S12a: The Dyer Manuscript:

Dyer spoke at great length of the hideous display of mutilations and dissections discovered around Lake’s camp and in the hanger:

The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies - men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. As by a careful butcher.

Evidence of curious alien fumbling and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices both at the camp and at the boring.

The ONLY possible conclusion: Out of the 14-specimen drug into camp, 8 ‘old ones’ were hibernating. But awaken to see their kind laid upon the table and dissected. Retaliation, retribution, or just scientific interest on their part considering they probably hibernated for eons and thus were unfamiliar with this time and inhabitants. With their great strength they strangled the dogs and one or more men, crushed the fuel drum. Their razor-sharp appendages cleanly sliced the tent post and beheaded some of its prey.

And then Dyer and Danforth turned their attention to the mountains, flying toward the plateau filled with the ancient remains of a once great city epochs old:

It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher mountain skyline - regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, Something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. A Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws.

Geometrical forms for which an Euclid would scarcely find a name - cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken columns in curious groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness. tubular stone bridges that connected the crazily sprinkled structures at various heights.

They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast membranous wings - thus oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. They had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of energy.

The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular and atomic disturbances against the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory.

Many graphic sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the Stygian sunless sea that lurked at earth’s bowels.

These workers brought with them all that was necessary to establish the new venture - Shoggoth tissue from which to breed stone lifters and subsequent beasts of burden for the cavern city, and other protoplasmic matter to mold into phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes.

Murals, frescoes, and artifacts suggested its builders were the ‘old ones’. And triangular prints suggested the 8 awakened specimen returned to their now empty city. Dragging supplies and equipment and Gedney and a dog along for possible further autopsy. Or God knows what!

Also, within the passages within the city, they found a penguin rookery. 6ft tall penguins! Albino and eyeless. But the murals also revealed long tunnels that descended to the center of the earth where there is a great sunless sea. Where the city builders took their final refuge. Because there were predators of the ‘old ones’. Things called ‘shoggoths’ that evolved from slave labor. And at least one alive that slew 4 of the returned specimen and pursued the others. Decapitation: the manner of removal looked more like some hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage.

Dyer and Danforth swore they heard the creature and saw its shadow: "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" That, I may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing white mist-that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range. What we did see - for the mists were indeed all too maliguly thinned - was immeasurably more hideous and detestable. The utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s "thing that should not be".

In conclusion:

It was the ‘old ones’ who gave their 6 deceased a proper burial in the vertical shafts topped with the star-shaped cairn and soapstone cap.

It was Dyer’s team that buried the dogs and Lake’s team. And explored with utter horror the scenes of the destroyed camp. And swore a pact of silent to mankind.

Next episode: https://rigglebmm.blogspot.com/2021/01/s13-my-god-this-is-greatest-discovery.html