object:1f.lovecraft - The Nameless City
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was
travelling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I
saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may
protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of
this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest
pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from
antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else
had ever dared to see.
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and
inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted
ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were
laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no
legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever
alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered
about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun
it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred
the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable
couplet:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the
nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living
man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel.
I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous
lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the
night-wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly
stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a
cold moon amidst the desert’s heat. And as I returned its look I forgot
my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for
the dawn.
For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and
the grey turned to roseal light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and
saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky
was clear and the vast reaches of the desert still. Then suddenly above
the desert’s far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the
tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I
fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal
to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across
the sand to that unvocal stone place; that place too old for Egypt and
Meroë to remember; that place which I alone of living men had seen.
In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and palaces I
wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of those men,
if men they were, who built the city and dwelt therein so long ago. The
antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some
sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind.
There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did
not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of
the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing
significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a
chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in
the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small
sighing sandstorm gathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones
though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.
I awaked just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears
ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through
the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless
city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more
I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand
like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the
forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much
time tracing the walls, and the bygone streets, and the outlines of the
nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed,
and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all
the splendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it,
and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when
mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before
mankind existed.
All at once I came upon a place where the bed-rock rose stark through
the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to
promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the
face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several small, squat
rock houses or temples; whose interiors might preserve many secrets of
ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long since
effaced any carvings which may have been outside.
Very low and sand-choked were all of the dark apertures near me, but I
cleared one with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to
reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that
the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that
had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive
altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and
though I saw no sculptures nor frescoes, there were many singular
stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of
the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly more than
kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch shewed only part
at a time. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain
altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting, and
inexplicable nature, and made me wonder what manner of men could have
made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place
contained, I crawled out again, avid to find what the other temples
might yield.
Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made
curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long
moon-cast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless
city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch
crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though nothing
more definite than the other temple had contained. The room was just as
low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with
obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when
the noise of a wind and of my camel outside broke through the stillness
and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.
The moon was gleaming vividly over the primeval ruins, lighting a dense
cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from
some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly,
sandy wind which had disturbed the camel, and was about to lead him to
a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that
there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me
fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds I had
seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal
thing. I decided that it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave,
and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon
perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long
distance south of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking
sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, which as I neared it loomed
larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked
sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind
almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing
uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread about the weird ruins. Soon
it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all
was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral
stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver
as though mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could
explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the
wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had
come.
This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either
of those I had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern,
since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite
upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the
other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some
traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race, curious curling
streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of
the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned
curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the
shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what
the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their
engineering skill must have been vast.
Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame shewed me that for which I
had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the
sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small
and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my
torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a
rough flight of very small, numerous, and steeply descending steps. I
shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what
they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or
mere foot-holds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad
thoughts, and the words and warnings of Arab prophets seemed to float
across the desert from the lands that men know to the nameless city
that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only a moment before advancing
through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep
passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.
It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any
other man can have had such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led
infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held
above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was
crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch,
though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must be
traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness, and once
I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle feet first
along the rocky floor, holding my torch at arm’s length beyond my head.
The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the
steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my
failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for
when I did notice it I was still holding it high above me as if it were
ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and
the unknown which has made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of
far, ancient, and forbidden places.
In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished
treasury of daemoniac lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab,
paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous
lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated
queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated
with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase
from one of Lord Dunsany’s tales—“the unreverberate blackness of the
abyss”. Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something
in sing-song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:
“A reservoir of darkness, black
As witches’ cauldrons are, when fill’d
With moon-drugs in th’ eclipse distill’d.
Leaning to look if foot might pass
Down thro’ that chasm, I saw, beneath,
As far as vision could explore,
The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
Looking as if just varnish’d o’er
With that dark pitch the Sea of Death
Throws out upon its slimy shore.”
Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor,
and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two
smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not
quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and
crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a narrow
passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts.
As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as
polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications. The
cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular
intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins in
shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further
examination, I found they were firmly fastened.
I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a
creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in
the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my
surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched
on. Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the
darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its
low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of
indescribable emotion I did see it.
Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came
a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim
outlines of the corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown
subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I
had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically
kept on stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my
fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the
temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and
exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures
formed a continuous scheme of mural painting whose lines and colours
were beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with
fronts of exquisite glass, and contained the mummified forms of
creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.
To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of
the reptile kind, with body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile,
sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the
naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated
a small man, and their fore legs bore delicate and evidently flexible
feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were
their heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological
principles. To nothing can such things be well compared—in one flash I
thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bulldog, the mythic
Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had so colossal and
protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the
alligator-like jaw placed the things outside all established
categories. I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half
suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were
indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city
was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously
enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments
of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals.
The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for
they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and
ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of
their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their
dimensions; and I could not but think that their pictured history was
allegorical, perhaps shewing the progress of the race that worshipped
them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to the men of the
nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to
a tribe of Indians.
Holding this view, I thought I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of
the nameless city; the tale of a mighty sea-coast metropolis that ruled
the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as
the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that
held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and
afterward its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its
people—here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles—were
driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvellous
manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It was
all vividly weird and realistic, and its connexion with the awesome
descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognised the passages.
As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later
stages of the painted epic—the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt
in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years; the
race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so
long, where they had settled as nomads in the earth’s youth, hewing in
the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they never ceased to
worship. Now that the light was better I studied the pictures more
closely, and, remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the
unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many
things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilisation, which included
a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those
immeasurably later civilisations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were
curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent
deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence,
and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence shewn concerning natural
death. It was as though an ideal of earthly immortality had been
fostered as a cheering illusion.
Still nearer the end of the passage were painted scenes of the utmost
picturesqueness and extravagance; contrasted views of the nameless city
in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm or
paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In
these views the city and the desert valley were shewn always by
moonlight, a golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls and half
revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shewn spectrally and
elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too
extravagant to be believed; portraying a hidden world of eternal day
filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very
last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anti-climax. The paintings
were less skilful, and much more bizarre than even the wildest of the
earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient
stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from
which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people—always
represented by the sacred reptiles—appeared to be gradually wasting
away, though their spirit as shewn hovering about the ruins by
moonlight gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as
reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who breathed it;
and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a
pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members
of the elder race. I remembered how the Arabs fear the nameless city,
and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were
bare.
As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely
the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a great gate through
which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it,
I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead
of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void of
uniform radiance, such as one might fancy when gazing down from the
peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a
passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was
an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep
flight of steps—small numerous steps like those of the black passages I
had traversed—but after a few feet the glowing vapours concealed
everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage
was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with
fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner world
of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the
steps, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass
door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my
mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like
exhaustion could banish.
As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had
lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible
significance—scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday, the
vegetation of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which
its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me
by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it should be so
closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the
frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the
reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had
been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the
ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of
the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of
deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce
reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites had
involved a crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory,
however, could easily explain why the level passage in that awesome
descent should be as low as the temples—or lower, since one could not
even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous
mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental
associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for
the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was
the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of primordial
life.
But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out
fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a
problem worthy of the greatest explorer. That a weird world of mystery
lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt,
and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted
corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable
cities, hills, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on
the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.
My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even
the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead
reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and
faced by another world of eerie light and mist, could match the lethal
dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An
ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from
the primal stones and rock-hewn temples in the nameless city, while the
very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes shewed oceans and
continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some
vaguely familiar outline. Of what could have happened in the geological
aeons since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully
succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these
caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid
relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages through which
these relics had kept a silent and deserted vigil.
Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had
intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and
the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found
myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along
the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My
sensations were much like those which had made me shun the nameless
city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In
another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form
of a definite sound—the first which had broken the utter silence of
these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant
throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was
staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till soon it reverberated frightfully
through the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an
increasing draught of cold air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and
the city above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for
I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth
of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed served to
reveal the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that
sunrise was near, so braced myself to resist the gale which was
sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My
fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel
broodings over the unknown.
More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night-wind into that
gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at
the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the
phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware
of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a
thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy of
the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I compared myself
shudderingly to the only other human image in that frightful corridor,
the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the
fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a
vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I
think I screamed frantically near the last—I was almost mad—but if I
did so my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling
wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent,
but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably
toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped, for
I fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad
Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place—what
indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what
Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver
in the night-wind till oblivion—or worse—claims me. Monstrous,
unnatural, colossal, was the thing—too far beyond all the ideas of man
to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours when one
cannot sleep.
I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was
infernal—cacodaemoniacal—and that its voices were hideous with the
pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently those voices,
while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take
articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered
aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard
the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I
saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss what could not be
seen against the dusk of the corridor—a nightmare horde of rushing
devils; hate-distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half-transparent; devils
of a race no man might mistake—the crawling reptiles of the nameless
city.
And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-peopled
blackness of earth’s bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the
great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music
whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the
rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
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