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''At the Mountains of Madness'' is a novella by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931 and rejected that year by ''Weird Tales'' editor Farnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length.〔Joshi, S. T. (2001). ''A dreamer and a visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in his time''. Liverpool University Press, 302. ISBN 0-85323-946-0〕 It was originally serialized in the February, March and April 1936 issues of ''Astounding Stories''. It has been reproduced in numerous collections. The story details the events of a disastrous expedition to the Antarctic continent in September of 1930 and what was found there by a group of explorers led by the narrator, Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic University. Throughout the story, Dyer details a series of previously untold events in the hope of deterring another group of explorers who wish to return to the continent. The novella's title is derived from a line in "The Hashish Man," a short story by fantasy writer Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany: "''And we came at last to those ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness...''" The story has inadvertently popularized the concept of ancient astronauts, as well as Antarctica's place in the "ancient astronaut mythology".〔Jason Colavito, ''The Cthulhu Comparison''〕 ==Plot summary== The story is told in first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor at Miskatonic University, as if in the hope to deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. Throughout the course of his explanation, Dyer relates that he led a group of scholars from Miskatonic University on a previous expedition to Antarctica, during which they discovered fantastic ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains higher than the Himalayas. A smaller advance group, led by Professor Lake, discovered the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals. Six of the specimens are badly damaged and the others pristine; whereas their stratum places them on the geologic time scale much too early for their features to evolve. When the main expedition loses contact with Lake's party, Dyer and his colleagues investigate. Lake's camp is devastated, and the majority of men and dogs slaughtered, while a man named Gedney and another dog are absent. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and one specimen under each. They discover that the better preserved life forms have vanished, and that some form of dissection experiment has been done on an unnamed man and a dog. Dyer and a graduate student named Danforth fly an airplane over the mountains, which they identify as the outer walls of a huge, abandoned stone city, alien to any human architecture. For their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the ''Necronomicon'', the builders of this lost civilization are dubbed the "Elder Things". By exploring these fantastic structures, the men learn through hieroglyphic murals that the Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon took form, and built their cities with the help of "Shoggoths" (biological entities created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought). As more buildings are explored, the explorers see the Elder Things' conflicts with the Star-spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-go, who arrived on Earth some time afterward. The images also reflect a degradation of this civilization, as the Shoggoths gain independence. As more resources are applied to maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive, and the murals allude to an unnamed evil in an even larger mountain range beyond the city. When Antarctica became uninhabitable even for the Elder Things, they migrated into a large, subterranean ocean. Dyer and Danforth eventually realize that the Elder Things missing from the advance party's camp had somehow returned to life and, after slaughtering the explorers, returned to the city. Dyer and Danforth discover traces of the Elder Things' earlier exploration, as well as sledges containing the corpses of Gedney and the missing dog. They are ultimately drawn to the entrance of a tunnel into the subterranean region described in the murals. Here, they find evidence of dead Elder Things killed in a brutal struggle, and blind six-foot-tall penguins wandering placidly, apparently as livestock. They are then confronted by a black, bubbling mass, which they identify as a Shoggoth, and escape. Aboard the plane high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something that causes him to lose his sanity; implied to be the unnamed evil itself. Dyer concludes that the Elder Things only slaughtered the survivors and dogs out of self-defense or scientific curiosity at their new surroundings; their civilization was eventually destroyed by the Shoggoths; and that this further entity has preyed on the enormous penguins, and the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay distant from the site. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「At the Mountains of Madness」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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