Antarctica

Overview

Antarctica is the white silence at the bottom of the world, a continent larger than Europe, wrapped in ice two miles thick, inhabited officially by penguins and occasionally by men in government-funded furs who believe they are mapping geology. They are not wrong. They are not right either. Beneath the ice lie ranges unnamed on public maps, cities built by colonists from the stars, and things that the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31 saw moving in the dark.

Professor Dyer suppressed his report to prevent another probe. The government listened. The ice did not forget. What woke when the dogs barked may still walk the tunnels under the plateau.

Description

The expedition's route, reconstructed from Dyer's testimony, crossed the Ross Ice Shelf, ascended into the Beardmore region, and penetrated mountain chains whose peaks exceeded Everest. There they found stone cities, fossil specimens of barrel-shaped beings, and murals depicting the entire history of life on Earth from an perspective no human museum would display.

The wind at altitude strips sound from the air. The light is blinding or absent for months. In the permanent twilight of the polar winter, shadows move in ways that have nothing to do with the sun. The camp at Lake was destroyed; the aircraft returned with one man screaming and one man silent forever.

Historical Record

The Elder Things colonized Antarctica when it was warm, built with shoggoth labour, warred with Cthulhu's spawn, and retreated to a final redoubt as the ice advanced and their slaves rebelled. The frescoes tell this story in pigment that should have crumbled millions of years before Homo sapiens existed. Dyer's team proved it with specimens, photographs, and the cost of sixteen men and thirty-seven dogs.

Subsequent expeditions have not duplicated the discovery. Whether that is because the city is buried again or because something guards the approach, the archive does not know. It suspects.

Archive Notes

No Miskatonic-sponsored polar penetration without Board vote and incendiary contingency. Fossil specimens in the university museum are labelled 'unknown prehistoric fauna'; do not correct the labels in public. Personnel who whistle 'Tekeli-li' in the cold are to be relieved of field duty. Antarctica is not empty. It is waiting for the ice to melt enough to matter.