane crash over the Barents Sea. Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) led the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic. He famously led five men to the South Pole on 17 January 1912, only to discover that they had been beaten by Amundsen’s team by five weeks. On the return journey, the team met catastrophe and they all died, becoming iconic British figures of heroic sacrifice. Richard Byrd (1888–1957) was an American explorer and the first to fly over the South Pole by plane during the 1928–30 Antarctic Expedition and helped America establish the first ‘Little America’ base on the continent. HPL had devoured stories of polar exploration since childhood, but the Byrd expedition provided many details for this story.
pre-Cambrian: geological period covering much of Earth’s earliest history: the Cambrian starts 540 million years ago.
battlements of … castles: these common mirages on the sea horizon are known as Fata Morgana because they look like fairy castles in the air.
land blink: that is, a corona of brightness seen from the sea of snow-covered land.
Nicholas Roerich: Roerich (1874–1947) was a Russian writer, mystic, and painter. In 1924–8, Roerich travelled from India up into the relatively unexplored areas of the Trans-Himalayas, a journey which produced several books, an Institute of Himalayan Studies, and over 500 paintings of dramatic mountain landscapes. These paintings resonated with the mysticism already associated with Tibet through rumours of lost cities and ancient wisdom in the mountains, a central part of the Theosophical Society and the transmission of Esoteric Buddhism to the West. Roerich’s paintings were widely admired in the 1930s. The last words of the Selected Letters contain HPL’s reflections on Roerich’s work: ‘There is something in his handling of perspective and atmosphere which to me suggests other dimensions and alien orders of being—or at least, the gateways leading to such. Those fantastic carven stones in lonely upland deserts—those ominous, almost sentient, lines of jagged pinnacles—and above all, those curious cubical edifices clinging to precipitous slopes and edging upward to forbidden needle-like peaks!’ (SL v. 436).
Leng: mythical Arabian desert plane HPL uses in several tales; see note to P. 135.
Necronomicon: HPL’s mythical grimoire: see note to p. 39.
the lavas … the boreal pole: the citation is from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, ‘Ulalume—A Ballad’ (1847), II. 15–19, about a mournful lover following an unlucky star’s path. ‘These were days when my heart was volcanic’, the lover claims. Poe scholars consider Mount Yaanek to be a reference to the volcano Mount Erebus, discovered in 1840, a name with hellish associations.
Arthur Gordon Pym: Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was serialized in 1837 and 1838. The episodic seafaring adventure drifts ever further south, until it reaches the realm of myth in the Antarctic seas.
Beardmore Glacier: all early expeditions had to climb the sheer face of one of the largest glaciers in the world in order to reach the Arctic plateau above. It is one of the highest points in the Antarctic.
Byrd … disproved the report: STJ notes that this
is a late correction added to the first Astounding instalment. James Ross’s early theory that the Antarctic might be several distinct land masses was disproved in the early 1930s by successive air crossings.
linguellae: HPL’s misspelling of lingula, a form of brachiopod.
Dunsanian dreams: referring to the fantasy fiction of Lord Dunsany, a major influence on all of HPL’s fiction.
lime juice … tinned …food: limes are there to prevent scurvy, which results from lack of vitamin C. Tinned foods were often the downfall of polar expeditions: it is speculated by some that the famous lost John Franklin expedition of 1845, which disappeared with no survivors, may have been poisoned by their tins.
Queen Mary and Knox Lands: subsections of the eastern part of the Antarctic, the territory known by the name Wilkes Land.
village: the manuscript specifies ‘Esquimau village’ at this point, STJ notes.
Archaean …Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists: geological periods: the Jurassic era was 200 to 150 million years ago, when life on the planet was dominated by dinosaurs. The ‘Comanchian’ is a term that became obsolete in the 1930s for the period meant to succeed the Jurassic. Permian era was 300 to 250 million years ago, where life was dominated by reptilian species, but was ended by a major extinction event. The Triassic occupies the period between 250 and 200 million years.
cephalopods … echini … spirifera … siliceous sponges … teleosts … ganoids: more poetic incantation of scientific classificatory language. Cephalopods, mollusc class of marine animals typified by presence of arms or tentacles; echini, sea urchins; spirifera, extinct class of brachiopods, known from fossil records; siliceous sponges are sea organisms with spiky structures made out of silicon; teleost is a class of ray-finned fish; ganoids are a class of fish that have protective bony extrusions.
Tertiary cycads: Tertiary period was 65 to 2.5 million years ago. Cycads are a form of plants like palms.
placoderms … labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mosasaur skull fragments, … pterodactyl teeth and wing bones, Archaeopteryx debris … and other bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons, and Titanotheriidae: a listing of extinct animals from the fossil record. Placoderms were armoured fish; labyrinthodonts were amphibians of the Palaeozoic era, named for their fearsome teeth; thecodonts were the Permian ancestors of the crocodile; mosasaurs were the ancestors of lizards; pterodactyls were Jurassic flying lizards; the archaeopteryx of the late Jurassic period was a crucial transitional dinosaur between reptiles and birds, first discovered in 1861 to much sensation; palaeotheres were ancestors of the horse; Xiphodon, meaning ‘sword-tooth’, was the hoofed ancestor of pigs and camels; Eohippi were also ancestors of the horse; Oreodons were ancestors of the camel; Titanotheriidae is the class from which the rhinoceros and tapir descended.
Oligocene Age: 34 to 23 million years ago.
Silurian or Ordovician: geologic periods that extend from 443 to 416 million years ago and 488 to 443 million years ago respectively.
Pleistocene: geological period which lasted from about 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the world’s recent period of glaciation.
Archaeozoic: the earlier of two divisions of the Precambrian era, during which the earliest forms of life are assumed to have appeared.
radiata: general classification for invertebrates that have all parts arranged radially around the axis of the body.
crinoid: echinoderms characterized by a mouth surrounded by feeding arms: the classic HPL tentacular horror.
Clark Ashton Smith: HPL’s epistolary friend, see note to p. 40.
Wilmarth: the narrator of ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, who glimpses the tentacular horrors of invaders from Yuggoth.
cryptogams, especially the Pteridophyta … developing from a thallus or prothallus: cryptogams reproduce by spores, Pteridophyta being ferns that use spores (and whose leaves unfold in a distinctly tentacular way). Thallus is a basic, undifferentiated vegetative tissue like fungus or algae.
a radiate: from the class of radiata, animals with parts arranged symmetrically and radially.
folklorist colleague: another reference to Wilmarth, narrator of ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’.
Pnakotic Manuscripts … Tshathoggua: for the Manuscripts see note to p. 164. The name sounds plausibly exotic enough to fit in to the ancient papyri being discovered in the Middle East at the time. For Tsathoggua, see note to p. 135.
Scoresby in 1820: William Scoresby (1789–1857), gentleman scientist and explorer, who wrote An Account of the Arctic Regions and Northern Whale Fishery (1820). This again refers to mirages sometimes called Fata Morgana.
mountains of madness: the end of the first part of the serialization in Astounding Stories ended here.
could not say: at this point, STJ adds a ‘lost’ paragraph: ‘Those specimens, of course, had been covered with a tent-cloth; yet the low Antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended to make the strangely sound and tough tissues of the things relax and expand. Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth from over them, and jostled them about in such a way that their more pungent olfactory qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity.’
Macchu Picchu … or the … walls of Kish: Machu Picchu is the Inca site located in the Peruvian mountains, 8,000 feet above sea level, built mainly in the fifth century. It became an internationally famous site upon its ‘rediscovery’ by the American explorer Hiram Bingham in 1911. The ancient Sumerian city of Kish, a site a few miles south of Baghdad, was excavated by an Oxford University team between 1923 and 1929. Biblical archaeologists at the time thought that evidence of flood at Kish could be related to the biblical flood as described in Genesis.
Giants’ Causeway: natural formation of volcanic rocks in County Antrim on the west coast of Ireland, shaped into uncannily regular hexagonal columns, and the focus of many legends.
Garden of the Gods … rocks of the Arizona desert: Garden of the Gods is a national park protecting spectacular rock formations in Colorado Springs. The Painted Desert and other sites in Arizona are famous for being shaped by the wind (so-called ‘Aeolian processes’ of rock formation).
Corona Mundi: the English translation Roof of the World is the title of a painting and a book of Nicholas Roerich’s work, issued in 1924, see note to p. 186. The museum of Roerich’s work is called the Corona Mundi International Art Center.
Mi-Go: the ‘wild man’ of the Himalayas entered the English language as the ‘Abominable Snow Man’ in 1921. See note to p. 126.
Hyperborean legends: in Greek myth, Hyperborea is a place in the far north, beyond the known world. The term was picked up as the backdrop for many tales by HPL’s friend Clark Ashton Smith.
principle of the arch: in evolutionary theories of architecture in the Victorian period, the discovery of the arch was considered to be a significant development over ‘primitive’ races who had not grasped the physics of building with arches. It was often used, for instance, to condemn Egyptian architecture. HPL thus introduces an alarmingly ‘advanced’ structure in these prehistoric remains.
Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoë in the land of Lomar … Valusia, R’lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City of Arabia Deserta: a mix of myth and HPL’s invention: Atlantis and Lemuria are the great sunken cities of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean respectively (see also note to p. 26). Commoriom and Uzuldaroum appear in Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’. Olathoë in Lamar is referred to in HPL’s early story ‘Polaris’. R’lyeh is the sunken city in HPL’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. Valusia is where King Kull reigns in the stories by Robert E. Howard. Ib is the city in Mnar populated by hideous green beings in HPL’s story ‘The Doom that Came to Sarnath’ (1919). The nameless city derives from HPL’s story, ‘The Nameless City’ (1921).
Snake Tomb … Petra: Petra, now in Jordan, was established in the sixth century
BCE, and is famous for its architecture carved out of the rock faces. The Snake Tomb is a famous site, carved into the rock with a narrow entrance and no outward display, where inside twelve graves are cut into the floor. On one wall there is a relief carving of two snakes attacking a dog, while above it is a horse with a rider. The snake is believed to be a representation of the guardians of the underworld.
Euclid: Greek mathematician, the father of modern geometry. HPL uses the emergence of new kinds of theoretical, non-Euclidean geometry in the nineteenth century as one definitive way of defining his ‘weird’ spaces. See note to p. 48.
Mesozoic gymnosperms: trees from the geological period that covers 250 to 65 million years ago.
angiosperms … Tertiary date: angiosperms are a broad botanical category for flowering plants; the Tertiary period follows the Mesozoic era 65 million years ago.
daring futurists: Futurism was the avant-garde Modernist movement founded by the Italian artist and provocateur Filippo Marinetti in 1909. HPL had an enduring hatred of Modernist experimental art (see the Introduction and note to p. 25).
antiquarian colleague: another reference to Wilmarth, narrator of ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, who encounters the Yuggoth that fly to earth on their ‘membranous wings’ from Pluto.
‘Shoggoths’: these lowly creatures first appear in HPL’s sonnet sequence, Fungi from Yuggoth, written over the New Year of 1929–30. STJ notes that they appear unnamed in ‘The Mound’, which he co-wrote with Zealia Bishop at the same time, where they are described as ‘amorphous lumps of viscous black slime that took temporary shapes for temporary purposes’. They are like the primordial goo that Victorian biologists such as T. H. Huxley speculated was the basis of all life; in HPL’s universe, higher beings can shape this slime into any form needed for slave labour.
moon wrenched from the … South Pacific: a theory of the origin of Earth’s satellite that was commonly held at the time.