The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

by H. P. Lovecraft

  42. Strewn.

  43. The two sentences following have been restored to the text by S. T. Joshi; they did not appear in the original publication.

  44. They were very lucky not to pass out: In 1804, the French chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac ascended in a balloon to 23,000 feet. At that height, he experienced quickened pulse, shortness of breath, and finally unconsciousness—symptoms of oxygen deprivation—until the balloon began to descend. Gay-Lussac’s measurements demonstrated that the quantity of oxygen in the atmosphere remained constant at different heights; it was not then understood that the reduced air pressure at this great height affected the diffusion of the gas, producing oxygen starvation.

  45. An Inca site in the eastern Andes, dating from the fifteenth century. Set in a range of tropical forests in the Amazon Basin and incomparably beautiful, it is considered an apotheosis of urban civilization.

  46. From 1923 to 1933, the Field Museum of Natural History of Chicago and the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University conducted excavations at the site of the ancient city of Kish, fifty miles south of modern Baghdad. Unfortunately, no final site report was ever published. Kish was an important Mesopotamian city, occupied from 3200 BCE.

  47. Harmoniously proportioned.

  48. These phrases (the former means “crown of the world”) are associated with the region known as “high Asia,” the mountainous interior, and in particular the Pamirs and the Himalayas. Nicholas Roerich, who traveled extensively in the region, established the Corona Mundi International Arts Center in 1922 with his wife, the Russian philosopher, writer, photographer, and art restorer Helena Roerich (1879–1955). See note 13, above.

  49. Lemuria was proposed in 1864 by the English zoologist Philip Sclater as a land bridge joining the islands Madagascar, Ceylon, and Sumatra. The theories of plate tectonics that emerged in the early twentieth century largely eliminated Lemuria from scientific thought. However, in The Secret Doctrine (1888), the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky announced that Lemuria was the home of what she termed a “root race” of humanity (in this case, egg-laying hermaphrodites), and others embraced the concept, most notably the investment banker and Theosophist William Scott-Elliot, in his The Lost Lemuria (1904). See also “The Call of Cthulhu,” note 16, above.

  50. Another capital of Hyperborea, succeeding Commoriom, described in numerous tales by Robert E. Howard (see “The Whisperer in Darkness,” note 64, above).

  51. In “The Mound,” a story cowritten by Lovecraft with Zealia Bishop in late 1929 and early 1930 (but not published until 1940), the land is said to be near the North Pole. Olathoë and Lomar are first mentioned in Lovecraft’s “Polaris” (1920).

  52. Another Robert E. Howard–referenced land, filled with serpent-men, identified later as coextensive with modern (that is, post-Archæan) Europe.

  53. See, of course, “The Nameless City” (here, above).

  54. The Comanchian or Commanchean period was an American usage, coined by geologist Robert T. Hill, to designate a portion of what in Europe was termed the Lower Cretaceous period. This was perhaps 100 million years ago, as contrasted with the Upper Cretaceous period of a mere 70 to 80 million years ago. The name was derived from the location of the rock strata examined, which were in the Comanche territories in Texas. It was a time when sauropods, giant dinosaurs with tiny heads and long necks, proliferated.

  55. The commercial flashbulb, patented on September 23, 1930, in Germany. Put in production under the trade name Vacublitz by the Hauser Company, which used a model invented by Johannes Ostermeier, they were soon sold in America by General Electric under the brand name Sashalite. French and Austrian versions of the technology, by Louis Bouton (in 1895) and Paul Vierkötter (in 1925), preceded Ostermeier’s.

  Early Sashalite flashbulbs.

  56. See “The Call of Cthulhu,” note 11, above, for a discussion of Futurism and other art movements.

  57. That is, Scarabaeus sacer, the dung beetle revered in ancient Egypt as a sacred symbol of the sun god Ra. The beetle is often depicted rolling a ball of dung across the sand; this symbolizes the rolling of the sun across the sky.

  58. In other words, points out Robert M. Price, in “Demythologizing Cthulhu,” the “occult and transcendent Great Old Ones . . . were simply a race of space aliens,” still horrifying, but horrifying because they underline the cosmic insignificance of humankind (9).

  59. “Flashlights” in the original published version—that is, flash photos.

  60. See “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” note 7, above, for a discussion of the ether.

  61. Again, a reference to Wilmarth, in “The Whisperer in Darkness,” above.

  62. Shoggoths are also mentioned in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (here, below) and “The Thing on the Doorstep” (here, below). In his notes for At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft explicitly describes shoggoths (without identifying them as such) as “hideous giant luminous savagely intelligent protoplasm masses composed of plastic jet-black—reflective iridescent bubbles & capable of forming temporary organs adaptable to any medium—air, water, nether spawn of inner earth. Mimic piping voices. 15 ft. diameter as sphere, but viscous like Tsathoggua” (Something About Cats and Other Pieces, 188).

  63. A Byzantine dynasty from the eleventh century to the seventeenth century CE. Lovecraft evidently means simply “old”—palaeology is the study of antiquities.

  64. Crinoids are marine animals, with a mouth on top and feeding arms around the mouth.

  65. Heart-shaped structures, like twigs, that form as a pteridophyte grows.

  66. Cf. the similar views on eugenics expressed by another alien race in “The Shadow Out of Time,” note 38, below. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Darwin’s theories had been transmuted by scientists and some political leaders into the idea that the genetic composition of human populations should be managed. Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), credited with the first modern use of the term “eugenics,” in 1883 (to replace “viriculture,” which he’d suggested earlier but which he had come to feel was clumsy), reported to the British government in 1909 that one of every 118 persons was “mad, feeble-minded, or idiotic” and recommended “colonies” to separate them from the remainder of the populace. In 1910, Winston Churchill advocated sterilization of these “moral degenerates,” and as late as 1934, the Brock Committee, in the so-called Brock Report, recommended voluntary sterilization of mental defectives. (The report’s chief signatory, Sir Lawrence Brock, was chairman of Britain’s Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency.) Lovecraft sympathized with such views (see in particular “The Lurking Fear,” written in 1923, for its example of moral degeneracy and suggestions that sterilization could have avoided the problem), and his support of Hitler’s eugenics programs, including the “racial cleansing” advocated by Ernst Rüdin and others, is well known. Yet Lovecraft’s views, extreme as they may sound today, must be regarded in the context of prevailing cultural attitudes. See, for example, Martin S. Pernick’s The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915. By the 1930s, many American states required the sterilization of “defective” individuals who failed to meet “standards” based on IQ tests, income, education, criminal behavior, and even physical appearance. The adoption of the eugenicists’ viewpoint by Nazi Germany led to its eventual rejection. See generally Elof Axel Carlson’s The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001).

  67. This theory of the origin of the moon is known as “fission” theory and has been rejected. The first to develop the theory was George H. Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin. In 1878, he postulated that the earth and moon consisted of a common, molten, viscous mass. The sun’s tidal action, he argued, triggered “fission,” and a mass approximately equal to that of the moon spun off from the rapidly rotating earth. Others later proposed that the basin of the Pacific Ocean was the scar left over from the separation. As late as 1936, the “fission” theory still had widespre
ad popularity (as evidenced by a 1936 U.S. Department of Education script for a radio program on the subject of the moon), and, in the words of Stephen G. Brush, in “Early History of Selenogony” (1986), it had become “translated into popular mythology.” In scientific circles, British astronomer Harold Jeffreys announced in 1930 that he had discovered what he considered to be a fatal objection to the theory, and his views were subsequently adopted. Having set sail in September 1930, however, the narrator Dyer may not have had time to catch up on his reading of British scientific journals. Today scientists still have not agreed on a theory of the moon’s creation, even with the data provided by lunar exploration.

  68. American geologist Frank Bursley Taylor (1869–1938), who proposed the idea of continental drift in 1910. In fact, there were several others who had independently formulated similar thoughts earlier than Taylor—Roberto Mantovani (1889), William H. Pickering (1907), and even Franklin Coxworthy (perhaps as early as 1848).

  69. See note 8, above.

  70. John Joly (1857–1933) was an Irish physicist who studied methods of determining the length of geological ages. He proposed convection-driven drift, a notion unpopular among geologists. Among his other achievements was extracting radium to be used in the treatment of cancer (radiotherapy).

  71. These creatures are described in detail in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (here, above).

  72. There is a legendary lost South American city of Patagonia, known as Ciudad de los Césares or Lin Lin or Trapananda. It was thought to have been occupied by Patagonian giants (or, less interestingly, by lost Spanish explorers).

  73. A peninsula on the northern edge of the continent, and the closest part of the continent to South America. This sixteenth-century map made by the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius clearly shows the linkage of South America and Terra Australis (“Land of the South”).

  74. A geologic period between the Devonian and Permian periods, extending from about 360 million to 300 million years ago. The Earth then was heavily forested (so that many coal beds were formed during this period, providing the name), and it was widely populated by amphibians and arthropods.

  75. Known in German as Prinzregent-Luitpold-Land, it was named by its discoverer in 1911 for the Bavarian prince-regent.

  76. Charles Wilkes (1798–1877), whose eccentricities and rigidity were said to have been borrowed by Melville in his characterization of Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick (see, for instance, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Sea of Glory), was an American naval officer who led the United States Exploring Expedition from 1838 to 1842. In December 1839, he sailed into the Antarctic Ocean and reported sighting the coast of “an Antarctic continent.” It is generally agreed that the continent was first sighted by explorers in 1820, and that the first landing occurred in 1821.

  77. Sir Douglas Mawson (1882–1958), Australian geologist. He turned down the opportunity to join Scott’s 1910 expedition, choosing instead to lead his own, the so-called Australasian Antarctic Expedition, in 1911 and 1912 to King George V Land and Adélie Land—due south of Australia and then almost completely unexplored. The expedition included a visit to the South Magnetic Pole. Mawson returned to Antarctica in 1929 to 1931 with a joint British, Australian, and New Zealand expedition, the first since Ernest Shackleton’s 1922 expedition. (Shackleton’s trip was his third and final, during which he suffered a heart attack and died.)

  78. Subsequent explorers have failed to find these awesome peaks, and they are invisible to satellite photography. See note 30, above.

  79. Constantine, the emperor of Rome from 306 to 337 CE, stripped the temples of pagan cities to decorate his new capital city of Constantinople, founded in 324 on the site of the former city of Byzantium.

  80. Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink (1864–1934) was an Anglo-Norwegian polar explorer and a pioneer of modern Antarctic travel. His great Southern Cross Expedition of 1898–1900 was largely sponsored by Sir George Newnes, the publisher of the Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine. The newspaper the Queenslander reported, on February 27, 1897:

  One remark that [Borchgrevink] let fall suggests an interesting query. He found that nearly all the seals which the party shot on Campbell Island and its vicinity had scars and scratches on their skin. Now, Sir John Ross had noticed the same fact. Ross explained it on the basis that they had been inflicted by the large, sharp tusks with which the sea leopards are provided, and that these wounds had been received in civil war among themselves. Borchgrevink’s theory, on the other hand, is that these scars are due to some enemy of a different species than the seal. The wounds are not like the ordinary cuts inflicted by a tusk or tooth; they are of a straight, narrow shape, varying from 2in. to 20in. in length, and where several of these cuts appear on one animal they are too far from one another to have possibly been produced by the numerous sharp teeth of a seal. . . . That they were inflicted by some animal of a superior and more dangerous kind than the seals themselves is evident from the fact that the scars never appear about the head and neck, which undoubtedly would have been the case if any battles were fought among themselves. This may explain the strange scarcity of seals in this particular locality, though they abound elsewhere. But the query suggests itself—What like is this mysterious monster, and where is his habitat?

  Borchgrevink went on to speculate that he might even find a new human race residing in the Antarctic. However, a study by Edward A. “Uncle Bill” Wilson, published as Mammalia in 1907, concluded that Orcinus orca, also known as Orca gladiator, or the killer whale, was responsible for the scarring. More recently, mammalogists think that leopard seals may be responsible, not orcas.

  81. This is the end of the second installment published in Astounding Stories.

  82. The preceding four sentences were omitted from the Astounding Stories publication.

  83. The Astounding Stories version reads, “a waste utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life.”

  84. Bones of a 25-million-year-old penguin, named Kairuku, four feet two in height, were discovered in New Zealand in 1977 and reconstructed in 2012, according to results published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Of course, the skeletal remains did not display either albinism or virtual eyelessness.

  85. In Astounding Stories, the sentence read, “We had heard two more penguins.”

  86. Palmyra (Tidmor or Tadmor) was an ancient city in Syria, northeast of Damascus, that flourished more than 3,000 years ago. Sometimes called “Syria’s Stonehenge,” its sculpture was distinctive. The Bible (2 Chronicles 8:4) credits Solomon (whose reign was probably 970 to 931 BCE) with “building” the city, but he may have merely fortified a preexisting city; Tadmor is also mentioned in older Sumerian archives.

  87. This and the two preceding sentences do not appear in Astounding Stories.

  88. In Astounding Stories, the sentence ends here, and the following sentence is omitted.

  89. See note 17, above. Lovecraft thus implies that Poe may have had access to the truth about Antarctica. Poe was likely inspired by the 1828–29 American Antarctic Exploring Expedition led by Benjamin Pendleton and Nathaniel Palmer and the landing on the continent by John Davis, of New Haven, Connecticut, in 1831. Poe’s story was also informed by his admiration for his contemporary Jeremiah N. Reynolds (1799–1858), an author, scientist, and explorer. In 1837, Poe favorably reviewed Reynolds’s book Address, on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas (New York, 1836) first delivered to the House of Representatives on April 2, 1836, and he borrowed seven hundred words of the book for a chapter of Pym. (Poe also borrowed heavily from other travel writers.) Reynolds espoused the “hollow earth” theory outlined by John Cleves Symmes in his novel Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820).

  90. In Pym’s narrative, it is not only the white birds that cry out “Tekeli-li!,” it is also the natives. The natives’ calls are in response to flapping white objects that they may have confused with the birds.

  91. Orpheus, a
ccording to Virgil, descended to the underworld to bring his wife, Eurydice, back to the living. When he won her release, Hades and Persephone instructed him not to look back even once during the ascent. When he did so, Eurydice was forever lost to death. According to the Bible, Lot and his family, on fleeing the destruction of Sodom, were told by angels not to look back, and when his wife did so in disobedience of these orders, she was turned to a pillar of salt (Genesis 19).

  92. This and the four previous sentences are omitted from Astounding Stories.

  93. Unfit to speak of; unmentionable.

  94. This and the preceding three sentences are omitted from Astounding Stories.

  95. This sentence does not appear in Astounding Stories.

  96. This and the succeeding sentence are omitted from Astounding Stories.

  97. This sentence does not appear in Astounding Stories.

  98. Similar encounters are reported in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Horror of the Heights,” published in November 1913 in the Strand Magazine and, in the United States, Everybody’s Magazine. Note that this sentence does not appear in Astounding Stories.

  99. This sentence does not appear in Astounding Stories.

  100. The sentence ends here in Astounding Stories.

  101. Homer recounts this tale. The Sirens of legend could lure men to their deaths with their singing. Odysseus, who desired to sail near the coast of the Sirens, had his men stop their ears with wax to prevent them from falling under their spell. Desiring to hear their reputedly lovely voices for himself, Odysseus had his men tie him to the mast.

  102. This and the previous sentence do not appear in Astounding Stories.

  Cover of At the Mountains of Madness. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House Publishers, 1964 (artist: Raymond Bayless)

  103. A pharos is a lighthouse; the Pharos of Alexandria was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, according to tourist guidebooks of the age.