Kitabı oku: «The Call of Cthulhu / Зов Ктулху», sayfa 21

Parts, especially upper parts, seem lighter than any visible strata on slopes. Close flying shows many cave-mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square or semicircular. You must come and investigate. I saw rampart squarely on top of one peak. Height seems about thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand feet. I am up twenty-one thousand, five hundred myself, in devilish, gnawing cold. Wind whistles and pipes, but no flying danger.”

I replied that I would join Lake as soon as he could send a plane. It was possible that the eastward flight might not be made, after all, this season.

Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where Moulton’s plane had landed. The ice sheet was very thin, with dark ground here and there visible. Lake spoke of the majesty of the whole scene, and the queer state of his sensations. The height of the five tallest peaks was from thirty thousand to thirty-four thousand feet. The camp lay a little more than five miles from the higher foothills. I could trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words. He was ready to rest now, after a continuous day’s work.

In the morning it was agreed that one of Lake’s planes would come to my base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as well as for all the fuel it could carry. Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as the case might be. Some of our conical tents were reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided to complete the job of making a permanent village. I sent a message that Pabodie and I would be ready for the northwestward journey after one day’s work and one night’s rest.

Lake began to send me the most extraordinary and excited messages. He had resolved to do some local boring as part of the expedition’s general program. In three hours youngGedney ¹⁴¹ – the acting foreman ¹⁴² – rushed into the camp with the shocking news.

They had struck a cave. The layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep but extended off in all directions. Its roof and floor were equipped with largestalactites and stalagmites ¹⁴³; but the most important things were shells and bones. This medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous ¹⁴⁴, Eocene ¹⁴⁵, and other animal species than the greatest paleontologist could count or classify in a year. Mollusks, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals – great and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp, and no wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong to a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished ages.

Lake wrote a message in his notebook and sent young Moulton to run back to the camp to tell it by wireless. This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones, remnants oflabyrinthodonts and thecodonts ¹⁴⁶, great skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing bones, Archaeopteryx debris ¹⁴⁷, Miocene ¹⁴⁸ sharks’ teeth, primitive bird skulls, and other bones of archaic mammals. Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the Oligocene Age ¹⁴⁹, so they are at least thirty million years old.