H.P. Lovecraft. Celephais
Celephais
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written early Nov 1920
Published May 1922 in The Rainbow, No. 2, p. 10-12.
In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast 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. 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
to remind him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did
not care for the ways of the people about him, but preferred to dream and
write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he
showed 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 show 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 had been 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 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 snowcapped mountain
near the shore.
Kuranes had awakened the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from
his brief glance that it was none other than Celephais, 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 Celephais. 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 Celephais.
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 spice he had sat upon before, and Athib seemed not to
realize that any time had passed. Then the two rowed to a galley in the
harbour, and giving orders to the oarmen, commenced to sail out into the
billowy Cerenarian 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 Celephais
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 Celephais 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 this 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,
showing 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 Celephais 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 in 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 Celephais, 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 fulfillment came, and he met
the cortege of knights come from Celephais 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 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 villagers 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 curtsied as the horsemen
clattered down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the
abyss of dreams. 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 west and
hid all the landscape in effulgent draperies. The abyss was 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 Celephais, 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 neighboring
regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Celephais and in the
cloud-fashioned Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign happily
for ever, 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.
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