OK, this post is quite different from the stuff I usually put here, but I was reading The Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft and noticed that there recurring references to ancient ruins and stone formations. I was interested in how these sites where portrayed at the time the book was written. So I googled, and even though I know most of them before, looking at the old pictures somehow felt like I was getting closer to Lovecrafts original vision.
I figured it was well worth sharing...
Images taken
from Library of congress website (http://www.loc.gov/index.html),
except the
imag of Monument Valley, which is from the library of the University of Utah
(http://content.lib.utah.edu/) and the
images of Machu Picchu, which are random webfinds. (The first of these
presumably from the original 1911 expedition, the latter one of unknown date,
but due to the state of the ruins must also predate 1930.)
All images predate the writing of Mountains of Madness
***************************
[…]
As he had
said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of savage
weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough material had saved them
from obliteration. Many parts, especially those closest to the slopes, seemed
identical in substance with the surrounding rock surface. The whole arrangement
looked like the ruins of Macchu Picchu in the Andes,
or the primal foundation walls of Kish as dug
up by the Oxford Field Museum Expedition in 1929;
and both Danforth and I obtained that
occasional impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which Lake had attributed to
his flight-companion Carroll. How to account for such things in this place was
frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous
formations often have strange regularities - like the famous Giants’ Causeway
in Ireland –
but this stupendous range, despite Lake’s
original suspicion of smoking cones, was above all else nonvolcanic in evident
structure.
[…]
V
I
think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror,
and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay
beyond. Of course, we must have had some natural theory in the back of our
heads to steady our faculties for the moment. Probably we thought of such
things as the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in
Colorado,
or
the fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert.
Perhaps
we even half thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning
before on first approaching those mountains of madness. We must have had some
such normal notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless,
tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal,
regular, and geometrically eurythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled
and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep
at its thickest, and in places obviously thinner.
[…]
We
also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares, and
noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill rose, it was
generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling-stone edifice; but there were
at least two exceptions. Of these latter, one was too badly weathered to
disclose what had been on the jutting eminence, while the other still bore a
fantastic conical monument carved out of the solid rock and roughly resembling
such things as the well-known Snake Tomb …
(here is a really nice photograph which shows it in context: http://eu.art.com/products/p15527056-sa-i3696219/posters.htm?ui=73968881EA724F93957B0D144DC46585)
… in the ancient valley of Petra.
*
Here is a link to the original novel by Lovecraft: http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/mountainsofmaddness.htm
I also created a .pdf of this post for other reasons, but in case you want it, here is the downlaod:
