Kitabı oku: «The Call of Cthulhu / Зов Ктулху», sayfa 18

TheNathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation ¹¹⁶ financed the expedition. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and 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, taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal ¹¹⁷, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania ¹¹⁸, where we got final supplies. Our ship captains were J. B. Douglas ¹¹⁹, commanding the brig Arkham, and Georg Thorfinnssen ¹²⁰, commanding the Miskatonic – both veteran whalers in Antarctic waters.

At about 62° South Latitude we noticed our first icebergs – table-like objects with vertical sides – and just before reaching theAntarctic circle ¹²¹, which we crossed on October 20th with appropriately ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with field ice. 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.

Pushing through the ice, 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 theAdmiralty Range discovered by Ross ¹²², and our task was to round Cape Adare ¹²³ and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land ¹²⁴ to our base on the shore of McMurdo Sound ¹²⁵, at the foot of the volcano Erebus ¹²⁶ 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 ofNicholas Roerich ¹²⁷, and of the disturbing descriptions of the evil plateau ofLeng ¹²⁸ which appear in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had looked into that monstrous book at the college library.

On the 7th of November, we passedFranklin Island ¹²⁹; and the next day the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror ¹³⁰ on Ross Island appeared, with the long line of the Parry Mountains ¹³¹ beyond. There was a white line of the great ice barrier, rising perpendicularly to a height of two hundred feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast ¹³² near 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 namedDanforth ¹³³ – noticed lava on the snowy slope. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins walked.