Hello everyone and welcome to the thirteenth week of our book club exploring H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle.
In this week’s thread we discuss the first 5 chapters of At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931. Our reading assignment for this week is the second half of At the Mountains of Madness, from Chapter VI onwards.
A PDF of the short story is found in the collected works curated by the Arkham Archivist here. A LibriVox audio recording is available here.
Very sorry for the late submission this week. My department is hosting an algebra conference and I’m spending my evenings “networking” (read: getting drunk while ranting about the Representation Theory of algebraic groups). Unfortunately, pleasure has to be sidelined by business until Wednesday evening. I’ll post comments on the first five chapters as soon as possible but expect significant delays for this week.
On the off-chance that the set of British Lemmy Users interested in Lovecraft and Representation theory of algebraic groups isn’t a one-member set, I’m the guy with the beard in a purple mushroom shirt.
Image Credit goes to Deviantartist Zhekan.
In Chapter V, Dyer and Danforth descend into the city and investigate.
Dyer and Danforth fly over the cyclopean city. Though the city is only about 50km wide, no matter how far Dyer and Danforth fly they cannot see the end of the city. The roofs of most buildings have long decayed away, and the ruins that remain are coated with such a layer of ice as to hint of abandonment hundreds of millennia ago. Of note to the two is a fixation with five-pointed stars in the architecture.
The city matches the mirages that Dyer frequently experienced, and so he guesses that some array of ice particles in the air must have reflected the image of the city in such a way to fool him. This doesn’t explain some of the warped architecture that he saw in the mirage but not now.
The pair land the plane, prepare for a swift take-off, and descend into the maze of the city. Buildings are tight-packed, with no streets of roads. Dyer and Danforth squeeze through tight alleyways, often overshadowed by the buildings drooping over them.
Finding one large star shaped building still mostly in tact, Dyer and Danforth plan to leave a paper trail and to wander in.
Again Dyer makes frequent references to Lovecraftian entities and artifacts of antiquity: he speaks of Leng, the ancient race of Mi-Go, the formless creature Tsathoggua, and the Pnakotic Manuscripts. He states how the city is unfathomably ancient, such that fabled ancient lands such as Atlantis, Lemuria, and Olathoë would be considered a relatively recent affair. He states this city as being contemporary with the sunken city of R’lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City.
Here Lovecraft makes numerous references to previous tales from the Cycle. Olathoë and the Pnakotic Manuscripts are references to the very first dream story, Polaris. Leng is mentioned often but first mentioned in Celephaïs. Iv in the Land of Mnar is the ancient city of moon people destroyed by the people of Sarnath. And finally the Nameless City itself is mentioned.