In Chapter VI Dyer and Danforth investigate the art and reported history of the cyclopean city and its inhabitants.

Venturing through the ancient building, Dyer and Danforth come across regular patterns on the walls, Hieroglyphic murals bordered by arabesques line the entirety of the walls, only with brief pauses in the patterns of dots. These dot patterns hint at a rhyming form alien to all cultures of man.

They two delve deeper and study these murals, which evidently depict the history of the the barrel-like creatures. The rooms are notably unfurnished, though murals depict contents of these old rooms. This leads Dyer and Danforth to conclude that the city was abandoned. The pair both arrive at a conclusion that they try their hardest to deny, until they are presented with an unambiguous mural.

These barrel-like creatures are in fact an alien species who have lived on many worlds, and arrived on Earth a billion years ago. Indeed, these creatures are evidently the “Elder Things” fearfully written of in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon. The mural further depicts that these creatures are at least partially responsible for life on earth.

Dyer and Danforth franticly take photographs of the murals and take to drawing pictures when they run out of film. Dyer reveals that on later study, Danforth suffered from a mental breakdown which Dyer blames on the revelations of their research. Unfortunately this was unavoidable, as Dyer and Danforth must warn against further expeditions.

This is an important chapter in the story. The revelation of spacefaring precursor races is noted by some Lovecraft scholars as Lovecraft’s attempt to frame the creatures of his short stories through a more scientific lens, rather than leaving them as supernatural earthly entities. Enigmatic entities such as Cthulhu were now justified as ancient colonists of earth rather than god-like entities.

Those of you more seasoned in Lovecraft’s work may have heard the term “Cthulhu Mythos”, coined by a friend of Lovecraft, August Derleth. Derleth, while a confidant of Lovecraft, was a proponent of viewing the collected works of Lovecraft as a collective mythos with an overarching theme of good versus evil, which suited his catholic sensibilities. Lovecraft being an atheist rejected the notion of such a meta-narrative and firmly rejected Derleth’s attempts to consolidate his works under a collective “Mythos” label.

Following Lovecraft’s death, Derleth became the publisher of Lovecraft’s unpublished works via Arkham House publishing. He is in part responsible for the widespread publication of Lovecraft’s work today. Be that as it may, he is responsible for some decisions which many Lovecraft fans dislike. The two most controversial decisions were to go against the express wishes of Lovecraft and propose that the collection of stories be viewed under the banner of a single connected “Cthulhu Mythos”; and Derleth publishing a large number of “posthumous collaborations” with Lovecraft as a co-author, decades after Lovecraft’s death.

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.

In Chapter XI Dyer and Danforth are confronted with a horror in the depths.

The lifeless obstructions in the hallway are in fact the bodies of four of the eight Elder Things, clearly dispatched recently. Green ichor pours from the stumped where their heads should be. Inspecting the bodies further, the pair realise that each body has had its head torn off, and that a pungent black ooze surrounds the stump.

Both recognise this method of killing as the method employed by the Shoggoths in the war of re-subjugation. Danforth is so shocked that he screams; the nightmarish Shoggoths are “known” to not exist on this world. A response comes from deep within the cavern. The sound was noted by Lake in his radio transmissions; Danforth and Dyer were subconsciously aware of the sound while travelling the city; and Dyer is aware of the inspiration for an odd utterance described in Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym.

From the abyss comes the repeated cry “Tekeli-li!” which the pair associates with the Elder Things. They believe that they see a wounded Elder Thing approaching and they immediately flee. The two run with only dim torchlight in hopes of losing the Elder Thing in the vast honeycombed network of tunnels.

Oddly enough, the scent of the Elder Thing does not grow stronger as it must surely be catching up to them. Instead, that second foetid odour becomes unbearably strong. The two look around out of morbid curiosity and nearly succumb to madness. They are being chased by a black ooze that squeezes through the incredibly vast hall, wider than a subway car. It screams “Tekeli-li!” in a mocking tone.

The Shoggoths, only given intelligence to serve the Elder Things and having no language of their own, could only imitate the language of their masters.

I find it odd but not uncharacteristic of Lovecraft that he has sympathy for the Elder Thing slavers in this chapter. The “poor Old Ones” who built their empire off the backs of engineered slaves had their final city usurped by their former slaves. I definitely fall on the side of the Shoggoths who are so engineered that they can’t even devise their own language and must resort to a half-intelligent mockery of their masters’ language.