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of which was covered by the glaciers. Dyer claimed that the city dated from the Carboniferous Period, some 280 to 350 million years ago, and had been abandoned sometime during the Pliocene, roughly two or three million years ago when our ancestors were little better than manlike apes.
    â€œWell, Dyer returned with what remained of his party and quite of few of them were completely mad and had to be institutionalized. Dyer’s findings . . . supported only by those dim photographs . . . were scoffed at. His journal, which went into some impressive detail about the city and culture of what he called the
Old Ones
or
Elder Things,
was shown only to certain scientists, then locked away in the vaults of the Miskatonic. I was allowed to read it about ten years ago, one of a handful that have been granted that opportunity. Well . . . “ Gates sighed and shook his head “ . . . it’s wild stuff, people. Dyer had no doubt that these Old Ones built that city and were of an extraterrestrial origin. Much of Dyer’s journal is probably sheer fantasy induced by temporary madness, but there can be no doubt now that Lake did indeed find these Old Ones, for, as you know, we’ve found them now, too.
    â€œWell, where does any of this leave us? I’m not really sure. I rather doubt we’ll be able to corroborate much of what Dyer said, but some of it, yes, a great deal in fact. But what about that city? Is it still up there? Yes and no.” Gates looked around at those faces, seeing maybe fascination and curiosity and, yes, maybe fear, too. “What Dyer described, unfortunately, is gone. The area he visited was decimated in the 1930s and ‘40s by geologic cataclysm and intense glaciation. Those awe-inspiring ‘Mountains of Madness’ of his were destroyed for the most part . . . the seismic activity and shifting of the glaciers now makes it almost impossible to say
where
his ruins in fact were. The entire area is changed . . . gorges and valleys opened where none existed before and the shattering of those high peaks he spoke of opened up the area to intense snowfall. If any of it’s there, it’s now buried beneath a mountain of snow and ice.”
    â€œWhat about that other expedition?” someone asked.
    â€œStarkweather-Moore? That was a follow-up to Dyer’s in 1931 to ‘32, but it proved inconclusive. Shortly after the Pabodie Expedition, the first of those geologic upheavals obliterated much of the region. So it was a bust. They had gone seeking evidence of a pre-human civilization and particularly of that great stone city built by an alien race and found neither. So, as you can imagine, all that Dyer claimed was scoffed at by the scientific community. Another expedition was funded privately in the 1960s but without any success. And since the days of the Pabodie Expedition, the tales down here of aliens and weird civilizations have been ripe and abundant. There has been no proof . . . until now . . . “
    Here we go, Hayes was thinking. Now comes the spooky shit as if all of this wasn’t spooky enough already. Jesus. He looked over at Sharkey and she looked at him. It was hard to say what exactly passed between them, but it was akin to the look a couple of wide-eyed kids might give each other around a campfire after they were told that, yes, the ghost story they had just heard was really true. It was certainly a day of revelations.
    Gates was busy sketching out for them his own excavations in a series of naturally-hollowed limestone caves which were far east of Dyer’s “Mountains of Madness.” The original aim of Gates’ team was paleontological and was extremely successful. They discovered Mesozoic theropods and tetrapods, near-complete sauropod dinosaurs. Proto-mammals such as triconodonts and cynodonts as well as Jurassic mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, even more recent fossils of cetacians from the Cenozoic. And not just animals, but plants, cycads