Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; At the Mountains of Madness, pt.3

Continuing the journey into the mountains of madness (chapters five and six).  Our narrator and his cohort Danforth head out over the mountains to search out the mysteries of this strange antarctic world.  There are sprawling descriptions of the landscape as they fly over it, but they eventually turn the corner and come across a terrible “Cyclopean city”.  In this meaning that it is a huge city, all made from stones laid together, not using mortar.  This adds to the mystery of the strange civilization, now abandoned.  They eventually land down where they can and head into this strange and massive city.

They take samples of the stones, showing that the city is incredibly old, older than any known civilization.  Older than the dinosaurs even.  This is an interesting perspective for a geologist like our narrator is.  If we take out all the horror aspect of this notion, it means an incredible find.  Somehow there was a civilization of intelligent creatures, long before we have known to be evolved from apes.

This brings up an interesting notion of transformation to me.  There have been many stories where the people in the stories have transformed into fish people, and ape people.  A strange juxtaposition.  As a writer, Lovecraft is probably trying to find transformative creatures that are terrifying, but if this is indeed the case why not transform people into crabs or some such?  Or even Octopus people to give the tentacle nightmares of Cthulhu?

I think there is something deeper that Lovecraft is going for, which is coming to light through the reading of this story.  People are descendants from apes, and even farther back, all life has developed from one celled organisms that transformed into amphibious creatures.  Is Lovecraft saying with this story that we are all descendant from the Old Ones?  Or is it that the Old Ones are transforming people back to the known quantity of what they knew when they had prevalence on our world?

If it’s the latter than there are potentially two different influences.  Which of these beings were around during the time we were amphibious and which of them were around when we were Apes?

This story seems to be about the “Great Old Ones” (of which I’m sure will come to light the farther I get in the story, though there is already mention of them), and this was their city before us.  Thus the Great Old Ones are beings like Dagon, and Cthulhu, because they are sea dwelling and such.

The strange thing is, this city is huge, but most of the rooms are small.  Which means that despite the fact that the narrator talks about how the Great Old Ones came from the stars and the moon, there were other beings here as well.  The beings that would house the 30 by 30 rooms that were no larger than 20 feet (Lovecraft goes into specific detail describing the layout of the city)…beings our size.  Is it possible that in that ancient civilization there were mortal beings from another planet?  Is the end game of this story to presuppose how Human’s came to be on the planet?

I’m over half way through the story with six chapters left, which means three more blogs (unless I get crazy into it and ignore work for a while).  I’m excited to see if any of these theories come to light.

What do you think?