Detailed View of Antarctica and HPL

Having never visited the continent, which was even less charted in his day than our own, H.P. Lovecraft was a great prophet of Antarctica's immense features. Indeed, one look at these new high res pictures gives one an even greater imaginative appreciation for the Cyclopean mountains hiding antique horrors in HPL's "At the Mountains of Madness." The frigid ice walls creeping deep into the continent's interior, the titanic peaks within, as well as reports of new bizarre features like underground river systems will keep Antarctica the most mysterious continent in the modern eye. Though all the attention is ultimately upon the alien city discovered later in the tale and the horrid Shoggoths, would Lovecraft's story be anything less without the mountains?

Yes! The piece's early mood is set exactly by Lovecraft's ominous, weird descriptions of those mountains. As if to ram this home with more force than a million exclamation marks, HPL also called his tale just that: "At the Mountains of Madness." And in his attempt to incorporate the great peaks into a work of the weird so thoroughly, he succeeded in capturing one of the most excellent highlights of the mystery and eeriness inherent in nature's most anti-human continent:

"Great barren peaks of mystery loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred."

-Grim Blogger