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continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main head
tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the
usual way - the writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen
surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths, though they used a curious
phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their vision with obscure
special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their heads - senses
which rendered all the Old
Ones partly independent of light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and
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curiously during the descent, embodying certain apparently chemical coating
processes - probably to secure phosphorescence - which the basreliefs could
not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming - using
the lateral crinoid arms - and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of
tentacles containing the pseudofeet. Occasionally they accomplished long
swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fanlike folding
wings. On land they locally used the pseudofeet, but now and then flew to
great heights or over long distances with their wings. The many slender
tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate,
flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coordination - ensuring the
utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations.
The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressure
of the deepest sea bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few seemed to
die at all except by violence, and their burial places were very limited. The
fact that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed
inscribed mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a fresh pause
and recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings
multiplied by means of spores - like vegetable pteridophytes, as Lake had
suspected - but, owing to their prodigious toughness and longevity, and
consequent lack of replacement needs, they did not encourage the large-scale
development of new prothallia except when they had new regions to colonize.
The young matured swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any
standard we can imagine.
The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and
produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions which I shall
describe more fully in my coming monograph. These varied slightly according to
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sea or land residence, but had the same foundations and essentials.
Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances,
they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food. They ate uncooked
marine life under the sea, but cooked their viands on land. They hunted game
and raised meat herds - slaughtering with sharp weapons whose odd marks on
certain fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resisted all ordinary
temperatures marvelously, and in their natural state could live in water down
to freezing.
When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however - nearly a million
years ago-the land dwellers had to resort to special measures, including
artificial heating - until at last the deadly cold appears to have driven them
back into the sea. For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legend
said, they absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating,
breathing, or heat conditions - but by the time of the great cold they had
lost track of the method. In any case they could not have prolonged the
artificial state indefinitely without harm.
Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no
biological basis for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed to organize
large households on the principles of comfortable space-utility and - as we
deduced from the pictured occupations and diversions of co-dwellers -
congenial mental association. In furnishing their homes they kept everything
in the center of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for
decorative treatment. Lighting, in the case of the land inhabitants, was
accomplished by a device probably electro-chemical in nature. Both on land and
under water they used curious tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical
frames - for they rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles - and
racks for hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books.
Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no
certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There
was extensive commerce, both local and between different cities - certain
small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably
the smaller of the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were
pieces of such currency. Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture
and much stock raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing
were also practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent migration seemed
relatively rare except for the vast colonizing movements by which the race
expanded. For personal locomotion no external aid was used, since in land,
air, and water
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Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for speed. Loads, however,
were drawn by beasts of burden - Shoggoths under the sea, and a curious
variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence.
These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms - animal and
vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aerial - were the products of unguided
evolution acting on life cells made by the Old Ones, but escaping beyond their
radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked because they
had not come in conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of
course, were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the
very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling, primitive mammal, used
sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers,
whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. 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 paleontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes and
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convulsions of the earth s crust was little short of miraculous. Though few or
none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean Age,
there was no interruption in their civilization or in the transmission of
their records. Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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