At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad word of all too obvious source: “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
1. Written during February and March 1931, the story first appeared in three installments, in Astounding Stories 16, no. 6 (February 1936), 8–32; 17, no. 1 (March 1936), 125–55; and 17, no. 2 (April 1936), 132–50. The following is the restored, corrected text prepared by S. T. Joshi. The original published text had many different paragraph breaks and cut a considerable amount of Lovecraft’s manuscript; the changes are indicated below.
2. The narrator, referred to only as “Dyer” here, is fully identified in “The Shadow Out of Time” as Professor William Dyer of the geology department of Miskatonic University. See text accompanying note 51 in “The Shadow Out of Time,” below.
3. Lovecraft, ever the antiquarian, never refers in this story to Antarctica or the Antarctic, with a capital A (except as part of the formal names of the “Antarctic Ocean” or “Antarctic Circle”). The name Antarctica, based on the Greek word antarktos (meaning “the opposite of the Bear,” a constellation in the Northern Hemisphere) and its English usage “antarctic,” was adopted by Scottish cartographer John George Bartholomew, who in 1887 was the first to publish a chart with that name applied to the land mass. See “John George Bartholomew and the naming of Antarctica.” Maps and atlases published in the 1850s had referred to the Antarctic Ocean or Antarctic Circle but usually termed the land the “South Polar” continent.
4. Dyer may well have had in mind the 1920–1921 controversy surrounding the photographs of the Cottingley fairies that so blemished the reputation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle died in July 1930, about when Dyer was writing up his notes, and some of the obituaries rehashed the controversy over the photographs. Conan Doyle’s version of the tale is told in his book The Coming of the Fairies (1921); a more balanced overview is found in magician James Randi’s Flim-Flam! The Truth About Unicorns, Parapsychology, and Other Delusions.
5. Professor Pabodie’s work has been developed further since the 1930s. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the ANDRILL (Antarctic geological drilling) program introduced new instruments permitting the operator to go deeper and bring up material at a faster rate. This has been accomplished by introducing hot water into the drill hole so that the machinery essentially melts the ice and drills simultaneously.
6. A German aircraft manufacturer founded in 1914 by Claudius Dornier. Dornier became known in the 1920s and 1930s as a quality manufacturer of large, all-metal flying boats—seaplanes that come equipped with a hull, enabling them to land on water—including the 1924 Wal (Whale) and the Do X, which had twelve engines. In 1924, when Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth prepared to fly over the North Pole, they chose a pair of Dornier Do-J Wals, particularly for their ability to handle rough ice and snow.
7. There was a significant hiatus in South Polar exploration during the 1930s and 1940s, in large part because of World War II. Byrd flew over the Pole in 1929; no one was to return to it until 1956. For a detailed study of the many similarities between Byrd’s 1930 expedition and the Miskatonic expedition, see “Behind the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft and the Antarctic in 1930,” by Jason C. Eckhardt.
8. The continent known now as Antarctica was once part of the supercontinent called Gondwana, which likely had a temperate or even tropical climate. The breakup of Gondwana and separation of Antarctica, after which Antarctica cooled and the first ice appeared, probably occurred about 40 million years ago. The concepts of a supercontinent and of continental drift were forcefully put forward by Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), a German meteorologist and polar explorer, in 1912. (Although he formed his theories independently, Wegener later credited earlier scientists as proposing parts of his overall theory.) He posited a single gigantic landmass, or Urkontinent. Others later named it Pangaea, for the Greek “All Lands” or “All Earth,” and described it as being composed of Gondwana and a second supercontinent, Laurasia.
9. Now known to be almost three miles in depth near the Pole.
10. In Lovecraft’s notes for the tale, reproduced in Something About Cats and Other Pieces, he provides the following personnel lists:
Party of 12
Lake +
Atwood *
# Gedney
Orrendorf
Carroll+
Watkins #
# Moulton +&
Brennar #&
# Fowler +
Aiello
# Mills +
Boudrean #
Party of Seven
* Professor
Prof. Byer *
+ Student
Pabodie *
# Pilot
Allen
& Wireless Op.
# & Williamson
The Students
McTighe
(Lake’s Party)
& # Ropes +
Gedney
Carroll
Relief Plane
Moulton
Sherman # &
Fowler
Gunnarson
Mills
Larsen
(Dyer’s Party)
Danforth
Ropes
Qualified Pilots
Gedney
Sherman
Carroll
Danforth
Moulton
McTighe
Fowler
Ropes
Mills
Brennan
Watkins (non op)
Boudrean (non op)
11. Derby and Pickman are prominent Arkham names that reappear in other Lovecraft tales, notably “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “Pickman’s Model.”
12. Line-crossing ceremonies (principally of the Equator) are found in records of English voyages as early as 1823. Those records suggest that the ceremonies were based on earlier Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian rituals performed upon the passing of certain headlands. Members of the U.S. Navy who cross that line are initiated into the Order of the Red Nose.
Technically, the Antarctic Circle is the northern extreme of the Southern Hemisphere, the point at which the Sun remains above or below the horizon for twenty-four hours (on the respective winter or summer solstice). Because of the tilting of the Earth’s axis over time, the exact latitude changes over the years. In 2012, the exact latitude was 66°33'44" South, and the line moves closer to the South Pole at about 1,100 meters per year.
13. Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) was a Russian mystic, philosopher, scientist, and writer who traveled extensively in the Himalayas. He also created thousands of paintings. Lovecraft was extremely impressed by Roerich’s work when he saw it in New York in 1930. Commenting in his last, unfinished letter (addressed to James F. Morton and probably written on March 15, 1937 [Selected Letters, V, 422–436]) on an exhibition of surrealist work at the Museum of Modern Art that he hoped would travel to Providence, Lovecraft wrote, “Better than the surrealists, though, is good old Nick Roerich, whose joint at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street is one of my shrines in the pest zone. 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!”
A Himalayan range, painted by Nicholas Roerich in 1924.
14. Scoriæ are dense chunks of lava resembling coral or sponges, pierced with holes caused by gases forming bubbles in the lava.
15. Erebrus has been continuously active since 1972. It remains the most active of all of the Antarctic’s volcanoes. Terror, on the other hand, has been inactive for over eight hundred thousand years.
16. Although some associate the fictitious Mount Yaanek with Erebrus, discovered in 1841, it should be noted that Poe specifically refers to the boreal pole—that is, the Nor
th Pole.
17. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Poe’s only novel, deals with the voyage of young Pym on a whaling ship. In the end, the protagonist encounters black natives, from whom he and a companion escape in a boat, but although they find “white” water (presumably based on the freezing water of the Antarctic region, although Poe describes it as becoming warmer and warmer), the story ends before they reach the Antarctic. Little was known of the polar region when Poe wrote this, and so he was free to imagine a subtropical climate. After its publication, in a letter, Poe dismissed it as a “very silly book” (Poe to William E. Burton, June 1, 1840, http://www.eapoe.org/works/letters/p4006010.htm).
Some scholars have termed At the Mountains of Madness a “loose sequel” to Pym. See, for example, Jules Zanger’s “Poe’s “Endless Voyage: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Others have shown, however, that at most Lovecraft was inspired by Pym and drew very few specific elements from the tale. Marc A. Cerasini, in “Thematic Links in Arthur Gordon Pym, At the Mountains of Madness, and Moby Dick,” writes that while Madness is not “a literal sequel to the events described in Poe’s Pym, [it] is surely a thematic sequel—with more than merely incidental tributes to the source novel” (17). In particular, Cerasini comments on the shared themes of “whiteness,” racial harmony, and the spiritual journey. See also Peter Cannon’s “At the Mountains of Madness as a Sequel to Arthur Gordon Pym,” in which he terms Lovecraft’s story an “incidental tribute to Poe,” and his subsequent remarks on a panel on At the Mountains of Madness, reported in Lovecraft Studies; and Ben P. Indick’s “Lovecraft’s POEtical Adventure,” in which Indick calls Lovecraft’s tale a “sequel (but not a continuation) of Poe’s novel” (25).
There were in fact sequels to Poe’s book, notably Jules Verne’s Le Sphinx des Glaces (The Ice Sphinx) (1897) and Charles Romyn Dake’s A Strange Discovery (1899).
18. A breeches buoy is a lifesaving device rigged from one ship to another or from ship to shore. It consists of a line that is shot aboard a disabled vessel by a line-throwing gun. Effectively, the device functions as a huge vintage clothesline on a continuous reel, along which the rescued party is ferried on a canvas “seat” attached to a cork-filled life preserver, shaped like a pair of breeches or pants (hence the name).
A breeches buoy in use.
19. Scott in 1911 and Shackleton in 1909 and again in 1914.
20. Famously, the use of dogs in the Antarctic was pioneered by the Amundsen expedition and shunned by the doomed Scott expedition. The latter used ineffective tractors and man-hauled sledges.
21. Otherwise, the expedition risked the ship’s becoming frozen in the ice. Shackleton’s Endeavour suffered that fate. Anchored in the polar waters, it became trapped when the water froze, and the explorers could not return home. The ice did not thaw, and the ship could not get free, for more than eight months, during which time the ice floes surrounding the ship drifted almost fifteen hundred miles. When the weather warmed sufficiently for the ice to begin to break apart, the released blocks of ice crushed the ship, and it sank.
22. This is of course summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and temperatures on the western side of the continent, where the expedition was based at this point, have been recorded as being as high as 59° on the western coast. However, interior temperatures in the winter can drop to −100° or lower. The narrator seems to have no appreciation of what he could be in for.
23. This is technically Mount Fridtjof Nansen, in the Queen Maud Mountains; there is another Mount Nansen in Antarctica, elevation only 8,990 feet, in the Eisenhower Range.
24. Byrd’s exploratory flights in 1934 demonstrated that Antarctica was a single continent—not two, as previously believed. However, not until the first coast-to-coast air crossing of Antarctica took place, in November 1935, when Lincoln Ellsworth and his pilot, Herbert Hollick-Kenyon, flew from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, could this be stated definitively. The information must have been added in the editorial process prior to publication of the story in 1936.
25. No “Daniels” appears on the personnel list; this is evidently Dyer’s slip of the pen for “Danforth.”
26. In 2012, an American expedition, the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project, found bacteria a half-mile below the ice. (The discovery was made in Lake Whillans, for which the expedition had been named.) Like Lake Vostok, Whillans is one of the hundreds of interconnected subglacial lakes between the continent of Antarctica itself and the ice surrounding it. A Russian expedition, plumbing two miles below the icy surface of Lake Vostok for microbial life, found bacteria in 2013.
27. Archæan, a term that is used a good deal in the following narrative, refers to the Archæozoic era, roughly 3.8 million to 2.5 million years before today—part of the Precambrian period. The oldest rocks discovered to date are said to have been formed or to have existed in this period.
28. While Sir Douglas Mawson had pioneered the use of shortwave radio on his Antarctic voyage of 1911–12 (see note 77, below), it wasn’t until Byrd’s expedition in 1928–29 that public radio broadcasts became part of the program. Byrd was accompanied by Russell Owen, a reporter for the New York Times, who sent daily dispatches, and Byrd himself made frequent radio broadcasts.
29. This is a distance of 864 miles from the base camp.
30. In 2010, scientists revealed radar data of the Gamburtsev Mountains, discovered in 1958, the so-called ghost mountains of Antarctica and the last remaining unexplored mountain range on the planet. The data reveal that the subglacial range, believed to have formed a billion years ago, includes rocky summits, deep river valleys, and liquid, not frozen, lakes, all hidden beneath three miles of ice. The range approximates the Alps in size and covers an area that is roughly the size of the state of New York. Further exploration has revealed, however, that the ghost mountains do not begin to approach Everest in height. The highest mountain on the continent of Antarctica, at 16,050 feet, is Mount Vinson, in the Ellsworth Range. Everest, by comparison, is over 29,000 feet.
31. Antarctica has indeed the worst winds on Earth, brought on by intense high pressure over the cold interior, which pushes the atmosphere outward toward the warmer surrounding seas. A strong slope toward the seas draws air downhill, and it picks up speed from gravity, creating katabatic winds. The windiest known location is in the Cape Denison/Commonwealth Bay area, on the coast south of Australia. Its annual average wind speed is 50 mph. A twenty-four-hour average of 108 mph was recorded on one occasion; peak gusts top 200 mph.
32. The Mesozoic era is the span of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, from 225 million to 65 million years ago.
33. Placodermi flourished between 450 to 250 million years ago, and so finding their remains with organisms deposited between 150 million to 50 million years ago should have alerted Lake that something was “wrong,” according to Bert Atama (in “An Autopsy on the Old Ones”).
34. The narrator of “The Whisperer in Darkness” (here, above), who, it will be recalled, was also on the faculty of Miskatonic University.
35. The narrator here confuses the terminology; although “pterodactyls” have wings, “pteridophytes” are ferns with roots, stems, and leaves (but no flowers or seeds). The name has nothing to do with wings.
36. Another reference to Wilmarth of “The Whisperer in Darkness,” above.
37. Roald Amundsen, in The South Pole (1913), recorded:
With the low temperatures we experienced on this trip, we noticed a curious snow-formation that I had never seen before. Fine—extremely fine—drift-snow collected, and formed small cylindrical bodies of an average diameter of 1¼ inches, and about the same height; they were, however, of various sizes. They generally rolled over the surface like a wheel, and now and then collected into large heaps, from which again, one by one, or several together, they continued their rolling (I, 287).
Such “cylinders,” also known as snow bales, snow rollers, or snow doughnuts, form
when tubelike drifts are lifted by the wind and blown around like tumbleweed. They have been spotted in many cold, windy places around the world, including North America and England.
These snow rollers were photographed in Czechoslovakia.
38. William Scoresby (1789–1857), an English scientist, curate, and explorer, published in 1820 An Account of the Arctic Regions and Northern Whale-Fishery, a narrative of his own voyages as well as those of previous navigators. It was read by Melville, who referred to Scoresby in Moby-Dick. Scoresby also wrote a memoir, Memorials of the Sea (London: Longman, 1851), primarily about his father, who took him to sea at the age of eleven.
39. Here ends the first installment in Astounding Stories.
40. The two sentences following have been restored to the text by S. T. Joshi; they did not appear in the original publication.
41. It is ironic that Dyer refers to the autopsy work performed by the Elder Ones as “inhuman,” similar as it is to the work done by Lake himself on the “specimens” he discovered.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 84
