HP Lovecrafts At the Mountains of Madness is, among other things, a cautionary tale. Explorers discover the realm of what they dub the Elder Things, otherworldly beings who created a sophisticated and beautiful civilization on Earth by engineering monstrous shoggoths to serve their grand visions. With every need served, the civilization degraded, until its citizens met their doom at the amoebic appendages of the horrors they had created but failed to control.