"Lovecraft's Antarctica is the most truly terrible of all his landscapes. This bleak realm of ice and death, the place where came "both mist and snow" to the Ancient Mariner, is at once a heightened version of the real Antarctic; and a vision of the abhorrent plateau of Leng, the roof of the world; and the labyrinthine city of the Elder Beings. It is a symphonic structure of landscaping. According to de Quincy, Coleridge, before starting "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," has planned "a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream scenery with external things and connected with the imagery of high latitudes." To some similar plan, Lovecraft brought his own fears; he had a horror of, and an allergy to, any temperature lower than twenty degrees and, frequently, in later life, below thirty degrees."