At the Mountains of Madness

Lovecraft’s classic tale of Antarctic science-terror, At the Mountains of Madness, follows geologist Dyer and his team of experts — including Pabodie, the engineer, Lake, the biologist, and Danforth, the neurasthenic youth — as they traipse across our southernmost continent, taking bores of ancient strata of rock. Sane men going insane in an utterly blank terrain. Early on, Lake sees a set of inexplicable triangular tracks in the rocks and eventually sets off to lead a small team further inland, arriving at a previously undiscovered and incredibly tall mountain range in the wild land’s heart. There, Lake finds an aeon-spanning cave, from which he recovers the desiccated bodies of several radially symmetric, many-tentacled, starfish-headed, half-vegetable, man-sized beings — the aliens who left the strange tracks, millennia ago.