The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft
The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft Written January 1921
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 have 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, through 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 remember 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 step, 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 cold 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 old 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
bracing 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 – 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 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.