O que acontece no final de “Mountains of Madness”?

Bem, como Lovecraft gostava de fazer, não é explicitamente definido, mas, aqui está como a Wikipedia o descreve:

As the two progress further into the city, they are ultimately drawn to a massive, ominous entrance which is the opening of a tunnel which they believe leads into the subterranean region described in the murals. Compulsively they are drawn in, finding further horrors: evidence of dead Elder Things caught in a brutal struggle and blind six-foot-tall penguins wandering around placidly. They are confronted with an immense, ululating horror in the form of a black, bubbling mass, which they identify as a Shoggoth. They escape with their lives using luck and diversion. On the plane high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something that causes him to lose his sanity. He refuses to tell anyone (even Dyer) what he saw, though it is implied that it has something to do with what lies beyond the larger mountain range that even the Elder Things feared.

Professor Dyer concludes that the Elder Things and their civilization were destroyed by the Shoggoths they created and that this entity has sustained itself on the enormous penguins since eons past. He begs the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this Earth.

Você pode lê-lo gratuitamente, btw, via WikiSource , bem como em alguns outros lugares, pois acredito que é entrou no domínio público ..

Aqui está o texto, com o que está disponível na história sobre o que ele viu:

All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of those echoing, vaporous, wormily-honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, demoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognized mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake's camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.

He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about "The black pit," "the carven rim," "the protoShoggoths," "the windowless solids with five dimensions," "the nameless cylinder," "the elder Pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color out of space," "the wings," "the eyes in darkness," "the moon-ladder," "the original, the eternal, the undying," and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years.

O tekeli-li choro vem de uma das obras de Poe: A narrativa de Arthur Gordon Pym . Seu único romance e uma leitura interessante, o livro teoriza que a terra é realmente oca, com portais, por assim dizer, nos pólos. A Narrativa foi uma influência direta em As Montanhas da Loucura .

A parte mais assustadora de uma história de terror é o que você não mostra. O leitor deve evocar o que Danforth achava que viu "atrás" (o que significa atrás ou além) das montanhas. O narrador sente falta disso porque as nuvens mudam, e isso só aumenta o mistério, porque Danforth não poderia ter conseguido mais do que um vislumbre distante e indistinto. A HPL fornece uma lista de gatilhos.

"Now as to the end of the thing -- of course I'm not satisfied myself, but I am very oddly unable whether more or less definiteness is needed. Remember Arthur Gordon Pym. In my tale the shoggoth provides a concrete & tangible climax -- & what I wished to add was merely a vague hint of further spiritual horrors -- as Poe hinted with his white birds screaming "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" I wanted to leave the actuality of the glimpse very unsettled, so that it might easily pass off as an hallucination. Possibly I ought to have left it vaguer still -- & then again I had an idea that the thing ought to be developed at full length -- perhaps as a sequel to the present thing, or perhaps as an expansion of that thing to full book length .... with the Simon & Schuster request, received last January, in mind. What the thing was supposed to be, of course, was a region containing vestiges of some utterly primal cosmic force or process ruling or occupying the earth (among other planets) even before its solidification, & upheaved from the sea-bottom when the great Antarctic land mass arose. Lack of interest in the world beyond the inner mountains would account of its non-reconquest of the sphere. But then again, there may have been no such thing! Those Others may well have had their superstitions -- & of course Danforth was strangely read, nervously organised, & fresh from a terrific shock.... Anyhow, what I did set down was a sort of weak compromise betwist the two ways I vaguely & ineffectively thought it ought to be."

Uma pena que HPL nunca escreveu a sequela que ele se refere na citação acima!