megaliths themselves. At first, the scientists thought they were looking at the flattened, sheered-off tops of some petrified prehistoric forest, much like the fossilized Permian stands found at the Beardmore Glacier area some years before.
But these were artificial in origin and the impact of that was said to have put more than one of the team down on their knees. For this was Antarctica, not Europe. And the ice that covered these particular standing stones dated from the Miocene at the very least and the implications of that, they knew, threatened not only the culture of mankind, but accepted history itself. These were not Neolithic or Paleolithic in origin, but from a time so distant that manâs earliest ancestors had yet to evolve from the stew of creation.
And what did that say?
What did that conceivably hint at?
Over the next month, using hot-water drills and suction pumps, the megaliths were slowly exposed for the first time in over twenty-million years. They towered above at least a hundred feet and using ice-penetrating sonar, it was discovered that there was at least another hundred feet of them encased in the ice.
As winter came on and the temperature dipped and the winds screamed through the Sentinels, all work was abandoned until the following spring.
And there was more than one of the scientists that were only too happy to be away from that awful place. Maybe it was the way the wind howled at night around their tents or the strange almost musical piping that drifted down from the high peaks like Panâs flute across a grim harvest field or the terrible dreams the standing stones inspired.
Dreams that no one would dare confess by daylight.
Perhaps it was all these things and perhaps something more. For there was no denying that those primal-hewed stones had a certain magnetism to them. That they made you want to stare at them. To touch them and feel them under your fingertips, feel the arcane and primordial energy thrumming through them. To go down on your knees before them like a mindless savage at the altar of his god.
They were hypnotic, morphic.
To look upon them was to remember dreadful things long forgotten. To touch them was to be owned by them and those that had erected them.
And the one thing that no one would dare admit was that the megaliths looked oddly
familiar.
As if they had seen them in dreams or half-glimpsed memories, the aberrant architecture of some surreal nightscape that haunted their every waking moment. You could not look upon those structures without feeling something, a certain
awareness
in the back of your mind, a primeval blackness rising up from the base of your skull that threatened to drown all that you were and ever would be.
For there was memory in those stones.
Bleak, anti-human, and unpleasantly vital.
So the site was abandoned amidst much fervor in the popular press, much recrimination and denial in organized religious circles, and much more revelation and soul-searching amongst the world population in general.
About the same time that Mount Hobb Station was emptied of human life, something incredible was happening there: the ice was continuing to melt. Though the temperatures had dropped to ten below zero and the winds screamed down from the high elevations in tempests of raging snow, the megaliths continued to rise from the retreating ice.
No one was there to see it.
No one human, at any rate.
Some unknown heat was directed at the site and the megaliths slowly revealed their superannuated secrets. It took but six days.
Beacon Valley was melted right down to the ancient volcanic rock below. Though no one knew it yet, the site had once sat upon a hilltop during the Cretaceous, but molten lava beds forced up from below under unbelievable pressureâcreating the Sentinel Mountains themselvesâhad drawn the megalith site down into the valley in which it now sat.
By the time of the chopper crash near Polar Clime, the megaliths were completely free
But these were artificial in origin and the impact of that was said to have put more than one of the team down on their knees. For this was Antarctica, not Europe. And the ice that covered these particular standing stones dated from the Miocene at the very least and the implications of that, they knew, threatened not only the culture of mankind, but accepted history itself. These were not Neolithic or Paleolithic in origin, but from a time so distant that manâs earliest ancestors had yet to evolve from the stew of creation.
And what did that say?
What did that conceivably hint at?
Over the next month, using hot-water drills and suction pumps, the megaliths were slowly exposed for the first time in over twenty-million years. They towered above at least a hundred feet and using ice-penetrating sonar, it was discovered that there was at least another hundred feet of them encased in the ice.
As winter came on and the temperature dipped and the winds screamed through the Sentinels, all work was abandoned until the following spring.
And there was more than one of the scientists that were only too happy to be away from that awful place. Maybe it was the way the wind howled at night around their tents or the strange almost musical piping that drifted down from the high peaks like Panâs flute across a grim harvest field or the terrible dreams the standing stones inspired.
Dreams that no one would dare confess by daylight.
Perhaps it was all these things and perhaps something more. For there was no denying that those primal-hewed stones had a certain magnetism to them. That they made you want to stare at them. To touch them and feel them under your fingertips, feel the arcane and primordial energy thrumming through them. To go down on your knees before them like a mindless savage at the altar of his god.
They were hypnotic, morphic.
To look upon them was to remember dreadful things long forgotten. To touch them was to be owned by them and those that had erected them.
And the one thing that no one would dare admit was that the megaliths looked oddly
familiar.
As if they had seen them in dreams or half-glimpsed memories, the aberrant architecture of some surreal nightscape that haunted their every waking moment. You could not look upon those structures without feeling something, a certain
awareness
in the back of your mind, a primeval blackness rising up from the base of your skull that threatened to drown all that you were and ever would be.
For there was memory in those stones.
Bleak, anti-human, and unpleasantly vital.
So the site was abandoned amidst much fervor in the popular press, much recrimination and denial in organized religious circles, and much more revelation and soul-searching amongst the world population in general.
About the same time that Mount Hobb Station was emptied of human life, something incredible was happening there: the ice was continuing to melt. Though the temperatures had dropped to ten below zero and the winds screamed down from the high elevations in tempests of raging snow, the megaliths continued to rise from the retreating ice.
No one was there to see it.
No one human, at any rate.
Some unknown heat was directed at the site and the megaliths slowly revealed their superannuated secrets. It took but six days.
Beacon Valley was melted right down to the ancient volcanic rock below. Though no one knew it yet, the site had once sat upon a hilltop during the Cretaceous, but molten lava beds forced up from below under unbelievable pressureâcreating the Sentinel Mountains themselvesâhad drawn the megalith site down into the valley in which it now sat.
By the time of the chopper crash near Polar Clime, the megaliths were completely free
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