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Title: The Nameless City
Date of first publication: 1938
Author: Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937)
Date first posted: February 20 2013
Date last updated: February 20 2013
Faded Page eBook #20130220

This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Mary Meehan
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




                        The Nameless City

                        By H. P. LOVECRAFT

    [Transcriber's Note: Published in _Weird Tales_, Volume 32, Number
    5, NOVEMBER, 1938]


     _It lay silent and dead under the cold desert moonlight, but what
     strange race inhabited the abyss under those cyclopean ruins?_


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 might
protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of
this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest
pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade retreat from antique
and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever
dared to see.

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and
inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted
ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were
laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no
legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive;
but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by
grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without
wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad
poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet:

    That is not dead which can eternal lie,
    And with strange eons even death may die.

I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the
nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living
man; yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel.
I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous
lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the
night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly
stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a
cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot
my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for
the dawn.

For hours I waited, till the east grew gray and the stars faded, and the
gray 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 the desert still. Then suddenly above the
desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny
sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that
from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the
fiery disk as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang
and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to
that unvocal stone place; that place too old for Egypt and Meroë to
remember; that place which I alone of living men had seen.

In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and palaces I
wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of 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 gray stones though the moon was
bright and most of the desert still.

       *       *       *       *       *

I awaked just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing
as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last
gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and
marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured
within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre
under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race.
At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the
walls and the bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished
buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed, and wondered at
the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the splendors of
an age so distant that Chaldea could not recall it, and thought of
Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land Mnar when mankind was young,
and of Ib, that was carven of gray stone before mankind existed.

All at once I came upon a place where the bed-rock rose stark through
the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to
promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the
face of the cliff were the unmistakable façades of several small, squat
rock houses or temples, whose interiors might preserve many secrets of
ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long since
effaced any carvings which may have been outside.

Very low and sand-choked were all of the dark apertures near me, but I
cleared one with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to
reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that
the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that
had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive
altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and
though I saw no sculptures nor frescoes, there were many singular stones
clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the
chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly 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 other temples
might yield.

       *       *       *       *       *

Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made
curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long
moon-cast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless
city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch
crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though nothing
more definite than the other temple had contained. The room was just as
low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with
obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the
noise of a wind and of my camel outside broke through the stillness and
drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.

The moon was gleaming vividly over the 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
showed 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 bright flare of the fantastic flame showed me that for which I
had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden
wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and
plainly _artificial_ door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch
within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a rough
flight of very small, numerous, and steeply descending steps. I shall
always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they
meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or mere
footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad
thoughts, and the words and warnings of Arab prophets seemed to float
across the desert from the lands that men know to the nameless city that
men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only a moment before advancing
through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep
passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.

It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other
man can have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely
down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head
could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost
track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch, though I was
frightened when I thought of the distance I must be traversing. There
were changes of direction and of steepness; and once I came to a long,
low level passage where I had to wriggle feet first along the rocky
floor, holding the 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 demoniac lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab,
paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascus, and infamous
lines from the delirious _Image du Monde_ of Gauthier de Metz. I
repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the demons that
floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a
phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--"the unreverberate blackness of
the abyss." Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited
something in singsong from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:

    A reservoir of darkness, black
    As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd
    With moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd.
    Leaning to look if foot might pass
    Down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath,
    As far as vision could explore,
    The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
    Looking as if just varnish'd o'er
    With that dark pitch the Sea of Death
    Throws out upon its slimy shore.

       *       *       *       *       *

Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor,
and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two
smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite
stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept
hither and thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage
whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts. As in
that paleozotic 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 the corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean
phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I had imagined
it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically kept stumbling
ahead into the stronger light I realized that my fancy had been but
feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city
above, but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich,
vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous
scheme of mural painting whose lines and colors 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 paleontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a
small man, and their forelegs bore delicate and evidently flexible feet
curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their
heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological
principles. To nothing can such things be well compared--in one flash I
thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bulldog, the mythic
satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and
protuberant a forehead; yet the horns and the noselessness and the
alligator-like jaw placed the things outside all established categories.
I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they
were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some paleogean
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 showing the progress of the race that
worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to the men of
the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is
to a tribe of Indians.

Holding this view, I thought I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of
the nameless city; the tale of a mighty sea-coast metropolis that ruled
the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as
the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that
held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and
afterward its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its
people here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles were
driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvelous
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 Chaldea, 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 were painted scenes of the utmost
picturesqueness and extravagance; contrasted views of the nameless city
in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of
paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these
views the city and the desert valley were shown always by moonlight, a
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 skilful, and much more bizarre than even the wildest
of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of the
ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world
from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people--always
represented by the sacred reptiles--appeared to be gradually wasting
away, though their spirits as shown 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 showed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer
of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the
older race. I remembered how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and was
glad that beyond this place the gray walls and ceiling were bare.

As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely
the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate through which
came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried
aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other
and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void of uniform
radiance, such as one might fancy when gazing down from the peak of
Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so
cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was an infinity
of subterranean effulgence.

Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep
flight of steps--small, numerous steps like those of the black passages
I had traversed--but after a few feet the glowing vapors concealed
everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage
was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with
fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner world
of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the
steps, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass
door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my
mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like
exhaustion could banish.

As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had
lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible
significance--scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday, the
vegetation of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its
merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by
its universal prominence, and I wondered that it should be so closely
followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the
nameless city had been shown 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 honored; though it perforce reduced the
worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites here involved a crawling
in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could
easily explain why the level passage in the awesome descent should be as
low as the temples--or lower, since one could not even kneel in it. As I
thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so
close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are
curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive
man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form
amidst the many relics and symbols of primordial life.

But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out
fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a
problem worthy of the greatest explorer. That a weird world of mystery
lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt,
and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted
corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable
cities 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 showed oceans and
continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely
familiar outline. 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 soon it reverberated frightfully through
the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an
increasing draft 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 that
gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at
the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the
phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware
of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a
thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination.

The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I
compared myself shudderingly to the only 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 eons 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--caco-demoniacal--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
eon-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 æther of the abyss what could not be
seen against the dusk of the corridor--a nightmare horde of rushing
devils; hate-distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half-transparent devils
of a race no man might mistake--the crawling reptiles of the nameless
city.

And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-peopled 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.


[The end of _The Nameless City_ by Howard Phillips Lovecraft]