The Alien Earth

H.P. Lovecraft -- The Mountains of Madness (Part 2)

I can't help but think that Mountains might be a better story if it were a shorter one.  I mean, it might be more dramatic and accessible, though its exaggerated grandiosity and ponderous movements suit the material.  Nonetheless, there are certainly gems of prose scattered throughout.  Time and geology are, at this point, the real antagonists in the tale: "we... thanked heaven that we were clear of the haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust."  Lovecraft goes out of his way to dislodge the world from its familiar role in human consciousness, creating an "utterly alien earth."

The narrator struggles to understand a time "before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom" and is forced to confront a "palaeogean megalopolis" constructed by the Great Old Ones.  As the exploration of the city commences, we hear the startling claim that these Old Ones were living at a time before "the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells" -- and that the aliens were "the makers and enslavers of that life."  From that point in the story we begin to learn the history of earth's first empire -- an ancient power that came from the stars.

Image from The Student's Lyell, available on the British Library's Flickr page.