There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque city a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights loomed dreamlike against the beckoning rose color of the western sky. Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancient tableland, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene’s unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land—highest of earth’s peaks and focus of earth’s evil; harborers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living thing of earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the plains in the polar night—beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof primal legends hint evasively.
If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than three hundred miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence appear above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then, must have been tremendous beyond all comparison—carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled only by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls. Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their accursed slopes—and wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently. I recalled how their northerly end must come near the coast at Queen Mary Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson’s expedition was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed a measure of my overwrought condition at the time—and Danforth seemed to be even worse.
Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane our fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast-enough range whose recrossing lay ahead of us. From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously against the east, again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave mouths where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range. To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the summits—as poor Lake must have done when he made that early mistake about volcanism—and thought shiveringly of that kindred mist from which we had just escaped; of that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering abyss whence all such vapors came.
All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying furs. Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a very smooth take-off over the nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry spread out as it had done when first we saw it, and we began rising and turning to test the wind for our crossing through the pass. At a very high level there must have been great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things; but at twenty-four thousand feet, the height we needed for the pass, we found navigation quite practicable. As we drew close to the jutting peaks the wind’s strange piping again became manifest, and I could see Danforth’s hands trembling at the controls. Rank amateur that I was, I thought at that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over his duties he did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the pass—resolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountain-top vapor, and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses’ men off the Sirens’ coast to keep that disturbing wind-piping from my consciousness.
But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely—yet I am afraid that Danforth will never be the same again.
I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind’s piping and the engine’s buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly—and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of those echoing, vaporous, wormily-honey-combed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, demoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the tiring was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognized mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake’s camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.
He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about “the black pit,” “the carven rim,” “the proto-Shoggoths,” “the windowless solids with five dimensions,” “the nameless cylinder,” “the elder Pharos,” “Yog-Sothoth,” “the primal white jelly,” “the color out of space,” “the wings,” “the eyes in darkness,” “the moon-ladder,” “the original, the eternal, the undying,” and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library.
The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that its swirls of ice dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest—and, of course, Danforth did not hint any of these specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance.
At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad word of all too obvious source: “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
Edward John Morton Drax Plunkett, Lord Dunsany (1878- ), famous as an Irish dramatist, author and fantaisiste, was born in London and educated at Eton and Sandhurst, coming into his title in 1899. His life has be
en far more active than that of most writers, for he served in the Boer War as well as in World War I. His best work appears in The Sword of Welleran (1908), The Gods of Pegana (1911), Time and the Gods (1913), A Dreamer’s Tales (1916), The Book of Wonder (1916), Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919), Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens (1931). His autobiography, Patches of Sunlight, appeared in 1938. A new collection of Jorkens tales is due for early publication by Arkham House.
MARS ON THE ETHER
Lord Dunsany
OF THE PAPERS LEFT BEHIND BY THE late Alfred Smulker, with one exception, I have little to say. They seem to reveal a rather selfish life. He must have aimed at a great name, with none to share it. But who remembers Alfred Smulker now? He had ample reason to hope for a great name and, if he had lived a few months more, would have had it, but it would have been due only to a lucky accident, and not to any essential merit in Smulker. The lucky accident was simply that, while fumbling for Daventry, he got his wireless exactly on to a certain number, and, having done that, left it on when he went to bed, and woke and remembered it about 2 a.m., and came down to turn it off and heard a queer station talking in no known language. And it turned out to be Mars. His name would not have been overlooked had he taken the matter to experts there and then, and certainly progress would have been made, within the year, that it took him ten years to perfect; but he wanted all the honor to himself. His industry was of course colossal, there can be no doubt of that, and he had a certain ingenuity too. It was ingenious how he worked out that these talks which his set got,
and continued to get, came from a planet. He hired at considerable expense one of those instruments by which they tell from what direction a wireless message is coming, and he found that the unknown transmitting station was moving. He assumed at first that it was from a ship, but gradually he found that it moved too slowly, even for a ship at a great distance. When he guessed that it was a planet he avoided help from astronomers just as he avoided the help of wireless experts; so he aimed his apparatus at the wastes of Space and worked it all out for himself; and so he got Mars. For the next ten years he worked at the language. And that is where with the help of philologists he could have done the work in a tenth of the time, but he wanted this lone immortal name for himself; which in the end he never got, because he lived only long enough to record one broadcast from the neighboring planet. And this broadcast is the only thing of interest to me in all the volume of his papers which have come into my hands. These papers deal with thousands of theories of sounds; and on these theories he built up word upon word and sentence upon sentence, none of which had any meaning for hundreds and hundreds of pages; until at last he got a theory’ which could be worked, and in the course of years he found words, and in the eighth or ninth year got a few coherent sentences. All the time he kept the indicator of his wireless set at the same point, never even allowing it to be dusted, and even protecting it with a sort of safe; for he knew that he had only tuned in to that other set by a hair’s breadth, and that if he lost it he would never get it again. And a hair’s breadth is far too coarse a measurement by which to define the exactitude of Smulker’s happy accident; for, were it otherwise, hundreds of others must have stumbled on it by now, even though it seems only to broadcast in the small hours, and Smulker had a particularly powerful set. Well, for the next two years Smulker worked in all his spare time on the new language; his papers teem with his studies of it; and towards the end of the time he was writing essays in it. And not until he was fluent did he take down any broadcast received from Mars. Or, if he did, he never preserved it. He meant to astonish the world with a perfect message, so that no one could argue or doubt whether or not he had been in touch with Mars. It is a pity that the one message he received is not of greater interest in itself: it is evidently merely a lecture upon astronomy, given in some Martian university and broadcast from one of their powerful sets. There will be no more for some while, because after Smulker’s death several people had naturally access to his room, and one of them admits to having turned his indicator, when the safe-like protection had been removed from his set, in order to get the right time. And several others may have interfered with it too. This then is the only communication we have from Mars at present; or rather I should say the only communication that is intelligible, for I leave out of account all those untranslated sounds that we usually attribute to atmospherics. Here then is the communication, annotated by Alfred Smulker, and, if it is not in itself thrilling, we must wait for that until we can get in touch with Mars again and so have a wider selection of messages from them . . . upon the third planet.”
[“At these words,” writes S., “I realized that the astronomical lecturer was presumably referring to us, and I therefore decided to take the whole thing down verbatim, as it might be of personal interest to the inhabitants of this planet. Otherwise I had intended to wait for something with more local color in it as the first communication from Mars that I should offer to our people.”]
“The proximity of the third planet to the sun is not so frightful as to preclude the possibility of its being inhabited, on the ground of heat alone; for, although life in the central portions of the surface would be impossible, there are, as with us, large areas of ice at the poles, and life might be able to exist in the neighborhood of these, were the air fit to breathe. It would seem however that the atmosphere, just over those areas on which life might otherwise have been possible, is composed entirely of clouds, from which the humidity frequently falls, with such force as to extinguish any life there might be, even were it able to breathe that nebulous air. These periods of excessive humidity are frequently accompanied by electric discharges, that have often been clearly detected, which again would destroy all life in the course of time; while life in the central spaces, away from intense humidity, is unthinkable, on account of the great heat of the sun. On these grounds life of any sort on the third planet would appear to be out of the question, unless the sea, of which the surface of the planet is mostly composed, is adapted to the life of some kind of fish. And it should be a source of satisfaction to us to know that this is so; for, the entire universe having been created for the appreciation of the people of Mars Thlekrethon, Smulker notes that they call it] it is somewhat jarring to our sense of fitness to be told, as Hoyce, Hobbuk and others have told us, that there is any life elsewhere, as though it might be thought that there was something somewhere that could share this great privilege with us.
“If we take seriously the theories of Hoyce and Hobbuk,” the lecturer continued, “the people of that planet would be curiously circumstanced: the sun, to begin with, would be an enormous fiery disc, pouring out intolerable heat at them, the natural effects of which seem to have been overlooked by both Hoyce and Hobbuk; and they would have the very curious experience of having only one moon. Of this moon they would never see more than half, on account of its single revolution during its tour of the planet, turning the same side always towards it. Hence we have the single paradox that we know more of the geography of their one moon than they do themselves, always supposing with Hoyce and Hobbuk that there is life on that planet at all, and that it is able to see. There would be no other object in view of the third planet, still supposing that there is life on it, that would appear as large as that planet does to us, though they would have a fair view of the second planet; but this would look nothing so splendid as the third planet must to it. They would also miss much of the splendor of the great fifth planet, which we are privileged to see. But, to turn from these fancies and discuss the third planet seriously: the greater part of its surface being covered with water, and any inhabitant of the land having only clouds to breathe, except where the sun is too hot for life to be possible, we should be content with its function of giving a certain brilliance to our sky, and not suppose it to be capable of maintaining some lower form of life.”
At this point the annotations of Smulker are very numerous, and, from the smallness of the writing that he has crowded in, it would
appear that he often inserted them whenever his feelings were stirred again with the indignation caused by the innocent remarks of the Martian lecturer. He seems even to have missed, while making the earlier annotations, some of the lecture itself, for there is an evident gap.
The lecturer continued: “Whatever inferior forms of life we may perhaps admit as being possible there, we must exclude the possibility of anything with more than four ears or any intelligence capable of understanding the purpose of Mars or Thlekrethon, as he called it] or the glory and greatness of her people.” There are more indignant annotations by Smulker and then the lecturer seemed to approach his peroration, after some rather dull passages which I will not quote, dealing with the chemistry and geology of Earth, seen accurately enough by some instruments they must possess that seem sufficiently powerful to examine the fire of our volcanoes by means of a spectrum. “Let us be thankful,” he continued, “here at the center of the universe, that science supports us in the belief, so natural to our best feelings, that nowhere else is there intelligent life to share with us our contemplation of the stars; and that the Milky Way, which is especially displayed for our contemplation, is not to be shared with other eyes than ours. We know from this that the destiny of the people of but at this point the tiresome annotations of Smulker broke in again; and, though nothing of scientific value may have been lost, I have a feeling that by his neglect to commit to paper the rest of that lecture the world has probably lost a valuable peroration, which not only would have adorned anthologies, but which with very slight alteration could have been used to lift and brighten the ends of speeches on many a platform, to the delight of audiences up and down the world.
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