air, but after a few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely.Let me try to state the thing without flinching.There was an odour—and that odour was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected.
Of course the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now.There were several conceivable explanations, and we did a good deal of indecisive whispering.Most important of all, we did not retreat without further investigation; for having come this far, we were loath to be balked by anything short of certain disaster.Anyway, what we must have suspected was altogether too wild to believe.Such things did not happen in any normal world.It was probably sheer irrational instinct which made us dim our single torch—tempted no longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from the oppressive walls—and which softened our progress to a cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris.
Danforth’s eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors on the ground level.It did not look quite as it ought after countless thousands of years of desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked through it.The irregular nature of the litter precluded any definite marks, but in the smoother places there were suggestions of the dragging of heavy objects.Once we thought there was a hint of parallel tracks, as if of runners.This was what made us pause again.
It was during that pause that we caught—simultaneously this time—the other odour ahead.Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a more frightful odour—less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this place under the known circumstances ...unless, of course, Gedney....For the odour was the plain and familiar one of common petrol—every-day gasoline.
Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists.We knew now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled into this nighted burial-place of the aeons, hence could not doubt any longer the existence of nameless conditions—present or at least recent—just ahead.Yet in the end we did let sheer burning curiosity—or anxiety—or auto-hypnotism—or vague thoughts of responsibility toward Gedney—or what not—drive us on.Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen at the alley-turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical piping—potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake’s dissection report despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks—which he thought he had shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths below.I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left—of what had disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivable—a wild trip across the monstrous mountains and a descent into the unknown primal masonry—
But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite.We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness from being absolute.Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch.The disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger.More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet, until very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease.We had been all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from the air.Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not even going to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened.
The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carven walls of the blocked corridor in which we stood, shewed several doorways in various states of obstruction; and from one of them the gasoline odour—quite submerging that other hint of odour—came with especial distinctness.As we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a slight and recent clearing away of debris from that particular opening.Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly manifest.I do not think anyone will wonder that we waited an appreciable time before making any further motion.
And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first impression was one of anticlimax.For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured crypt—a perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet—there remained no recent object of instantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively, though in vain, for a farther doorway.In another moment, however, Danforth’s sharp vision had descried a place where the floor debris had been disturbed; and we turned on both torches full strength.Though what we saw in that light was actually simple and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because of what it implied.It was a rough levelling of the debris, upon which several small objects lay carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount of gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odour even at this extreme super-plateau altitude.In other words, it could not be other than a sort of camp—a camp made by questing beings who like us had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.
Let me be plain.The scattered objects were, so far as substance was concerned, all from Lake’s camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches, three illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with its pictorial and instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur and tent-cloth, a used electric battery with circular of directions, a folder that came with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers.It was all bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on them we felt we had come to the worst.We had found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet the effect of the sight down there in the pre-human vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much to bear.
A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave-mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches—varying in their accuracy or lack of it—which outlined the neighbouring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly represented place outside our previous route—a place we identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aërial survey—to the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel-mouth therein.He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite obviously compiled as our own had been from late sculptures somewhere in the glacial labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had seen and used.But what this art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute those sketches in a strange and assured technique perhaps superior, despite haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings from which they were taken—the characteristic and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones themselves in the dead city’s heyday.
There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for our lives after that; since our conclusions were now—notwithstanding their wildness—completely fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention to those who have read my account as far as this.Perhaps we were mad—for have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of the same spirit—albeit in a less extreme form—in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits.Half-paralysed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.
Of course we did not mean to face that—or those—which we knew had been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now.They would by this time have found the other neighbouring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within to whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate gulf—the ultimate gulf they had never seen.Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the north seeking another.They were, we remembered, partly independent of light.
Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our new emotions took—just what change of immediate
