Must remember to keep up this journal; have been forgetful recently. Not even certain which day it is, not that it matters much.
About Oct. 1
... This land is more ancient than I could have dreamed; wind has scoured sand and desiccated soil away to lay bare the hill slopes, revealing strata of amazing antiquity—Cambrian, certainly, if not indeed pre-Cambrian—incredible to realize that this region of central Asia has been above the waves for five hundred million years, perhaps as much as a thousand million ... surely it must be one of the oldest continually exposed portions of land area on Earth. ... Suffering terribly from cold and the haunting stillness, also thirst. Snow tastes “bad” again, as if contaminated with some foulness. ... down to five bearers only by now, since Champo-Yaa deserted, or disappeared, or was carried off ... no water at all for eleven days now ... drinking the blood of the camels ... wind like a whetted knife, and more howling in the hills ... but no single sign of life for a hundred miles and more, as if all of this immense region has been sterile since Time began. ...
—That unknown range of mountains closer now, looming monstrously huge, virtually Himalayan ... weird vistas of bare, black, jagged, fanglike peaks marching across supernal sunset skies to the north; sky an amazing sight, a blazing panorama of sulfurous and flame-lit vapors ... somehow, the colossal vista of snow-laden, black peaks and under-lit cloud effects horribly suggestive of a growing and gathering menace, as if with each day I struggle on I draw closer to some stupendous ancient secret those nameless and uncharted ranges have been guarding like a colossal wall for hundreds of thousands of aeons ... oddest of all is the peculiar and haunting sensation of remembering ... doubtless after-effects of that lingering fever and this omnipresent thirst, but—I could swear that I have seen this region before, either in a previous life, or within old, half-forgotten dreams.
About Oct. 3rd or 4 th.
Horrible day—hunger, gnawing cold—thirst a continual torment—snow deposits still polluted and undrinkable—perhaps the uncanny sterility of this region, its total lack of living things, of even the most rudimentary forms of life, due to some inexplicable contamination?—one step after another, boots crunching through dry crystalline sand—Richardson never got this far, turned aside in the hills, searching for some strange, sealed, forbidden cave which was supposedly guarded by degenerate worshipers of that abominable Chaugnar idol ... tortured him to death, I believe, poor, brave man!—remember now that Ulman brought back a horrible stone Thing from chis region—-something so chillingly suggestive, so nauseatingly obscene, that I believe the Manhattan Museum of Fine Arts people never dared put it on public exhibition. ...
This must be the most horribly ancient land on Earth—ghastly place of horrid cold, utterly lifeless, dry, desiccated, no other desert region this bleak and barren, none known to me, anyway ... remember cryptic and frightful hints in the obscure Mu Sang prophecies ... shadowy whispers of age-old survivals from the blasphemous Elder World, hideous hybrids from the squirming ooze of primal swamps ... old gods and demons and darkling horrors that lurk and linger on in the dim, forgotten corners of this bleak legended region of unthinkable and terrifying antiquity. ...
Odd, how that chance reading of the Ponape Scripture years ago has changed my entire life—from the day I first unwisely peered into those curious, thick-fibered pages of palm-leaf parchment, bound between crumbling boards of wood hewn from what some experts unhesitatingly swear is an extinct species of prehistoric cycad or tree-fern, and then first studied the Hoag translation, I have been unable to think of anything else but to locate the tomb of the wizard-priest Zanthu, who fled from the destruction of antique Mu, bearing with him the Elder Lore. And to think that Zanthu himself passed this way, living over this same harsh and desolate ice plateau of dead sand and frozen shadows! ... The quest has been like an obsession with me, as if to the fanaticism of the dedicated scientist was added the blind, unquestioning faith of the occultist or the mystic. ... Dreams very disturbing, and more howling in the hills to all sides, and from that enormous range of unmapped and nameless mountains that loom dead ahead. ...
A bit later.
Have lost much weight and depleted my strength from short rations and fatigue, but thank God thirst no longer a problem, now that we are into the high snows, queer chemical contamination no longer noticeable—it was old von Junzt that confirmed me on my path; his data on Mu, in the copy of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten they keep (for some reason) under lock and key at the Huntington, completely corroborates information in the Ponape Scripture. ...
Found myself thinking lately about certain obscure old books and their puzzling hints as to the fantastic antiquity of all this Tsang Plateau region of Asia—dim whispers of elder horrors that seeped down from the stars when the planet was young and molten, or terrible Visitants from beyond the universe itself, uninvited Things that wandered here through inter-dimensional "gates"—started to remember baffling remarks in that damnable Necronomicon I puzzled my way through so many years ago ... did not the Mad Arab himself, old Abdul Alhazred, whisper suggestively that remote and mythic Leng was thought by some to be located somewhere in this dark corner of forbidden Asia? Horrible, prehuman Leng, guarded by the Tcho-Tcho people, and the shantaks, and the Abom. Mi-Go who haunt the hills? ... Terrible, fragmentary legends of weird, inhuman shapes shambling amid the unbroken snow of polar summits, threshing tentacles in the moonlight, shrill ululations that come from no human or bestial throat gliding pillars of quaking protoplasmic jelly, somehow strayed from other worlds and far dimensions—what is that awful passage from the nightmarish pages of the Necronomicon about "portals to Beyond, and Things from Outside that sometimes stray through the shadowy Gates to stalk through earthly snows" ... antique Leng is coterminous both with obscure regions of High Asia and with other worlds and spheres and planes of existence ... why do I seem to recognize all this landscape, as if I had seen it before, long ago, as though from another, earlier life?
God! I am mad or going mad ... cannot endure for much longer these torments of the mind, body and soul ... near the limits of my strength and sanity ... last three bearers hall-insane themselves with superstitious fear by now; have to drive them on before me all day at gun-point. ...
Much later.
Horrible blind battle in snow—bearers dead or run off—middle of the night, frightful shrill ululation from the frigid darkness, terribly close; snatched up gun and flashlight and plunged out into the moonlight to glimpse bearers battling hulking crustacean-lizard monsters, horribly huge—they bad no faces, but somehow they saw me—had already torn one poor native (poor devil!) limb from limb, the hot blood glistening black on fresh snow in the gray moonlight—came stalking toward me, dreadfully real in the dim light, paying no attention to the gun in my hand ... but most curious and frightening of all, when the flashlight momentarily revealed my face, the monsters whipped about—waddled away, and all the while squealing as in mindless panic—but why should such brutes be afraid of me?