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Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing. They were
normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like
an agglutination of bubbles, and each averaged about fifteen feet in
diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape
and volume - throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent
organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either
spontaneously or according to suggestion.
They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the
Permian Age, perhaps one hundred and fifty million years ago, when a
veritable war of resubjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old
Ones. Pictures of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in
by H. P. Lovecraft 68
which the Shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a marvelously
fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old
Ones had used curious weapons of molecular and atomic disturbances
against the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory.
Thereafter the sculptures showed a period in which Shoggoths were tamed
and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west
were tamed by cowboys. Though during the rebellion the Shoggoths had
shown an ability to live out of water, this transition was not encouraged -
since their usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with
the trouble of their management.
During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a
new invasion from outer space - this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean
creatures - creatures undoubtedly the same as those figuring in certain
whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered in the Himalayas as
the Mi-Go, or abominable Snow Men. To fight these beings the Old Ones
attempted, for the first time since their terrene advent, to sally forth again
into the planetary ether; but, despite all traditional preparations, found it no
longer possible to leave the earth's atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of
interstellar travel had been, it was now definitely lost to the race. In the end
the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands, though they
were powerless to disturb those in the sea. Little by little the slow retreat of
the elder race to their original antarctic habitat was beginning.
It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn
and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely
different from that which we know than was the substance of the Old Ones.
They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible
for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally come from even
remoter gulfs of the cosmic space. The Old Ones, but for their abnormal
toughness and peculiar vital properties, were strictly material, and must
have had their absolute origin within the known space-time continuum -
whereas the first sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with
bated breath. All this, of course, assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages
and the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are not pure mythology.
Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework to
by H. P. Lovecraft 69
account for their occasional defeats, since historical interest and pride
obviously formed their chief psychological element. It is significant that
their annals failed to mention many advanced and potent races of beings
whose mighty cultures and towering cities figure persistently in certain
obscure legends.
The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with
startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain
cases existing science will require revision, while in other cases its bold
deductions are magnificently confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis of
Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all the continents are fragments of an
original antarctic land mass which cracked from centrifugal force and
drifted apart over a technically viscous lower surface - an hypothesis
suggested by such things as the complementary outlines of Africa and
South America, and the way the great mountain chains are rolled and
shoved up - receives striking support from this uncanny source.
Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or
more years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to
separate Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe (then the
Valusia of primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic continent.
Other charts - and most significantly one in connection with the founding
fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around us - showed all the
present continents well differentiated. And in the latest discoverable
specimen - dating perhaps from the Pliocene Age - the approximate world
of today appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia,
of North America with Europe through Greenland, and of South America
with the antarctic continent through Graham Land. In the Carboniferous
map the whole globe-ocean floor and rifted land mass alike - bore symbols
of the Old Ones' vast stone cities, but in the later charts the gradual
recession toward the antarctic became very plain. The final Pliocene
specimen showed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip
of South America, nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South
Latitude. Knowledge and interest in the northern world, save for a study of
coast lines probably made during long exploration flights on those fanlike
membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones.
by H. P. Lovecraft 70
Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal
rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea bottom, and
other natural causes, was a matter of common record; and it was curious to
observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on.
The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last
general center of the race - built early in the Cretaceous Age after a titanic
earth buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant. It
appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of all, where
reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea bottom. In the new
city - many of whose features we could recognize in the sculptures, but
which stretched fully a hundred miles along the mountain range in each
direction beyond the farthest limits of our aerial survey - there were reputed
to be preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottom
city, which thrust up to light after long epochs in the course of the general
crumbling of strata.
VIII
Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly
personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district in
which we were. Of this local material there was naturally a vast abundance;
and on the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find a
house of very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a
neighboring rift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying
the story of the region much beyond the period of the Pliocene map whence
we derived our last general glimpse of the prehuman world. This was the
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