opening lines hinting at madness

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aërial, will count in my favour; for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures; notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.

In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of those mountains of madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.

the first two paragraphs from h. p. lovecrafts tale " at the mountains of madness ". the entire text of the story can be read at the lovecraft archive.

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leng proxima

''mythologists have placed leng in central asia; but the racial memory of man--or of his predecessors--is long, and it may well be that certain tales have come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than asia and earlier than any human world we know ... leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region i would care to be in or near ... at the moment i felt sorry that i had ever read the abhorred necronomicon, ...''

h.p.lovecraft, at the mountains of madness.

i: speculations on the location of leng.

deoxyriboshoggothic acid

'' it was under the sea ... that they first created earth life ... certain multicellular protoplasmic masses ... capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs ... these viscous masses were without doubt what abdul alhazred whispered about as the "shoggoths" in his frightful necronomicon ... they were normally shapeless entities composed of a vicous jelly which looked like an aggultination of bubbles, and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere ...

'' they seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the permian age ... when a veritable war of resubjugation was waged upon them ... and in the end had achieved a complete victory ... though durihg the rebellion the shoggoths had shown an ability to live out of water this transition was not encouraged ... but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and aquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented a formidible problem. ''

h.p.lovecraft, at the mountains of madness.


i: shoggoth fetish art via notcothulhu.
ii: shoggoth experiments at notcothulhu.
iii: shoggoth war maneuvers at artcom.de, via notcothulhu.