H.P. Lovecraft. The Nameless City
The Nameless City
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written January 1921
Published November 1921 in The Wolverine, No. 11: 3-15.
When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling
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-grandfather 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 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 of the night
before he sang his unexplained couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons 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 roseate 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 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 place; that place which I alone of living men had seen.
In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I
wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these men, if
men they were, who built this 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 awakened 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 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 spendours 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 bedrock 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 effaced any carvings
which may have been outside.
Very low and sand-choked were all 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 or 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 kneel upright; but the area was so great
that my torch showed only part of it 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 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
mooncast 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 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 primitive 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 that I had seen and heard
before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided
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 among 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 showed that form 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 footholds in a
precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the words
and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the
land that men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I
hesitated only for 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 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 my feet first along the rocky floor, holding 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 above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that
instinct for the strange and the unknown which had 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 daemonic 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 unreveberate 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 Seat 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 that 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
a 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 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
paintings whose lines and colours were beyond description. The cases were
of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing
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 evident feet curiously like human
hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented
a contour violating all know biological principles. To nothing can such
things be well compared - in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied
as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove
himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and
the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed 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 help 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 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 could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless
city; the tale of a mighty seacoast 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 afterwards 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
though the rocks in some marvellous manner to another world whereof their
prophets had told them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its
connection with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable. I even
recognized 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 had 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 civilization, which included a written alphabet, had
seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later
civilizations 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 shown concerning natural death. It was as though
an ideal of immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.
Still nearer the end of the passage was 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 of 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, golden nimbus
hovering over the fallen walls, and half-revealing the splendid perfection
of former times, shown 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
anticlimax. The paintings were less skillful, 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 above 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 to
the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a 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 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 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 vegetations 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 would 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
here involved crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory,
however, could easily explain why the level passages 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 the 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, 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 eery 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 of 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 outlines. Of
what could have happened in the geological ages 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 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 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 it soon 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 revealed the hidden tunnels to me. I
looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so braced myself to
resist the gale that 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 the 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 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 of the morning 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 these 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-pooled darkness 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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