Lake is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft, who appears in the 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness.
Description[]
A professor of biology at Miskatonic University, Lake was the first to discover the Mountains of Madness as a result of his "strange and dogged insistence on a westward -- or rather, northwestward -- prospecting trip", based on his discovery of strange fossils. He also discovers the ancient extraterrestrial specimens that he dubs "Elder Ones", based on their resemblance to "certain monsters of primal myth" found in the Necronomicon. He reports that his findings in Antarctica confirm his belief "that earth has seen whole cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells," and predicts that this "[w]ill mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics." When eight of the Elder Ones turn out to be living creatures rather than fossils, they butcher Lake and the rest of his sub-expedition. For the rest of the story, he is referred to as "poor Lake".
Lake is notable for his "alarmingly radical daring"; he is willing to put the expedition at risk in pursuit of knowledge, asserting that "his new specimens made any hazard worth taking." The narrator Dyer notes at one point that his "excitement had reached the point of mutiny". He is an imaginative personality, as evidenced by his comparison of his first sight of the Mountains of Madness to a "land of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of untrodden wonder." He is familiar with the Cthulhu cult from "prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of".