He approached curiously and cautiously the opposite edge, and peered below. He drew back in even greater alarm, for he had glimpsed a pit of fire that sent up great tongues of flame. He seemed literally between the devil and the deep sea! Stepping back a few paces he commenced to walk along the paving which seemed the only safe place upon this strange world. To the left stretched the boundless sea and to the right the awful semblance of Hades!
After several miles of weary walking, Edgar began to feel acutely the pangs of hunger. He ventured warily toward the right edge once more, and this time he did not draw back in alarm. Far, far below him lay a beautiful green valley with rolling swards and mossy hillocks. Dwelling-places dotted the landscape and figures moved about. From his lofty height the scene resembled the miniature card-board village of his childhood’s day. But how to descend into this Garden of Eden! There seemed to be no visible means of getting down to what seemed a veritable paradise, after the experiences of the past hour. Along the entire length of the wall, as far down as Edgar could see, in both directions, his eye could perceive nothing but a blank uniformity, unless—he peered more intently. A few feet directly below him he saw two small holes, and his heart gave a joyful bound. The holes must have been made there for the purpose of attaching the curved ends of a ladder used in ascending this most gigantic piece of masonry. Edgar decided to remain directly above the holes until one of the inhabitants of this miniature world should be moved by providence to investigate the top of the mammoth dike.
Many times during the days that followed, Edgar gave up in despair. He tried to shout, but his voice was completely lost in the unceasing roar of the ocean back of him. Too weak to hope longer, he lay down utterly despondent. And then came hope and with it a renewed strength!
Directly below him at the base of this vast wall which sloped toward the valley, at an angle of about thirty degrees, were many figures gesticulating and carrying long black objects upon their shoulders. Edgar in his weakness and excitement nearly lost his balance in watching the procedure. Then he was assured beyond the question of a doubt that one of them was scaling the wall. Over and over the ladder was being turned and attached into holes along the side. Nearer and nearer crawled a tiny saffron garmented creature until the ladder had been inserted into the last holes and an inhabitant of the remote valley stood in astonishment before Edgar Hamilton.
His short yellow garment hung by straps across his shoulders and extended below his waist where it ended in short bloomers, full enough to give the effect of a skirt. His features were in type not unlike those of the people of our eastern civilization of today.
Communication through a common language was, of course, impossible, but Edgar was able to indicate his desire for food and his wish to descend into the green valley. The stranger nodded and then ran to the opposite edge of the dike and gazed long and fixedly at the stormy sea. At length he turned back toward Edgar and the latter noticed that his face wore an expression of extreme anxiety.
They both descended by the ladder.
Once down among these people, so like and yet so different from himself, Hamilton learned many strange and wonderful things. Inside of a few weeks he had mastered their language. He became acquainted with numerous astounding truths concerning this planet to which fate had so strangely sent him. Chief among these was the fact that the large island upon which the people dwelt had at one time been part of a vast continent, but the larger portion of this land with its great cities and monumental temples, palaces and fertile plains had been swallowed up in the ocean. The remnant of the civilization living upon a lofty plateau had managed to survive the onslaught of the sea, whose waters seemed to creep up through the centuries, and threatened to engulf them. In reality it was not the water which rose, but the land that sank due to enormous subterranean gas pockets collapsing, the gas escaping through fiery volcanoes. This was a sunken land then that maintained its temporary safety only through the building and repair of its monstrous dikes.
Edgar thought of Holland on the far away Earth. (Ah I but was it so far away? He and all the universe about him were an infinitesimal part of the new blue-figured linoleum that he had purchased recently for his laboratory!)
“Not so much like Holland,” he said to himself one time, “as like the lost land of Mu, which, according to archeologists was a tropical continent larger than North America. It went to the bottom of the Pacific with its sixty-four million white inhabitants and their templed cities thirteen thousand years ago.”
Then she came into Edgar’s life and gradually he forgot the linoleum on the laboratory floor and the measles that threatened to last for five long years. She was the daughter of Elto, the chief inspector and engineer of the dikes. A sort of modern Nehemiah was he, as he superintended the continual erection of the rocky walls that preserved the land of Luntin from total annihilation. Her name was Yana and her pale, wild beauty outrivaled the charms of any earthly maiden Edgar had ever known.
One time they sat upon a grassy knoll outside Elto’s home. They looked in the direction of Mt. Karp, into whose forbidding depths Edgar had gazed at the time of his arrival upon this planet.
“The fiery mount has been very active of late years,” said Yana sadly, her sweet troubled eyes turned in the direction of the volcano. “Father says that the land is sinking rapidly and that the dikes have now been built as high as is possible without their crumbling. He and the wise Kermis predict that inside of the next fifty or sixty years our beloved Luntin and its inhabitants will be no more, and over all this will stretch that wild, roaring ocean!”
She shuddered and in that moment Edgar had clasped her in his arms and won from her the promise to be his bride.
Twenty-five years passed; years filled with much happiness, but clouded with an ever increasing anxiety for the fate of Luntin. Edgar and Yana had lived in happy companionship. They had a son whom they called Yangar. The lad was the pride of their hearts. He had inherited his grandfather’s constructive ability, and at the age of twenty-two was appointed chief engineer of the dikes, to succeed his late grandfather, Elto. In this capacity Yangar was a decided success, and by his ingenuity had more than once warded off dire calamity to his country.
Thirty-five years more! It looked as if the date set by old Elto for the inundation was nigh. Yangar, now a widower with a son of his own, Manly, was ingenious and vigilant, but even these qualities could not hold out forever against such a monster as hurled itself constantly against the walls. Yana grew thin and wasted away with worry and died. Edgar sorrowed greatly over the loss of his wife, and his son became doubly dear to him.
One time after Yangar had returned from an inspection of the dikes, his father showed him a bottle containing a yellow liquid.
“This,” he explained to Yangar, “is the way out of the catastrophe for us. It has taken me years to prepare it. I will divide it in thirds; for you, your son, Manly, and myself. It is a very concentrated form of a drug I prepared sixty years ago. The entire contents of this bottle is sufficient, if injected into the veins of you, Manly and myself, to so decrease the rate of our nerve impulses that we shall no longer be of this world.”
He paused, while in retrospection his mind’s eye saw the immobile form of that earthly maiden with her interminable smile.
“We shall not be of this world, father!” exclaimed Yangar. “Do you mean that we shall die?”
“Not that, I trust,”replied Edgar, “but as I have often explained to you before, time and size being purely relative, we cannot of necessity become infinitely slower in our rate of existence without at the same time growing infinitely bigger. This process employed at the crucial moment of disaster will lift us to a world in a universe next larger to our own. My bodily forces are about exhausted anyhow, but for you and your son Manly, it will mean the ability to complete the normal span of your lives.”
Then came a day when Edgar and his grandson, Manly, a young man of four and thirty, who bore a marked resemblance to his grandfather w
hen the latter had come a stranger to Luntin, sat within the little stone house where they and Yangar dwelt together. The latter was away, as was his custom, to oversee work upon the dikes. On the morrow Manly would be one of the number chosen to labor for the safety of his land.
“Tomorrow you and Yangar must take with you your bottles containing your portions of this wonderful drug that diminishes nervous pressure,” said Edgar Hamilton, smiling with affection at his stalwart and handsome grandson. “It is no longer safe to be without it. The attached syringes will render its injection a matter of seconds only.”
He had scarcely finished speaking when a roar like thunder shook the very ground beneath their feet. Together they rushed to the entrance and lifted their eyes to the rocky wall that had held at bay their watery enemy for so many generations. The dike was a crumbling mass, a Niagara, increased to many times its earthly proportions.
* * * *
“May the saints preserve me!” exclaimed Agnes as she flew toward her room and locked the door. “This mornin’ I hands a note to master Edgar and he acts that queer I think he’s after losin’ his mind. Then this evenin’ I goes in, and there he’s a settin’ on the floor with next to nothin’ on, and an old man standin’ beside him! I’m through. If these goin’s on don’t stop, I’m after lookin’ for another job!”
At nine o’clock that evening the door-bell rang at the Gordan residence.
“The strange doctor who was called for consultation by Dr. Bennett, dear,” said Mrs. Gordan to her husband. “Dr. Bennett said he would send him to see poor Ellen. Will you go to the door?”
“If it’s the doctor, all right,” responded her spouse, “but should it chance to be that scalawag, Hamilton, down the front steps he goes faster than he came up!”
Mr. Gordan opened the front door and gave a little gasp of amazement. In the entryway, with the streetlight shining grotesquely upon his bent figure, stood an aged stranger.
“Are you the consulting physician to investigate Miss Gordan’s case?” asked Mr. Gordan.
The elderly individual bent an interested glance upon the man before him. Then he replied.
“I—that is—yes, I believe I have an excellent cure for her condition. May I see her?”
“Certainly, this way, doctor.”
The strange physician followed Mr. and Mrs. Paul Gordan to the room of their daughter. Upon the bed lay the inert form of the unfortunate young woman whose nerve impulses had been so retarded as to render her a misfit among all the rest of humanity about her. The aged doctor gazed at the still form intently.
“Not a day over thirty-two,” he thought to himself.
Aloud he said, “Her most rapid cure will be accomplished by injecting this serum which—”
‘‘But please, doctor!” pleaded the mother with a detaining hand upon his arm, “I—I don’t like injected serums. Can’t she—-er—take it internally?”
“Unfortunatey not, my good woman, but let me assure you, it will effect a rapid cure.”
The mother surrendered and the old doctor injected into the arm of his patient a drop of colorless liquid The effect was almost instantaneous. Ellen sat up quickly and looked from one to another of the occupants of the room.
“Mother, father,” she cried. “Has the world really stopped tearing around at such a fearful rate? Ah, I know it is I who am back to normal. I wonder if Edgar is succeeding in catching up with me. My measles won’t last long now!”
The old man turned to leave the room, but stopped at a question from the astonished father, Paul Gordan. “To whom are we indebted for this restoration of our daughter to normalcy?”
The piercing eyes of the stranger swept the faces of all three.
“To Edgar Hamilton,” he replied quietly.
“Oh, he sent you, did he?” laughed Mr. Gordan. “Probably the young rascal was afraid to deliver the antidote in person after my somewhat plain letter this morning.”
The aged man advanced a step with outstretched trembling hands.
“You do not understand, Mr. Gordan. I am Edgar Hamilton.”
“You—well this is rich!” Aside to his wife, “We must humor the poor devil.”
“Joking set aside,” persisted the stranger, “I am Edgar Hamilton, to whom you owe your late catastrophe and its more recent remedy.”
Then he proceeded to tell a tale of a spent lifetime, a tale so fantastic that it fell upon incredulous ears. It ended with a wild unearthly cry of, “Yangar, my son, Yangar.” His shrieks grew louder until they became the ravings of a mad man.
Nearly all who have seen him at the asylum and heard his story believe him to be the victim of an hallucination.
It is said that some months after Ellen Gordan’s complete recovery from measles, she married a young man by the name of Manly Hamilton, who claimed kinship with the Edgar Hamilton, who had so mysteriously disappeared. There remain those of their acquaintance, who maintain that Ellen’s husband and Edgar are one and the same man, but that does not explain the aged inmate of the asylum.
* * * *
Copyright © 1929 Experimenter Publishing Co., Inc.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
(1890–1937)
While H. P. Lovecraft is incredibly popular now, he was less well-known in his day. A staple of Weird Tales and a mentor and correspondent to many other writers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction (which overlapped significantly in the 1920s), Lovecraft was an astonishingly gifted writer, but just as astonishingly unstable.
Born in 1890 to a well-to-do family in Rhode Island, he was ferociously inquisitive as a boy, and was allowed to learn anything he wanted. His family’s fortunes took a dramatic and permanent turn for the worse by the time Lovecraft was a teenager, however. His father, ravaged by syphilis, ended his life locked in a madhouse. The family mismanaged their money (Lovecraft never would learn how to make a living), and his mother ended up in the same madhouse. Lovecraft himself broke down emotionally before he finished high school, so he never made it to college.
As a boy he wrote heavily, and had articles published before he finished high school. But his sanity was shaky at best; at one point he destroyed all his writing and didn’t do any writing at all for the next nine years. Eventually, he got involved with the amateur press—people writing for their own enjoyment and that of fellow writers, rather than for broader publication—and from there drifted back into writing fiction. He ended up eking out a living by writing fiction for the pulps, and was one of the original Weird Tales writers.
Lovecraft died of cancer, which he left untreated until it was too late to do any good.
One distinguishing thing about Lovecraft’s fiction is the astonishing scale of it—he works with vast landscapes and huge reachs of time. Like in a Japanese painting, the humans are often represented as small and nearly meaningless.
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, by H. P. Lovecraft
First published in Astounding Stories, February–April 1936
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 & 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 mer
its or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of those mountains of madness. 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 by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were fashioned. 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, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us.
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