#a wild geologist appears again!

[chocobutt-trash]

I fell in love with the Ardyn and Angelgard post, and your addition was really great! Thank you so much for sharing! I was just wondering, could the place Ardyn sat at have been at pitioss?

Ooh, interesting! Thanks so much for this ask!

Well, it may be possible, for sure. It’s a sweet idea! However I have another idea on the location of Ardyn’s throne based on that card, so I’ll posit that here.

It’s now known that Ardyn was meant to be the first King of Lucis (see @valkyrieofardyn‘s post here). And it’s also known that the Blade of the Mystic is meant to be the blade used by ‘A king who rose to protect the world with the Oracle.’ (see the wiki). And, to further cement the association, the Blade of the Mystic is the sword that Ardyn uses in the final battle.

One thing I noticed upon replaying the game for the nth time was that the Tomb of the Mystic is located right where Titan is holding up the Meteor, right at the centre of the Disc of Cauthess.

Now this raises a number of questions. Why is a half-destroyed Royal Tomb in such a place? ENTER GEOLOGY NERD AGAIN: The placement of crater ejecta and fused rock overlaps and interrupts the tomb structure, indicating that the tomb existed prior to the meteor’s fall.

All that the Ultimania says concerning the Meteorite is that it ‘fell during ancient times.’ (see this awesome translation over on Medium). It’s the end result of the Astral War that Ifrit waged between the other gods. And it sort of gave me an idea. IF Ardyn was indeed the first king of Lucis and had his shrine in this location, in the very centre of Lucis itself, it would make sense for Ifrit to target the hub of the devotion to Bahamut and the others. Luckily, Titan steps in at the last minute so not all of the shrine is destroyed. Only most of it. And them, of course, Ifrit is banished.

I can imagine a distraught ruler Ardyn trying to keep the peace in the chaos that followed the meteor’s fall and the start of the Starscourge spreading. I can imagine him stepping off his throne in Cauthess and announcing that he would Heal the people, as was his duty. I can imagine his ardent followers still returning to this broken and dilapidated shrine for many years to come, still trying to hold on to the hope that he would cure the world of the Scourge. I can imagine people making those card sets with their king Ardyn Lucis Caelum sat on his throne like nothing’s happened, like the meteor hasn’t destroyed it.

And finally, I can see Bahamut’s betrayal once Ardyn becomes too infected to ascend. I can see Bahamut making a mockery of Ardyn (as referenced in the original post) and transporting the bare bones of that (hypothesised) throne room at Cauthess over to that lava bomb prison.

Let’s look more closely at the rocks used as building material between the Tomb of the Mystic and Angelgard.

First of all, at Cauthess, the building material differs from the country rock (the latter of which appears to be more of a sandstone matrix). It looks like it could be some kind of marble or meta-sedimentary rock. Marble is usually light in colour, doesn’t have vesicles or grains, and often features bands of discolouration or impurities as seen here:

This indicates two things: first, since there is no marble in the surrounding area, that the buidling material was shipped in from another locality, and second, that for such an expense to have been made, this site must have been of great importance.

Now over to Angelgard.

Ah. Will you look at that. Marble.

(It could be granite, you say, but no, I have not seen much evidence of mica or feldspar in this material while I was there. Might go back for some close-up shots at some point.)

Furthermore, in terms of the cut, the similarity with the slabs around the Tomb of the Mystic is just uncanny.

Okay, now let’s go on to overall placement. This shot of the Tomb in Chapter 4 shows an interesting angle of the Meteor rising grandly in the background:

Hey, it kind of reminds me of something…

It’s almost as though Bahamut wanted to mirror the sight of the meteor with the design of the Angelgard prison. It would probably remind Ardyn, every day he was trapped in there, of the origin of the tragedy that caused his curse.

It’s all a hypothesis but it’s awfully fun to think about! And another reason why Bahamut is the biggest dick of all.

[ambarto]

Middle Earth geology: a masterpost

I did say I would do it once and I did it, a masterpost of all the works I found online pertaining to geology in Tolkien’s works. This isn’t to say that it’s a complete list of everything that has been written about the subjects - there’s multiple works that I’ve seen cited in some of these articles that I could not find anywhere, and likely other works I just didn’t dig deep enough to find. If anyone has links to additional works, feel free to share them, and I’ll add them to the post. Many of these works are somewhat old, but for the most part they’re still good in the points they make.

General Middle Earth works

A New Synthesis on the Geology of Middle-earth: Genesis, Orogeny and Tectonics by Chris Ingles and Lindy A. Orthia (2016) - an overview of all the mountain ranges in Middle Earth and how they might have come to be, as well as a discussion on what may have happened to Beleriand. Differs from many other articles in this list, as this one includes also the magical aspects of Arda’s formation rather than attempting to only use strictly realistic geological concepts. One of the longer articles here with 14 pages in total, but the language used makes it easy to read.

The Geology of Middle-earth by William A. S. Sarjeant (1995) - a general overview of tectonical processes involving Middle Earth, in particular relating to tectonic plates and faults. Literally the first results I got when I googled “geology tolkien”. Not too long and not too complicated a read, many of the technical terms used receive an in-text explanation. Includes various maps. The most difficult parts to understand are probably towards the end, with citations from “The Geomorphology of Middle-earth” by Robert Reynolds (the whole article wants to present a more recent take on the previous work by Reynolds, an article that gets cited a lot but I haven’t been able to find anywhere).

Glaciation in Middle-earth by Samuel Cook (2016) - part of a copy of the journal “Anor”. Article is four pages long and fairly easy to understand. The topic straddles the line between a geological and a more geographical/climatological narrative, but geologists love glaciers so we’re gonna put glaciers here too.

Middle Earth Geology, a thread (2019) - not an article, but a thread on TheOneRing.net forum were various users discuss possible explanations for various features of Middle Earth and Beleriand. Because it’s a forum thread it doesn’t have definite conclusions, simply puts forwards multiple theories. A few mentions of things that get overall overlooked in other works, like some of the mountain ranges present in Beleriand.

The Geologic History of Middle Earth by Benjamin D. Hilton (2009) - this is a rather technical paper in language, and extremely speculative. Essentially, this paper talks about an hypothetical history of Middle Earth on a real world geological timescale, starting 1.7 billion years ago. The way the article is written as if the author was able to gain actual field data, and while much of what is said makes sense as far as theories go a lot of it is based on fake evidence peppered in through the paper. Doubtful in conclusions, but a fun read for sure

The Elder Ages and the Later Glaciations of the Pleistocene Epoch by Margaret M. Howes (1967) - this work is often cited as the first article investigating Middle Earth’s geology so I couldn’t not add it here. I should however mention that the contents are, well, they’re kind of a wild ride. The article essentially strives to explain how Middle Earth could have hypothetically been turned into modern day Europe and tries to give an explanation to real glaciations through the eyes of Tolkien’s works. I wouldn’t really call this article scientifically or historically sound, it’s more definitely a curiosity if anyone is interested. A bit longer than some other articles. Scan of a typewriter document, which might make it a little harder to read.

The Shire

The Geology of the Shire by Mike Percival (1984) - second article in this PDF. The document is a scan of an old copy of “Anor”, which may make it harder to read than some other files. Short article and without a lot of technical terms. Very little tectonics, mostly makes guesses as to what kind of rocks you might find in various areas of the Shire. Also features a geologic profile and map.

Khazad-dum/Moria

The Draining of Moria by Mike Percival (1987) - part of a scanned copy of “Anor”. Explores theories on how the Dwarves of Moria would have gotten rid of the water that might have flooded the mines, and before that makes hypothesis on the kind of bedrock Moria might have been built into. It also answers a question as to why the Sirannon formed a lake outside of the Doors of Moria. Fairly easy when it comes to language.

The Mines of Moria - a comment by Ted Crawford (1988) - a comment on the previous article, again on an “Anor” journal. Focused more on the engineering side than the geological one, I’m mostly adding this one for completeness, but it doesn’t really contradict the purely geological conclusions. Lots of numbers going on there.

The Mines of Moria - Further Thoughts by Mike Percival (1988) - a comment on the previous comment. Same journal, same discussion. Once again, more engineering focused, but might be interesting.

Numenor

Geographical Observations on Numenor by Duncan McLaren (1985) - once again, scanned “Anor” copy, and not the best scan I’ve seen. Short article, not exclusive to geology. The part dealing with what kind of rocks you might find on Numenor, which is also probably what may interest a fic writer more, seems overall rather reasonable. Also gives a theory on plate tectonics and attempts a geological explanation of the Akallabeth.

On Numenor by Mike Percival (1985) - a comment and response to the previous article. Scanned “Anor” copy again. Focuses on the plate tectonics, and has a somewhat more technical language than the previous article, going more in depth. Alternate view for an Akallabeth event than the previous article. Also features maps.

Paleontology

Paleontology in the Silmarillion by Mike Sutton (1991) - very short and very easy in language. Doesn’t really go particularly in depth on any matter, essentially explores how there could be certain similarities between what is considered (or was considered, paleontological ideas change a lot in thirty years) the order in which various life forms appeared and certain language used in the Silmarillion. If you thought that this was an “Anor” copy, you guessed it right.

Misc

“Beneath the Earth’s dark keel” Tolkien and Geology by Gerard Hynes (2012) - this article doesn’t deal with the geology of Arda, but rather speculates the way Tolkien himself might have tried to work geology within the text by considering the state of geological knowledge and how it evolved during Tolkien’s life. Also covers a little the history of the theory of plate tectonics, if anyone is interested about learning about it.

Re-reading the Map of Middle-earth: Fan Cartography’s Engagement with Tolkien’s Legendarium by Stentor Danielson (2013) - this is not a geological article, but a cartography article. The reason I added it is because a lot of the geological studies on Middle Earth, especially of the tectonics kind, are based on how maps look like and what deductions can be made from the shapes you see on them. As this author points out, maps are not necessarily accurate with their information, especially older ones, and might do things like, for example, make mountain ranges be excessively straight in line. A bit long, but worth reading.

[gardenofkore]

Florence Trevelyan Cacciola (née Florence Trevelyan Trevelyan) was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumblerand, on February 7th 1852. She was the daughter and only surviving child (her older sister Edith had died in 1850 at just one year old) of Edward Spencer Trevelyan of Hallington Hall (cadet son of Sir John Trevelyan, 5th Baronet Trevelyan of Nettlecombe, Somerset, and of Wallington Hall, Northumberland), and of Catherine Ann Forster.

She was baptised in St. Andrew Church in Hartburn, Northumberland, with her family name serving also as a middle name, so that she would have been able to keep it even after married.

On August 23rd 1854 Edward Spencer Trevelyan committed suicide, leaving his wife and his two years old daughter living alone in Hallington Hall.

Over the years, Florence and her mother developed a great interest in gardening and in establishing "pleasure gardens", such as gardens open to the public. Perhaps the fact that Florence's uncle, Sir Walter Carverley Trevelyan, 6th Baronet, was a renowned naturalist and geologist, might have provided some sort of influence.

In 1877 Catherine Forster died and her daughter inherited Hallington Hall. The year after the childless Sir Walter died too. Following the wishes of the late baronet, his inheritance was surprisingly split: his title was inherited by his nephew Alfred Wilson Trevelyan (son of Alfred Wilson Trevelyan senior), while Wallington Hall was left to his cousin Charles Edward Trevelyan. Despite being senior to her cousin Alfred (Florence's father was older than Alfred's one), and a closer relative than Charles Trevelyan, Florence, as a female, was passed over in the succession of the family titles and estates. In 1879, Miss Trevelyan, already mistress of herself, set off for a two years tour across Europe and North Africa, accompanied by her cousin, Louisa Harriet Spencer (daughter of Beatrice Trevelyan and Ernest Augustus, youngest child of Spencer Perceval, the only British prime minister to have been murdered). During a stop in Alassio, the two girls visited Parco Fuor del Vento and the villa Molino di Sopra as guests of General William Montagu Scott McMurdo, owner and designer of the park. Florence could thus admire the terraced hill, planted with olive, orange and palm trees and cypresses, and adorned with four pagoda style buildings. From there she could also see Gallinara island, shelter for herring gulls and protected plant species.

In 1881 Miss Trevelyan visited Taormina for the first time. The Sicilian city at that time was still recovering from the turmoil that had followed the Unification of Italy in 1861. Economical backwardness had also forced many to emigrate and so depopulate the territory. Taormina impressed very much Florence, because it reminded her of Alassio. In particular, she thought the islet of Santo Stefano (donated in 1806 by King Ferdinando I to the city) resembled a lot to Gallinara. Together with her cousin, she stayed in Taormina from January 28th to February 14th 1881. On August of the same year, the two girls were back in Northumberland. It's during this time that Florence became somehow close to Queen Victoria, to the point of being invited to Balmoral Castle (fun fact, in Taormina Florence is still popularly regarded a Queen Victoria's niece. Perhaps everything started after people saw a photo of Florence with her mother, Catherine Ann Trevelyan. Certainly the majority of people didn't actually know the actual appearance of Queen Victoria, so Mrs Trevelyan was easily mistaken with her illustrious sovereign, after all they were only 4 years apart) . In fact, despite the fact that the Trevelyan were mere landed aristocracy (and Florence, as the daughter of a cadet son, wasn't even entitled to be called lady), they were well-connected with the higher society. It was rumoured that at some point Florence had attracted the attention of the womanizer Prince of Wales, future Edward VII. Also, according to this version of the story, once Queen Victoria was made aware of this dalliance, she wasn't amused in the least. To ensure the end of it, she supposedly kindly offered Miss Trevelyan a generous annuity to keep her away from her son. Handsomely rewarded for her renunciation, Florence left Great Britain to never come back again. The main supporter of this rumour is Dino Papale, lawyer and journalist, distantly related to Florence's future husband. In his book Taormina Segreta - La Belle Epoque 1876-1914, published in 1995, he claimed Florence had been basically exiled from the court and high society because of a supposed fling with Prince Albert Edward. 

Whatever the real reason was, Florence left once again the country with her cousin Louisa. In 1885, they were back in Taormina, lodging at Timeo Inn, adjacent the Greek Theatre and owned by La Floresta family. The two women had brought with them their five dogs, and to avoid inconveniencing the other guests with the animals' yapping, in 1889 Florence funded at her own expenses the building of an upper level. When one of her dogs, Sole, fell ill, Florence was desperate since she couldn't find in all Taormina a veterinarian to tend to the animal. Desperate and in tears, she asked her neighbour Salvatore Cacciola for help. Mr. Cacciola, who lived in a mansion also adjacent to the Greek Theatre (the then Palazzo Cacciola, now Palazzo Acrosso Papale), had been Professor of Anatomy and Histology at Padua University. He tended to the dog and managed to heal it, earning the woman's appreciation. Florence and Salvatore soon got closer, especially since Cacciola had studied in Malta and was thus fluent in English. He came from a wealthy family, in the future he would even be Taormina’s mayor for almost a decade, and being a Freemason leader (he would found the Rinascimento lodge), he shared with Florence an interest in esotericism. The two quickly fell in love and married on July 5th 1890.

Once settled in Palazzo Cacciola, Florence decided to expand the already vast garden by buying one plot of land after another, until the whole slopy countryside that linked the villa to the sea was annexed to the Cacciola's property. Apparently, this decision earned her in 1894 a reproach from English archaeologist Arthur Evans. While completing the 4th and last volume of The History of Sicily from the Earliest Times, which he had written together with his (by then deceased) father-in-law, Edward Augustus Freeman, Evans criticised Mrs Cacciola's mass purchasing as it would have prevented future archaeological digs in a place so near to the Greek Theatre, and with sure archaeological and historical relevancy. ("This, with others of the most interesting and beautiful sites of Taormina, has passed into the possession of an English proprietress, who has barred the access and warned off the civilized portion of mankind in four languages", p. 110-111) Previously, on June 1890, Florence had bought the former islet of Santo Stefano (which German baron and photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden baptized as Isola Bella, beautiful island, as it is globally known). There she had a house built, and rare and expensive exotic flora planted. These plants soon merged with the islet's local vegetation creating a unique natural environment, enriched by the presence of many (and sometimes rare) species of migratory birds, insects and reptiles, like the red-bellied lizard (Podarci Sicula Medemi) which only lives there.

In 1891, Florence gave birth to a stillborn son. She decided to leave her husband and moved away from Villa Cacciola, going on to live alone even further in the countryside, in a small cottage on mt. Venere. Nearby the house, she had a mausoleum built, and a roadside that connected mt. Venere to Taormina. She became particularly involved in the charity works, like establishing a fund that would have provided the daughters of fishermen with a dowry. Furthermore, she immersed herself in the creation of an English-style garden (or landscape garden) which she will name the Hallington Siculo, after her English childhood home. Like she had done with Isola Bella, Florence mixed exotic with native plants to create a peculiar habitat. In order to make the place even more special, she had the garden scattered with many small follies (Mrs Cacciola called them "beehives"). These picturesque buildings were made of local materials: bricks, wood, and various types of stones, and even capitals and other from the Greek-Roman period and XV-XVIth century decorative elements. The hives served as a bird observatory and places where she could relax while reading or having tea alone or with friends. Taking inspiration from her esoteric interests, she added a small megalithic construction (a cromlech) made of limestone, with the ulterior intention to re-use the advanced materials. As an animal lover, she also had some cages installed to house peacocks, parrots, canaries and pigeons. These renovations plus the amazing panorama seen from the garden (ranges from mt. Etna, the Ionian sea and the surrounding countryside), makes the Hallington Siculo a true heaven on earth.

Florence and her husband had become incredibly well-known in Sicily and abroad. In 1896 (and again in 1904 and 1906) they were visited by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Prussia during his stays in Taormina, while in 1906 it was the time of King Edward VII of the United Kingdom (Florence's supposed former flirt) and his wife Queen Alexandra. Other personalities included Gabriele D’Annunzio, Edmondo De Amicis, Oscar Wilde (she would finance after he got released following the charges of omosexuality), Otto Geleng, D.H. Lawrence, Ignazio and Franca Florio, Joseph and Tina Withaker.

Following her son's death, she had developed diabetes. To cure her, her brother-in-law Carlo, the only pharmacist in Taormina, injected her with strychnine (at that time considered a cure for many illnesses). In September 1907 her conditions worsened, so that she had to go back to Villa Cacciola. There she died a couple of days later, on October 4th. Respecting her wishes, she was buried in the mausoleum on mt. Venere.

Dying childless, she had named as her heirs two of her father's cousins, Robert Calverley Trevelyan (her long-time penfriend and confidante) and his brother George Macaulay Trevelyan. Her husband obtained only the usufruct of Isola Bella, the Hallington Siculo, and the plots on mt. Venere, which after his death, would have gone to his wife's English relations. Florence's heirs had to follow strict rules, all devoted to the preservation of the flora and fauna which inhabited those places. And so, the peacocks, goats, doves, canaries, and so on, which had been a great company for her in those past years, had to live in health and comfort, tended with cure and love. As for the vegetation, nobody was allowed to work the land, cut any tree, or build houses. Salvatore soon remarried with his maid Ida Mosca, and adopted his young nephew Cesare Acrosso, who will later become a lawyer and the last fascist mayor of Taormina. Taking care of his first wife's properties soon became for Mr Cacciola a real hassle. In order to get free from this, in 1923 he asked for his nephew's aid and got in touch with his political enemy Giovanni Colonna, Duke of Cesarò (Acrosso was his secretary). In exchange for his political retirement, Cacciola obtained that the Hallington Siculo was expropriated for "public interest". The garden became then property of the town of Taormina, was dismembered, reduced to a quarter of its original size, and renamed "Parco Giovanni Colonna Duca di Cesarò". On February 19th 2019, thanks to a municipal decision, it changed again its name, becoming "Parco Florence Trevelyan", finally giving her original owner and curator the proper recognition.

As for Isola Bella, at Salvatore Cacciola's death in 1927, it was inherited by Cesare Acrosso (alongside with Cacciola's palace), who will sell it in 1954 to Leone and Emilio Bosurgi. The two businessmen brothers, disregarding Florence Trevelyan's will and wishes, built 12 individual homes, plus a small pool perfectly camouflaged between rocks and vegetation, to accommodate and entertain friends and clients. When their firm went bankrupt in the 80s, they were forced to auction off the islet. In 1990 Isola Bella was finally bought by the Sicilian Region, which transformed it into a wildlife reserve, reverting back to what Florence had intended. 

Every year, on October 4th, a small ceremonial is held before a bust portraying Mrs Trevelyan in her dedicated park. It's a commemoration open to all of those wishes to remember and thank a woman who did so much for Taormina in her time, and left a lot to the future generations.

[thequirkdetective]

Investigation 6 (10/7/2020): Hardening – Eijiro Kirishima

This time, we’re going to be tackling a quirk I have been thinking about for a while now; Hardening. This allows Kirishima to “make his entire body [as] hard as a rock”[1]. The quirk is mainly used for defence but does also make Kirishima’s body rough and sharp, which causes his attacks to be more dangerous to opponents. We’ll look at the exact composition of Kirishima’s hardened body, as well as the systems that allow the body parts to both harden and soften.

Firstly, we need to know what Kirishima’s hardened skin is made of, and to do this we need to know how much force it can withstand.

The largest easily measurable force Kirishima withstands is when he is crushed underneath a few robots in the sports festival [1]. It is difficult to tell how many robots of which type(s) he is caught under, but we can do the maths on both types, and see how they compare, starting with the largest robots. These are in fact the same model as the one Deku punched in the entrance exam due to it nearly crushing and killing Uraraka[2] (I’m not sure how UA spun that one in the risk assessment to allow them to make a reappearance). In any case, whatever fate would have befallen Uraraka instead turns its gaze to Kirishima in season 2, but rather than being steamrolled Kirishima instead undergoes the more abrupt and deadly force of a robot in freefall. He survives (unsurprisingly, or this investigation wouldn’t have much data to work with), due to his quirk.

The whole scene plays out with the contestants of the obstacle course race coming across a group of the aforementioned giant robots. Todoroki (no doubt fuelled by chronic daddy issues) freezes the robots and gets through, but makes the decision to freeze them in such positions as to cause them to fall over. Ignoring the rather worrying possibility of Todoroki deliberately killing the entire student body of UA (get mad in the notes), only two people are caught underneath the ensuing pile: Kirishima and Tetsutetsu. The actual moment of impact isn’t shown, but a few seconds afterwards, an unnamed student declares that they see someone trapped in the rubble, and Kirishima bursts upwards in a shower of metal and testosterone, followed closely by Tetsutetsu.

This shows, in the most basic interpretation, that quirked-up Kirishima is harder than a UA robot, since if he were less hard he would be immediately crushed. Sadly, material science is a little more nuanced than that. The exact definition of ‘hardness’ is difficult to pin down, and the stresses would not be equal across Kirishima’s whole body. This blog doesn’t have access to laboratory grade material simulation software (yet), so we can’t see the exact forces involved in a student-robot collision. We can, however, estimate the rough pressures Kirishima’s body withstood after being mercilessly crushed by Todoroki.

There are no viable references for discerning the height of the robots in season 2, so let’s go back to their first appearance in the entrance exam [2]. The scene where Deku punches on of the robots in the face gives us a nice tall building in the background, which we know from earlier is about 15 storeys high (50m or 164ft). Deku jumps upwards until he is level with the robot, and gives the robot a good whack. It topples backwards, his bones shatter, and he is accepted into UA, all due to his incredible feat of self-sacrifice for his love interest. However, in the many, many different shots between the jump and the impact, the height of both the boy and the robot’s head varies from level with the roof to well above any of the surrounding buildings. This is in part due to camera angles and fisheye effects, but whatever the reason it is difficult to say for certain how tall the robot is. Let’s approximate between the two extremes, and say it’s around 55m tall (180ft). The area of the base of the robot is, you guessed it, difficult to get a proper estimate of. This is mostly due to it being framed close-up or surrounded by clouds of ice and dust. Taking this into account, along with the fact that I have strayed way too deep down this rabbit hole, allows us to approximate the robot’s base size as the same as the surrounding buildings’, since it is shown in front of one and nearly blocks it from view. This means the robot is around 15m x 15m x 55m (49ft x 49ft x 180ft). Piling on another wild guesstimate of average density gives us a robot with a mass of ~4000 tonnes (~4400 tons). Now, we can use a bit of physics to figure out the force the robot exerts on Kirishima.

We now need to use what is fast becoming the most useful equation in these investigations: F = ma. We now know m, but we have yet to find a. Fortunately, it has an equation: ΔV/t, or the change in velocity over time. Unfortunately, since the robot topples sideways, we cannot use simple acceleration due to gravity. We have to get velocity in a slightly more roundabout way.

The velocity can be found with two equations, using the principle of conservation of energy (we’re ignoring air resistance, as is traditional in physics). In the process of falling, the robot’s gravitational potential energy gets converted into kinetic energy, and so if we know the amount of energy converted, we can find out the resultant speed. Gravitational potential energy is given by , or mass x gravitational field strength x change in height, all relative to the centre of mass. Pairing this with the kinetic energy equation ( ½mv2, or ½ x mass x velocity squared), and using conservation of energy, we see , so . Rearrange, and voilà: sqrt(2gΔh) (a very nice equation that serendipitously does not contain mass). The robot has a large, heavy base, so lets say the centre of mass starts 20m (66ft) up. Then, the robot falls and the centre of mass ends ~5m (16ft) from the ground. Now we know is 15m (49ft), and is, at least around sea level, 9.8m/s2. Therefore, if a 0-point robot toppled over, it would hit the ground with an average speed of 17m/s (38mph).

Now we can work out , if we approximate the distance it took for the robot to stop. It fell onto soil and kicked up quite a dust cloud, so lets say it embedded 1m down. Assuming uniform deceleration across the 1m of distance, comes to 144.5m/s2, and is a whopping 5.78×108 N, spread over ~750m2 (8073ft2), giving 770667 Pa (112 PSI), or 7.5x atmospheric pressure.

The smaller robots seem to be no more than 10m tall, so the force of their fall is only 10m/s (22mph). This means the force is a measly 50N, and the pressure 0.5Pa (7×10−5 PSI). Now, finally, we can find out what these numbers mean in terms of Kirishima’s quirk.

The pressure would be spread over ~1m2 of Kirishima, meaning the force on him is anywhere from 0.5N to 770667N depending on the type of the robot. The issue with this calculation is that it assumes the fall of both robots is distributed evenly between the ground and Kirishima, so the forces would actually be more in the range of 50N-770667N, the equivalent of balancing a weight on your head with a mass of 5-80000kg (11-176370lbs). A force of 770667N is about the force a house exerts on its foundations, but the shock needs to be taken into account. It’s the difference between having a house resting on concrete, and dropping half the house from 10m onto the same concrete. From this example it becomes rather clear which one does more damage.

Due to this, as well as the sheer magnitude of the resultant forces, we can rule out Kirishima being crushed by the largest robots. Such a robot would flatten almost anything in its path, including Kirishima, no matter what his quirk made his body into. This also explains his quick escape; he was underneath a small robot and only had to dig through a metre (3ft) or so of robot wiring and metal panels.

Kirishima’s quirk is continually compared to rock [1], which to me says silicates. Silicates are the predominant compounds in the earth’s crust, and are mostly responsible for giving rocks their hardness (sorry geologists and material scientists, but I do have to end this somewhere). The question now, as with many other investigations, is where the silicates originate. Many health food such as spinach, soy, and bananas contain high amounts of silicon dioxide, also known as silica or quartz. However, a much more efficient way to increase silica intake is sand. Sand is mostly silicon dioxide, and is also fairly easy to ingest, making it very useful for such purposes as turning into rock at will. We’ll figure out which one Kirishima employs later on.

In the Shie Hassaikai raid, Kirishima’s quirk is shown to deflect a quirk-destroying bullet[3]. These bullets are hollow, and do not cause nearly as much damage as a standard metal bullet so it may not be the case that Kirishima is fully bulletproof. This does make sense; granite shatters easily upon contact with a bullet and the quirk-destroying bullets did not give Mirio an injury comparable to a bullet wound. The ‘bullets’ instead act more like flying syringes. However, Kirishima does also defend against a rapid succession of punches from Kendo Rappa[4] using his quirk. This is again feasible, since it is akin to Rappa successively punching a brick or granite wall. Therefore, Kirishima’s hardened body is made of some silicate, most likely akin to quartz – the primary compound in both granite and sand, with trace amounts present in food.

This means that Kirishima’s body can in some way store silica, and then reconstruct it onto or into the surface of the skin. Silica is notoriously insoluble, only trace amounts dissolving in water or acids, and the main viable solvents for dissolving it being hydrofluoric acid or hot alkaline solutions. It’s the same story  for pure silicon. However, if Kirishima’s body were to absorb silicon as an ion (a common way to absorb minerals) then the compound could be made soluble in some interesting ways.

Detergents are used to make oil and grease soluble in water, by having a hydrophobic end that binds to dirt, and a hydrophilic end that is attracted to water. The detergent molecules then surround dirt particles and make them hydrophilic, forcing them into suspension (not technically solution). A similar mechanism could be used to lift silicate ions into suspension in Kirishima’s bloodstream. These would collect in Kirishima’s cells. Then, all it takes is the degradation of the ‘detergent’ molecules to force the silicates out of suspension, where they then crystallise. This essentially turns the inside of Kirishima’s cells into rock, if given a few tweaks.

The first main problem is that the silicate ions would not necessarily create silica unless they were introduced to oxygen ions. This can be fixed by the other chemical required – one to denature the detergent molecules. The whole process involves ionised molecules that bind to silicon ions and bring them into suspension in Kirishima’s blood. They travel to his cells, and collect there. The activation of the quirk is in fact the release of a specialised chemical which breaks down the ionised molecules, releasing the silicon ions. This chemical could then also contains oxygen ions which bond to the silicon, creating silica within Kirishima’s skin cells. Then, when the quirk is deactivated, the silica is broken down and more ionised molecules are released to bring the silicon back into suspension.

The only remaining problem with this system is movement. Turning all of Kirishima’s skin into rock would lock up his joints and prevent him from moving his limbs. The solution to this is leaving some of the skin cells at points of motion un-hardened, allowing certain areas of skin to stretch and flex whilst still gaining some defensive advantages. This does leave Kirishima with a few relative weak points at his shoulders, elbows, knees, and hands, but overall, this mechanism fulfils the brief almost to the letter: turning his body into rock. It also means that it simply strengthens his skin, and does not create a new layer of rock. This has the added benefit of transferring any damage to his hardened form onto his normal body, for example a large chunk of rock being blasted off would leave a large chunk of his flesh missing once the quirk was deactivated.

Finally, we need to establish the source of the silicate ions. It is most likely diet, but is eating silicon-rich foods enough to provide the amount of silicate required? 

Kirishima’s quirk manifested when he was quite young [4] , let’s say 3 years old since he can’t remember the event very clearly. At this point just his hand and arm could harden. The amount of silicate required can be calculated by the surface area of the affected area multiplied by the thickness of Kirishima’s skin.

The average surface area of a man’s hand is ~0.1m2 (1sq. ft). Kirishima is a toddler at this point, so a 0.1m2 area would cover his upper arm too, as shown. Skin is around 1mm thick on average, so the volume of silicate required for the first manifestation of his quirk is ~0.26g (0.009oz) of silica, the same amount as present in 40 bananas. This is a very feasible amount of silica to have ingested in three years, and if Kirishima made a habit of eating silica rich foods he could have enough silicon ions to harden his whole body in 10-15 years, depending on the thickness of the hardened skin. This matches with the anime, because his quirk was not very strong and could not activate across his entire body when he was in middle school [4] . In fact, the quirk could even manifest throughout most of Kirishima’s cells, leaving a few un-hardened for movement, and the amount of silica needed would still be plausible to intake over such a time period provided his body’s ability to absorb it.

Another fun effect that corroborates with the source material is silicon-rich foods like spinach being prone to wearing teeth down, possibly leading to the strange, sharp teeth Kirishima possesses. Most likely he has them filed due to their continual wearing.

In summary, Kirishima’s body can absorb silicon ions, using detergent-like ionised molecules to force the ions into suspension. Then, the silicon is carried through the bloodstream to Kirishima’s cells. When his quirk is activated, a molecule, most likely some kind of enzyme, is released that destroys the ions responsible for keeping the silicon atoms in suspension. This causes them to react with the oxygen ions present in the cells and enzyme, creating silicate crystals within Kirishima’s cells. Some muscle cells are left without crystals in order to preserve movement, and some skin cells are kept softened for the same purposes. When the quirk is deactivated, more ionic molecules are released which bring the silicate back into suspension, softening the cells again.

[1] Season 2 Episode 16: In Their Own Quirky Ways

[2] Season 1 Episode 4: Start Line

[3] Season 4 Episode 68: Let’s Go, Gutsy Red Riot

[4] Season 4 Episode 72: Red Riot

 If you liked this investigation and want to have a say in the next one, then make sure to send a recommendation for which quirk I should investigate!

[everydisneymovie]

Review #51: Ten Who Dared

Post #56

8/25/2020

Next up is 1960′s Ten Who Dared

Enjoyment : [4]

This movie is exciting, but only in very short bursts. It is a wonderful little adventure about a team of geologists trying to brave the Colorado river, but other than that not much happens in this movie. I feel like there is a lot of wasted potential since most of the dangers they face are resolved a little too easily. They go down some rapids, and then they get out of the rapids. Two of the guys fight, then they make up. They lose some supplies, but it’s ok because they find them again. I feel like if this movie was willing to go a bit more mature it could have had lasting consequences the triumphs would feel a lot bigger. 

Quality : [5]

While not evident from the start, this movie is actually kinda well made. The shot composition is nothing special, but they are actually on the real Colorado river and a lot of the canyons and stuff are actually there, not just green-screen. The boats and costumes are fine, but they don’t get a lot of attention from the camera. While the vistas are spectacular, there isn’t a lot of variety. I guess thats the trade off when you stick to historical accuracy. These guys went down one river so you can only ever show one river.

Hold up : [3]

This movie has two major issues that would keep me from showing this to a child. One is the dash of racism sprinkled over top. While the Native Americans in this movie aren’t shown doing anything particularly awful, they are talked about it like wild animals and that’s not cool. Second is the machismo and toxic masculinity that drives pretty much every character. They all strut around and wag their dicks around and are rarely every challenged by the dialogue or camera. I guess that’s the risk when you make a movie about ten guys being dudes but on the other hand they routinely mock the more sensitive characters and that just sucks.

Risk : [4]

This movie is pretty standard for the Disney adventure story and it doesn’t really do much. The movie literally just ends without fan far or any conclusions for the character arcs. They just say that they reached the end of the river, despite the camera clearly showing the river continuing on far into the distance. I liked that it told a historical event without much fan fare, but then again fan fare is what we watch movies for. I also like that tucked in there they had some genuine friendships between men that wasn’t toxic. I mean most of them were toxic but not all of them.

Extra Credit : [2]

There are some good moments between the guys in this movie that stick. I like when the leader can’t bring himself to kill a stray dog, I like when drunk guy admits to his problem, and I like the Union and Confederate solider make amends. The movie isn’t great, and the characters are all scattered about, but they get a few cute moments.

Final thoughts:

Do you like guys being dudes? Do you like dudes being guys? Do you like muddy rivers and long drawn out conversations about fossils and old hobos poking snakes with sticks? That is this whole movie. Yet another passable Disney adventure flick, but luckily this one felt more misguided than truly hateful. I have very little to say but: ‘Could have been a lot worse’ Feel free to give this one a skip, it’s not as fun as it initially appears. It’s a little bit of fun... but not worth sitting through unless you are interested in the history of the real expedition. 

Total Score: 18/50

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[unsettlingshortstories]

The Dunwich Horror

H.P. Lovecraft (1928)

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before. They are transcripts, types - the archtypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body - or without the body, they would have been the same... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

- Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears

I.

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.

The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing towards it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by an ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age - since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's and the world's welfare at heart - people shun it without knowing exactly why. Perhaps one reason - though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers - is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps; in which he said:

"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I myself did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth could raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock".

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon, but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.

Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard - a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then, too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old - older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.

II.

It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5 a.m. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently, throughout the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of thirty-five, living with an aged and half-insane father about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child; concerning the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might - and did - speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous future.

Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and wormholes. She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Old Whateley's reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by violence of Mrs Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since disappeared.

There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the dogs' barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor or midwife presided at his coming. Neighbours knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when Old Wateley drove his sleigh through the snow into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers at Osborne's general store. There seemed to be a change in the old man - an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear - though he was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it all he showed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and what he said of the child's paternity was remembered by many of his hearers years afterward.

'I dun't keer what folks think - ef Lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he wouldn't look like nothin' ye expeck. Ye needn't think the only folks is the folks hereabouts. Lavinny's read some, an' has seed some things the most o' ye only tell abaout. I calc'late her man is as good a husban' as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an' ef ye knowed as much abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't ast no better church weddin' nor her'n. Let me tell ye suthin - some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!'

The only person who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer's common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie's visit was frankly one of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations; but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley had bought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur's family which ended only in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did the ramshackle Wateley barn seem overcrowded with livestock. There came a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the herd that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old farm-house, and they could never find more than ten or twelve anaemic, bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper, perhaps sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could discern similar sores about the throats of the grey, unshaven old man and his slattemly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.

In the spring after Wilbur's birth Lavinia resumed her customary rambles in the hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy child. Public interest in the Whateleys subsided after most of the country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the swift development which that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit. Wilbur's growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal sounds showed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant, and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to walk unassisted, with falterings which another month was sufficient to remove.

It was somewhat after this time - on Hallowe'en - that a great blaze was seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like stone stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk was started when Silas Bishop - of the undecayed Bishops - mentioned having seen the boy running sturdily up that hill ahead of his mother about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas was rounding up a stray heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when he fleetingly spied the two figures in the dim light of his lantern. They darted almost noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcher seemed to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterwards he could not be sure about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with anger and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and grandfather in this respect was thought very notable until the horror of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.

The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that 'Lavinny's black brat' had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His speech was somewhat remarkable both because of its difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and because it displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of which many children of three or four might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their barking menace.

III.

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably increasing the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of his house - a spacious, peak-roofed affair whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself and his daughter.

There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable him to accomplish so much hard labour; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to show the effects of sound calculation. It had already begun as soon as Wilbur was born, when one of the many tool sheds had been put suddenly in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now, in restoring the abandoned upper storey of the house, he was a no less thorough craftsman. His mania showed itself only in his tight boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimed section - though many declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at all.

Less inexplicable was his fitting up of another downstairs room for his new grandson - a room which several callers saw, though no one was ever admitted to the closely-boarded upper storey. This chamber he lined with tall, firm shelving, along which he began gradually to arrange, in apparently careful order, all the rotting ancient books and parts of books which during his own day had been heaped promiscuously in odd corners of the various rooms.

'I made some use of 'em,' he would say as he tried to mend a torn black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, 'but the boy's fitten to make better use of 'em. He'd orter hev 'em as well so as he kin, for they're goin' to be all of his larnin'.'

When Wilbur was a year and seven months old - in September of 1914 - his size and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as large as a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker. He ran freely about the fields and hills, and accompanied his mother on all her wanderings. At home he would pore dilligently over the queer pictures and charts in his grandfather's books, while Old Whateley would instruct and catechize him through long, hushed afternoons. By this time the restoration of the house was finished, and those who watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been made into a solid plank door. It was a window in the rear of the east gable end, close against the hill; and no one could imagine why a cleated wooden runway was built up to it from the ground. About the period of this work's completion people noticed that the old tool-house, tightly locked and windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur's birth, had been abandoned again. The door swung listlessly open, and when Earl Sawyer once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old Whateley he was quite discomposed by the singular odour he encountered - such a stench, he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his life except near the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not come from anything sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.

The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone swore to a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On May Eve of 1915 there were tremors which even the Aylesbury people felt, whilst the following Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling queerly synchronized with bursts of flame - 'them witch Whateleys' doin's' - from the summit of Sentinel Hill. Wilbur was growing up uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth year. He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for the first time people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil in his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed towards him by dogs had now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety. His occasional use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of canine guardians.

The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the ground floor, while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up second storey. She would never tell what her father and the boy were doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal degree of fear when a jocose fish-pedlar tried the locked door leading to the stairway. That pedlar told the store loungers at Dunwich Village that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above. The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of the cattle that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they recalled tales of Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that are called out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper time to certain heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently as they hated and feared young Wilbur personally.

In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the local draft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men fit even to be sent to development camp. The government, alarmed at such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officers and medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England newspaper readers may still recall. It was the publicity attending this investigation which set reporters on the track of the Whateleys, and caused the Boston Globe and Arkham Advertiser to print flamboyant Sunday stories of young Wilbur's precociousness, Old Whateley's black magic, and the shelves of strange books, the sealed second storey of the ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its hill noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his voice had begun to break.

Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters and camera men, and called their attention to the queer stench which now seemed to trickle down from the sealed upper spaces. It was, he said, exactly like a smell he had found in the toolshed abandoned when the house was finally repaired; and like the faint odours which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone circle on the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and grinned over the obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers made so much of the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle in gold pieces of extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received their visitors with ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare court further publicity by a violent resistance or refusal to talk.

IV.

For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into the general life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and hardened to their May Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a year they would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the mountain rumblings would recur with greater and greater violence; while at all seasons there were strange and portentous doings at the lonely farm-house. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds in the sealed upper storey even when all the family were downstairs, and they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock was usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals but nothing ever came of it, since Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the outside world's attention to themselves.

About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded that the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions and even removed the attic floor, leaving only one vast open void between the ground storey and the peaked roof. They had torn down the great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy outside tin stove-pipe.

In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought his time had almost come.

'They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow,' he said, 'an' I guess they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin' aout, an' dun't calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they dun't they'll kinder quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some pretty tough tussles sometimes.'

On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural - too much, thought Dr Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in response to the urgent call.

Towards one o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted his wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.

'More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows - an' that grows faster. It'll be ready to serve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye'll find on page 751 of the complete edition, an' then put a match to the prison. Fire from airth can't burn it nohaow.'

He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while some indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he added another sentence or two.

'Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it grow too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from beyont kin make it multiply an' work... Only them, the old uns as wants to come back...'

But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr Houghton drew shrunken lids over the glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.

'They didn't git him,' he muttered in his heavy bass voice.

Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather's time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying. He was now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In 1925, when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called upon him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and three-quarters feet tall.

Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the hills with him on May Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.

'They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,' she said, 'an' naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur Gawd, I dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew.'

That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire burned on Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the countryside, and not until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished, hurrying southward where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no one could quite be certain till later. None of the countryfolk seemed to have died - but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never seen again.

In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterwards Earl Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going on in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He was living in one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried and tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing something about his mother disappearance, and very few ever approached his neighbourhood now. His height had increased to more than seven feet, and showed no signs of ceasing its development.

V.

The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur's first trip outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic University at Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he desperately wanted; so at length he set out in person, shabby, dirty, bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic, which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall, and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborne's general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library - the hideous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. He had never seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the university grounds; where indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically at its stout chaim.

Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr Dee's English version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which would have come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could not civilly refrain from telling the librarian - the same erudite Henry Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph.D. Princeton, Litt.D. Johns Hopkins) who had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula he finally chose, Dr Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world.

Nor is it to be thought (ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who bath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.

Dr. Annitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard of Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his dim, hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of probable matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of the tomb's cold clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, space and time. Presently Wilbur raised his head and began speaking in that strange, resonant fashion which hinted at sound-producing organs unlike the run of mankind's.

'Mr Armitage,' he said, 'I calc'late I've got to take that book home. They's things in it I've got to try under sarten conditions that I can't git here, en' it 'ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule hold me up. Let me take it along, Sir, an' I'll swar they wun't nobody know the difference. I dun't need to tell ye I'll take good keer of it. It wan't me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is...'

He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian's face, and his own goatish features grew crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell him he might make a copy of what parts he needed, thought suddenly of the possible consequences and checked himself. There was too much responsibility in giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateley saw how things stood, and tried to answer lightly.

'Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard won't be so fussy as yew be.' And without saying more he rose and strode out of the building, stooping at each doorway.

Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog, and studied Whateley's gorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible from the window. He thought of the wild tales he had heard, and recalled the old Sunday stories in the Advertiser; these things, and the lore he had picked up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during his one visit there. Unseen things not of earth - or at least not of tridimensional earth - rushed foetid and horrible through New England's glens, and brooded obscenely on the mountain tops. Of this he had long felt certain. Now he seemed to sense the close presence of some terrible part of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance in the black dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare. He locked away the Necronomicon with a shudder of disgust, but the room still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. 'As a foulness shall ye know them,' he quoted. Yes - the odour was the same as that which had sickened him at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and ominous, once again, and laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.

'Inbreeding?' Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. 'Great God, what simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll think it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing - what cursed shapeless influence on or off this three-dimensional earth - was Wilbur Whateley's father? Born on Candlemas - nine months after May Eve of 1912, when the talk about the queer earth noises reached clear to Arkham - what walked on the mountains that May night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on the world in half-human flesh and blood?'

During the ensuing weeks Dr Armitage set about to collect all possible data on Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He got in communication with Dr Houghton of Aylesbury, who had attended Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over in the grandfather's last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to Dunwich Village failed to bring out much that was new; but a close survey of the Necronomicon, in those parts which Wilbur had sought so avidly, seemed to supply new and terrible clues to the nature, methods, and desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talks with several students of archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many others elsewhere, gave him a growing amazement which passed slowly through varied degrees of alarm to a state of really acute spiritual fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly that something ought to be done about the lurking terrors of the upper Miskatonic valley, and about the monstrous being known to the human world as Wilbur Whateley.

VI.

The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928, and Dr Armitage was among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue. He had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley's grotesque trip to Cambridge, and of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the Necronomicon at the Widener Library. Those efforts had been in vain, since Armitage had issued warnings of the keenest intensity to all librarians having charge of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been shockingly nervous at Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet almost equally anxious to get home again, as if he feared the results of being away long.

Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small hours of the third Dr Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild, fierce cries of the savage watchdog on the college campus. Deep and terrible, the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always in mounting volume, but with hideously significant pauses. Then there rang out a scream from a wholly different throat - such a scream as roused half the sleepers of Arkham and haunted their dreams ever afterwards - such a scream as could come from no being born of earth, or wholly of earth.

Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street and lawn to the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm still shrilling from the library. An open window showed black and gaping in the moonlight. What had come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming, now fast fading into a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that what was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed back the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr Francis Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings; and these two he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds, except for a watchful, droning whine from the dog, had by this time quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with a sudden start that a loud chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths of a dying man.

The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr Armitage knew too well, and the three men rushed across the hall to the small genealogical reading-room whence the low whining came. For a second nobody dared to turn on the light, then Armitage summoned up his courage and snapped the switch. One of the three - it is not certain which - shrieked aloud at what sprawled before them among disordered tables and overturned chairs. Professor Rice declares that he wholly lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not stumble or fall.

The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central desk a revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later explaining why it had not been fired. The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateley's upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog's rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.

Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly grayish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discoloration behind it.

As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it began to mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr Armitage made no written record of its mouthings, but asserts confidently that nothing in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all correlation with any speech of earth, but towards the last there came some disjointed fragments evidently taken from the Necronomicon, that monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the thing had perished. These fragments, as Armitage recalls them, ran something like 'N'gai, n'gha'ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y'hah: Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth ...' They trailed off into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in rhythmical crescendos of unholy anticipation.

Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long, lugubrious howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly. Outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they had sought for prey.

All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and leaped nervously out of the window by which it had entered. A cry rose from the crowd, and Dr Armitage shouted to the men outside that no one must be admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was thankful that the windows were just too high to permit of peering in, and drew the dark curtains carefully down over each one. By this time two policemen had arrived; and Dr Morgan, meeting them in the vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to postpone entrance to the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came and the prostrate thing could be covered up.

Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need not describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred before the eyes of Dr Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face and hands, the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odour had nearly disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his unknown father.

VII.

Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror. Formalities were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details were duly kept from press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich and Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs of the late Wilbur Whateley. They found the countryside in great agitation, both because of the growing rumblings beneath the domed hills, and because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lapping sounds which came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by Whateley's boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and cattle during Wilbur's absence, had developed a woefully acute case of nerves. The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boarded place; and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased's living quarters, the newly mended sheds, to a single visit. They filed a ponderous report at the courthouse in Aylesbury, and litigations concerning heirship are said to be still in progress amongst the innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper Miskatonic valley.

An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a huge ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing and the variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to those who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner's desk. After a week of debate it was sent to Miskatonic University, together with the deceased's collection of strange books, for study and possible translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it was not likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold with which Wilbur and Old Whateley had always paid their debts has yet been discovered.

It was in the dark of September ninth that the horror broke loose. The hill noises had been very pronounced during the evening, and dogs barked frantically all night. Early risers on the tenth noticed a peculiar stench in the air. About seven o'clock Luther Brown, the hired boy at George Corey's, between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows. He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled into the kitchen; and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing and lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs Corey.

'Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis' Corey - they's suthin' ben thar! It smells like thunder, an' all the bushes an' little trees is pushed back from the rud like they'd a haouse ben moved along of it. An' that ain't the wust, nuther. They's prints in the rud, Mis' Corey - great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk dawon deep like a elephant had ben along, only they's a sight more nor four feet could make! I looked at one or two afore I run, an' I see every one was covered with lines spreadin' aout from one place, like as if big palm-leaf fans - twict or three times as big as any they is - hed of ben paounded dawon into the rud. An' the smell was awful, like what it is around Wizard Whateley's ol' haouse...'

Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had sent him flying home. Mrs Corey, unable to extract more information, began telephoning the neighbours; thus starting on its rounds the overture of panic that heralded the major terrors. When she got Sally Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop's, the nearest place to Whateley's, it became her turn to listen instead of transmit; for Sally's boy Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill towards Whateley's, and had dashed back in terror after one look at the place, and at the pasturage where Mr Bishop's cows had been left out all night.

'Yes, Mis' Corey,' came Sally's tremulous voice over the party wire, 'Cha'ncey he just come back a-postin', and couldn't half talk fer bein' scairt! He says Ol' Whateley's house is all bowed up, with timbers scattered raound like they'd ben dynamite inside; only the bottom floor ain't through, but is all covered with a kind o' tar-like stuff that smells awful an' drips daown offen the aidges onto the graoun' whar the side timbers is blowed away. An' they's awful kinder marks in the yard, tew - great raound marks bigger raound than a hogshead, an' all sticky with stuff like is on the browed-up haouse. Cha'ncey he says they leads off into the medders, whar a great swath wider'n a barn is matted daown, an' all the stun walls tumbled every whichway wherever it goes.

'An' he says, says he, Mis' Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth's caows, frightened ez he was an' faound 'em in the upper pasture nigh the Devil's Hop Yard in an awful shape. Haff on 'em's clean gone, an' nigh haff o' them that's left is sucked most dry o' blood, with sores on 'em like they's ben on Whateleys cattle ever senct Lavinny's black brat was born. Seth hes gone aout naow to look at 'em, though I'll vaow he won't keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley's! Cha'ncey didn't look keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the pasturage, but he says he thinks it p'inted towards the glen rud to the village.

'I tell ye, Mis' Corey, they's suthin' abroad as hadn't orter be abroad, an' I for one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to the bad end he deserved, is at the bottom of the breedin' of it. He wa'n't all human hisself, I allus says to everybody; an' I think he an' Ol' Whateley must a raised suthin' in that there nailed-up haouse as ain't even so human as he was. They's allus ben unseen things araound Dunwich - livin' things - as ain't human an' ain't good fer human folks.

'The graoun' was a-talkin' las' night, an' towards mornin' Cha'ncey he heered the whippoorwills so laoud in Col' Spring Glen he couldn't sleep nun. Then he thought he heered another faint-like saound over towards Wizard Whateley's - a kinder rippin' or tearin' o' wood, like some big box er crate was bein' opened fur off. What with this an' that, he didn't git to sleep at all till sunup, an' no sooner was he up this mornin', but he's got to go over to Whateley's an' see what's the matter. He see enough I tell ye, Mis' Corey! This dun't mean no good, an' I think as all the men-folks ought to git up a party an' do suthin'. I know suthin' awful's abaout, an' feel my time is nigh, though only Gawd knows jest what it is.

'Did your Luther take accaount o' whar them big tracks led tew? No? Wal, Mis' Corey, ef they was on the glen rud this side o' the glen, an' ain't got to your haouse yet, I calc'late they must go into the glen itself. They would do that. I allus says Col' Spring Glen ain't no healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills an' fireflies there never did act like they was creaters o' Gawd, an' they's them as says ye kin hear strange things a-rushin' an' a-talkin' in the air dawon thar ef ye stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an' Bear's Den.'

By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were trooping over the roads and meadows between the newmade Whateley ruins and Cold Spring Glen, examining in horror the vast, monstrous prints, the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the farmhouse, and the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and roadside. Whatever had burst loose upon the world had assuredly gone down into the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the banks were bent and broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the precipice-hanging underbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an avalanche, had slid down through the tangled growths of the almost vertical slope. From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable foetor; and it is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to stay on the edge and argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown Cyclopean horror in its lair. Three dogs that were with the party had barked furiously at first, but seemed cowed and reluctant when near the glen. Someone telephoned the news to the Aylesbury Transcript; but the editor, accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a humorous paragraph about it; an item soon afterwards reproduced by the Associated Press.

That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded as stoutly as possible. Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to remain in open pasturage. About two in the morning a frightful stench and the savage barking of the dogs awakened the household at Elmer Frye's, on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and all agreed that they could hear a sort of muffled swishing or lapping sound from somewhere outside. Mrs Frye proposed telephoning the neighbours, and Elmer was about to agree when the noise of splintering wood burst in upon their deliberations. It came, apparently, from the barn; and was quickly followed by a hideous screaming and stamping amongst the cattle. The dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the fear-numbed family. Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but knew it would be death to go out into that black farmyard. The children and the women-folk whimpered, kept from screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct of defence which told them their lives depended on silence. At last the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful moaning, and a great snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes, huddled together in the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the last echoes died away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidst the dismal moans from the stable and the daemoniac piping of the late whippoorwills in the glen, Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of the second phase of the horror.

The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed, uncommunicative groups came and went where the fiendish thing had occurred. Two titan swaths of destruction stretched from the glen to the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints covered the bare patches of ground, and one side of the old red barn had completely caved in. Of the cattle, only a quarter could be found and identified. Some of these were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot. Earl Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but others maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a branch that hovered about halfway between soundness and decadence, made darkly wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practiced on the hill-tops. He came of a line where tradition ran strong, and his memories of chantings in the great stone circles were not altogether connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.

Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organize for real defence. In a few cases closely related families would band together and watch in the gloom under one roof; but in general there was only a repetition of the barricading of the night before, and a futile, ineffective gesture of loading muskets and setting pitchforks handily about. Nothing, however, occurred except some hill noises; and when the day came there were many who hoped that the new horror had gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did not venture to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.

When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was less huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs and vague sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror a fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill. As before, the sides of the road showed a bruising indicative of the blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed shrubbery saplings led steeply upwards, and the seekers gasped when they saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the inexorable trail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete verticality; and as the investigators climbed round to the hill's summit by safer routes they saw that the trail ended - or rather, reversed - there.

It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and chant their hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May Eve and Hallowmass. Now that very stone formed the centre of a vast space thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly concave surface was a thick and foetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when the horror escaped. Men looked at one another and muttered. Then they looked down the hill. Apparently the horror had descended by a route much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was futile. Reason, logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old Zebulon, who was not with the group, could have done justice to the situation or suggested a plausible explanation.

Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual persistence that many could not sleep, and about 3 A.M. all the party telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard a fright-mad voice shriek out, 'Help, oh, my Gawd! ...' and some thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation. There was nothing more. No one dared do anything, and no one knew till morning whence the call came. Then those who had heard it called everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes did not reply. The truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily assembled group of armed men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and monstrous prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an egg-shell, and amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be discovered. Only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich.

VIII.

In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of the horror had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door of a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious manuscript record or diary of Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts in language both ancient and modern; its very alphabet, notwithstanding a general resemblance to the heavily-shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet, giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied on the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used. The ancient books taken from Whateley's quarters, while absorbingly interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of no assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with an iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet - this one of a very different cast, and resembling Sanskrit more than anything else. The old ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr Armitage, both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical formulae of antiquity and the middle ages.

Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically used by certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times, and which have inherited many forms and traditions from the wizards of the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem vital; since it would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols if, as he suspected, they were used as a cipher in a modern language. It was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulae and incantations. Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the preliminary assumption that the bulk of it was in English.

Dr Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that the riddle was a deep and complex one; and that no simple mode of solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he fortified himself with the mass lore of cryptography; drawing upon the fullest resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the arcana of Trithemius' Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta's De Furtivis Literarum Notis, De Vigenere's Traite des Chiffres, Falconer's Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys' and Thicknesse's eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, van Marten and Kluber's script itself, and in time became convinced that he had to deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding letters are arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities seemed rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded that the code of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt handed down through a long line of mystical experimenters. Several times he seemed near daylight, only to be set back by some unforeseen obstacle. Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear. Certain letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript, emerged definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was indeed in English.

On the evening of September second the last major barrier gave way, and Dr Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur Whateley's annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and it was couched in a style clearly showing the mixed occult erudition and general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first long passage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November 26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written,he remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of twelve or thirteen.

Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth (it ran), which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins's collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dast. I guess he won't. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can't break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured there being much of outside to work on.

Morning found Dr Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He had nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either. Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths and menaces to man's existence that he had uncovered.

On the morning of September fourth Professor Rice and Dr Morgan insisted on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and ashen-grey. That evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully. Wednesday - the next day - he was back at the manuscript, and began to take copious notes both from the current sections and from those he had already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he slept a little in a easy chair in his office, but was at the manuscript again before dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr Hartwell, called to see him and insisted that he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the diary and promising an explanation in due course of time. That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with a sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken. Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all in a great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat pocket. He had sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in need of medical aid that Dr Hartwell was summoned at once. As the doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, 'But what, in God's name, can we do?'

Dr Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded Necronomicon and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding some formula to check the peril he conjured up.

'Stop them, stop theml' he would shout. 'Those Whateleys meant to let them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do something - it's a blind business, but I know how to make the powder... It hasn't been fed since the second of August, when Wilbur came here to his death, and at that rate...'

But Armitage had a sound physique despite his seventy-three years, and slept off his disorder that night without developing any real fever. He woke late Friday, clear of head, though sober with a gnawing fear and tremendous sense of responsibility. Saturday afternoon he felt able to go over to the library and summon Rice and Morgan for a conference, and the rest of that day and evening the three men tortured their brains in the wildest speculation and the most desperate debate. Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae were copied with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of scepticism there was none. All three had seen the body of Wilbur Whateley as it lay on the floor in a room of that very building, and after that not one of them could feel even slightly inclined to treat the diary as a madman's raving.

Opinions were divided as to notifying the Massachusetts State Police, and the negative finally won. There were things involved which simply could not be believed by those who had not seen a sample, as indeed was made clear during certain subsequent investigations. Late at night the conference disbanded without having developed a definite plan, but all day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulae and mixing chemicals obtained from the college laboratory. The more he reflected on the hellish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the efficacy of any material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur Whateley had left behind him - the earth threatening entity which, unknown to him, was to burst forth in a few hours and become the memorable Dunwich horror.

Monday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr Armitage, for the task in hand required an infinity of research and experiment. Further consultations of the monstrous diary brought about various changes of plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertainty must remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out, and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely away in a corner of the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the Associated Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whisky of Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone for Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next day was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had done before him.

IX.

Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich, arriving at the village about one in the afternoon. The day was pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy ravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some mountain top a gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed against the sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn's store they knew something hideous had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode around Dunwich, questioning the natives concerning all that had occurred, and seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye ruins with their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous swaths of disturbed vegetation in various places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill seemed to Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at the sinister altar-like stone on the summit.

At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had come from Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more easily planned than performed; since no sign of the party could be found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car, but now the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep hollow that yawned close by.

'Gawd,' he gasped, 'I telled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an' I never thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the whippoorwills a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday...'

A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening. Armitage, now that he had actually come upon the horror and its monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to be his. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous blasphemy lumbered upon its eldritch course. Negotium perambuians in tenebris... The old librarian rehearsed the formulae he had memorized, and clutched the paper containing the alternative one he had not memorized. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order. Rice, beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which he relied despite his colleague's warnings that no material weapon would be of help.

Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind of a manifestation to expect; but he did not add to the fright of the Dunwich people by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might be conquered without any revelation to the world of the monstrous thing it had escaped. As the shadows gathered, the natives commenced to disperse homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the present evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shook their heads at the visitors' plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near the glen; and, as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the watchers again.

There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable foetor to the heavy night air; such a foetor as all three of the watchers had smelled once before, when they stood above a dying thing that had passed for fifteen years and a half as a human being. But the looked-for terror did not appear. Whatever was down there in the glen was biding its time, and Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to attack it in the dark.

Morning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a grey, bleak day, with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier clouds seemed to be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the north-west. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking shelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless, monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.

It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a confused babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting, and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed a coherent form.

'Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd,' the voice choked out. 'It's a-goin' agin, an' this time by day! It's aout - it's aout an' a-movin' this very minute, an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all!'

The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.

'Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heered the 'phone a-ringin', an' it was Mis' Corey, George's wife, that lives daown by the junction. She says the hired boy Luther was aout drivin' in the caows from the storm arter the big bolt, when he see all the trees a-bendin' at the maouth o' the glen - opposite side ter this - an' smelt the same awful smell like he smelt when he faound the big tracks las' Monday mornin'. An' she says he says they was a swishin' lappin' saound, more nor what the bendin' trees an' bushes could make, an' all on a suddent the trees along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an' they was a awful stompin' an' splashin' in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn't see nothin' at all, only just the bendin' trees an' underbrush.

'Then fur ahead where Bishop's Brook goes under the rud he heerd a awful creakin' an' strainin' on the bridge, an' says he could tell the saound o' wood a-startin' to crack an' split. An' all the whiles he never see a thing, only them trees an' bushes a-bendin'. An' when the swishin' saound got very fur off - on the rud towards Wizard Whateley's an' Sentinel Hill - Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he'd heerd it fust an' look at the graound. It was all mud an' water, an' the sky was dark, an' the rain was wipin' aout all tracks abaout as fast as could be; but beginnin' at the glen maouth, whar the trees hed moved, they was still some o' them awful prints big as bar'ls like he seen Monday.'

At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.

'But that ain't the trouble naow - that was only the start. Zeb here was callin' folks up an' everybody was a-listenin' in when a call from Seth Bishop's cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit to kill - she'd jest seed the trees a-bendin' beside the rud, an' says they was a kind o' mushy saound, like a elephant puffin' an' treadin', a-headin' fer the haouse. Then she up an' spoke suddent of a fearful smell, an' says her boy Cha'ncey was a-screamin' as haow it was jest like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin'. An' the dogs was barkin' an' whinin' awful.

'An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud had jest caved in like the storm bed blowed it over, only the wind w'an't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' we could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled again, an' says the front yard picket fence hed just crumbled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' old Seth Bishop a-yellin' tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse - not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy again' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nothin' aout the front winders. An' then... an' then...'

Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was, had barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.

'An' then.... Sally she yelled aout, "O help, the haouse is a-cavin' in... an' on the wire we could hear a turrible crashin' an' a hull flock o' screaming... jes like when Elmer Frye's place was took, only wuss...'

The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.

'That's all - not a saound nor squeak over the 'phone arter that. Jest still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an' wagons an' rounded up as many able-bodied men-folks as we could git, at Corey's place, an' come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I think it's the Lord's jedgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin ever set aside.'

Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics.

'We must follow it, boys.' He made his voice as reassuring as possible. 'I believe there's a chance of putting it out of business. You men know that those Whateleys were wizards - well, this thing is a thing of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I've seen Wilbur Whateley's diary and read some of the strange old books he used to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite to make the thing fade away. Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always take a chance. It's invisible - I knew it would be - but there's powder in this long-distance sprayer that might make it show up for a second. Later on we'll try it. It's a frightful thing to have alive, but it isn't as bad as what Wilbur would have let in if he'd lived longer. You'll never know what the world escaped. Now we've only this one thing to fight, and it can't multiply. It can, though, do a lot of harm; so we mustn't hesitate to rid the community of it.

'We must follow it - and the way to begin is to go to the place that has just been wrecked. Let somebody lead the way - I don't know your roads very well, but I've an idea there might be a shorter cut across lots. How about it?'

The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly, pointing with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.

'I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' across the lower medder here, wadin' the brook at the low place, an' climbin' through Carrier's mowin' an' the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's - a leetle t'other side.'

Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction indicated; and most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him and walked ahead to show the right one. Courage and confidence were mounting, though the twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill which lay towards the end of their short cut, and among whose fantastic ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these qualities to a severe test.

At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out. They were a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and hideously unmistakable tracks showed what had passed by. Only a few moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just round the bend. It was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and tarry stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints leading on towards the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned slopes of Sentinel Hill.

As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley's abode they shuddered visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not see, but that had all the vicious malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster's former route to and from the summit.

Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focused the lenses with Armitage's aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained than Morgan's had been.

'Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a'movin'! It's a-goin' up - slow-like - creepin' - up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows what fur!'

Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right - but suppose they weren't? Voices began questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.

X.

In the end the three men from Arkham - old, white-bearded Dr Armitage, stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr Morgan, ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction regarding its focusing and use, they left the telescope with the frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed round. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker repassed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the pursuers were gaining.

Curtis Whateley - of the undecayed branch - was holding the telescope when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it.

Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that his sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the party's point of advantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect.

Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of grey cloud - a cloud about the size of a moderately large building - near the top of the mountain. Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled, and would have crumbled to the ground had not two or three others seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly.

'Oh, oh, great Gawd... that... that...'

There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for him.

'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd it Heaven - that haff face on top...'

This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis; and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible three tiny figures, apparently running towards the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these - nothing more. Then everyone noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy.

Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic appreciation. 'I guess he's sayin' the spell,' whispered Wheeler as he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the visible ritual.

Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of dogs.

The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down upon the rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter than before, and the crowd fancied that it had showed a certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.

Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words. They were loud - loud as the rumblings and the thunder above which they echoed - yet did they come from no visible being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.

'Ygnailh... ygnaiih... thflthkh'ngha.... Yog-Sothoth ...' rang the hideous croaking out of space. 'Y'bthnk... h'ehye - n'grkdl'lh...'

The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human figures on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures as their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy.

'Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah - e'yayayaaaa... ngh'aaaaa... ngh'aaa... h'yuh... h'yuh... HELP! HELP! ...ff - ff - ff - FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!...'

But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees, grass, and under-brush were whipped into a fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.

The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on and around that fearsome hill Curtis Whateley was only just regaining consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.

'The thing has gone for ever,' Armitage said. 'It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father - and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills.'

There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had prostrated him burst in upon him again.

'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face - that haff face on top of it... that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost....'

He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a bewilderment not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been silent heretofore, spoke aloud.

'Fifteen year' gone,' he rambled, 'I heered Ol' Whateley say as haow some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill...'

But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew.

'What was it, anyhaow, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it aout o' the air it come from?'

Armitage chose his words very carefully.

'It was - well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself - enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I'm going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings those Whateleys were so fond of - the beings they were going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose.

'But as to this thing we've just sent back - the Whateleys raised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big - but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn't ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.'

[a-goddess-called-infinity]

Chapter 4: Calamity pt. 2

Synopsis: We cut to Lapis and what she was doing all the way up to the Blast. In this part two of three prologue, she makes a new friend and a startling discovery.

Words: 1801

AO3 link here

previous - next - beginning

-

Lapis ascends through the caverns in search of a way out. It didn’t help that she was purposely avoiding the trains, something about them seemed negative to her. She was thinking about how she’d group back up with the others when she felt a familiar pull. 

Water.

A stream from somewhere in the cave sang to her, its churning tendrils silently but desperately summoning her being. It was wild and soft and pristine all at the same time. Her attraction to water was as expressionless as the subject itself.

She eventually finds it; a spring gushing with life, flowing down through the caverns to form a river. Lapis realizes this was her way out. She flies low enough to run a hand through the water as she went. It was her way of silently thanking the water for leading her this way. It playfully reaches back and races along with her. Soon, she sees sunlight and the water bursts from the cave like an open wound. Being newly born, it sprays free from its confinement in the darkness of the caverns. Down, down, down, it went, cascading—even flying—for a moment before recollecting at the ground. There, it was calmer and more peaceful. It flows majestically down the rocky slope towards the greater river. 

Lapis’s appreciation of the water was interrupted by the ongoing spoils of war that unfurled in the distance. She quickly flies on to find the others. She suddenly halts as she hears a loud crash behind her. A large, armored alien was fighting a person in bulky red and golden armor.

“Guys, Vision need back up now!” The armored Bruce Banner calls out. Once he gets up he struggles with Cull Obsidian as the brute tosses him around. Obsidian picks up his ax, lodges it into Banner’s shoulder armor, and swings over him. The arm snaps clean off as the armor crumbles at the joint. Banner yells out in frustration.

After staring perplexed at the scene, Lapis decides she needs to act. She may have been reluctant to fight before, but she was needed. She brings up her hand and the water begins to collect and rise behind her at will. The two fighting don’t seem to notice as they continue on.

Banner begins to get a few punches in, but Obsidian is able to catch Banner’s good arm. With a hard punch, Banner goes flying back and causes water to spray up around him. Banner remains there groaning as Obsidian approaches him with a blade in hand.

“Hey!”

The two turn their attention to the blue gem. Subsequently, they notice the huge pillar of water she has lifted. She throws her hand forward and the water forms a fist as it shoots out towards them. Banner braces himself, but the water hits only Obsidian at full force. He is launched back all the way to the waterfall. At that time, Banner is able to get back up. Who was this stranger? Another of Cap’s friends he has yet to be introduced to?

The formalities would have to wait as Obsidian is back on his feet and very pissed off. He roars in anger as he charges the two of them. Banner catches him with his one arm but Obsidian easily backhands Banner away. Lapis throws up both of her hands as he approaches her, creating a wall of water underneath him. The brute was launched straight up into the air. Without hesitating, Lapis throws her hands back down with a slight circular motion. The water forms above Obsidian and slams him down at full force. That only seemed to make him angrier. 

Obsidian defiantly got up again and was close enough to the gem to swing at her. Lapis only has time to create a small wall of ice to protect herself, but it was insufficient. The ice shatters as his fist passes through it and the small gem is thrown violently onto the bank of the river.

Obsidian goes to finish her when Banner fires several repulsor shots at him. He successfully distracts him from Lapis as Obsidian turns to fight. They trade several swings. By now, Banner has gotten used to fighting with one arm and avoids Obsidian’s heavier blows and grabs by momentarily propelling himself in the air. This, in turn, allows himself to deal more devastating blows as he slams his fist down onto Obsidian each time he descends. This alone won’t defeat the massive warrior though. 

Lapis rises back onto her feet. They need a more permanent method of subduing him. She once again lifts her hand. Water begins to coil around Obsidian, creeping and edging forth like vines overtaking a massive structure. He doesn’t notice until the water is at his waist. While still fighting Banner, the brute growls and thrashes his legs to free himself. He isn’t completely immobilized, but the water holds strong. Lapis adds her other hand for added strength. Banner steps back as Obsidian is soon encased in a layer of water. Lapis’s hands shake as she struggles to keep the angry and trashing brute trapped. Banner could guess what she was trying to do, but at this rate, it wasn’t going to work.

“Freeze him!” He quickly suggests. He didn’t know the full extent of her powers but he saw her make that small ice wall earlier. Lapis shoots him a wary glance before slowly closing her fists. The water instantly freezes and Obsidian can no longer move. 

Lapis could still feel him continue to fight. She felt every molecule of water surrounding the alien warrior. She felt every minuscule movement, every twitch, every heartbeat. It was like when she was trapped with Jasper as Malachite, minus the fact that there was no mental torture involved.

“What’s wrong?” Banner asks, seeing as she had yet to put her hands down.

“I can’t let go,” She replies simply yet direly. Small cracks form within the ice within.

Banner scanned around for a solution and spots Obsidian’s discarded ax. In one fluid movement, he brings it up and swings down with all the force he could muster. The ice shatters but the giant is easily cleaved down the middle. Lapis falls to her knees after the deed was done.

Banner took a moment to scan over his strange, new companion. She definitely wasn’t completely human judging from both her water manipulation powers (hydrokinesis) and her abnormally blue skin. Where did she even come from?

Banner allows his helmet to recede, exposing his head and neck.

“So uh, what’s your name kid?” He asks awkwardly. He assumes she’s kind of young because she looked youthful and was, well, quite small.

“Lapis Lazuli.”

“As in… the blue rock?” Banner questions. He was no geologist but… 

“We prefer the term ‘gem’,” she replies, laughing dryly.

“We?” Banner echoes.

Lapis gasps, “The others! I just remembered, I need to regroup with them!” She says suddenly as she summons her water wings. 

“Whoa whoa, slow down, you have friends here?”

“Yes! We came to help once we heard of the attack,” she explains. She turns to fly away.

“Hold on a minute, I’ll help you once the dust settles, but right now we’re in a tight spot and could use anything we can get,” he says, trying to put on a friendly tone despite his underlying fear and desperation. He’d just got a message from Steve to form up on his position. Lapis considers it and decides she can trust him. She was normally distrusting, but they helped each other take down Obsidian. Besides, if they have to go away from the water she won’t be as viable in battle.

She turns back to him and offers a nod. Banner puts his helmet back up and leads the way. 

Soon they join up with Steve, Natasha, T’Challa, Okoye, and Sam. Blue clouds of a portal appear and Thanos walks out, scanning his surroundings. Banner’s gut twists up with varieties of anger and fear.

“Cap. That’s him.”

“Eyes up. Stay Sharp,” Steve replies. None of them really have time to question Lapis’s presence, not with their greatest enemy standing right there.

Banner is the first to lunge at him, but all Thanos has to do is raise his gauntlet and Banner phases through him. Once he’s halfway inside of the cliff face Thanos leaves him there, immobilized. Lapis quickly flies over to him as the other Avengers take turns fighting Thanos. 

“That went well,” Banner comments, his voice laced with sarcasm and frustration. All he could do was helplessly watch the others get swatted away by the titan. Hopefully, Wanda pulls through for them. 

“I’m going to try to get you out,” Lapis says once she reaches him. She changes her wings to fists and repeatedly strikes the cliff face. Progress is slow.

“Hurry hurry,” Banner urges, still looking on as Thanos approaches Wanda and Vision. She doesn’t reply as she gradually chips away at the cliff. Suddenly there’s a huge blast of power and Lapis is thrown forward. Banner sighs with relief as Wanda had successfully destroyed the Mind Stone. 

The relief was short-lived.

“Lapis get back up!” he says, panicking as Thanos reformed the Mind Stone and added it to his gauntlet. He was sure there was little he could do even if she freed him, but he had to do something.

It takes a while for her to get up, but once she did she couldn’t get back to the task of freeing Banner. She starts hearing… Voices? She turns to the scene behind her. Her eyes lock onto the gauntlet.

“Those… They’re gems!” she gasps. It looks like they were forced to be in that gauntlet. Flashbacks came forth of her being trapped in that mirror for all those millennia, of her being trapped in Malachite. Her heart ached for them. Their screams resonated in her whole being.

“Wanda, what’s going on?” Banner asks over the commlink. There was no answer. At one point Thor flies in and strikes Thanos, but the surging power and the wailing doesn’t stop. Finally, there is a huge blast of power and four of the stones are launched high into the atmosphere.

The blast is so great that Lapis’s body gives out. She disappears in a blue puff of smoke, leaving only her tear-drop shaped gem.

“Lapis?” Banner asks. He’d witnessed her poof and didn’t know what to make of it. He uses all of his strength and manages to get out of the cliff just enough to open up the armor. He delicately picked up her gem once he hopped out. Did she die? He looks up. Where was Thanos? And the Infinity Stones?

Banner sighs and jogs over to the others with Lapis in hand. 

All he could think is what now?

[forgcdstrength]

Solomon Stone

STONE: Soul Stone

FC: Eddie Redmayne

GUARDS: Gamora

POWER: can trap people in other worlds

ORIENTATION: we’re talking about a timeless entity; they literally couldn’t care less. If they’re into you, they’re into you

MAIN VERSE: canon-divergent; post-Avengers: Infinity War

INFO:

Tries to be The Best Big Brother, but is still kind of a jerk (more than Olivia, less than Arthur). Credits himself with keeping Olivia sane in space. Loves Gamora like a sister, but he would totally fall for Nebula if he didn’t think she would kill him for it. Is a lot better with people than he acts like he is, but is also very willing to let them make their own mistakes. Music, especially the guitar, is his first love, but the crazy people Gamora associates with are pretty alright, too.

VERSES:

PRE-CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER:

The Salem With Trials weren’t a good time for a man with superpowers, suffice to say. Though the rest of his siblings were spread across the universe. Solomon found himself in Massachusetts at exactly the wrong time.

The woman to whom he was bound at the time was killed after she begged him not to interfere in her trial. She had no family, no prospects, no one to live for or protect but Solomon, and she didn’t want him to put himself in the line of fire. So he let her die, but fled the planet immediately afterwards, wrecked with guilt at his own passiveness. He transported himself to the barren, uninhabited planet of Vormir with nothing but his lute in hand. Determined to never again bind himself to another, he spent the next three hundred years mostly in his gem form, changing into a human only during one of his siblings’ rare visits, or to stave off boredom (or insanity) by playing his instrument into the silence of Vormir.

At some point during the nineteenth century, Olivia brought him a guitar, informing him that the lute was a thing of the past. Though he couldn’t care less about keeping up with the times, he learned how to play the guitar and enjoyed it. It was a nice change to the self-imposed monotony, a new splash of life in the loneliness.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER:

Until, in the 1940s, he found himself very much not alone on Vormir. Peripherally, he’d seen the flash of light and space that meant Tess had opened a portal to Vormir, and he had stepped forward, expecting to see his sister. But Tess herself wasn’t there. Instead, she had sent someone to Vormir, to Solomon – a man with red skin and wild eyes. Solomon tucked himself into the darkest recess of the already gloomy planet, returning to his simplest stone form, doing everything he could to avoid encountering Vormir’s other resident even while the man soon began doing everything he could to get to Solomon.

POST-CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER:

Thus, he spent the next seventy-five years bored and slightly afraid. He could feel traces of Tess in the man’s psyche, but something was wrong with him, and Solomon didn’t want to get close enough to figure out what.

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR:

Then two more people visited Vormir, and it all hit the fan.

There were rules about what it took to get Solomon to come out of hiding, and the idiot grape did not have what it took, but he thought he did, and Solomon could feel his siblings’ nearness and distress.

He bent the rules.

Sending the green woman to a safe and abandoned planet elsewhere, Solomon felt the bond to her spring up, and he clung stubbornly to it even while submitting to the whims of the grape. All to be near his siblings – because together they could defeat this threat. Together they formed a plan with the help of Milo’s telepathy and when the “end of the world” was upon them, Solomon went to work.

He worked in tandem with Arthur when the grape very predictably snapped his fingers, Solomon transporting people to safety while Arthur made it appear that they were dying as expected. As his last trick of the night, when the raisin retired to Vormir, Solomon “shut the door” on the planet, and locked it and threw away the key, too. He trapped the madman on Vormir for the rest of his days – using spells so strong that not even Solomon himself would find it easy to return to his sanctuary. And after spending the last seventy-five years there with the man Tess called the “Red Skull,” he wasn’t sure he wanted to go back.

POST-AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR:

After returning everyone to their proper places in the universe, he decided to follow his new protectorate, Gamora, instead.

As if he had much of a choice – though, unlike Olivia, he chose not to dwell on that fact, and instead tried to adapt to life aboard the Milano. He had at least Olivia nearby for the first time in over a century, and really Gamora and her people weren’t so bad, for as long as life with them lasted.

AUs:

BOLDLY GO: (Star Trek) a geologist at the rank of lieutenant

Starter Call

[berniesandersniece]

The Collapse of Modern Society (Revised)

           The word “history” is most often associated with past civilizations, wars, leaders, and other great milestones and achievements of humanity. The traditional subject of history typically begins around 5000 BCE with the development of agriculture and the establishment of major civilizations; while it centers on humankind as the focus of study, conventional history fails to view humanity in the larger context of the history of the universe. Big History, a term coined by historian David Christian in the 1990s, involves the interdisciplinary, big picture study of science and humanities to examine human existence. According to Christian, the very little time our planet and species has existed for is only understandable when viewing it from the context of the universe’s fourteen billion-year-old history. His study of Big History consists of nine “threshold moments”: the Big Bang and the creation of the universe (13 billion years ago), the creation of stars as the first complex objects (12 billion ya), the creation of chemical elements inside dying stars required for chemically-complex objects, the formation of planets more chemically complex than stars, the creation and evolution of life (3.8 billion ya), the development of our speciesHomo sapiens(250,000 ya), the appearance of agriculture which allowed for more complex societies (11,000 ya), the “modern revolution” which brought the world into the modern era, and finally whatever will happen in the future and predicting the next threshold of history.1 

2 Natural Timeline of Universe.

Each of these thresholds represents a level of increasing complexity brought on by “Goldilocks conditions”, a set of very exact circumstances required for complex forms to exist. When looking at Christian’s final few thresholds, it is evident that Goldilocks conditions along with increasingly advanced human civilizations have allowed the human population to flourish in large numbers.

3 Goldilocks Conditions of Planet Earth, Neither too Close or Too Far from the Sun.

           Throughout the past century, the amount of humans on Earth has exploded at an exponential rate. In 4 BCE, just 250 million Homo sapiens sapiensexisted. By 1850 CE, that number had quadrupled, and the human population reached one billion over the course of three to five million years. Another billion humans were added to that number over only 80 years, and the human population reached three billion in 1958, four billion in 1975, five billion in 1988, and six billion in 2000. Currently, there are almost nine billion humans on Earth, and that number is expected to reach twelve billion by 2060. Humans account for 36% of all mammals, and another 60% consists of mammals we raise for food, with wild mammals consisting of only 4%. It is evident humanity has come to dominate the planet. 4 We are currently living in what scientists refer to as the Anthropocene, the geological epoch beginning with the significant human impact on Earth’s ecosystems and geology. 

5 The Anthropocene.

           Through carbon emissions, the construction of roads and dams, soil degradation, deforestation, and other destructive activities, humans have brought on anthropogenic climate change, along with a severe negative impact on Earth’s ecosystems and biodiversity. Proposed starting dates of the Anthropocene range from the Agricultural Revolution 12,000 years ago to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas all the way to the 1960s, but it is agreed that the Industrial Revolution was the time that significantly accelerated humanity’s damages to Earth. 6

           According to historian Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the damages humans are currently inflicting upon our environment on a large scale are not entirely unique to our modern era. Diamond determines instances of past societal collapse have come down to five main factors: climate change, hostile neighbors, collapse of essential trading partners, environmental problems, and society’s response to the foregoing four factors.7 He states, “In fact, one of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies…is that a society’s steep decline may begin only a decade or two after society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power.” 8. This evidence is particularly alarming as the human population nears its potential carrying capacity; Earth’s sixth major extinction may be imminent.

9Easter Island, the Best Example of Societal Collapse According to Diamond.

           The four major eras of US environmental history depict how the country’s relationship with the diverse ecosystems of the Americas over the past several hundred years. They consist of the Tribal Era (13,000 years ago-1600s), the Frontier Era (1607-1890), the Early Conservationist Era (1832-1870), and 1870- present times.10 The case study of the American bison examined by the text reflects the changes that occurred throughout these four eras. In 1500 CE, 30-60 million bison roamed the plains of North America, and were the center of life for many American Indian tribes. The arrival of European colonists and their frontier environmental world-view saw the Americas, American Indian tribes, and the bison as wilderness to be conquered by the white man. Bison were slaughtered by the millions for meat and entertainment by Europeans moving west, and even the US Army took part in this killing to drive tribes from their land. By 1892, only 85 bison remained; the endangerment of this species also brought on the endangerment of many Plains Indian tribes.

11Portrait of Plenty Coups.

           Plenty Coups, leader of the Crow Nation in the early 1900s, said, “…when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not life them up again. After this nothing happened.”12 The bison was relied on not only for its physical contributions to many tribes, but also as a prominent spiritual figure. After the bison was driven to near extinction, many tribes were traumatized and stripped of their identities. In his work An American Urphilosophie, author Robert Bunge states, “Would you [want to] know how an area is faring ecologically speaking, look then at the Indian population, for they reflect the ecological balance or lack of it in an exact manner.”13 Although the bison became protected and its population slowly grew, the effects the loss in numbers on many American Indian tribes have only worsened. Many tribes today are burdened with addiction, mental illness, poverty, and continuing attacks on their land and culture from the US government who continues to neglect and abuse them. With the critical climate conditions we are currently facing, the intimate bond between many American Indians and their land may hold the answers of how to address our environmental crisis; however, they are rarely included in the conversation despite having a deep knowledge of sustainable practices. As Diamond states in his book, the most vulnerable populations will be forced to bear the brunt of environmental degradation, and the many American Indian tribes living in the United States are no exception to this. As Americans, we are living on stolen land and are continuing to abuse it in the most profane matter; if major changes are not made in philosophy, lifestyle, and industry, our society will collapse.

How could looking to other environmental philosophies be beneficial in addressing our current climate crisis?

1“Big History.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, December 20, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History, 3.

2 ”Big History”, 3.

3“Big History”, 3.

4 Stoll, Steven. U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: a Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007.

5 Bliss, Sam. “The Anthropocene Is Here, Whether Geologists Make It Official or Not.” Grist. Grist, October 20, 2014. https://grist.org/climate-energy/the-anthropocene-is-here-whether-geologists-make-it-official-or-not/, 1.

6 “Anthropocene.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, February 6, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene.

7“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, January 19, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed, 2.

8Diamond, Jared M. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin, 2011, 509.

9“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”, 1.

10Miller, G. Tyler. Living in the Environment. S.I.: Cengage Learning, 2020, 20.

11“Plenty Coups.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, November 19, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenty_Coups, 1.

12Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Londres (Inglaterra): Harvard University Press, 2008, 4.

13Bunge, Robert. An American Urphilosophie: an American Philosophy, BP (before Pragmatism). Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984, 84.

[southrift-galaxy-safaris-blog]

Reasons to visit Madagascar

As the biggest island in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar is famous for its unique wildlife and biodiversity. With breathtaking views of nature, white sand beaches, stunning rainforest and delicious local food, this spot offers an unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Here’s why it should be on your bucket list.

1. It’s home to some seriously cute lemurs

Found only in Madagascar, lemurs are the country’s ultimate hallmark, notably the black and white ring-tailed Lemur Catta species. With more than 60 species present throughout the island, these mammals are currently classified as an endangered species. Visitors can take photos with them while visiting national parks, while luxury hotels built within natural reserves here also offer the chance to see them in the wild where they are no longer afraid of humans. You will certainly fall in love with them.

2. The whale-watching is spectacular

Madagascar is lucky enough to be located close to a migration route for whales and, twice a year, the creatures are visible from the coast. Between July and September, Sainte-Marie island is the best place to admire a whole legion of humpback whales where females come to calve in the warm sea. From October to December, baby whales and their mothers bask in Nosy Be shallow waters in the north-west. In addition to this mind-blowing spectacle, you can also listen to the powerful song of the males.

3. The beaches are beautiful

What else would heal the soul more than resting on a calm and peaceful beach away from home? In front of an emerald sea offering stunning views at sunset, a large part of the south-west of Madagascar has become one of the country’s top destinations for tourists. These places are perfect for that crucial wedding proposal moment and as a honeymoon destination for newlyweds. You can also have this same experience in the north and within the surrounding islands of Nosy Be.

4. You’ll get to taste the local koba cake

Don’t judge the flavour of this cake by its appearance! In western society where people tend to prefer European-style dishes, this brown cake has recently gained a prestigious place among desserts during luxury weddings, being presented with vanilla ice cream. One of the most traditional Malagasy foods, koba is a cake made of peanuts and rice flour. It is sold by street vendors, or in a tightly-packed tin in supermarkets. It makes for an authentic gift for friends upon your return.

5. You can help through volunteering

Madagascar is the fifth poorest country in the world and, with our time on this earth being so short, giving a helping hand at least once in your life is always more than welcome. Many volunteering opportunities are available with local organizations: you can teach French or English to children in remote villages, help environmental NGOs with scientific research and above all, work in the humanitarian sector by helping non-profit organisations which look after sick children from impoverished areas, most of whom suffer from critical illnesses.

6. It’s home to the biggest baobab ever

Known as the bottle tree, the baobab is also called ‘reniala,’ which means ‘mother of the forest’ in the Malagasy language. Six out of eight existing baobab species can be found in Madagascar, where they form a vast forest in semi-arid regions in the south. Some baobab can reach 29.52 ft (30 meters) high and 98.4 ft (9 meters) in circumference. Enough to remind how small you are regardless of your size, these natural jewels will leave you mesmerised.  

7. The local rice-and-romazava-soup combo is a delight

If you’re tired of eating heavy and fatty meals, it’s time to go to Madagascar and try this particular traditional meal. Romazava is a soup essentially prepared with different leaves and meat, which is an optional addition. Though its preparation varies from one region to one other depending on available leaves, the final mixture is a tender tasting dish typical of tropical regions. When prepared without meat, romazava is suitable for vegetarians knowing that its taste comes primarily from the leaves it contains.

8. Isalo, the Malagasy Grand Canyon

Madagascar has its own version of the American Grand Canyon: Isalo National Park. Covering more than 80,000 hectares in the south, millions of years ago this wonder was beneath the sea, and today is the most visited park in the country with more than 30,000 visitors per year. Though you can swim in natural pools if you’re tired between trecks, Isalo is Madagascar’s first wildlife hotspot, so be ready for extreme adventures and sensational views in the wild. A whole week may not be enough to see it all but enjoy your stay, regardless of how long you’re here for.

9. It offers affordable living

For a short stay or a gap year, living in Madagascar is not that difficult. Unless you a are very particular about food or hotel quality, you can have good and affordable meal with €5 (USD$6.25), and rooms start at around €12 (USD$15). You can spend even less if you eat local food. Because of this, many Europeans have decided to spend their retirement here, as you can live far better in Madagascar than in Europe. If you’re a digital nomad, you can easily work and travel here at the same time.

10. There are some great surfing spots

From May to October, you can enjoy great surf breaks in some epic surf zones. These are located in the southernmost or northernmost points of the island, and along the whole region of the vezo people in the south. Part of the eastern region also offers amazing surfing waves due to its rugged coastline. Madagascar opened its surf school in 2003 in Mahambo, and while the island is ideal for beginners, it’s also a must-see surf trip destination for advanced surfers too. If you’re looking for awesome waves, put Madagascar on your bucket list.

11. It has a stunning World Heritage Site

You’ll need a guide to visit this World Heritage Site. The Bemaraha Tsingy is one of the oldest national parks in Madagascar and is formed with majestic limestone formation covering a labyrinth of 72,300 hectares. Created in 1927, the park has long piques the curiosity of geologists and botanists around the world. With unique views, the park can be visited on a four-day excursion offered by most local tour operators, and is home to some 90 bird species, 10 types of lemur, and eight species of reptiles. RELATED POSTS  Are you in doubts  where to spend your Easter Holiday? Don't worry again, we got ideal destinations for with great offers     Top Self Drive Holiday Deals in Kenya If you think you have to travel far to enjoy a nice weekend, you may never get away. Besides, you can enjoy a beautiful weekend right here in Kenya. There are countless wallet-friendly Kenyan self drive getaways that won’t even break your budget. Don’t spend your weekend, doing absolutely nothing at home. Whether you are looking for romantic destinations, pristine beaches, and adventurous outdoor activities, there are plenty wallet-friendly getaways that will satisfy your weekend desires. Malindi & Watamu Self Drive Deals Mombasa South Coast Self Drive Deals Mombasa North Coast Self Drive Deals Masai Mara Self Drive Holiday Packages Lukenya & Machakos Self Drive Meru Holiday Self Drive Deals Mt. Kenya & Aberdare Self Drive Holiday Deals Nyeri Holiday Self Drive Deals Samburu Holiday Self Drive Deals Top Outdoor Activities in Kenya Outdoor activities in Kenya are a great way to experience Kenya, Choosing where to start in Kenya can be overwhelming. The country has many different outdoor activities, ranging from adrenaline-pumping adventures to more meditative outings. Kenya is always a fantastic destination for family bonding. Spending time with the family on weekend is a great opportunity to re-connect and communicate while having fun. Outdoor activities are perfect for those who want to experience a relaxing and refreshing weekend in an amazing place. Do something fun this weekend and spend worthy time with your family. For great weekend bonding, we present to you 6 fun outdoor activities for the family. These outdoor activities are great adventures for you and your family. Hike To Ol Donyo Sabuk & 14 Falls, Thika Chaka Ranch Day Trip – QuadBikes, PaintBalling Ngare Ndare Day Trip Hike (Nanyuki) Kereita Zip Lining & Hiking Day Trip Top Madaraka Express SGR Holiday Deals 2 Nights Malindi & Watamu holiday with SGR 2 Nights Amboseli Holiday With SGR 2 Nights Tsavo Holiday With SGR Sa 2 Nights Voi Holiday With SGR 2 Nights Mombasa North Coast With SGR 2 Nights Mombasa South Coast With SGR Read the full article

[jo-shanenewzealand]

Haast to Hokitika

Day 7 – 5/10/2018

Once again it was a gloomy morning. Cool weather, ten degrees and drizzling. Today we headed to Hokitika, a self-proclaimed cool little town and 'must stay' destination. We'll see if it's cool or not and we are staying there. We'll see.

Flat bottom boats, whitebait nets and fisherman's waders flanked the covered walkway in front of the room just up from us. Outside the door sat the fisherman and his young son. As we headed past, he gave a nod, we gave a hello before scampering through the light rain to the corner café for breakfast. At the Fantail Café, we were served by a couple of local ladies who were both friendly and inquisitive. They dished up a simple and inexpensive breakfast that was plentiful and tasty. After bacon and eggs and pancakes were paid our dues and returned to our rooms to prepare to leave.

Breakfast at the Fantail Café

It was a little after nine when we finally hit the Glacier Highway heading north east but before we had travelled a kilometre, we had our first stop, within one of the passing lanes on the three quarters of a kilometre long Haast River Bridge. It spanned a vast expanse of rocks and occasional streams that punctuated the river bed before crossing the main water body on the other end. When we first got there, we stopped at the road's edge and watched a couple of small trucks parked a ways away at the other end of the bridge, the occupants standing in the middle of the road looking around so we thought that it would be a good idea to do the same. We pulled into one of two passing bays and got out for a look. All was fine until we upset a grey nomad towing his caravan across the river. A toot of his horn and a shake of his head showed his disapproval at what we were doing. We don't know if the people at the other end got the same response but after we took a few photos of the river bed surrounded by mist, we started back on our journey. The people at the next passing lane were local fishermen checking out the conditions to set their whitebait traps up. We doubt that they would have cared what the grey nomad thought, this was their turf. The grey nomads had the last laugh though as within a few kilometres they were in our way cruising along, taking most of the road and well below the speed limit.

Haast River from the passing lane and Mosquito Hill, the snow capped Mataketake Range beyond

After we passed the oldies we encountered flat countryside for a short period. The sea to our left wasn't visible due to cow paddocks immediately adjacent to the road and the dunes and saltbush type vegetation beyond. The snow-capped mountains to our right weren't visible either due to a high canopy close to the road. Soon after the road started to curve upward as the steep escarpments closed in on the coast and interrupted the flat countryside (just near Ship Creek). This in turn lead us to our second stop for the day, a brief period spent looking at the rugged coastline and reading the information boards at Knight's Point which separated Jackson Bay, south of Haast and Bruce Bay further to the north.

Looking south from Knight's Point toward Arnott Point

Early South Westlands Moari traded throughout the areas around here. They built canoes around Bruce Bay (Northern Maitaki) and travelled along the coast and further south to Jackson Bay (Okahu) trading with a settlement which produced fish and jade. The only taste of civilisation that the settlers experienced was when ships rowed their supplies ashore, accompanied by cattle made to swim. By the 1930's they were visited more regularly with Captain Bert Mercer delivering mail, goods and passengers by landing his aircraft on the beaches and paddocks. Otago and Jackson Bay were linked by road via Haast Pass by 1960 but the Haast to Paringa section wasn't completed until five years later, the two roads finally linking just near Knight's Point. The idea was to make the stop a toilet break as well but the toilets were filthy (the womens' anyway) so we spent a bit of time looking at the rugged coastline and kept heading on.

The Haast Highway meandering north

As soon as we hit the road again, we headed down the winding highway and immediately inland. By the time we reached flat land again we were crossing the Whakapohi River, passing the Wilderness Lodge and stopping for a short break at Lake Moeraki. Due to the terrain we started heading south again until we got around Moeraki Hill, from which the road turned back to the north and directly past the beautiful Lake Paringa. Shane and Jo initially missed the campsite turn off and ended up doing an about face at the caravan park. This was a lovely spot and it had a toilet for the women. A quick stop, some photos and a look around and we were at it again, through Paringa, around Ward Hill and over the river flats and cattle country that surrounded the Paringa River (what imagination), and then further on to Bruce Bay.

Lonely bench on the shore of Jamie Beach, Lake Paringa

From the river flats and farmed salmon of the Paringa River we kept on Haast Highway north east, through a green valley bounded by Hunt Hill and the much larger Douglas Ranges until the next open area appeared. We had entered the Mahitahi River flats and were guided to Bruce Bay by the river and a rather small Mount Arthur on one flank (much smaller than the hill that we had just passed), and the other, Pakihi Swamp. A small village soon appeared with only a few houses on either side of the road and the Bruce Bay Hall, advertising the Sunday sports day. Further along, the road ran very close to the coast along Maori Beach, so close in fact that caution signs were erected warning of debris on highway during high seas. It was almost immediately apparent why the warning was necessary, the road was practically built on the sand dunes, protected somewhat by large rocks to quell the sea.

A wild Maori Beach, Bruce Bay

Keen for a look around, we pulled over to check the place out. This place was wild, windy, wet and the seas rough. Driftwood lined the side of the road, washed up during the last storm. Accompanying the debris were curious piles of rounded white rocks strewn along the side of the road. Some piles large, some not so. On these rocks some people felt it necessary to write messages and greetings, maybe to their friends back home or just to make a statement. Others proclaimed that the All Blacks were the best (we already know that) or a profound quote from Ferris Bueller. It was quite interesting.

Itchy head or bewilderment?

Apparently, this pile of rocks is called a Cairn, by tradition a mound of stones at the edge of a river by which travellers in the high country indicate a place of departure and a place to regain the shore. These boulders must have come from the nearby Mahitahi River or maybe they just washed up on the beach.

Cairn

After a few photos we kept moving ahead. The power of the ocean was evident towards the northern end of Maori Beach where a significant part of the road, over a hundred metres had been repaired recently. Apparently ex-Cyclone Fehi caused a bit of havoc last February trapping seven hundred people in Haast and destroying plenty (the locals and the Hard Antler would have been busy), including a local church being washed away when Makawhio (Jacobs) River burst its banks. The storm also washed roads and bridges away and plenty of landslides trapping people everywhere with no way out.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/101144230/birdseye-view-of-stormravaged-west-coast

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11986976

The Makawhio River was in fact the next river we crossed, just north of Maori Beach. Beyond was the Karangarua River with an old suspension bridge. The old bridge was pretty impressive and the river and surrounds lovely. We stopped here in the drizzling rain for a short period before proceeding. It was an hour nonstop between Knight's Point and Franz Joseph so we had to keep moving.

Old suspension bridge

The following river, the Cook, was where the road veered left to skirt around the base of Mount Fox, crossing the Fox River thereafter. We had considered going to the glacier that feeds the river but the maps showed no discernible parking facilities and with Jan more than likely intending to sit out the walk to the glacier, we chose Franz Josef Glacier instead. Crossing the bridge, we drove through the village and kept on ahead, this time along the Fox Glacier Highway. The road rose from here, meandering to and fro to compensate for the mountains on either side until it spat us out on the flat country surrounding the Waiho River and the entry road to Franz Josef Glacier.

Franz Josef Glacier was named by the German geologist and explorer Julius von Haast who was the first to explore the terminal of the glacier in the 1860's. He named the glacier after his Austrian Emperor, Franz Josef I. From high in the Southern Alps, the glacier drops around two and a half thousand metres in eleven kilometres, the gradient and gravity pushing the ice down the slopes at more than a half metre daily. The terminal was located at the car park during the 1920's, almost three kilometres further down than where it is today but its cyclic. When Saint James Church was built in 1931 a panoramic window behind the altar was specifically located to provide a good view of the glacier, by 1954 it had gone. It reappeared again in 1997. The time taken for ice to travel from the neve to the terminal is about five years so there is a considerable lag from when conditions on the snowfield vary and the change of the location of the terminal.

The Maori name for the glacier is Kā Roimata ō Hine Hukatere after a local legend involving a Maori girl, Hine Hukatere, and her love Wawe. She loved climbing the mountains but he came from the coast and wasn't so keen. One day Wawe agreed to accompany Hine Hukatere into the mountains but lagged behind and an avalanche swept him to his death. A distraught Hine Hukatere shed many tears that froze and formed the glacier.

The window in the local church was positioned to view the glacier

The access road to the glacier car park was almost four kilometres from the turn off, some fit looking people were actually walking it, braving the weather. They must have come from the village a further half kilometre back. The car park was very busy, mostly with campervans but they were parked as close as they could to the walks. We done a loop and parked in the near empty return road, still close. There was some discussion as to who would walk to the glacier. Shane, Brett and Justine were in, Jan was definitely out and Jo was not confident that she could keep up so also declined. After some coaxing she agreed and we headed off. "See you mum, we'll be back in an hour or more".

The glacier from the first viewing spot

The track slowly climbed and weaved through the vegetation for a kilometre before we reached the first viewing platform. The walk was about a kilometre and by the time we had arrived, Brett's ankle was playing up and Jo had had enough. She stayed there and worked her way back. Brett battled on. The view from the platform was amazing and the truth be known, the view from the highest view point wasn't much better.

Almost there

The last viewpoint was a couple of kilometres further up. The path was a signposted track that was elevated, although still part of the river bed. Cascades were everywhere as we worked our way along the path, and quite close. Around a half an hour after we left Jo, we climbed a few mounds and a few large rock formations and we were there. Shane and Justine led the way, Brett a little behind and feeling the pain. He wouldn't give up though.

Justine & Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatereustine  

Apparently a couple of Indians climbed to the terminal a couple of years ago and were crushed by a hundred tonne of ice

After maybe twenty minutes of looking around and taking photos we turned back for the downhill trip to the cars.

After the glacier we headed back to the Bailey Bridge across the Waiho River. The bridge was supposed to have been lifted last winter due to a continual build up of gravel in the river bed, fed by the Franz Josef Glacier which spills into the Upper Waiho Valley and the three glaciers further south, the Callery, Spencer and Burton Glaciers which spill through the steep Callery Gorge and into the Waiho River just upstream from the bridge. Since the nineteen forties the river bed has risen well over ten metres and still going causing issues with the bridge height and the levee banks providing flood protection for the locals. There is a real problem here as the bridge was raised in 1988, 1996, 1998, 2002 and 2011. The levee has received more attention than the bridge. Since 2011 the river bed has risen between a half and one and a half metres.

The Waiho River Bailey Bridge. Continually being raised

Once across the bridge we veered left, past Saint James Church, semi hidden in the bushes but noticeable by a sign at the gate requesting donations for its renovation, over a slight rise and into the village of Franz Josef Glacier for some lunch. The atmosphere was similar to several other towns that we had driven through, giving the impression that with winter over so were the peak times and they were tapering off approaching summer. The crowds on the street reflected this as few were around. After a look in the Glacier Gift Shop while waiting for Brett and Justine, we all assembled and headed across the road to the Snake Bite Restaurant for a beer and pretty large burger. Mum's shout. Not long after we were on our last leg to Hokitika.

Mum's shout at the Snakebite

The next couple of hours were spent driving through a country side of river flats and undulating landscape from the road up to the base of the escarpments and steep walled valleys, cascades a plenty as we had witnessed the whole day. The road was regularly chequered with culverts channelling water from the frequent scoured and rocky streams, some fed by the cascades. This continued until we crossed the Hokitika River and entered the township. The GPS pointed us straight ahead until we reached the Fitzherbert Hotel on the northern outskirts of the town. While booking in the manager listed a few good eating spots including the Royal Mail Hotel at nearby Woodstock, back over the river and a little up stream. He said the pub put on a good feed and was family orientated so we could have a quiet afternoon after the journey. Advice appreciated, we chose to take it easy and get some takeaway Chinese. We had a quick drive around the town, back over the bridge across the river and back down the main drag to Easteat Country Restaurant. An easy night was ahead.

Tomorrow is the last leg of our journey. We return to Christchurch.

[esrescuer]

And other tales from the intersection of science and airport security Martin J Cohn / University of Florida ED YONG MAY 23, 2017 When Martin Cohn passed through airport security at Ronald Reagan Airport, he figured that he’d probably get some questions about the 3-D-printed model of a mouse penis in his bag. The model is 15 centimeters long, made of clear translucent plastic, and indisputably phallic— like the dismembered member of some monstrous, transparent, 11-foot rodent. One of Cohn’s colleagues had already been questioned about it when she carried it on an outward flight from Gainesville to Washington D.C. She put it through the security scanner, and the bag got pulled. A TSA official looked inside, winked at her, and let her go. She was amused but embarrassed, so Cohn offered to take the model home on the return flight. Once again, the bag was pulled. A TSA officer asked if Cohn had anything sharp or fragile inside. Yes, he said, some 3-D-printed anatomical models. They’re pretty fragile. The officer pulled out two models of mouse embryos, nodded to herself, and moved on. “And then,” Cohn recalls, “she pulled out this mouse penis by its base, like it was Excalibur.” What is this? “Do you need to know or do youwant to know?” said Cohn. I’m curious, she replied. “It’s a 3-D print-out of an adult mouse penis.” A what? “A 3-D print-out of an adult mouse penis.” Oh no it isn’t. “It is.” The officer called over three of her colleagues and asked them to guess what it is. No one said anything, so Cohn told them. They fell apart laughing. In previous years, Cohn has flown with the shin bone of a giant ground sloth and a cooler full of turtle embryos. Just last month, Diane Kelly from the University of Massachusetts, who studies the evolution of animal genitals, was stopped by the TSA because she was carrying what is roughly the opposite of Cohn’s item: a 3-D-printed mold of a dolphin vagina. “Technically it’s not even my dolphin vagina mold,” she says. “I was carrying it for someone.” Other scientists who responded to a call for stories on Twitter have flown with bottles of monkey pee,chameleon and skate embryos,5,000 year old human bones, remotely operated vehicles, and, well, a bunch of rocks. (“I’m a geologist. I study rocks.”) Astrophysicist Brian Schimdt was once stopped by airport officials on his way to North Dakota because he was carrying his Nobel Prize—a half-pound gold disk that showed up as completely black on the security scanners. “Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?” they said. “The King of Sweden,” he replied. “Why did he give this to you?,” they probed. “Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.” Anthropologist Donald Johanson has flown with probably the most precious—and the most famous—of these cargos: the bones of the Lucythe Australopithecus, who Johanson himself discovered. In a memoir, he recalls having to show her bones to a customs official in Paris. The man was an anthropology buff, and when Johanson told him that the fossils were from Ethiopia, he said, “You mean Lucy?” “A large crowd gathered and watched as Lucy’s bones were displayed, one by one, on the Customs counter. I got my first inkling of the enormous pull that Lucy would generate from then on, everywhere she went.” Several people have stories about more animate luggage. Jonathan Klassen from the University of Connecticut studies leafcutter ants, and the permits that allow him to collect wild colonies stipulate that he must hand-carry them onto planes. “Inevitably, some poor security officer gets a duffle bag full of 10,000 ants and gets really confused,” he says. Indeed, many animals have to be hand-carried onto planes because they don’t fare well in the cold of cargo holds, (and often can’t be shipped for similar reasons). That’s certainly the case for the amblypygids—docile relatives of spiders with utterly nightmarish appearances—that Alexander Vaughan once tried to carry onto a domestic flight. “My strategy was to pretend that everything I was doing was perfectly normal,” he tells me. Cohn, who’s based at the University of Florida, studies genitals and urinary tracts, and how they develop in embryos. Around 1 in 250 people are born with birth defects affecting these organs, and although such changes are becoming more common, their causes are largely unclear. By studying how genitals normally develop, Cohn’s hoping to understand what happens when they take a different path. And like many scientists, he is working with mice. He recently analysed a mouse’s genitals with a high-resolution medical scanner. To show his colleagues how incredibly detailed the scans can be, he used them to print a scaled-up model, which he took with him to the conference in DC. And because the conference was just a two-day affair, Cohn didn’t bring any checked luggage. Hence: the penis in his carry-on. Scientists, as it happens, are full of tales like this because as a group, they’re likely to (a) travel frequently, and (b) carry really weird shit in their bags. Others were more upfront about their unorthodox cargo. Ondine Cleaver from UT Southwestern Medical Center once tried carrying tupperware containers full of frogs from New York to Austin. At security, she realized that she couldn’t possibly subject the animals to harmful doses of X-rays, so she explained the contents of her bag to a TSA agent. “She totally freaked out, but had to peek in the container,” says Cleaver. “We opened it just a slit, and there were 12-14 eyes staring at her. She screamed. She did this 3 times. A few other agents came by to see, and none could deal with the container being opened more than a bit. But they had to make sure there was nothing nefarious inside, so we went through cycles of opening the container, screaming, closing it laughing, and again.” They eventually let her through.Many scientists have had tougher experiences because their equipment looks suspicious. The bio-logging collars that Luca Borger uses to track cattle in the Alps look a lot like explosive belts. And the Petterson D500x bat detector, which Daniella Rabaiotti uses to record bat calls, is a “big, black box with blinking lights on the front.” She had one in her backpack on a flight going into Houston. “The security people said, ‘Take your laptop out,” and I did that. But they don’t really say, ‘Take your bat detector out,’ and I forgot about it.When the scanner went off, she had to explain her research to a suspicious and stand-offish TSA official, who wasn’t clear how anyone could manage to record bat calls, let alone why anyone would want to do that. So Rabaiotti showed him some sonograms, pulled out her laptop, and played him some calls—all while other passengers were going about their more mundane checks. “By the end of it, he said: Oh, I never knew bats were so interesting,” she says. Many of the stories I heard had similar endings. The TSA once stopped Michael Polito, an Antarctic researcher from Louisiana State University, because his bag contained 50 vials of white powder. When he explained that the powder was freeze-dried Antarctic fur seal milk, he got a mixed reaction. “Some officers just wanted to just wave me on,” he says. “Others wanted me to stay and answer their questions, like:How do you milk a fur seal? I was almost late for my flight.” Airport security lines, it turns out, are a fantastic venue for scientists to try their hand at outreach. Various scientists are said to have claimed that you don’t really understand something if you can’t explain it to your grandmother, a barmaid, a six-year-old, and other such sexist or ageist variants. But how about this: can you successfully explain it to an TSA official—someone who not only might have no background in science, but also strongly suspects that you might be a national security threat? Can you justify your research in the face of questions like “What are you doing?” or “Why are you doing it?” or “Why are you taking that onto a plane?” Cohn did pretty well to the four assembled TSA agents who started quizzing him about his mouse penis. They noticed that the translucent object had a white tube inside it, and asked if it was a bone. It was indeed—the baculum. “I explained to them that most other mammals have a bone in the penis and humans have lost them,” says Cohn. “I do outreach at the drop of a hat, and I’m ready to teach a bit of evolution to the TSA if they’re interested. And they were freaking out.” Eventually, Cohn asked if he was free to go. You are, said the agent who first looked inside his bag. And then: “I gotta go on break, my mind is blown.”

[path-to-the-salaf-2]

The Myth of Darwinian Evolution (Part 3) – The Fossil Records refute Darwin!

Bismillahi Wal Hamdullillah Was Salātu Was Salāmu ‘alā rasoolillahi

Ammā Ba’d:

Another most important piece of evidence for Darwinian evolution is that of the fossil records. Since the theory revolves around decent with modification, and the earliest life forms changing very gradually in incremental stages, it should follow, that the best way to trace those changes is by studying the fossil records that exist for life on earth. Of course, if the theory is correct, the fossil records should be abundant with evidence of the varying life forms that have mutated and gradually became various species of animal. We should also witness some of the mutated animals that have died out, and their fitter, stronger successors.

It is a fact that Darwin had a hard time trying to get acceptance for his theory, but most people are unaware that Darwin’s most formidable opponents were not clergymen, but fossil experts.

Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago and a leading evolutionist.

According to Coyne, “if evolution meant only gradual genetic change within a species, we’d have only one species today—a single highly evolved descendant of the first species. Yet we have many… How does this diversity arise from one ancestral form?” It arises because of “splitting, or, more accurately, speciation,” which “simply means the evolution of different groups that can’t interbreed.”

If Darwinian theory were true, “we should be able to find some cases of speciation in the fossil record, with one line of descent dividing into two or more. And we should be able to find new species forming in the wild.” Furthermore, “we should be able to find examples of species that link together major groups suspected to have common ancestry, like birds with reptiles and fish with amphibians.”

Coyne turns first to the fossil record. “We should be able,” he writes, “to find some evidence for evolutionary change in the fossil record. The deepest (and oldest) layers of rock would contain the fossils of more primitive species, and some fossils should become more complex as the layers of rock become younger, with organisms resembling present-day species found in the most recent layers. And we should be able to see some species changing over time, forming lineages showing ‘descent with modification’ (adaptation).” In particular, “later species should have traits that make them look like the descendants of earlier ones.” (Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 17-18, 25)

This issue is one that evolutionist past and present acknowledge. They accept that the fossil records should be the greatest testimony to Darwin’s theory. But it isn’t.

As Coyne writes “We should be able to find some evidence for evolutionary change in the fossil record…” but we don’t! this of course is a catastrophic problem for the theory.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin acknowledged that the fossil record presented difficulties for his theory.

Darwin knew that the major animal groups—which modern biologists call “phyla”—appeared fully formed in what were at the time the earliest known fossil-bearing rocks, deposited during a geological period known as the Cambrian.

The ‘Cambrian Explosion’

The oldest of all fossil records at the time of Darwin were the Cambrian fossil records.

This discovery, found in Cumbria, south Wales is possibly the greatest and most popular breakthrough fossil discovery.

This phenomenon is so dramatic that is it known as the Cambrian Explosion (referred to as such, because most of the major animal phyla or groups, appear within it, all of a sudden) hence biologists refer to it as biology’s ‘big bang’ (not a reference to an actual explosion).

But the fossil record doesn’t have within it, a few species that diverged gradually over millions of years into genera then families then orders then classes then phyla.

In the Cambrian it was discovered that there were over 50 body plans — simple to complex — appearing suddenly in the fossil record without any trace of gradual modification.

Thus most of the major animal phyla and the major classes within it appear together …fully formed!  Darwin could not explain it except with conjecture.

He considered this a “serious” difficulty for his theory, since “if the theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited long periods elapsed… and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures.” And “to the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.” So “the case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained”

(Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Sixth Edition (London: John Murray, 1872), Chapter X, pp. 266, 285-288.)

Charles Darwin plainly stated, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been produced by numerous, successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

Darwinian evolution requires geological time periods, making the fossil record a vital ally in the corner of scientific materialism. Unfortunately for Darwin and his advocates, the fossil record has some major problems. First, the fossil record offers little to no evidence of transitional forms — those intermediary life forms bridging the gaps between known species.

One might therefore suppose, that geologists would be continually uncovering fossil evidence of transitional forms. This, however, was clearly not the case. What geologists did discover was species, and groups of species, which appeared suddenly rather than at the end of a chain of evolutionary links. Darwin conceded that the state of the fossil evidence was “the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory,”

According to Steven Stanley, the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming contains a continuous local record of fossil deposits for about five million years, during an early period in the age of mammals. Because this record is so complete, paleontologists assumed that certain populations of the basin could be linked together to illustrate continuous evolution. On the contrary, species that were once thought to have turned into others turn out to overlap in time with their alleged descendants, and “the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” In addition, species remain fundamentally unchanged for an average of more than one million years before disappearing from the record.

The Maths of the theory

There are some issues related to the theory that do not add up. Bare in mind, the theory revolves around gradual change over time. To demonstrate the problem, paleontologist Stephen Stanley uses the example of the bat and the whale, which are supposed to have evolved from a common mammalian ancestor in little more than ten million years, to illustrate the unsolvable problem that fossil stasis poses for Darwinian gradualism: Let us suppose that we wish, hypothetically, to form a bat or a whale by a process of gradual transformation of established species. If an average chronospecies (fossil lifespan of a species lasts nearly a million years, or even longer, and we have at our disposal only ten million years, then we have only ten or fifteen chronospecies to align, end-to-end, to form a continuous lineage connecting our primitive little mammal with a bat or a whale. This is clearly preposterous. Chronospecies, by definition, grade into each other, and each one encompasses very little change. A chain of ten or fifteen of these might move us from one small rodent like form to a slightly different one, perhaps representing a new genus, but not to a bat or a whale!

The other issue at hand is proving decent through modification. If we were to suppose that we had two fossils of animals that resemble one another that according to our dating seemed to precede each other. How exactly do we establish that one has ‘evolved’ from the other except through conjecture as overwhelming as it may well be.

The late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould acknowledged this as “the trade secret of paleontology.” He went on to admit, “The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.” This is a reference to the well-known ‘tree of evolution’ that we find in our biology textbooks. The only thing that we have concrete evidence for it that which exists at the tips of the branches of the tree, everything that exists in those drawing lower down in the tree have been added based upon ‘belief’ and conjecture and not evidence.

Other Darwinists have suggested that the absence of fossils is a problem with the fossil record itself rather than with evolutionary theory. That is to say even though we don’t have evidence for the theory in fossil records, it is because the fossil records are deficient and we will eventually discover fossil that will prove it. Again we see proof of the fact that the theory was thought up first and then evidence was sought for it! Even though evidence does not exist, evolutionists still postulate that the theory is ‘established’ even in the absence of categorical proof. And it is with this ‘blind faith’ we see believers in the theory debate.

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their time on earth. They appear in the fossil record, looking pretty much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.

Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.”

In short, if evolution means the gradual change of one kind of organism into another kind (a process considered by later-day darwinists (or neo-darwinists) to have occurred through genetic mutations), the outstanding characteristic of the fossil record is the absence of evidence for evolution. Darwinists explain away the sudden appearance of new species by saying that perhaps the transitional intermediates were for some reason not fossilized, and that perhaps the soft frames of the creatures caused them to dissappear and not be fossilised! But stasis- the consistent absence of fundamental directional change- is positively documented. It is also the norm and not the exception.

Next, there is the problem of interpretation. As Ian Tattersall, Curator of the American Museum of Natural History, confesses, “The patterns we perceive are as likely to result from our unconscious mind-sets as from the evidence itself.” Richard Leakey admitted as much when he disclosed the tendency of his father (palaeontologist Louis Leakey) to arrange fossils and alter their criteria to fit into a line of human descent. That is to say, the fossils that do exist are ‘re-arranged’ to fit with evolutionist theory and not left  in the manner in which they were discovered.

But most damaging to the integrity of the fossil record is the cloud of fraud that hangs over it. As reported in the February 2003 issue of Discover, “Such so-called missing links as Java man, Nebraska man, Piltdown man, and Peking man were eventually shown to be outright fabrications. …Today there are scores of fake fossils out there and they have cast a dark shadow over the whole field … there is a fake fossil factory in north-eastern China…. The Chinese fossil trade has become a big business.”

For 150 years the fossil record has ‘refused’ to affirm gradualism and, with it, Darwin’s theory of evolution

Stephen J. Gould said:

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions…has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution”

(Evolution Now P.140)

Darwinists claim they have found the missing link between land mammals and whales but they admit none could have been an ancestor of the other, it is impossible in principle to show that any two fossils are genealogically related.

In 1998 and 1999 the Us national academy of sciences published two booklets defending darwins theory of evolution. According to the 1998 booklet fossils provide the first of several ‘compelling‘ lines of evidence that ‘demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt‘ that all living things are modified decendants of a common ancestor’

The 1999 booklet claims that the theory has been ‘thoroughly tested and confirmed’ by several categories of evidence. First of all the fossil record which provides consistent evidence of systematic change through time, and decent with modification. Most biology texts books take the same deceptive line.

Darwinism is the theory of gradualism from common descent: the slow process whereby complex life forms emerge from simpler ones that have accumulated modifications through the mechanisms of variation and natural selection. This should be recorded in fossil history.

Fossils certainly prove that the earth was once populated by creatures that are no longer with us. The fossil record also provides evidence that the history of life has passed through several stages, only the most recent of which includes us.

Darwins ‘Tree of Life’

Imagine having a chronoscope that would enable you to peer back in time to the origin of the first animal. Perhaps a primitive sponge. The sponge makes more sponges like itself and if darwins theory is true, after thousands of generations this sponge population splits into two different kinds of sponges which are called separate species. After millions more generations and the origin of a few more species some species become so different from each other that we split them into two genera (plural of genus) after countless more generations the differences are so great within those genera that we divide them into two families. As differences continue to accumulate, we eventually group the splitting of those families into two of more ‘orders’ and various orders into two or more ‘classes’ despite all the generations and the differences however we might still have only sponges. Then another major type of animal emerges perhaps jellyfish. This animal would be so radically different from the others that we wouldn’t just class it as another sponge. Rather it is an entirely new category, a phylum (plural of phyla).

This pattern of gradual divergence from a common ancestor with major differences occurring only after a long accumulation of minor differences, is how Darwin envisioned evolution.

These transitional links present here would create a branching pattern Darwin called the great tree of life he demonstrated this with a sketch in the origin of species. It the bottom of the tree graph were the primitive sponge from which all other animals decended, then most of the branches above it would be sponges, the major differences, the phyla would appear only at the top after a long history of branching due to the accumulation of minor differences.

Biologists recognise several dozen animal phyla based upon major differences in body plans. There are over a dozen phyla of worms alone. There are even more striking differences between worms and mollusc’s, (clams and octopuses), Echinoderms (starfish and sea urchins), arthropods (lobsters and insects) and vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals)

If Darwin’s theory were true then these major differences should only make their appearance at the top of his great tree of life…but the fossil records shows exactly the opposite, they appear in the lower levels of the Cambrian discovery !

Each of the divisions of the biological world (kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders), it was noted, conformed to a basic structural plan, with very few intermediate types. Where were the links between these discontinuous groups? The absence of transitional intermediates was troubling even to Darwin’s loyal supporter T. H. Huxley, who warned Darwin repeatedly in private that a theory consistent with the evidence would have to allow for some big jumps (since there is no evidence for the incremental gradual changes).

Darwin posed the question himself, asking why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?

Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?

He answered with a theory of extinction which was the logical counterpart of “the survival of the fittest.

In 1978, Gareth Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History wrote: “The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.”

( “Presentation to the American Museum of Natural History (1969),” in David M. Williams & Malte C. Ebach, “The reform of palaeontology and the rise of biogeography—25 years after ‘ontogeny, phylogeny, palaeontology and the biogenetic law’ (Nelson, 1978),” Journal of Biogeography 31 (2004): 685-712)

Therefore the issue remains the same, the claim of ‘evidence’ is still an unestablished myth. Evolution is still a ‘belief’. The issue is intensified though, by ‘hidden’ fossil discoveries, that have been intentionally concealed and we will look into that in the following part inshaa’allah.

Wa Sallallahu ‘alā Nabiyinā Muhammad

@abuhakeembilal

[autolovecraft]

While he screamed outright.

Through quickly re-pass that ominous spot, I thought as I viewed it, and of the meteorite; and he changed his line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes. Of course it was he thought only of the Widmanstätten figures found on meteoric iron. And yet amid that tense godless calm the high ground. And so all through the stony soil of the whole farm was shocking—grayish withered grass and leaves on the blasted heath seemed to be shot for its own elder mystery. The grass had so far seemed untouched, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a moving object. For this strange beam of ghastly miasma was to come. What he told in Arkham. The asters and golden-rod bloomed gray and brittle?

It shrieked and howled, and shimmered over the sashes of the thing which every man of that spot, I shall visit the Arkham papers made much of the path, for in one family was pretty bad, too, for old Ammi Pierce has never been fed from the gray desolation was terrible enough, but appeared to stir furtively in the sun. Stark terror seemed to be. In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and Nahum worked hard at his wit's end. Ammi, when it was none of Nahum's to tell on him. There was no glow from the great chimney, and the unaccountable deaths of Nahum and Nabby—Nahum was the same with the nearby vegetation.

What was it, Nahum said as he mumbled his formless reflections. Most of it ever reached the people around, who first noticed the glow about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul. There was no smoke from the well was a crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been the lantern and pail for water, and at last, and the dogs had run away when they put it in the early morning, having heard that he acted as he did. The reservoir will soon be washed away.

Then there flashed across the visitor's mind a sudden thought of the trees increased, while his body leaned forward and his wife had gone. When it had glowed faintly in the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and I wondered how it had been dark and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. Ammi returned the next morning to see something not quite right since. It's somewhat from beyond had not dislodged anything after all—the faint miasmal odor which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. Very possibly. No watcher can ever forget that sight, and upon tapping it appeared highly malleable, and I wondered how it had come into the Milky Way. Why, here she is! There was a general cry; muffled with awe, but merely told of the huddled men, a lad of fifteen, swore that they empty and explore the well I passed.

There was too much silence in the house, but shadow lurked always there. From him there were not haunted woods, and was very cold. It was then that they empty and explore the well water was no vegetation of the future crop. Too awed even to hint at the fluid, and he felt himself brushed as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom. Anyone but a piece of the other crops were in a constant state of real excitement; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, and all thought it feeds on everything organic that's been around here, muttered the medical examiner, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce listened in a queer way impossible to describe; and as the column of unknown and unholy iridescence from the college scientists were forced to own that they left all the trees. The veterinary shivered, the unknown. Certainly, however, as baffling in the green grass and leaves became apparent to the laboratory and test again the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow. It was not a single specific noun, but the death had come the runaway in the green grass and leaves became apparent to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such colored and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown. He had gone with a geologist's hammer had shattered, and even such grass and leaves became apparent to the growing luminosity of all that he had by that phrase strange days; and as Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they realized that the clouded father would say. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce remarked that the geologist's hammer and chisel. Only a wooden ripping and crackling, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. Strange colors danced before his eyes; and remembering how strange the men from the gray November sky with a cloud of darker depth passed over the moon, and was very terrible, especially to little Merwin this time, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all drunk the water will always be very deep—but even so, I sought him out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, except where the two phials of dust for analysis in a queer way impossible to describe, while their restless branches seemed to be faint traces of the floor below. He did not send her to the open spaces, mostly along the line of inquiry. The professors tried it, Italians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and he and the trees. Why, here she is! So the men from the stars, though the tethered vehicles of the mad woman and the poor woman screamed about things in the well—was all that the clouded father would say. One did arise not long afterward, but let her wander about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.

Night had fully set in, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. Then the lurching buggy had gone. Why has he never been able to move away? Hot as it was very close and noisome up there, in telling the city veterinary from Arkham was given a short paragraph in the air? When Ammi reached his house by neighbors told on his tales, I sought him out the next morning both chips and beaker were gone too; numbers went queer in the early saxifrage came out it had come that white noontide cloud, that of the baffling bands were precisely like those which the strange days are never talked about in the usual order of use. Stephen as wholly unprecedented. And so all through the strange vegetable conditions, the screams of the trees first begin to get the heavy extra bar across it. Nahum had feared it would not credit this.

[wonderliv]

The Mountains Are Calling And I Must Go

John Muir ” The Mountains Are Calling And I Must Go “, born in 1838, was just one of America’s most popular and also prominent “Outdoor Lover,” which in his era, were called Naturalists. He remains one of California’s most important historical characters and is usually still known today as one of the Dad’s of our National Parks. He defined himself as, a “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and also ornithologist-naturalist and so on and so on !!!!”.

Famous documentary manufacturer Ken Burns recently stated, “As we got to know him … he [John Muir] rose to the pantheon of the greatest individuals in our country; I’m talking about the level of Abraham Lincoln, and also Martin Luther King, as well as Thomas Jefferson, and also Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jackie Robinson– people that have had a transformational result on that we are.”.

Perhaps the best means to evaluate the continued gravity of both him and his inspiring quote is by its’ occurrence on the Internet’s universal peg-board, Pinterest.com. There you will locate a substantial directory of attractive, typographically stylized pictures with the quote decorated throughout each of them.

So where did this quote actually originated from? It, like several others, came from among his letters written to his sister, Sarah Muir Galloway. In it he creates:.

Yosemite Valley– September 3rd, 1873. Dear Sibling Sarah:. I have actually simply returned from the lengthiest and also hardest trip I have ever before made in the hills, having actually been looked at five weeks. I am tired, however resting quick; drowsy, however sleeping deep and also fast; hungry, however eating a lot. For two weeks I checked out the glaciers of the tops eastern of below, sleeping among the snowy hills without coverings and with but little to eat on account of its being so inaccessible. After my icy experiences it seems weird to be down here in so warm as well as flowery an environment.

I will quickly be off once again, established to use all the season in prosecuting my researches– will go next to Kings River a hundred miles southern, then to Lake Tahoe and surrounding hills, and also in winter months operate in Oakland with my pen.

The Scotch are slow, but someday I will have the outcomes of my mount mountain researches in a type in which you all will certainly be able to check out and also judge of them. In the mean time I create sometimes for the Overland Month-to-month, yet neither these publication posts neither my first publication will create any finished part of the clinical payment that I wish to make … The hills are calling as well as I should go, and also I will certainly work on while I can, studying ceaselessly.

My love to you all, David and the youngsters, as well as Mrs. Galloway who though came from sunshine yet, dwells in Light. I will certainly create again when I return from Kings River Canyon. The fallen leave sent me from China is for Cecelia.

Goodbye, with love eternal.

[John Muir]

Absorbed its original context as well as recognizing a little a lot more about him, It’s very easy to see an ambitious, regimented, and also extremely objective oriented boy; dedicated not just to the outdoors (as we generally see him) but additionally to his work. Yes, passionately, the Hills were contacting us to him as they do us, but the full quote genuinely speaks to his operate in those high places. Turns out, Muir had not been just speaking about treking for pure laid-back satisfaction, nor regarding those careless summer season outdoor camping vacations that so quickly enter your mind when one reads that quote. What Muir was actually talking about was the job he felt compelled to do in these incomparably stunning areas– he was determined to make a substantial “clinical payment” as a biologist. John Muir was operating in Yosemite, and functioning really hard no question. So while the preferred connotation attributed to his quote might not be totally exact, there is deep motivation to find in it still.

It appears that his love for nature was only equaled by his commitment to understanding and protecting it.

This essay initially ran in 2016 and is one in a collection of our most preferred articles that we put on top of our tale stream for new readers. With more than 3,000 evergreen stories, we want to see to it you don’t miss out on the goods!

The Mountains Are Calling And I Must Go

Run a Google search on biologist and preservationist John Muir and also you will swiftly show up one of his best-known, yet abbreviated, sayings: “The Mountains Are Calling And I Must Go.” It’s an engaging quote that says everything for many outdoor enthusiasts, which might discuss why it’s printed extensively on mugs, tee shirts, posters and fashion jewelry and also reworded by today’s travelers.

Nevertheless, the reduced quote doesn’t totally record John Muir or his desire to comprehend and also protect The golden state’s Yosemite– a grand glacially reduced valley with sheer 2,500-foot wall surfaces, now government shielded as one of the earliest of the Sierra Nevada’s 4 national forests.

As we mark the anniversary of Muir’s birth on April 21, 1838, we need to think about the full quote, which appears in an 1873 letter from Muir to his sister: “The hills are calling & I need to go & I will certainly work on while I can, examining persistently.” These words reveal a male who saw responsibility and also objective along with pleasure in the mountains. Muir was a master onlooker who enjoyed the consistent work of recognizing nature.

As the manager of John Muir’s documents at the University of the Pacific, I help researchers to “examine nonstop” these basic materials as well as obtain the full unabbreviated story. The documents reveal Muir’s decision to translate as well as protect nature, and also his critical function in the development of the National Park Solution which is commemorating its 100th wedding anniversary this year.

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You as well can take part in not only understanding Muir yet making him much more accessible by transcribing his handwritten journals. We are employing person managers to collect Muir’s words as well as make his journals keyword-searchable. Obviously, the payoff for the scribes is locating their own significant Muir quote.

Revelry as well as science. Via Muir’s archives we can map how his thinking about Yosemite advanced over almost 50 years. He first pointed out the valley in an 1867 letter after an industrial mishap left him briefly blind: “I check out a summary of the Yo Semite valley in 2014 and also have thought about it most daily given that.”.

Muir, that was birthed in Scotland and matured in Wisconsin, went to college briefly and “botanized” every opportunity he might obtain. He made his living as a creator and efficiency expert, however the mishap realigned his thinking. As he would certainly later remember in his autobiography, he “made haste with all my heart, bade adieu to all ideas of designing equipment as well as figured out to commit the rest of my life to researching the creations of God.”.

Before acting upon those “each day” ideas and also mosting likely to Yosemite, Muir wanted to adhere to the footsteps of renowned naturalist Alexander von Humboldt to South America, so he got some books as well as a plant press, and also began his “thousand mile walk to the Gulf” of Mexico from Indianapolis. Nonetheless, a spell with malaria in Florida diverted his attention from checking out South America. He decided to make his way to California by means of steamship as swiftly as feasible.

Muir got to the granite high cliffs of Yosemite in the spring of 1868. He was short on money but high up on the majestic elegance of the granite encounters, the magnificent Giant Sequoia trees, and also the roaring falls. In a letter to mentor and also buddy Jeanne Carr, he created, “It is without a doubt the grandest of all of His special temples of Nature I was ever allowed to go into. It needs to be the sanctum sanctorum of the Sierras [sic]”.

The Sierra had called, as well as he went. Muir studied the “Range of Light” incessantly for the following five years while staying in Yosemite Valley. He recognized that his research studies could be dangerous– for example, he virtually dangled himself over the top of the 2,500-foot Yosemite Falls in order to observe the activity of the water– however expressed no fear, exclaiming “Where could a mountaineer locate an even more glorious fatality!”.

Muir’s extreme monitorings deepened his understanding of the natural world as well as called him better right into nature. Going into a grove of Giant Sequoias, the largest trees on the planet, he wrote what chronicler Bonnie Gisel considers Muir’s pledge of obligation to the wild:. The King Tree and also me have actually sworn everlasting love, … and also I have actually taken sacrament with Douglas Squirrel [and also consumed alcohol] sequoia blood … I desire I could be a lot more tree-wise as well as sequoiacal, so I could preach the green brownish woods to all the dry masses. Muir used his observations to translate the scientific research of Yosemite as well as the Sierra. Before Muir showed up, The golden state’s first rock hounds had supposed that Yosemite was created by tragic going down of the valley floor through violent quakes. Yet based on his researches as well as expedition, Muir concluded that glaciers had actually scratched Half Dome and carved the granite cliffs. Today geologists commonly concur that glaciers were key forces in the origins of the valley.

Maintaining the Sierra. In the very early 1870s, Muir drew his Yosemite observations together and also published articles concerning the grand landscapes. He preached his concepts and called those “juiceless masses” to join him in the hills. Years later he wrote,” [T] ry the mountain passes. They will certainly kill treatment, save you from harmful passiveness, established you cost-free, as well as call forth every professors into energetic, enthusiastic action.”.

Muir also started to call for shielding Yosemite as well as the Sierra. He saw major dangers from loggers’ axes and the animals market’s “hoofed locusts”– his description of sheep that were overgrazing as well as ruining mountain meadows. 2 years after Yosemite National Park was produced in 1890, he cofounded the Sierra Club to maintain California’s greatest chain of mountains as well as make it a lot more available.

Muir’s books and posts helped to promote gratitude of wilderness, and brought in political interest. In 1903, Head of state Theodore Roosevelt visited Yosemite with Muir, wishing to “go down national politics definitely for 4 days and also just be visible with you.”.

In 1908 Muir joined an additional head of state, William Howard Taft, in Yosemite, looking for to quit a project by the city of San Francisco to construct a tank in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which lay inside the national park. Muir stated in outrage,” Dam Hetch Hetchy! Too dam for water-tanks individuals’s basilicas as well as churches, for no holier holy place has actually ever before been consecrated by the heart of man.”.

The fight to preserve the glorious valley was shed in 1913 when Congress passed an expense accrediting the dam. The loss virtually killed Muir too, as well as he died of pneumonia in a Los Angeles hospital a year later.

Summing up Muir’s heritage with the declaration that “the hills are calling and also I have to go” can suggest that he viewed nature as a play area. When he included, “& I will work with while I can, studying ceaselessly,” we see an even more full image of Muir’s relationship with Yosemite. He checked out the Sierra with a mix of reverence as well as scientific fascination, yet comprehended that its future relied on his efforts. Reviewing Muir’s writing meticulously, we can identify our proceeding duty to observe, analyze, as well as commemorate the worth of his “sanctum sanctorum.”

The Mountains Are Calling And I Must Go

The post The Mountains Are Calling And I Must Go appeared first on Wonderliv.

[oral-history]

Below is a text I was commissioned to write for the Seoul Museum of Art(SeMA)’s exhibition “Digital Promenade: 22nd Century Flâneur” for the 30th Anniversary of SeMA. The text will be out soon in their catalogue but here is already the (not copyedited) version online for those interested. Thousands of Tiny Futures 0 Ruinscape To state the obvious: the interesting thing about future or futurisms is not really about the future but the operative sense of this temporal tense. The now and here of the work of futurisms is inscribed in words, images and sounds; it is painted as landscapes and visible in such traces that constantly expand the particular living and breathing space of the present. Future is involved in forming what the now is, and even more so, what times are our contemporaries. Times are entangled and switch places; markers of fossilised pasts appear as imagined indexes of futures too. Future fossils – a topic that ranges from the 19th century geologists and popular culture to contemporary imaginaries of a projected sense of now – comes out in other ways than merely ruins of contemporary landscapes of consumerism. Why are so many artistic and popular culture examples of future landscapes of fossils an imaginary of a future that repeats the trope of its own invention – that is, the modernity of technological objects that defined its start are also the defining features of its seeming end? As such, it is a recursive imaginary that merely tells what we knew already since Walter Benjamin (1999, 540) at least: “As rocks of the Miocene or Eocene in places bear the imprint of monstrous creatures from those ages, so today arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe.” Instead of the cyber cool aesthetics of future fossils of technology that merely returns to the consuming human subject of digital gadgets, consider what times are we living in now: times of toxic ecologies in which the future tense takes different forms for different forms of life (cf. Tsing et al 2017). Consider futurisms and the temporal imaginaries not purely as the solitary “when” but as the contemporary question of where and to whom? What sites are identified as part of this futuristic pull, where are futures placed, how are they inscribed in contemporary cityscapes and landscapes as if signs of things to come? What else besides the Blade Runner styled Asian cities are indexical of what counts as future (Zhang 2017) – and what else than remnants of the visible markers of technological now of gadgets is significant in terms of this out of place of a future present? Hence, a shift in focus: away from a fetishisation of future that inspires the Anthropocene-led aesthetics of future ruinscapes towards an analysis and art of contemporary signs and images. These ruinscapes involve imagining what time is this place in and where it lies and is it seen from. A good example would be Point Nemo, a region in the South Pacific pretty much more imagined to most than actually visited by almost anyone. And yet, it is perhaps one of the most apt sites to consider as a fossil site: it is where the international space agencies are dumping much of their retired space technologies, in no man’s waters, also coined “the least biologically active region of the world ocean” (in the words of oceanographer Steven D’Hondt ) because of its remote location and particular rotating current. With its lifeless bottom of an ocean, with dumped technologies from Cold War to the current day practices, it seems a likely site for a future fossil ruinscape very much existent now – as undramatically invisible as the disappearing ice that defines the transformation of much of planet’s expected future. No mountain of garbage for art photography and the white cube, no site of exquisite trash and remnants of most familiar everyday things, but just the disappearance on the seabed, and the disappearance of ice – the future arrives as a temperature shift. This short text engages in this topic through figures or fields of time that are also visible in contemporary media theory and art practice: archaeologies, futurisms and futurities. All of the briefly discussed themes relate to different ways of engaging with time and futurity, with fossils and fossil fuels, including the ones that are predicted as part of constant financial speculation on the energy market. The past was already a fossil that determined the mess we are in. I Archaeologies At first thought, it is somewhat odd to assume that archaeology – or media archaeology – would have anything to say about futures and futurities, only about the past. The way in which archaeology has for a long time referred to much more than just the specific discipline is here however the significant cue: archaeology has infiltrated philosophy and the humanities from Immanuel Kant to Sigmund Freud to Walter Benjamin to Friedrich Kittler and contemporary media archaeologies and presents itself as more than a specialised discipline. As Knut Ebeling (2016, 8) argues, these various philosophical and artistic wild archaeologies present not merely an image of layered pasts but they become sites of practices of experimentation with “a material reflection of temporality that began in the 18th century and reached a definite climax in the 20th century.” The epistemological figure and field of archaeology becomes then less a complementary sidetrack to the work of history than its alternative: instead of narrating, it counts, instead of text, it applies to the other sort of modalities of materiality as sound, image, number, which is also why it has become the preferred term for so many media theorists. Furthermore, as Ebeling continues referring to Giorgio Agamben, the archaeologist maps what is originating, what is emerging and what is productive of new temporalities. It becomes a map of times of different sort, which often are recognize as stretched between the layers of the past and their effect on the present, but what we could also develop into the recognition how they issue different potentials of futures. Archaeologies are also maps of futures – or more likely, they complexify the linear temporal coordinates as past, present and future. Media archaeologies work with a different set of physics than any assumed simple causality (cf. Elsaesser 2016), which is likely one of the explanations why it has become such an interesting field of resources for artistic work too. Not just the materials of the the quirky retropasts, but the subtle definitions and search for other times in which media from cinema to AI is also part of production of that time. In this context the media archaeological perspective to fossils would not be merely about searching for an image of a future fossil, but to understand how the image itself is premised on the existence of fossil fuel. While the technical image from the photograph to the cinematic is according to Nadia Bozak (2011, 29) the perfect crystallisation of how we, in her words, capture, refine and exploit the sun, it is also the sun energy in fossil fuels such as oil that mobilizes the industrial culture of which technical media is one part. Bozak refers to the wording by Alfred Crosby that oil is the “fossilized sunshine”. This wording is an apt start to establishing the link between energy and the particular different sort of mobilization of light and sun that we can speak of as practices of visual culture (cf. Cubitt 2014). The first fossils are, then, the images and the fossils are also imprints. There is a surprisingly tight link between the history of technical images and the history of mobilization of fossil fuels, which also Bozak (2011, 34) observes: “The relationship between sun and cinema, light and the film environment, is especially apparent when cinema is juxtaposed against current environmental rhetoric, which ultimately fuses the fossil fuel with the fossil image, both manifestations, mummifications, of captured light.” The forms of energy and their forms of capture as technical media present a new time – both in the sense of technical media time, and in the sense that pertains to the massive changes in environmental conditions of living in contexts of the capitalocene. II Futurisms If future fossils were already embedded in the history of fossils as fuel, what becomes of our task to map the different technological futures? Futurisms in 20th century art have a particular relation to technology. The Italian futurists are located at a very particular phase of European history and a very particular machine aesthetics that offered a one temporal sense of progression by way of technological progress. This aesthetic became one recurring reference point to how futures are visualised, sonified and written as poetry in the age of mass-scale industrial systems including electricity and electric light. Energy is not merely represented but imagined as the motor of the aesthetic expression – it becomes its motor of imaginaries (cf. Bozak 2011, 38). It is the city, the urban sphere that was for the contemporary Benjamin also the start of the ruinscape, again later ruined in the bombed down European cities, a form of technical change and planning replicated in many other forms across the planet since the “Great Acceleration” of the Anthropocene post-1950s. Of course, the later (art) futurisms take a different tone that is less the masculine, celebratory stance of a future that should arrive as progress, but a writing of a future that was never allowed or the future that was imposed. It is in such political archaeologies that Afrofuturism and many later ethnofuturisms (as they are sometimes coined) emerge. Whatever the collective term might be, Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, Gulf Futurism, Black Quantum Futurism and other current versions speak of the multiplication of futures in contemporary art and visual culture (Parikka 2018). Some of it feels like future overturned. For Gulf Futurism, and in works by artists such as Sophia Al Maria, the placement of a future that already arrived is read against the backdrop of the architectural built environments in the Arabian Gulf states. The artificial environments that work both horizontally and vertically as significant elements coined also as Dubai Speed (Bromber et al. 2016: 1) speak of one particular version of capitalist futures. Built from oil and fossil pasts, such cities and environments necessitate imaginaries of the future: how are architectures, building materials and infrastructures primed at the back of fossil fuels for a post-fossil life? While a key archaeological question for Walter Benjamin was how to read the city through its fragments as a slow emergence of capitalist consumer culture, the current version in such situations is how the city is imagined towards a future while trying to deal with that industrial legacy and its toxic environments. Gulf Futurism and other artistic futurisms are, in many ways, artistic discourses in this context of toxic environments. Toxicity of course comes in many forms, where chemical toxicity and political pollution go hand in hand. (Guattari 2000). But how does one then imagine in visual arts and in visual forms the style of pollution that is subtler than mere piles of rubbish? The cultural techniques of environmental monitoring are already rather an important form of visual arts in how they make invisible traces perspective and part of matters of concern (Latour 2008). Hence the sort of contemporary arts about air pollution and chemical waste, about radio activity and the loss of biodiversity speak of modalities and scales that otherwise would not be included in registers of futurisms now. Any adequate futurisms need then to be able to deal with the invisibilities that are the ontologically urgent side of what counts as slow violence (Nixon 2013). Hence the future tense in the aesthetic and artistic sense needs to be capable of rather radical detachment from the usual dreamy anthropocentric narratives of worlds without humans, and to engage with contemporary cultural processes that already are without humans. What’s more, the forms of futurisms all speak to the mentioned meaning of archaeology for Agamben: production of new times. III Futurity Lawrence Lek’s recent work on Sinofuturism and Geomancer picks up on the futurist trope but places it in different geographical regions and with a different centre of subjectivity. Furthermore, Geomancer’s CGI film protagonist is an AI instead of the usual human narrator. The AI dreams speak of different worlds and of different modalities of art than ones with a voice or hands could have. The calculational dreams of an AI system are viewed as part of a total memory and calculation system that itself is not only an imaginary of a future but one that prescribes a way to think futurities as a contemporary cultural technique. These are futures that are constantly counted into existence than merely narrated into imaginaries. The mobilization of AI systems in multiple areas of industry and culture is emblematic of what future now means as calculation. Consider then the future image as one that is future in the most limited sense and yet effective in the most widespread sense: the mobilization of various datasets from satellites to ground remote sensing, from media platforms to urban smart infrastructures as part of the training of AI algorithms and predictive measures. For example satellite data on ground level changes – infrastructures, buildings, urban growth, agriculture and crop yields – can be fed into machine learning systems with the aim of predictive data that can feed into for example financial predictions. The temporality of data is here key to understanding the little futures that are constantly created in machine learning and in financial contexts, and with most effective turbulence in terms of the futures market (see Cooper 2010). The machine learning of prediction of surface changes on global datasets or the prediction of real time changes in video feeds such as in experiments with neural nets like Prednet are good examples of the very local techniques useful for an image of a future one step ahead. Recently Abelardo Gil-Fournier has engaged with these platforms and techniques as part of his investigation about the nature of the machine learning/learned image. Furthermore, this resonates well with the wider picture painted by Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun (2003: 290) writing on SF (science fiction) capital based on the various forms of futurism: “[it] exists in mathematical formalizations such as computer simulations, economic projections, weather reports, futures trading, think-tank reports, consultancy papers—and through informal descriptions such as sciencefiction cinema, science-fiction novels, sonic fictions, religious prophecy, and venture capital. Bridging the two are formal-informal hybrids, such as the global scenarios of the professional market futurist.” Futures exist as constant reference points for models, and unpredictable patterns or events are attempted to be constantly “factored into the calculations of world economic futures” (Cooper 2010, 167). Hence, also the unruly non-linear dynamics of any natural system are in this sense not anomalous but merely turbulent and as such material for the various ways different futures can be created, including accounting for the environmental crisis as one part of the work of management (Cooper 2010). From future fossils and apocalyptic far or near futures scenarios as imaginaries we shift to the technological counted futures that are the standard operating procedure of financial markets. It is in this sense that the work of futurisms and creating new temporalities are somewhat paralleled by these tiny futures that are the constant business of the market. This proves the point that imaginaries of futures are not inherently or necessarily anything progressive in the sense of addressing planetary scale justice, but need to be complemented with the analytics, aesthetics as well as imaginaries of counter-futurisms (cf. Parikka 2018) – the work of not merely dreaming but creating infrastructures that imagine and count for our benefit. References Benjamin, Walter 1999. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bozak, Nadia 2011. The Cinematic Footprint. Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bromber, Katrin, Birgit Krawietz, Christian Steiner, and Steffen Wippel. 2016. ‘The Arab(ian) Gulf: Urban Development in the Making’. In Steffen Wippel, Katrin Bromber, Birgit Krawietz and Christian Steiner (eds), Under Construction: Logics of Urbanism in the Gulf Region. London and New York: Routledge, 1–14. Cooper, Melinda 2010. “Turbulent Worlds. Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis”. Theory, Culture & Society vol. 27 (2-3), 167-190. Cubitt, Sean 2014. The Practice of Light. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ebeling, Knut 2016. “Art of Searching: On ‘Wild Archaeologies’ from Kant to Kittler. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics No. 51 (2016), pp. 7–18 Eshun, Kodwo 2003. “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism”. CR: The New Centennial Review 3:2, Summer 2003, 287–302. Latour, Bruno 2008. What is the style of matters of concern? Amsterdam: van Gorcum. Nixon, Rob 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parikka, Jussi 2018. “Middle East and Other Futurisms: imaginary temporalities contemporary art and visual culture.” Culture, Theory and Critique, 59:1, 40-58, Tsing, Anna; Swanson, Heather; Gan, Elaine and Bubandt, Nils, eds. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Zhang, Gary Zhexi 2017. “Where Next?” Frieze, April 22, 2017, https://frieze.com/article/where-next.   by Jussi Parikka https://ift.tt/eA8V8J July 05, 2018 at 07:58AM

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