The Nameless City

The Nameless City

by H.P. Lovecraft


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.