IV

now my terrible duty to amplify this account by filling in the merciful blanks with hints of what we really saw in that hidden transmontane world⁠—hints of the revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a nervous collapse.

I wish he would add a really frank word about the thing which he thinks he alone saw⁠—even though it was probably a nervous delusion⁠—and which was perhaps the last straw that put him where he is; but he is firm against that. All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed whispers about what set him shrieking as the plane soared back through the wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and tangible shock which I shared.

This will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving elder horrors in what I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling with the inner Antarctic⁠—or at least from prying too deeply beneath the surface of that ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and unhuman, aeon-cursed desolation⁠—the responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immeasurable evils will not be mine.

Danforth and I, studying