The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced
evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of
so vastly ancient a date - Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian
- as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly
evolved life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or
at most the trilobite stage. These fragments, with their odd marking,
must have been five hundred million to a thousand million years
old.
II
Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to
our wireless bulletins of Lake’s start northwestward into regions
At the Mountains of Madness |