I was reading the BBC webpage the other day and came across this, which struck me as positively Lovecraftian;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7668070.stm
After a few seconds of googling I found the email address of one of the expedition members, and I felt the urgent need to send her a telegram of warning of what horrors that lie in wait beneath those prodigious layers of ice.
I took some obvious liberties with the "At the Mountains of Madness" story, but here goes
Dear Dr Robin Bell,
I hope this message finds you well. I am Professor Emeritus Frank H. Pabodie of the Engineering Science faculty, Miskatonic University. Let me first say that I have had my eyes upon your research for quite some time, and I greatly admire your finds connected to the Hudson River research project.
The reason for me contacting you is based upon an article on the BBC web page this Tuesday, October 14th. It was with great distress and a heavy heart that I read about another daring, yet ignorant attempt to explore and unearth what should best be left undisturbed; The Gamburtsev mountains, by some referred to as ‘The Mountains of Madness’, which I myself had the doubtful honour to experience many years ago.
I was only a young student back then, in 1947, several years before the alleged Soviet discoverers reported their find to the authorities. The Miskatonic University had put together an expedition consisting of several distinguished professors and students, who would embark on a staggering journey to the southern continent to investigate the several sites where our Professor Lake, palaeontology, had found a number of archaic fossils in singularly ancient strata beneath the prodigious layer of ice covering Antarctica. Professor Lake hoped to reinforce his hypothesis that earth has seen whole cycles of organic life before the known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells.
There had also been recent reports of strange mountains buried several miles beneath the ice, and it was believed that we should have to venture beyond those antediluvian monoliths to find fossils in even more pristine condition than the ones previously recovered. We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season - or longer, if absolutely necessary - would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material. For this task we had remarkable technology such as a revolutionary drill of my design, which was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity, combining the ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness.
We were not disappointed, as we found a number of singularily puzzling organic materials in the AGAP zone, near the site of your upcoming expedition. Results were baffling and provocative indeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the little that was achieved left us all awed and bewildered. Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no product of any cell growth science knows about. There had been scarcely any mineral replacement, and despite an 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, and pertained to some paleogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation.
The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast. Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing had a set of ganglial centers and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialized development. Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced, and there were signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry cilia of the head, involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism.
What happened the day after this discovery I remember only in a feverish collage of faded memories, but something had gone awfully wrong; twelve of our dogs were either dead or missing, Professors Lake and Sherman were nowhere to be found, but most baffling of all was that the fossils were all gone. The specimens on the dissection table, the ones in our biological containers; all had vanished without a trace. After that I remember only running for my life, with uncanny visions of archaic and aeon-forgotten cities around me and eerie incarnations of albino penguins have haunted my dreams ever since. There was something beneath the ice. More sinister, and even more ancient than the fossils we found, creatures so malign and of such unutterable antiquity, it makes my blood freeze, even now, sixty years after these events.
I woke up in the old hospital of my home town Arkham, where I was told that all the stories about finding ancient fossils were a fabrication of my troubled mind, and that all my colleagues and comrades had perished due to a storm, and I myself had been salvaged by a search and rescue team who had heard our distress calls.
I would seek solace and comfort in the fact of these horrible events being mere spectres of my imagination, but it was with indescribable horror that I found one, albeit tiny, specimen among my belongings recovered from the expedition site; Star-fish shaped, with all the baffling qualities of the creatures that to my certainty eradicated my whole expedition.
Such is my story, and I hope you will take this into consideration before embarking upon your expedition, as I will not dare think about what horrors that you may unearth with your modern technology. It is not my intention to scare you, but if you decide to go though with this expedition, be prepared and bring a good amount of firearms.
I will be praying for your expedition.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Frank H. Pabodie
