They built their cities with the help of ' Shoggoths', things created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought. By exploring these fantastic structures, the men are able to learn the history of the Elder Things by interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic murals: The Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. Dyer elects to close off the area from which they took their samples.ĭyer and a graduate student named Danforth fly an airplane over the mountains, which they soon realize are the outer wall of a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones, utterly alien compared with any human architecture.

They discover that the better preserved life forms have vanished, and that some form of dissection experiment has been done on a man and dog. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and a damaged Elder Thing buried under each. The camp is devastated and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, with only one of each missing. When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, they are dubbed the ' Elder Things'. Their highly-evolved features are problematic: their stratum location puts them at a point on the geologic time scale much too early for such features to have naturally evolved yet. Six of the specimens are badly damaged, the others uncannily pristine. The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals, after discovering an underground cave while boring for ice cores. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains higher than the Himalayas.įile:At the Mountains of Madness -image002.jpgĪ book cover depicting a scene from the novella. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. The story is written in first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor from Miskatonic University. 6 Connections to other Lovecraft stories.

At the mountain of madness manga