Every one, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the rest of our antarctic sojourn.

They had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of energy.

It was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulæ and incantations.

I do not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter.

The box held only a queer parchment whose characters no linguist or paleographer has been able to decipher or identify.

The newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plane, telling of our nonstop course, our two battles with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of those strange […]

I had drilled myself in preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training saved me.

I have reared a marble urn to his memory in St. John's churchyard--the place that Poe loved--the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and headstones huddle quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and the houses and bank walls of Benefit Street.

I believe that my mind was partly unhinged by events since August 5th; the demon shadow in the mansion, the general strain and disappointment, and the thing that occurred at the hamlet in an October storm.

Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

Then he came to the strange cave in the forest slope, the dreaded "snake-den" which country folk shunned, and away from which Benijah had warned him again and again.

A swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah pounced on the silent and bewildered form of the pilgrim.

This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected, for, despite the heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the deceptively flexible tissues of the chosen specimen--a powerful and intact one--lost nothing of their more than leathery toughness.

There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable him to accomplish so much hard labor; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to show the effects of sound calculation.

One could picture the demonic fray between namelessly monstrous entities as it surged out of the black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins squawking and scurrying ahead.

Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them.

The penguins alone could not have saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they seem to have done so.

Doctor Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as some infantile fever, though others declared it was more of a mere wasting-away or decline.

After snowstorm, have spied mountain range ahead higher than any hitherto seen.

Afterward he could not be sure about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark blue trunks or trousers on.

I calc'late her man is as good a husban' as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an' ef ye knowed as much abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't ast no better church weddin' nor her'n. Let me tell ye suthin'--_some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top […]

I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words--flashed across a glacial void of seven hundred miles--as he urged that we all hasten with the matter and get the strange, new region disposed of as soon as possible.

He had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the small barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things had happened.

Of course, the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now.

It was a mirage in solid stone, and were it not for the photographs I would still doubt that such a thing could be.

It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe.

Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived him.

The aversion displayed toward him by dogs had now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety.

Weighing in his mind the importance of the matter, and the significance of our relation to it, he insisted that we both test--and if possible destroy--the horror of the house by a joint night or nights of aggressive vigil in that musty and fungus-cursed cellar.

"Inbreeding?" Armitage muttered half aloud to himself.

They shook their heads at the visitors' plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near the glen; and as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the watchers again.

There, where morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground windows, and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked door which placed me only a few feet from the placid sidewalk outside.

And in front of the fireplace was no vestige of the giant doubled-up form traced in niter.

The stone, magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property; for it had "drawn the lightning," as Nahum said, with a singular persistence.

And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain.

Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these hasty diagrams, made us think that its subglacial levels must still form a feature of peculiar importance.

These lights were seen as late as 1810, but toward the last they became very infrequent.

In the building of land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to palæontology.

That at least two of the fear's embodiments were destroyed, formed but a slight guarantee of mental and physical safety in this Acheron of multiform diabolism; yet I continued my quest with even greater zeal as events and revelations became more monstrous.

Certain touches here and there gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another mental and emotional background, and a fuller or different sensory equipment, might have made of profound and poignant significance to us.

But still there remained that burning determination to reach the innermost secret of the fear, which I had once more come to deem definite, material, and organic.

Geographically it lay about two miles northwest of the base of Tempest Mountain, and three miles from the oak-girt mansion.

This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail.

This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind!

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars.

We were dressed, of course, in our heaviest furs.

Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always take a chance.

With the deepening of the hole, which was about six feet square, the evil smell increased; and I lost all doubt of my imminent contact with the hellish thing whose emanations had cursed the house for over a century and a half.

Hard work hewing out, but toughness prevented damage.

So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger and the hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy.