Known Accounts of The Elder Things

Known Accounts of The Elder Things

Compiled and Edited by Professor Qui Von Wer Foreman Serendipity

Contents:

1. Introduction.

2. Resemblance to Certain Creatures of Primal Myth.

3. Footprints.

4. Biology.

5. Classification.

6. Skin.

7. Torso.

8. Wings.

9. Limbs.

10. Head.

11. Posterior.

12. Respiration.

13. Voice.

14. Musculature.

15. Nervous System.

16. Biological Regression.

17. Soapstone Fragments.

18. Artwork.

19. Shoggoths.

20. Rock Formations.

21. Labyrinthine Complexity.

22. Five Pointed Theme.

23. Use of Naturally Occurring Materials.

24. Rooms.

25. Other Architectural Formations

1. Introduction.

Accounts of Elderians, also known as Elder Things or Old Ones, are based on apocryphal literature, scant physical evidence, and a few uncorroborated statement by discredited eye-witnesses who had recently experienced extreme trauma and exposure conditions.

Inconclusive physical evidence such a fossilized footprints and a small sampling of green ornamental stones.

The fossilized footprints correspond to creatures resembling major phylum found in geological rock strata among fossils indicating an age hundreds of millions of years before multicellular life appeared in the planet’s history.

The small sampling of green ornamental stones with 5-pointed star pattern markings, tens of millions of years before intelligent life and tool using was thought to have existed in a planet’s history.

Sketches of large building formations carved into stone with complex architecture, tens of millions of years before intelligent life and tool using was thought to have existed in a planet’s history.

Notebook sketches of sculpted bas relief murals, supposedly of alien origin.

Notes from an alleged field autopsy of a seemingly biological organism of alien origin which supposedly resists cutting by conventional medical instrumentation and said to have resisted decomposition and fossilization, despite being found among geological rock strata tens of millions of years old. No biological specimens or samples have been recovered to corroborate the record.

Description of biological organisms resembling certain creatures of primal myth referenced in the Necronomicon and Clark Ashton Smith’s paintings based on the text, which claims that said creatures, known as Elder Things, supposed created all life on Earth.

Aerial photographs and dimly lit ordinary photographs, doubted because they were suspiciously withheld until a much later date, and of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried (admitted by the photographer).

The ink drawings, jeered at as obvious impostures, notwithstanding the strangeness of technique.

One of the early observers in his field journal mentions the possibility that they are succumbing to "anxiety or autohypnotism".

2. Resemblance to Certain Creatures of Primal Myth.

Arrangement reminded one of the early observers of certain monsters of primal myth, especially fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon.

"Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside Antarctic becomes inevitable.

Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton Smith’s nightmare paintings based on text, And will understand when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth life as jest or mistake. Students have always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative treatment of very ancient tropical radiata.

Also like prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of - Cthulhu cult appendages, etc."

The same early observers described the architecture to appear similar to "disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. "

Unable to classify the specimen they found into an existing taxonomy scheme, they early observers fell back on mythology for a provisional name, jocosely dubbing their finds "The Elder Ones".

Unable to explain how the specimen could have undergone its tremendously complex evolution on a new-born earth in time to leave prints in Archaean rocks was so far beyond conception as to make the biologist among the early observers whimsically recall "the primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth life as a joke or mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from outside told by a folklorist colleague in Miskatonic’s English Department."

From the journal of the geologist who was one of the early observers, "I felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances; of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings.

Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory of man - or of his predecessors – is long, and it may well be that certain tales have come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and earlier than any human world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself.

Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region I would care to be in or near, nor did I relish the proximity of a world that had ever bred such ambiguous and Archaean monstrosities as those Lake had just mentioned.

At the moment I felt sorry that I had ever read the abhorred Necronomicon, Or talked so much with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the University."

As the party’s isolation and exposure wore on from days to weeks before their rescue, the journal entries show how the anxiety increasingly convinced them about the mythological origins:

"I thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently haunted me since my first sight of this dead antarctic world - of the demoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or abominable Snow Men of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their prehuman implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than formless star spawn associated with that semientity."

"They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish Elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the great "Old Ones" that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young - the beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had never bred."

"These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the "Shoggoths" in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb."

"The conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which even the mad author of the Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss."

"The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that none had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had even conceived them."

"Primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth life; and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from outside told by a folklorists."

"The old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste."

One of the recovered scientists was so distraught from trauma and exposure, that he was unable to communicate other that babbling, "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" On rare occasions the recovered scientist whispers disjointed and irresponsible things about "The black pit", "the carven rim", "the protoshoggoths", "the windowless solids with five dimensions", "the nameless cylinder", "the Elder Pharos", "Yog-Sothoth", "the primal white jelly", "the color out of space", "the wings", "the eyes in darkness", "the moon-ladder," "the original, the eternal, the undying," and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years.

3. Footprints.

"Queer triangular, striated markings, about a foot in greatest diameter, conjectured to be the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rocks and other fossilized remains which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage."

"These markings, however, were of very primitive life forms involving no great paradox except that any life forms should occur in rock as definitely ancient as these seemed to be."

The biologist seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling and provocative, though the geologist thought it looked not unlike some of the ripple effects reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks. "Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself produces odd distorting effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression."

Given the geological strata, it was concluded that these fragments, with their odd marking, must have been five hundred million to a billion years old.

Similar markings from more contemporary rock strata indicating tens of millions of years ago, "…proving that source survived from over six hundred million years ago to Comanchian times without more than moderate morphological changes and decrease in average size. Comanchian prints apparently more primitive or decadent, if anything, than older ones."

4. Biology.

Most of the knowledge of the Elderian biology comes from notes of a partial field autopsy under adverse conditions. No biological samples or intact specimens are available to corroborate. The other source of knowledge of Elderian biology comes from second-hand accounts of artistic renderings supposedly of alien origin, which also has not been corroborated.

"Fabulously early date of evolution, preceding even simplest Archaean protozoa hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to origin."

5. Classification.

Early observers had some difficulty trying to classify the Elderian specimen into a context they were familiar with, "Its symmetrical contour and certain other attributes clearly indicated marine origin, yet one could not be exact as to the limit of its later adaptations; the wings hold a persistent suggestion of the aerial." The wing structures were puzzling in view of probable marine habitat, but may have use in water navigation.

Early observers mistook the Elderians to be some form of plant, due to its radial symmetry and essential up-and-down structure rather than the fore-and-aft structure that is typical of animals.

During a field dissection it was concluded to be an invertebrate resembling a species of marine radiate, but internal inspection revealed even more plantlike structures.

"It looked like a radiate, but appears partly vegetable, but had three-fourths of the essentials of animal structure."

The conclusion was that the species is a hybrid of animal and plant, but the scientists on the scene could not rule out that it could be an "overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiate". Uncorroborated evidence suggests the Elderians were capable of engineering symbiotic relationships with plant and fungi.

"It reproduced like the vegetable cryptogams (algae, lichens, mosses and ferns), especially the Pteridophyta (ferns), having spore cases at the tips of the wings and evidently developing from a thallus or prothallus (heart-shaped plant reproductive organs)."

Like plants, they were able to derive nourishment from inorganic substances.

Gills and other structures suggests it could be an amphibian invertebrate, also adapted to long airless hibernation periods.

Incredibly advanced evolution of radiata with strong resemblance to Echinoderms without loss of certain primordial features.

6. Skin.

The dark gray flesh and skin exhibits a tough leather texture, but was extremely flexible.

The tissues of the specimen was thought to have been preserved by mineral salts which resisted mineral replacement (fossilization) despite its great age. "Scarcely any mineral replacement, despite apparent age of perhaps forty million years, the internal organs were wholly intact. The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing’s form of organization."

The deceptively flexible tissues had more than leathery toughness, standard field-autopsy instruments were hardly able to cut the tissue.

7. Torso.

Torso was six feet top to bottom, three and five-tenths feet central barrel shaped diameter, tapering to one foot at each end with five bulging ridges in place of staves and great torso furrows. Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at equator in middle of these ridges.

8. Wings.

In furrows between ridges are dark grey membranous comb or winglike growths with serrated edge stretched on a framework of glandular tubing with minute orifices at wing tips, that fold up and spread out like fans; almost seven-foot wing spread.

9. Limbs.

Around its equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are five systems of light gray flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over three feet like the arms of primitive crinoid.

Single stalks three inches diameter branch after six inches into five substalks, each of which branches after eight inches into small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles.

From inner angles of starfish arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from three inches diameter at base to one at tip. Orifices at tips.

Tough, muscular four feet long arms, tapering from seven inches diameter at base to about two and five-tenths at point.

Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort, marine or otherwise.

To each point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membranous triangle eight inches long and six wide at farther end. This paddle, fin, or pseudofoot was identical in form to the prints in rocks from a billion to fifty or sixty million years old.

All projections fold tightly over the pseudoneck and end of torso, corresponding to projections at other end.

10. Head.

At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like suggestions, holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colors.

Slit in exact center of top probably breathing aperture.

Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point. At end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently an eye.

Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and end in saclike swellings of same color which, upon pressure, open to bell- shaped orifices two inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp, white tooth like projections - probably mouths.

All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso.

Bulbous light-gray pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement.

11. Posterior.

The Elderians exhibit remnants of the starfish arrangements at both ends

At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist.

It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base.

12. Respiration.

Organic moisture of pungent and offensive odor caused by a thick, dark-green fluid which acts as blood.

Its respiration apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide.

Evidences of air-storage chambers and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two other fully developed breathing systems - gills and pores.

13. Voice.

Vocal organs seemed present in connection with the main respiratory system.

Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable utterance, seemed barely conceivable, but musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly probable.

14. Musculature.

The muscular system was almost prematurely developed.

When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated muscularity.

15. Nervous System.

The nervous system was complex and highly developed. Although the body appeared archaically primitive in some respects, it possessed a set of ganglial centers and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialized development. The five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced.

Signs of sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry cilia of the head, indicating more than five senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from any existing analogy.

The complexity of the nervous system and sensory apparatus led the biologist to conclude that they are creatures of keen sensitiveness and delicately differentiated functions.

16. Biological Regression.

Early observers considered the possibility of the ancient prints were made by a less evolved ancestor of the more recent specimens, but quickly rejected this too-facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the older fossils. "If anything, the later contours showed decadence rather than higher evolution. The size of the pseudofeet had decreased, and the whole morphology seemed coarsened and simplified. The nerves and organs just examined held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent."

17. Soapstone Fragments.

"Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across and an inch and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation - greenish, but no evidences to place its period. Has curious smoothness and regularity. Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage at inward angles and in center of surface. Small, smooth depression in center of unbroken surface. Arouses much curiosity as to source and weathering. Probably some freak of water action. Carroll, with magnifier, thinks he can make out additional markings of geologic significance. Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns."

"Curiously rounded and configured soapstone fragments smaller than one previously found - star-shaped, but no marks of breakage except at some of the points."

"Greenish soapstone fragments whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots caused so many doubtful comparisons."

18. Artwork.

Most of the conclusions about the Elderians comes from second hand accounts about sculpted bas-relief "Omnipresent mural carvings", none of which could be corroborated.

"The carvings revealed that this city was many million years old."

"The prime decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture, which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width given over to geometrical arabesques with few exceptions."

"The technique of a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of dots would be sunk along one of the arabesque bands, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved to the high degree of civilized mastery art tradition in great delicacy."

"The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the conventional designs were marvels of skillful intricacy."

"The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical principles, and were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based on the quantity of five."

"The pictorial bands followed a highly formalized tradition, and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective. Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross section with the two-dimensional silhouette. The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines, whose depth on unweathered walls varied from one to two inches."

"When cartouches with dot groups appeared - evidently as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language and alphabet - the depression of the smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps a half inch more."

"The pictorial bands were in countersunk low relief, their background being depressed about two inches from the original wall surface."

"Certain cartouches gave hints of latent symbols and stimuli designed for another mental and emotional background, and a fuller or different sensory equipment."

The subject matter of the sculptures contained a large proportion of evident history.

"The preterrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets, in other galaxies, and in other universes - can readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; yet involve designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. The sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless planets out of cosmic space - their coming, and the coming of many other alien entities such as at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering."

"Sculptural representation illustrated that they seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast membranous wings - thus oddly confirming some folklore."

"They had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unrevealed principles of energy."

"Their scientific and mechanical knowledge far was very advanced, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to."

"Some sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanized life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying."

"Their preternatural toughness of organization and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to live on a high plane without the more specialized fruits of artificial manufacture, and even without garments, except for occasional protection against the elements."

"The highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land, and retained many traditions of land construction."

"Those in shallow water had 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 phosphorescent organ 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 writing had changed during the descent, embodying certain apparently chemical coating processes - probably to secure phosphorescence."

"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. "

"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."

"They covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds."

"The beings multiplied by means of spores - like vegetable pteridophytes, owing to their toughness and longevity, and consequent lack of replacement needs, they do 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 at a very high standard."

"The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions. These varied slightly according to sea or land residence, but had the same foundations and essentials."

"The beings multiplied by means of spores - like vegetable pteridophytes."

"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."

"Illustrations show that a shambling vaguely-simian primitive mammal was used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon."

"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 - 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. They cannot have prolonged the artificial state indefinitely without harm.”

“Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological basis for family, organized 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.”

“Furnishing were kept 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 electro-devices. Both on land and under water they used cylindrical frames tables, chairs and couches, for they rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles. Racks for hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books.”

"Government was evidently complex and socialistic, though no certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures."

"There was extensive commerce, both local and between different cities - certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. The smaller of the various greenish soapstones are 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 movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for speed."

"The huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls."

"The Old Ones survive various geologic changes and convulsions of the planets, while some cities perished or wee relocated, there was no interruption in their civilization or in the transmission of their records."

"A land race of beings shaped like octopi corresponding to spawn of Cthulhu - filtering down from space and precipitated a war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea. Later peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands."

"The Old Ones, despite all traditional preparations, lost their original ability of interstellar."

"The Old Ones warred with half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures Mi-Go. The Mi-Go drove them from the land but were unable to fight them under the sea."

"The Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go seem to be composed of matter more widely different from that of the Old Ones. All this, of course, assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework to account for their occasional defeats, since historical interest and pride obviously formed their chief psychological element. It is significant that their annals failed to mention many advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering cities figure persistently in certain obscure legends."

"The Old Ones are able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible for their adversaries. The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital properties, were strictly material."

"According to certain carvings, there was a somber recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shown in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object which was never allowed to appear in the designs."

"The sculptures were made considerably less than a million years ago, and that the actual desertion was complete long before five hundred thousand years ago."

"Heating devices were shown in the houses, and winter travelers were represented as muffled in protective fabrics."

"The Old Ones built their new city under water because of its greater certainty of uniform warmth at great depth so that the planet's internal heat could ensure its habitability for an indefinite period."

"Elderians had no trouble in adapting themselves to part-time and eventually whole-time residence under water, since their gill systems did not atrophy."

"Undersea metropolises architecture displays relatively little decadence because of the precise mathematical element inherent in building operations."

"The phosphorescent organisms supplied light with vast effectiveness."

"Art and decoration were pursued."

"By the time total abandonment did occur - and it surely must have occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced – the Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art - or had ceased to recognize the superior merit of the older carvings."

"But what the art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute those sketches in a strange and assured technique perhaps superior, despite haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings from which they were taken - the characteristic and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones themselves in the dead city’s heyday."

"We realized, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones’ sculpture at the time of the tunneling, and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us."

"There was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanation - a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it. This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail. It was countersunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections, but the height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface. A second carving - a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. Wholly decorative and conventional, and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seemingly more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique - an alien element, that was responsible for the laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognize as the Old Ones' art."

19. Shoggoths.

"It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they first created earth life - using available substances according to long-known methods. The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets, having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community."

"When the star-headed Old Ones had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes, extirpating any whose presence became troublesome."

"With the aid of the Shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on land."

"Loads were drawn by beasts of burden - Shoggoths under the sea, and a variety of vertebrates on land. These vertebrates, as well as other animal and vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aerial life forms 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 were mechanically exterminated."

"Cultural regression was caused by new difficulty in breeding and managing the Shoggoths upon which successful sea life depended. The art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost, so that the Old Ones had to depend on the molding of forms already in existence. The great reptiles proved highly tractable."

"The Shoggoths reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presenting a formidable problem. They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestions of the Old Ones, and had modeled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modeling powers were sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a semistable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it."

"Shoggoths were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which look like an agglutination of bubbles, and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. Shoggoths had a constantly shifting shape and volume - throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion."

"Shoggoths eventually become intractable about one hundred and fifty million years ago, and had to be resubjugated forcefully using weapons of molecular and atomic disturbances. Shoggoths typically behead and coat their victims in slime."

"Thereafter the sculptures showed a period in which Shoggoths were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west were tamed by cowboys."

"Though during the rebellion the Shoggoths had shown an ability to live out of water, this transition was not encouraged - since their usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble of their management."

"What was necessary to establish the new venture - Shoggoth tissue from which to breed stone lifters and subsequent beasts of burden, protoplasmic matter to mold into phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes. The newly bred Shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular intelligence, and were represented as taking and executing orders with marvelous quickness. The newly bred Shoggoths conversed with the Old Ones by mimicking their voices - a sort of musical piping over a wide range, and worked more from spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times. They were kept in admirable control."

"Some of the amorphous cold-resistant Shoggoths were adapted to land life."

Eye-witness accounts describe that the fetid odor of Shoggoths "was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to the Elderian ichor."

Eye-witness accounts claim that the Shoggoths were strong enough to removed the tentacled starfish head of the Elderians in a "manner of removal looked more like some hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage." The bodies were coated with a greenish slime.

Eye-witness accounts describe the Shoggoths as "Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes – viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells - rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile - slaves of suggestion, builders of cities - more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative."

"Freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new, unknown odor, clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly resculptured wall in a series of grouped dots."

"Shoggoths - given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups expressed - had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters. 'Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!' insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range."

"That fetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to recarve and squirm through the burrows of the hills. "

"A plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor."

"A shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light."

"Slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter."

The musically piped words 'Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!' were described as sinister, shocking, wide-ranged, insidious, eldritch and mocking.

20. Rock Formations.

There are no known examples of Elderian architecture, only second hand accounts and a few sketches from discredited eye-witnesses.

Most references to Elderian architecture refer to building as part of natural formations, use of natural building particularly rocky materials, with a strong preference to labyrinthine subterranean construction, five pointed shapes and arrangements, but also perfect cubes, vertical ramparts, needle-like spires, cones, columns, and pyramids.

21. Labyrinthine Complexity.

"Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks."

"Mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave mouths."

"Jagged line of witchlike cones and pinnacles"

"Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular difference in floor levels, characterized the entire arrangement."

"A continuous maze of connected chambers and passages leading over unlimited areas outside this particular building."

"Labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically eurythmic stone masses forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest, thinner in other places."

"Stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from ten to one hundred and fifty feet in height, and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone - blocks in many cases as large as 4 x 6 x 8 feet - though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bedrock of pre-Cambrian slate."

"Great slate slabs, and formed the outlet of a long, high corridor with sculptured walls with many inner archways which led off from it, complex nest of apartments within."

22. Five Pointed Theme.

"The ridgy, barrel-shaped cyclopean pylons design resembled the Elderians themselves."

"Resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their clusters of grouped dots, to the strange greenish soapstones; and when we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the great mineral pile, we found the likeness very close indeed. The whole general formation, seemed suggestive of the starfish head of the entities."

"The general shape of these things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern fortifications. "

"Strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath."

"Occasional stark needle-like spires in clusters of five."

"Carefully buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly those on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times."

"Star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares."

"The five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the mural arabesques."

"Huge, roofless rampart five-pointed outline, rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet. This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps three hundred feet from point to point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6 x 8 feet in surface."

"Cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, disproportioned terraces, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken columns in curious groupings, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements."

"Rooms were of all imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes."

"The five-pointed motifs meant only some cultural or religious exaltation of the Archaean natural object which had so patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribes some chosen totem animal."

23. Use of Naturally Occurring Materials.

"While the engineering principles used in the anomalous balancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses is unclear, though the function of the arch was much relied on."

"On some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations were bolder and plainer. The distribution of cave mouths seemed roughly even."

"Lightish Archaean quartzite, regularity was extreme and uncanny. Preternatural solidity and tough material had saved them from obliteration."

"Many parts, especially those closest to the slopes, seemed identical in substance with the surrounding rock surface."

"The cave mouths had a regularity of outline, often approximately square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry. Their numerousness and wide distribution suggested that the whole region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata. Tunnels were clear of stalactites and stalagmites."

Where a sharp hill rose, it was generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling-stone edifice.

"One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly even fifty million years - to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous – and contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one tremendous exception, that we encountered."

"A startling expansion of the tunnel, a broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-looking elliptical cavern with a level floor, some seventy-five feet long and fifty broad, and with many immense side passages leading away into cryptical darkness. Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torches suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several walls between adjacent honeycombings. The walls were rough, and the high, vaulted roof was thick with stalactites; but the solid rock floor had been smoothed off, and was free from all debris, detritus, or even dust to a positively abnormal extent."

"Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, arranged like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains."

"Parts, especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-colored rock than any visible strata on slopes proper, hence of evidently crystalline origin. Many cave mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square or semicircular. Ramparts squarely on top of one peak. Height seems about thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand feet."

"Probably wrong about cones, for formations look stratified. Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in. Queer skyline effects - regular sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks. Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich’s paintings. Parts, especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-colored rock than any visible strata on slopes proper, hence of evidently crystalline origin. Think I saw rampart squarely on top of one peak."

"Vast aggregations of night-black masonry."

24. Rooms.

"Sculptural decorations in horizontal bands – decorations including the groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones."

"Sculptures arranged round the walls in broad, horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips of conventional arabesques."

"It might be safe to say that their general average was about 30 x 30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height, though many larger apartments existed."

"Certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied by the presence of maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs of an enlarged scale - these things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dadoes."

"Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-foot doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks - elaborately carved and polished - of the actual shutters and doors. All metal fixtures had long ago vanished, but some of the doors remained in place and had to be forced aside as we progressed from room to room."

"Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles. Floors were also paved with such tiles, though plain stonework predominated."

"Frequent niches of great magnitude to contain a sculpture carved from green soapstone."

"Apertures were connected with mechanical facilities for heating, lighting."

"Window frames with odd mostly elliptical transparent panes."

25. Other Architectural Formations.

"Curious regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes and rampart formations."

"Truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks."

"Composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids."

"Uneven upper edges; whilst others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model."

"Cylinder with no windows and with a curious bulge about ten feet above the aperture."

"Mighty stone corbels and pillars."

"Monstrous cylindrical tower, a prodigious round aperture at the top."

"The tower stand in the center of an immense circular plaza, perhaps five hundred or six hundred feet high, with tiers of horizontal disks near the top, and a row of needlelike spires along the upper rim."

"The tops of the buildings had vast clusters of needle-like spires, delicate finials on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin, horizontal scalloped disks capping cylindrical shafts."

"The pittings resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities."

"Structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights."

"A titanic stone ramp which, eluding the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally up the cylindrical wall. The ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet."