Welcome back to our Dream Cycle Book Club, where we explore the dream based stories and dream-adjacent tales written by H.P. Lovecraft. In this week's thread we shall discuss the final half of At the Mountains of Madness.
This week we will be reading our penultimate story: The Dreams in the Witch House. The Arkham Archivist provides us with a collated collection of stories here. A LibriVox audio recording is not available and so I direct you to a recording by the YouTuber HorrorBabble here
This week image credit goes to Joseph Diaz.
Chapter VIII concerns the further decline of the empire of the Elder Things.
Dyer is now convinced that this great city is no other than the evil Plateau of Leng, of which even the great occult scholar Abdul Al-Hazred was fearful. The carvings of the Elder Things speak of the geography surrounding the city, including a much vaster mountain range which was the source of the great river that spanned the city. Even the Elder Things feared those mountains, for any who built near that range found their constructions falling to ruin. They even came to fear that which the river bore down from the mountains. Dyer recalls Kadath of the Cold Wastes mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and is thankful that he has not seen that range.
Though the Elder Things were hardy folk, the approaching ice age originating at the poles caused ever decreasing crop yields, resulting in a population crisis. The Elder Things determined to build a new city, in the vast depths of an underground ocean which would be uniformly heated by the planet itself. To this end, they fashioned a new breed of intelligent Shoggoths. These new Shoggoths were capable of verbal communications, following complex instruction, and forming intelligent questions.
Dyer ponders on this underwater city and whether it still stands. He wonders whether it is possible for the Elder Things to have survived uncontacted for long millenia, and is then disturbed by the thought of the remarkably preserved specimens which disappeared after the slaughter at the camp.
It sounds to me like we have in fact found Unknown Kadath. While it lies in Antarctica in the waking world, it lies far to the North of the world of Dream. It is also notable in both worlds for its proximity to the Plateau of Leng and it's incredible size compared to other mountain ranges. A brief thought I had is that perhaps the fables of these locations are the cause for their representations in the Dreamlands. After all, these fables can lead to many dreams of these horrific places.