Читать книгу Зов Ктулху / The Call of Cthulhu. Уровень 2 - Говард Лавкрафт, Говард Филлипс Лавкрафт, Adolphe de Castro - Страница 5

I don’t want to tell the reasons why I oppose the invasion of the Antarctic – with its vast fossil hunt and its melting of the ancient ice caps. But I must do so. I can understand clearly that my story will seem extravagant and incredible. But there are photographs, both ordinary and aerial, and they will help me. They are vivid and graphic. Of course, some people can say that it is all fakery. And there are ink drawings, but somebody may laugh at them and call them obvious impostures.

I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders. They have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought. On the other hand, they have sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any over-ambitious program[67] in the region of those mountains of madness. It is pity that[68] ordinary men like myself and my colleagues are connected only with a small university. That’s why we have little chance to make an impression in the controversial matters[69].

In the strictest sense, we are not specialists in these fields. Miskatonic University[70] sent me as a geologist. The aim of our expedition was to secure deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the Antarctic continent. We had a remarkable drill that was designed by Professor Frank H. Pabodie[71] of our engineering department. I hoped, as a geologist, that this new mechanical device will discover the materials, unacceptable by the ordinary methods of collection. And I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this.

Pabodie’s drilling apparatus was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity. Only three sledges carried steel head, jointed rods[72], gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick[73], dynamiting paraphernalia[74], cords, rubbish-removal auger[75], and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep. This was possible due to aluminum alloy used by Pabodie. Four large aeroplanes were able to transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various inland points.

We planned to explore a great area in one season. We were operating mostly in the mountain ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea[76]. These were regions explored by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd[77]. We expected to get a quite unprecedented amount of material – especially in the pre-Cambrian[78] strata. We wished also to obtain a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks. The primal life history of this realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth’s past. The Antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical. We hoped to expand that information about its flora and fauna in variety, accuracy, and detail.

The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press[79], and through the later articles of Pabodie and myself. There were four men from the University – Pabodie, Lake of the biology department[80], Atwood of the physics department[81] – also a meteorologist – and myself. I was representing geology and was a nominal leader. There were also sixteen assistants: seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aeroplane pilots. Most of them were competent wireless operators as well. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships were fully manned[82].

The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation[83] financed the expedition. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston. There our ships were loaded. We were marvelously well-equipped for our specific purposes. As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd, 1930. We took a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopped at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania [84]. There we got final supplies. Our ship captains were J. B. Douglas[85], commanding the brig Arkham, and Georg Thorfinnssen[86], commanding the Miskatonic. They both were veteran whalers in Antarctic waters.

At about 62° South Latitude we noticed our first icebergs. These were table-like objects with vertical sides. Just before reaching the Antarctic circle[87], which we crossed on October 20th with appropriately ceremonies, field ice [88] considerably troubled us. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics. Very often the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly. Distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

We were pushing through the ice. Finally, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175°. On the morning of October 26th, a snow-clad mountain chain appeared on the south. That was an outpost of the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross[89]. Our task was to round Cape Adare[90] and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land[91] to our base on the shore of McMurdo Sound[92], at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9’.

The last part of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks of mystery, white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich[93], and of the disturbing descriptions of the evil plateau of Leng[94]. These descriptions appear in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred[95]. I was rather sorry, later on, that I looked into that monstrous book at the college library.

On the 7th of November, we passed Franklin Island[96]. The next day the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island[97] appeared, with the long line of the Parry Mountains[98] beyond. There was a white line of the great ice barrier. It was rising perpendicularly to a height of two hundred feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec. It marked the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast near the Mt. Erebus. Beyond it rose the white, ghostlike height of Mt. Terror, ten thousand, nine hundred feet in altitude.

One of the graduate assistants – a brilliant young fellow named Danforth[99] – noticed lava on the snowy slope. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins walked.

We used small boats and landed on Ross Island shortly after midnight on the morning of the 9th. Then we prepared to unload supplies. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano’s slope was only a provisional one. Headquarters were situated aboard the Arkham. We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit[100], cameras, both ordinary and aerial, aeroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless devices – besides those in the planes. These devices helped us to communicate with the Arkham’s large device from any part of the Antarctic continent that we wanted to visit. The ship’s radio was communicating with the outside world. It was able to convey press reports to the Arkham Advertiser’s powerful wireless station on Kingsport Head, Massachusetts[101]. We hoped to complete our work during an Antarctic summer. Otherwise we planned to winter on the Arkham and send the Miskatonic north for another summer’s supplies.

I need not repeat what the newspapers already published about our early work. The health of our party – twenty men and fifty-five Alaskan sledge dogs – was remarkable. Of course we did not encounter really destructive temperatures or windstorms.

We reached Beardmore Glacier[102], the largest valley glacier in the world. The frozen sea changed to a mountainous coast line. We were eight thousand, five hundred feet above sea-level. When experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the small melting apparatus.

In certain sandstones we found some highly interesting fossil fragments. We found ferns, seaweeds, and mollusks. They were very important for the region’s primordial history. There was also a queer triangular, striated marking[103], about a foot in greatest diameter. Lake, as a biologist, found these curious marking unusually puzzling and provocative. To my geological eye it looked not unlike some of the ripple effects common in the sedimentary rocks[104]. Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation, I saw no reason for extreme wonder.

On January 6th, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, the other six students, and myself flew directly over the South pole in two planes. There was a high wind. This was, as the papers said, one of several observation flights. Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities. Often the whole white world dissolved into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of dreams under the magic of the low midnight sun.

We resolved to carry out our original plan. We wanted to fly five hundred miles eastward and establish a new base. Our health remained excellent. It was now midsummer. With haste and care we will be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long Antarctic night. There were some severe windstorms but we escaped the damage. No doubt, we had our good luck. But this good luck was almost strange.

Lake insisted on a westward – or rather, northwestward – trip before our shift to the new base. He was too much interested in that triangular marking in the slate. He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and unclassifiable organism of advanced evolution. Lake thought that this rock was probably Cambrian or even pre-Cambrian. It meant that this advanced organism existed in times when there was only unicellular life[105]. So these fragments, with their odd marking, were five hundred million – a thousand million years old.