Prior to this reread, I had considered this my favourite of HPL's tales. But the truth is, there's just a wee bit too much description of the Old Ones' murals/bas-reliefs/sculpture even for a fan of murals, bas-reliefs and sculpture like me. I mean it's like 60% of the book. Of course it's utterly beyond belief that the narrator and plucky Danforth are able to reconstruct the "aeon-long" (as HPL would, and does, say) history of the Old Ones in such incredible detail just from a few hours gawping at their carvings, but when you're surrounded by Shoggoths and colossal albino penguins, disbelief is suspended by default.

Incidentally, HPL uses "aeon-" as a modifying prefix 12 times in this tale. We get one instance each of "aeon-old" and (my favourite) "aeon-cursed", two of "aeon-long" and "aeon-silent", and SIX, count 'em, descriptions of things as "aeon-dead". The ole slab-faced weirdo actually had a pretty limited vocabulary, just not in the way most people's vocabulary is limited.

I had forgotten how explicitly MoM cites Arthur Gordon Pym — it's practically a sequel. You have to admire the direction HPL takes Poe's enigmatic masterpiece, and how he grounds it in the contemporary with namedrops of Amundsen, Mawson, Scott, etc. I might as well quote here a couple of passages from Mawson's The Home of the Blizzard that convinced me HPL had read it:

We had come to probe its mystery, we had hoped to reduce it to terms of science, but there was always the 'indefinable' which held aloof, yet riveted our souls.

And:

Climbing out of the veranda, one was immediately swallowed in the chaos of hurtling drift, the darkness sinister and menacing [...] Unseen wizard hands clutched with insane fury, hacked and harried.

And as usual, HPL is bang up to date with the science - the theory of continental drift gets a couple of respectful mentions here, and the marvel of aeronautics is a key, albeit somewhat fanciful in terms of fuel-efficiency, plot-driver.

But we're not here for science, are we. We're here for the "foetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm" and the "Cyclopean water-city of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss". We're here for abysses and penguins in general. And this time, I was especially here for the distinctly heartfelt, almost plangent note Lovecraft strikes in his narrative of the rise and fall of the Old Ones, how human he ends up making them despite their cosmic freakshow anatomy. Their Golden Age, their battles with Cthulhu and the Mi-Go, their gradual retreat to that aeon-old, aeon-silent, aeon-cursed, aeon-dead city, the "decadence" of their later carvings which so offends the narrator's sensibilities — it's both a genuine sic transit gloria mundi lament and a brilliant bit of narrative misdirection as it sets up the climactic horror of the shoggoth — and HPL's subway-train simile for the pursuing shoggoth is just as fresh and powerful as the first time I read it. You can imagine him, during his ill-starred sojourn in New York, down in the dinge of the subway surrounded by — ugh — hoi polloi and being utterly scared and distraught at the howling, hellish approach of the train, snug-tight in the tunnel.