Antarctica enters the account not through a description of its landscape but through the beings and histories associated with it: the winged, star-headed Antarctic star-headed plant race, which had a central place in the ancient conflicts of the Great Race of Yith and whose captive minds left traces in that civilization’s city and records.

Ancient Inhabitants and Conflict

The Great Race of Yith’s history includes intermittent, devastating wars against several kinds of invader. Among its opponents were the winged, star-headed Old Ones, whose center lay in Antarctica. The conflict places the continent within the wider history of struggles that shaped the Great Race’s survival, although the account gives no further geographical or military details about the Antarctic center itself.

Captive Minds and the Yithian City

Antarctica is also connected to the Great Race through minds taken from its star-headed, plant-like inhabitants. One such captive, S’gg’ha, had been held in the Great Race’s ancient city. In the narrator’s remembered knowledge of that city, S’gg’ha had chiselled pictures into blank spaces on the walls of a tower. The detail makes the captive mind more than an entry in a catalogue: its images remain a material trace of an Antarctic being’s presence within an alien civilization.

Narrative Significance

These references place Antarctica at the intersection of two histories: the Great Race’s wars against a powerful rival and its practice of capturing minds from distant species and eras. The account presents the Antarctic beings as participants in a conflict and as individual intelligences whose works survive in the Great Race’s urban spaces. It does not describe Antarctica’s terrain or the later fate of its inhabitants, keeping the continent’s significance focused on this ancient political and intellectual connection.