At The Mountains Of Madness
H.P. Lovecraft
Book Club October 22, 2023
A lot of science fiction concerns itself with the question ‘what will encounter with the unknown be like?’ Sometimes, as in the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein the imagined answer is horror in the face of what lies beyond death. In Lovecraft’s short novel At The Mountains Of Madness, encounter with the unknown is set in the then-unexplored interior of Antarctica. The story takes the form of a manuscript whose writer, a scientist himself, is attempting to warn the world that his expedition has discovered an ancient and malevolent evil lurking beneath the polar ice. He is adamant that his fellow scientists dare not risk disturbing that evil with further exploration, at the risk of all human civilization.
But it’s important here to start with the understanding that the look and feel of the unknown is not really a mystery. For example: the Spanish conquistadors’ first sighting of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1519 – the city was built by an alien civilization, ten times larger than any city in Europe, with temples larger than any cathedral, and streets filled with tropical flowers and brightly-costumed people. A soldier, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, wrote of the experience years later:
we could compare it to nothing but the enchanted scenes we had read of in Amadis of Gaul,1 from the great towers and temples and other edifices of lime and stone which seemed to rise out of the water. To many of us it appeared doubtful whether we were asleep or awake; nor is the manner in which I express myself to be wondered at, for it must be considered, that never yet did man see, hear, or dream of any thing equal to the spectacle which appeared to our eyes on this day.
In the face of the total unknown, space and time collapse, dream, fantasy and reality intermingle, and consciousness becomes a mirror. It is in the blind spot hidden by reflection where mythmaking begins; where landscapes are embroidered from threads of self and memory.
Just as was depicted in Frankenstein: when Victor first sees his creature stir with life, he does not react with elation, or joy, or triumph or vindication. Strangely, he flees his laboratory, goes to bed, and dreams of his fiancee and dead mother fusing into one.
Or as Nietzsche said, simply, “gaze not into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze back into you.”2
The novel’s title itself comes from a story by Lord Dunsany,3 denoting a liminal barrier to a world of drugged dreams.
The objective of mythmaking is to obscure the abyss, to safeguard consciousness from the terror of it. It is left to literature to uncover the mirror, if the threads can be untangled, and acknowledge the reflection.
When the novel was published, Antarctica was one of the last frontiers of the unknown on planet Earth. As the expedition ship of the narrator, geologist William Dyer, approaches the coast, he sees several examples of what today are called fata morgana, weird mirages (like ships hovering in air over the water) caused by the extreme atmospheric conditions of the polar region: “On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage… in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.”
After the expedition makes landfall and subsequent events make necessary a rescue mission by airplane into the continental interior, it is a particularly vivid mirage seen from the air that Lovecraft portrays as a portal into the unknown. Dyer states:
I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present sample; but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice-vapours above our heads.
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie… the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer giganticism.
The mirage turns out to be an uncanny vision of collapsed space and time. Unknown to Dyer at the time of sighting, the mirage was an accurate portrayal of a vastly ancient city in its prime millions of years ago, whose ruins lay far away from his location, to be discovered later by him and his companion.
His passage into the void had a visceral effect on him, marking what he recognized as a caesura in his experience:
Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature’s laws. Thenceforward the ten of us – but the student Danforth and myself above all others – were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could.
Dyer and Danforth try to come to the rescue of an exploratory party that had awakened a group of weird aliens from hibernation, and track the aliens into the ruins of the city. Dyer claims that while there he learned the story of the aliens and their city by examining plentiful bas-relief murals carved by former generations of aliens, still visible on the walls of ruined buildings.
As he and Danforth penetrate deeper into the city in search of survivors, Dyer’s feelings of revulsion, obscenity and antipathy increase, but he is driven on by scientific curiosity as well as the urgency of rescue. But he unexpectedly reaches a critical point of information about the aliens, whereby his horror is somewhat replaced by a sudden empathy. The aliens he was tracking had gone into suspended animation thirty million years ago for unknown reasons, when Antarctica was a lush tropical paradise and their civilization was at its peak. They were awakened by human explorers into a harsh and brutal snowscape, their city and civilization in ruins, and an even greater horror awaiting them below it:
After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them… and this was their tragic homecoming.
They had not been even savages – for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch… 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!
They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped and roamed among the tree-ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done. They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seen – and what had they found?
Why did these aliens subject themselves to a sleep of millions of years, to find they had outlasted their own kind? There is no answer within the narrative. There are only hints, contained within the story presented in the city’s many mural carvings:
according to certain carvings the denizens of that city had themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a sombre and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shewn in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object – never allowed to appear in the design – found in the great river and indicated as having been washed down through waving, vine-draped cycad-forests from those horrible westward mountains.
This is a remarkable passage. It creates a parallelism of thematic structure. Just as the human explorers faced the boundary of the unknown and penetrated into a mythical landscape beyond it, so the aliens within that landscape faced a boundary of their own. The problem of what the unknown looks like is not solved, because the problem recurses, to a more deeply embedded bourn before another unglimpsed mystery. Thus the limitation of mythmaking is revealed, and by stacking of metaphor becomes literature. The reader is again left before a mirror.
And so the mythical question of origin is replaced by the literary question, handed down in a direct line from the fount of science fiction: what does the mirror reveal?
Dyer’s sudden burst of empathy for the aliens, the “Elder Things”, shows that there is an alternate interpretation of their story, and calls into question his initial reactions of repugnance and condemnation. So I will attempt another reading of the facts of their eons-long history on Earth as they are presented, a theory of their motivations hinted at by the stark flare lights of irony on the Antarctic plain:
The Elder Things are space spores, floating or flying through space without ships, exposed bodily to the void. They are intellectually advanced and have built civilizations. And they are aware of the many dangers and threats that exist in the universe, and flee from them when necessary. Some of them make their way to earth as spores do, perhaps inevitably, and settle here, over three billion years in the past.
At this point in Earth’s development, the Archaean era, it is a lifeless ocean planet; sunny, silent, sterile. But the Elder Things’ adaptable physiology allows them to absorb the ocean’s rich nutrients directly. They find Earth ideal for their needs, they can hide from their enemies at the bottom of the sea and simply be, in a paradise of mere existence. And there they stay for a half billion years or more.
They come to love Earth and think of it as home as much as an alien race can. They understand that they are vagabonds of the universe, and are grateful for their refuge. But they also come to understand the creative potential of the nutrient-rich oceans under the warm sun, and can’t deny it or retard it forever. So they create life, or allow it to germinate, and guide and nurture its development.
They eschew the technological forms of civilization that their ancestors had mastered elsewhere, and choose in this place the opportunity to live in harmony with nature as it develops.
Where previously they would flee from danger, here they fight costly wars to defend their home against invaders. Eventually they evolve to lose the capacity for space travel altogether, and become as close to true Earthlings as they can.
They also become city builders, leaving behind their serene benthic rurality to further their global project of fostering the development of life. Rather than employ industrial technology, they create shoggoths, protoplasmic life forms that assume shapes and sizes necessary for large scale construction.
But their lives are so long, and their civilization has such continuity, that they witness a succession of their greatest urban projects consumed by tectonic plate action as continents are born and die over eons. They realize that in their perception of time, life is the only legacy of theirs that has a chance of lasting.
And so their ambition for their project grows. The shoggoths, formerly automatons, had developed a form of restive consciousness. This inspires the Elder Things to breed intelligent life, proper heirs, with the awareness to recognize and show gratitude to their creators, as the Elder Things were grateful for their Earth home.
As the first apes appear in Africa and Asia, at last a species with rudimentary awareness, the Elder Things resolve to create one last great city in Antarctica; to carry out their project, and to make an exhaustive record of their time on the planet for when the descendents of the apes can understand it. They capture some ape specimens and implant into them the genetic potential for consciousness, as well as the brain mechanism for a visual trigger that will activate when an ape descendent views the basilisk-like geometric patterns the Elder Things have placed next to the carved illustrative tableaux on their building walls. The trigger will initiate complete coded transmission of the Elder Things’ story straight into the conscious mind, so it will be known even if the Elders themselves no longer exist by the time the tableaux are found.
In order to be able to welcome their heirs even if the Elder civilization is wiped out, fifteen Elder Things agree to seal themselves in an underground cave in suspended animation, as a living time capsule. They stock the cave with fossil records of every era of life, as a sort of museum to demonstrate the continuity and consistency of effort that led to the ultimate arising of the heir species. Once the cavern is sealed, onee Elder applies to the other fourteen their race’s ancient technology invented to allow survival during their spore-distribution in space, adapted to allow an indefinite sleep in the cave. The one Elder survives the long treatment process by consuming animals stocked in the cave for provisions. Once the job is done on the fourteen, the one artisan maintains the seal on the cavern and accepts death by starvation.
On the surface, the shoggoths participate in the city building and the fostering of conscious life, but eventually they realize the full scope of the project. They are being replaced, by a fully welcomed and valued conscious culmination of the Elder Things entire sojourn on earth. However problematic the history between Elder and shoggoth had been, they had a shared history and a shared home. Now the Elders were making them redundant, treating them merely as a means to an end.
Where the shoggoths had previously rebelled for freedom, now they did so for revenge, and all the more violently. As they murder their creators, they scream in mockery a phrase that the Elders had intended to use to welcome their creation when the new species was mature enough to come exploring. They write the phrase in Elder blood on the walls of the city as an execration and an anathema.
With the Elder civilization destroyed, the shoggoths emulate their creators in their earliest innocent phase of millions of years at the bottom of the sea, and retreat into the vast subterranean body of water below the city, to sulk and try to forget their insults and indignities.
When the new species finally arrived, they were in a degenerate state, the Elders not having been able to guide them to their final intended form after the shoggoth revolt. The first meeting of humans with the cavern Elders awakened from suspended animation resulted in fatal confusion and misunderstanding. The encodings in the walls meant to activate information transfer to the human brain worked only partially, and transmitted a message of horror rather than enlightenment. Worse, left as orphans for ages, humans had fallen out of communion with the order of nature, and had developed a technological, objectifying, alienating scientific mindset. This mindset led the humans to interpret the idea that they were part of a continuity, with a past, with creators who had intended to make them heirs – rather than self-made and supreme to nature – as so repugnant it had to be expelled from consciousness.
The novel incorporates some of Lovecraft’s oeuvre-wide mythos, but stands independent of it, and shows awareness of the mythmaking as an incomplete and abortive obsession. The novel completes a tragic story of its own, beyond myth, illuminated by irony. That is to say, there is no point devising a literary mirror without the possibility of showing the reflection. Parallel thematic structures point the way to how the irony incorporates and implicates the reader, and perhaps even the author:
The tragedy revealed is that we are exiles, castaways in time, which is too vast for us ever to get the advantage of – eventually it will do worse than kill us, it will dispossess us and make us vagabonds, no matter our pretensions.4 The power of life can encircle the void of meaninglessness, but never extinguish it. The only option is – like Sisyphus – to embrace the futility rather than contend against it, and keep pushing on. The only Hell is to try to push alone, or to exclude some in the common effort. Yet our objectifying, stratifying scientific mindset prevents us from seeing this.
Through the novel runs the thread of mystery of what exactly Dyer’s young companion Danforth saw in the mirage they encountered on the plane trip back from the cursed city, a sight that finally unglued him and immersed him in unremitting horror. But what he must have seen is clear. Just as happened on the plane trip in, space and time collapsed within the mirage, and he saw a reflection of himself, superimposed on a vision of an Elder Thing in its prime of thirty million years ago, and saw the family resemblance. The Elder spoke to him across the ages, and at last Danforth understood the meaning and implications of the phrase in the Elder language that the human exploring party had heard echoing in the halls of the city’s ruins, the phrase the shoggoths had screamed mockingly at the Elders as they did their murder…
“My Children!”