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mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and
recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied
by means of spores - like vegetable pteridophytes, as Lake had suspected - but,
owing to their prodigious toughness and longevity, and consequent lack of
replacement needs, they did 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 evidently beyond any standard we can imagine.
The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced
a tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions which I shall describe
more fully in my coming monograph. These varied slightly according to sea or
land residence, but had the same foundations and essentials.
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 whose odd marks on certain
fossil bones our expedition had noted. 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, however - 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. In any case they could not have prolonged the artificial
state indefinitely without harm.
Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological
basis for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed to organize 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. In furnishing their homes they kept everything 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 a device probably
electro-chemical in nature. Both on land and under water they used curious
tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical frames - for they rested and slept
upright with folded-down tentacles - and racks for hinged sets of dotted
surfaces forming their books.
Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no certainties
in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There was extensive
commerce, both local and between different cities - certain small, flat
counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably the smaller of
the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such
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
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movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for
speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden - Shoggoths under the sea,
and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land
existence.
These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms - animal and
vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aerial - 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, of course,
were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very last
and most decadent sculptures a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes for
food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely
simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of land
cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by
vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to paleontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes and
convulsions of the earth s crust was little short of miraculous. Though few or
none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean Age, there
was no interruption in their civilization or in the transmission of their
records. Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean,
and it is likely that they came not long after the matter forming the moon was
wrenched from the neighboring South Pacific. According to one of the sculptured
maps the whole globe was then under water, with stone cities scattered farther
and farther from the antarctic as aeons passed. Another map shows a vast bulk of
dry land around the south pole, where it is evident that some of the beings made
experimental settlements, though their main centers were transferred to the
nearest sea bottom. Later maps, which display the land mass as cracking and
drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way
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