[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
H_%20P_%20Lovecraft.txt complementary outlines of Africa and South America,
Page 41
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
and the way the great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up - receives
striking support from this uncanny source.
Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or more
years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate
Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe (then the Valusia of primal
legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic continent. Other charts - and
most significantly one in connection with the founding fifty million years ago
of the vast dead city around us - showed all the present continents well
differentiated. And in the latest discoverable specimen - dating perhaps from
the Pliocene Age - the approximate world of today appeared quite clearly
despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe
through
Greenland, and of South America with the antarctic continent through Graham
Land. In the Carboniferous map the whole globe-ocean floor and rifted land
mass alike - bore symbols of the Old Ones vast stone cities, but in the later
charts the gradual recession toward the antarctic became very plain. The final
Pliocene specimen showed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and
the tip of
South America, nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South
Latitude. Knowledge and interest in the northern world, save for a study of
coast lines probably made during long exploration flights on those fanlike
membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones.
Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal
rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea bottom, and
other natural causes, was a matter of common record; and it was curious to
observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on. The
vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last general
center of the race - built early in the Cretaceous Age after a titanic earth
buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant. It
appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of all, where
reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea bottom. In the new
city - many of whose features we could recognize in the sculptures, but which
stretched fully a hundred miles along the mountain range in each direction
beyond the farthest limits of our aerial survey
- there were reputed to be preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the
first sea-bottom city, which thrust up to light after long epochs in the
course of the general crumbling of strata.
VIII
Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly
personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district in which
we were. Of this local material there was naturally a vast abundance; and on
the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find a house of
very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a neighboring rift,
contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the story of the region
much beyond the period of the Pliocene map whence we derived our last general
glimpse of the prehuman world. This was the last place we examined in detail,
since what we found there gave us a fresh immediate objective.
Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all
the corners of earth s globe. Of all existing lands, it was infinitely the
most ancient. The conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed
be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which even the mad author of the
Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss. The great mountain chain was
tremendously long -
starting as a low range at Luitpold Land on the east coast of Weddell Sea and
virtually crossing the entire continent. That really high part stretched in a
mighty arc from about Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70°, E.
Longitude 115°, with its concave side toward our camp and its seaward end in
the region of that long, ice-locked coast whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes
and
Mawson at the antarctic circle.
Page 42
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of nature seemed disturbingly close at
hand. I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the
sculptures forbid me to say that they are earth s highest. That grim honor is
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]