Welcome back to our Dream Cycle Book Club, where we explore the dream based stories and dream-adjacent tales written by H.P. Lovecraft. In this week’s thread we shall discuss the final half of At the Mountains of Madness.
This week we will be reading our penultimate story: The Dreams in the Witch House. The Arkham Archivist provides us with a collated collection of stories here. A LibriVox audio recording is not available and so I direct you to a recording by the YouTuber HorrorBabble here
This week image credit goes to Joseph Diaz.
In Chapter XII Dyer and Danforth escape the Plateau of Leng.
The duo eventually reach the surface and make a mad dash through the city to their plane. They have one last glimpse of the city, and finally spy the colossal peaks of Kadath of the Cold Wastes, burning purple in the midnight Antarctic sun.
Danforth is the trained pilot but his nerves are so shot that Dyer, with no training, proves the more competent pilot in the moment. As they fly over the mountain pass of the Mountains of Madness, the scientists are audibly assaulted by haunting sounds, which makes Dyer wish for wax plugs for his ears. Relieved of his piloting duties, Danforth glances back towards Unknown Kadath and begins shrieking anew. Of the horror he saw, Danforth will reveal very little to Dyer. He speaks only of a second mirage over the peaks of Kadath. In later ramblings he will make mention to various entities including “Yog-Sothoth” and “The Colour Out of Space”.
Again to me this parallels Unknown Kadath where Carter escapes the trap of Nyarlathotep while being hypnotised by the unearthly piping of the Other Gods.
The two main references in this section, other than Unknown Kadath, are to Yog-Sothoth, first introduced in Charles Dexter Ward, and the eponymous Colour Out of Space from the short story of the same name. While we haven’t covered the latter story in this book club, I highly recommend reading it.