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already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but
the Shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous
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degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem.
They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestions of the Old
Ones, and had modeled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs
and organs; but now their self-modeling powers were sometimes exercised
independently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion. They
had, it seems, developed a semistable brain whose separate and occasionally
stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it.
Sculptured images of these 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 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 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
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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.
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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]