We meant to look farther later on; but as I have said, immediate conditions dictated another present objective. There would, though, have been a limit⁠—for after all hope of a long future occupancy of the place had perished among the Old Ones, there could not but have been a complete cessation of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming of the great cold which once held most of the earth in thrall, and which has never departed from the ill-fated poles⁠—the great cold that, at the world’s other extremity, put an end to the fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.

Just when this tendency began in the Antarctic it would be hard to say in terms of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at a distance of about five hundred thousand years from the present, but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork, but it is quite likely that the decadent sculptures were made considerably less than a million years ago, and that the actual desertion of the city was complete long before the conventional opening of the Pleistocene⁠—five hundred thousand years ago⁠—as reckoned in terms of the earth’s whole surface.

In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation everywhere, and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old Ones. Heating devices were shown in the houses, and winter travelers were represented as muffled in protective fabrics. Then we saw a series of cartouches⁠—the continuous band arrangement being frequently interrupted in these late carvings⁠—depicting a constantly growing migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmth⁠—some fleeing to cities under the sea off the faraway coast, and some clambering down through networks of limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the neighboring black abyss of subterrane waters.