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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dave2008" data-source="post: 8276668" data-attributes="member: 83242">I just looked it up. It actually wasn't the Shoggoth (or at least not in total).Last 6 paragraphs of "At the Mountains of Madness"[spoiler]But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely—yet I am afraid that Danforth will never be the same again.<img src="https://www.hplovecraft.com/pics/PixelClear.gif" alt=" " class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind’s piping and the engine’s buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly—and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.<img src="https://www.hplovecraft.com/pics/PixelClear.gif" alt=" " class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, daemoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith-clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognised mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake’s camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.<img src="https://www.hplovecraft.com/pics/PixelClear.gif" alt=" " class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about “the black pit”, “the carven rim”, “the proto-shoggoths”, “the windowless solids with five dimensions”, “the nameless cylinder”, “the elder pharos”, “Yog-Sothoth”, “the primal white jelly”, “the colour out of space”, “the wings”, “the eyes in darkness”, “the moon-ladder”, “the original, the eternal, the undying”, and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library.<img src="https://www.hplovecraft.com/pics/PixelClear.gif" alt=" " class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that its swirls of ice-dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest—and of course Danforth did not hint any of those specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance.<img src="https://www.hplovecraft.com/pics/PixelClear.gif" alt=" " class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad word of all too obvious source:<img src="https://www.hplovecraft.com/pics/PixelClear.gif" alt=" " class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”[/spoiler]Thought the last line is the sound the shogoth made (in mimicry of the elder thing, AKA old one)</blockquote>

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