The Nameless City - H P Lovecraft 2

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Nameless City by H. P. Lovecraft. When I drew
nigh the Nameless City, I knew it was a cursed
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

(00:24):
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 of viewless aura, repelled
me and made me retreat from antique and sinister secrets
that no man should see, and no man else had

(00:47):
dared to see. Remote in the desert of Arabi lies
the Nameless City, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly
hidden by the sands of a 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

(01:11):
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 camp fires, and muttered
about by grandams in the tents of sheikhs, so that
all the tribes shun it, without wholly knowing why. It

(01:32):
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 eons death may die. I should have known that
the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city.

(01:54):
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 bare such hideous
lines of fear as mine, why no other man shivers

(02:16):
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

(02:36):
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

(02:57):
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

(03:18):
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 place, that place which
I alone of living men, had seen. In and out

(03:39):
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

(04:02):
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

(04:27):
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 sand storm gathered
behind me, blowing over the gray stones. Though the moon
was bright and most of the desert still, I awakened

(04:52):
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

(05:13):
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 by gone streets and the outlines of the

(05:34):
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 of Manar when

(05:57):
mankind was young, and of ib that was Carvion 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

(06:21):
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

(06:43):
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 worshiped before the desert was a desert.

(07:07):
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 chiseled chamber was very strange, for

(07:30):
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

(07:54):
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

(08:15):
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 cymbals, though
nothing more definite than the other temple had contained. The

(08:37):
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

(08:57):
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

(09:19):
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

(09:41):
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

(10:04):
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.

(10:25):
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

(10:48):
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

(11:12):
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

(11:33):
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

(11:56):
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

(12:19):
when I saw that it was a small and plainly
artificial door chiseled 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

(12:42):
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 worn
of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert, from

(13:03):
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

(13:24):
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 towards
which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours

(13:46):
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,

(14:06):
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

(14:28):
notice it, I was still holding it above me, as
if it were a blaze. I was quite unbalanced with
that instinct for the strange and unknown, which had made
me a wanderer upon the earth and a haunter of
far ancient and forbidden places. In the darkness, there flashed
before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of demonic lore,

(14:53):
sentences from Alhazred, the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal
Nightmares of Damasci, and infamous lines from the delirious image
DuMond of Gautier Demetz. I repeated queer extracts and muttered
of aphrasiab and the demons that floated with him down
the Oxus, later chanting over and over again a phrase

(15:19):
from one of Lord Duncane's tales, the unreverberate 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
witch's cauldrons are when filled with moon drugs in the clipse, distilled.

(15:45):
Leaning to look if foot might pass down through that chasm,
I saw beneath, as far as vision could explore, the
jetty sides, as smooth as glass, looking as if just
varnished o'er with that dark pitch the seat of death
throws out upon its slimy shore. Time had quite ceased

(16:09):
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

(16:29):
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
paleozoic and abysmal place, I felt of such things as
polished wood and glass. I shuddered at the possible implications.

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The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the
passage at regular intervals, and were oblong, 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

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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

(17:35):
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,

(17:59):
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

(18:21):
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

(18:46):
formed a continuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines and
colors were beyond description. The cases were of a strange
golden wood with fronts of exquisite glass, and contained, meaning
the mummified forms of creatures, outreaching in grotesqueness the most
chaotic dreams of man. To convey any idea of these

(19:11):
monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with
body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, and
more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the
paleontologist ever heard. In size, they approximated a small man

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and their forelegs bore delicate and evident feet, curiously like
human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads,
which presented a contour violating all known by logical principles
to nothing. Can such things be well compared? In one flash,

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I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog,
the mythic sat 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

(20:13):
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 paleagean species which
had lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown

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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

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among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling
with matchless skill. Had the artists 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

(21:15):
the progress of the race that worshiped them. These creatures,
I said to myself, were two 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 epoch of the Nameless City,

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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

(21:57):
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 through the rocks
in some marvelous manner to another world whereof their prophets
had told them. It was all vividly weird and realistic,

(22:20):
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 epoch, 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

(22:44):
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

(23:04):
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.

(23:29):
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

(23:53):
end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost
picturesqueness and extravagance trasted 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 in

(24:13):
the desert valley were shown 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 Paradiso scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed,
portraying a hidden world of eternal day, filled with glorious

(24:37):
cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last
I thought I saw signs of an artistic anti climax.
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

(24:59):
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 shown hovering above the
ruins by moonlight, gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as

(25:23):
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 Iram, the
city of Pillars torn to pieces by members of the
elder race. I remembered how the Arabs feared the nameless city,

(25:44):
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 to the end
of the low sealed hall, and was aware of a
game through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence creeping

(26:04):
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

(26:26):
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

(26:47):
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 decoration with fantastic
bah reliefs, which could, if closed, shut the whole inner
world of light, away from the vaults and passages of rock.

(27:10):
I looked at the steps, and for the knots, 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 deathlike exhaustion could banish. As I lay still

(27:33):
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

(27:54):
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 shown in proportions fitted to
the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence

(28:14):
had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I
had noticed in the ruins, I thought curiously of the
lonness 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

(28:35):
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. And as I thought

(28:58):
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

(29:20):
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

(29:41):
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.

(30:03):
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
eerie light and mist could match the lethal dread I

(30:24):
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

(30:45):
man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely
familiar outlines of what could have happened in the geological
ages since the painting 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.

(31:08):
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 in the
Nameless City under a cold moon. And despite my exhaustion,

(31:32):
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,

(31:53):
I received a still greater shock, in the form of
a definite sound, the first which had broken the utter
silence of these tomblike 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

(32:15):
rapidly grew till it soon 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

(32:36):
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

(32:59):
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 being swept bodily through the open gate into

(33:21):
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

(33:45):
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 stronger because it
was largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the last.

(34:07):
I was almost mad, But if I did so, my
cries were lost in the hell born babble of the
howling wind raiths. 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,

(34:30):
reason must have wholly snapped, for I fell to babbling
over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arabel Hazred,
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

(34:53):
really took place, what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the
dark I endured, or what Abaton 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

(35:13):
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,
that its voices were hideous with a pent up viciousness

(35:35):
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

(35:55):
the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange tonguedes. Turning, I
saw outlined against the luminous ether of the abyss, what
could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor,
a nightmare horde of rushing devils, hate, distorted, grotesquely panoplied,

(36:17):
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,

(36:38):
the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal
of metallic music, whose reverberation 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 H. P. Lovecraft