In stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a death which had reigned at least five hundred thousand years, and in all probability even longer.
And as I patted down the last spadeful of mold, I shed the first of the many tears with which I have paid unaffected tribute to my beloved uncle's memory.
The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told also of Lake's strange and dogged insistence on a westward--or rather, northwestward--prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new base.
Never could they realize that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next.
Of all existing lands it was infinitely the most ancient.
The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness.
Later maps, which display this land mass as cracking and drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly.
Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in.
Never before had the presence of evil so poignantly oppressed me.
