In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the sea-coast
beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted
galleys that sail out of the harbour toward the distant regions where
the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name
of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. Perhaps it
was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his
family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there
were not many to speak to him and remind him who he had been. His money
and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about
him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was
laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept
his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he
withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his
dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on
paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote.
Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth,
and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes
sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it,
he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep,
amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in
the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen
and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to
remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some
of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and
gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs
overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping
cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that
ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and
then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that
world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been
dreaming of the house where he was born; the great stone house covered
with ivy, where thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived, and
where he had hoped to die. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into
the fragrant summer night, through the gardens, down the terraces, past
the great oaks of the park, and along the long white road to the
village. The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the
moon which had commenced to wane, and Kuranes wondered whether the
peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or death. In the streets
were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on either side were
either broken or filmily staring. Kuranes had not lingered, but had
plodded on as though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey
the summons for fear it might prove an illusion like the urges and
aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal. Then he had
been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street toward the
channel cliffs, and had come to the end of things—to the precipice and
the abyss where all the village and all the world fell abruptly into
the unechoing emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead was
empty and unlit by the crumbling moon and the peering stars. Faith had
urged him on, over the precipice and into the gulf, where he had
floated down, down, down; past dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams,
faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly dreamed dreams, and
laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the
worlds. Then a rift seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he
saw the city of the valley, glistening radiantly far, far below, with a
background of sea and sky, and a snow-capped mountain near the shore.
Kuranes had awaked the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from
his brief glance that it was none other than Celephaïs, in the Valley
of Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where his spirit had dwelt
all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he
had slipt away from his nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him to
sleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village. He had
protested then, when they had found him, waked him, and carried him
home, for just as he was aroused he had been about to sail in a golden
galley for those alluring regions where the sea meets the sky. And now
he was equally resentful of awaking, for he had found his fabulous city
after forty weary years.
But three nights afterward Kuranes came again to Celephaïs. As before,
he dreamed first of the village that was asleep or dead, and of the
abyss down which one must float silently; then the rift appeared again,
and he beheld the glittering minarets of the city, and saw the graceful
galleys riding at anchor in the blue harbour, and watched the gingko
trees of Mount Aran swaying in the sea-breeze. But this time he was not
snatched away, and like a winged being settled gradually over a grassy
hillside till finally his feet rested gently on the turf. He had indeed
come back to the Valley of Ooth-Nargai and the splendid city of
Celephaïs.
Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked
Kuranes, over the bubbling Naraxa on the small wooden bridge where he
had carved his name so many years ago, and through the whispering grove
to the great stone bridge by the city gate. All was as of old, nor were
the marble walls discoloured, nor the polished bronze statues upon them
tarnished. And Kuranes saw that he need not tremble lest the things he
knew be vanished; for even the sentries on the ramparts were the same,
and still as young as he remembered them. When he entered the city,
past the bronze gates and over the onyx pavements, the merchants and
camel-drivers greeted him as if he had never been away; and it was the
same at the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, where the
orchid-wreathed priests told him that there is no time in Ooth-Nargai,
but only perpetual youth. Then Kuranes walked through the Street of
Pillars to the seaward wall, where gathered the traders and sailors,
and strange men from the regions where the sea meets the sky. There he
stayed long, gazing out over the bright harbour where the ripples
sparkled beneath an unknown sun, and where rode lightly the galleys
from far places over the water. And he gazed also upon Mount Aran
rising regally from the shore, its lower slopes green with swaying
trees and its white summit touching the sky.
More than ever Kuranes wished to sail in a galley to the far places of
which he had heard so many strange tales, and he sought again the
captain who had agreed to carry him so long ago. He found the man,
Athib, sitting on the same chest of spices he had sat upon before, and
Athib seemed not to realise that any time had passed. Then the two
rowed to a galley in the harbour, and giving orders to the oarsmen,
commenced to sail out into the billowy Cerenerian Sea that leads to the
sky. For several days they glided undulatingly over the water, till
finally they came to the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. Here the
galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky
among fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kuranes
could see strange lands and rivers and cities of surpassing beauty,
spread indolently in the sunshine which seemed never to lessen or
disappear. At length Athib told him that their journey was near its
end, and that they would soon enter the harbour of Serannian, the pink
marble city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast where
the west wind flows into the sky; but as the highest of the city’s
carven towers came into sight there was a sound somewhere in space, and
Kuranes awaked in his London garret.
For many months after that Kuranes sought the marvellous city of
Celephaïs and its sky-bound galleys in vain; and though his dreams
carried him to many gorgeous and unheard-of places, no one whom he met
could tell him how to find Ooth-Nargai, beyond the Tanarian Hills. One
night he went flying over dark mountains where there were faint, lone
campfires at great distances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with
tinkling bells on the leaders; and in the wildest part of this hilly
country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he found a
hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges
and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of
such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in
the grey dawn he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and
when the sun rose he beheld such beauty of red and white flowers, green
foliage and lawns, white paths, diamond brooks, blue lakelets, carven
bridges, and red-roofed pagodas, that he for a moment forgot Celephaïs
in sheer delight. But he remembered it again when he walked down a
white path toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would have questioned the
people of that land about it, had he not found that there were no
people there, but only birds and bees and butterflies. On another night
Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came to a
tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon;
and in the silent city that spread away from the river-bank he thought
he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known before. He
would have descended and asked the way to Ooth-Nargai had not a
fearsome aurora sputtered up from some remote place beyond the horizon,
shewing the ruin and antiquity of the city, and the stagnation of the
reedy river, and the death lying upon that land, as it had lain since
King Kynaratholis came home from his conquests to find the vengeance of
the gods.
So Kuranes sought fruitlessly for the marvellous city of Celephaïs and
its galleys that sail to Serannian in the sky, meanwhile seeing many
wonders and once barely escaping from the high-priest not to be
described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells
all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery on the cold desert plateau
of Leng. In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day
that he began buying drugs in order to increase his periods of sleep.
Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space
where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of
existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space
was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of
planets and organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from
the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist. Kuranes was
now very anxious to return to minaret-studded Celephaïs, and increased
his doses of drugs; but eventually he had no more money left, and could
buy no drugs. Then one summer day he was turned out of his garret, and
wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a
place where the houses grew thinner and thinner. And it was there that
fulfilment came, and he met the cortege of knights come from Celephaïs
to bear him thither forever.
Handsome knights they were, astride roan horses and clad in shining
armour with tabards of cloth-of-gold curiously emblazoned. So numerous
were they, that Kuranes almost mistook them for an army, but their
leader told him they were sent in his honour; since it was he who had
created Ooth-Nargai in his dreams, on which account he was now to be
appointed its chief god for evermore. Then they gave Kuranes a horse
and placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically
through the downs of Surrey and onward toward the region where Kuranes
and his ancestors were born. It was very strange, but as the riders
went on they seemed to gallop back through Time; for whenever they
passed through a village in the twilight they saw only such houses and
villages as Chaucer or men before him might have seen, and sometimes
they saw knights on horseback with small companies of retainers. When
it grew dark they travelled more swiftly, till soon they were flying
uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came upon the village
which Kuranes had seen alive in his childhood, and asleep or dead in
his dreams. It was alive now, and early villagers courtesied as the
horsemen clattered down the street and turned off into the lane that
ends in the abyss of dream. Kuranes had previously entered that abyss
only at night, and wondered what it would look like by day; so he
watched anxiously as the column approached its brink. Just as they
galloped up the rising ground to the precipice a golden glare came
somewhere out of the east and hid all the landscape in its effulgent
draperies. The abyss was now a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean
splendour, and invisible voices sang exultantly as the knightly
entourage plunged over the edge and floated gracefully down past
glittering clouds and silvery coruscations. Endlessly down the horsemen
floated, their chargers pawing the aether as if galloping over golden
sands; and then the luminous vapours spread apart to reveal a greater
brightness, the brightness of the city Celephaïs, and the sea-coast
beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted
galleys that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions where the
sea meets the sky.
And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the
neighbouring regions of dream, and held his court alternately in
Celephaïs and in the cloud-fashioned Serannian. He reigns there still,
and will reign happily forever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth
the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had
stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly,
and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a
notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the
purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.
Return to “Celephaïs”
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