At the Mountains of Madness Read Online Free

are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the
city-as-world,
which suffers nothing beside itself. . . .” In turn, Lovecraft describes the unbelievable sprawl and scale of the Old Ones’ city, “stretched nearly to the vision’s limit,” a “Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks . . . which cut off all comfortable refuge,” the “unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts,” as embodying “some fiendish violation of known natural law.”
    For Spengler, the city-as-world exists in a vampiric relationship with the country around it. Where once the city was thrown up by the country, “now the giant city sucks the country dry,” relentlessly seducing the population until the city is full and the country is devoid of human life. In Lovecraft’s story, the dynamic of the city’s parasitic rise and fall is rendered aesthetically, with a vivid image of a dark city surrounded by country that has been sucked so dry it is bone-white, bled of all color.
    As the narrator navigates the vast stone corridors, he literally walks through the architecturalization of Spengler’s cyclical history. In the bas-reliefs that he and Danforth are able (however improbably) to decipher, we read a fantasticated representation of
The Decline of the West
.
    The oldest domestic structure the narrator finds “contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else.” By contrast, the later art “would be called decadent in comparison.” This is an obsessive concern. It was this jeremiad about “decadence” that Lovecraft took, above all, from Spengler.
    “It is my belief,” he wrote to Clark Ashton Smith in 1927, “[and] was so long before Spengler put his seal of scholarly proof on it—that our mechanical and industrial age is one of frank decadence.”
    In this short novel, the words “decadent” and “decadence” and their derived forms are repeated twenty-one times. Toward the end of the story, there are near-casual references to surfaces “sparsely decorated with cartouches of conventional designs in a late, decadent style.” The narrative of the Old Ones’ cultural decline from a high point of classical perfection to an explicitly Byzantine self-conscious decadence, then on to a decadence which did not even have the mitigation of self-knowledge, has by now become accepted wisdom.
    5. SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
    The resonance with the rise and decline of human culture is made explicit not only in historic comparison, but in the narrator’s actual sympathy with the Old Ones and his claiming our kinship with them. “[T]hey were not evil. . . . They were the men of another age and another order of being. . . . Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!”
    This is a brilliant and surprising maneuver, which allows the Old Ones to occupy two precisely opposed positions in the story. At first they are the monsters, the murderers of humans, the source of our fear; by the end of the book, they have become projections of ourselves, and when we find them brutally murdered in turn, they are now the victims of monsters, and our identification with them is seamless and complete.
    Underlining the tragic nature of the narrative is the fact, stressed by Lovecraft, that these were Old Ones from an early stage of their culture. When we read of their execution of sketches “in a strange and assured technique perhaps superior . . . to any of the decadent carvings . . . the characteristic and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones . . . in the dead city’s heyday,” there is a sadness, for these poor nobles displaced into a city marking their compatriots’ decline—a city of decultured
“fellaheen,”
in Spengler’s terminology. Ultimately they suffer an even worse fate.
    It is with this that Lovecraft departs from, or perhaps adds to, “classic” Spenglerianism.
    As the story gradually asks us to