And with strange aeons death may die.I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the namelesscity, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defiedthem and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, andthat is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no otherman shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I cameupon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly fromthe rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look Iforgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for thedawn.For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and thegrey turned to roseate light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a stormof sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear and the vastreaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came theblazing 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 crashof musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of theNile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly acrossthe 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 Iwandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these men, if menthey were, who built this city and dwelt therein so long ago. The antiquity ofthe spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to provethat the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportionsand dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools, anddug 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 achill 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 sandstormgathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright andmost of the desert still.I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringingas from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gustsof a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and marked thequietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within thosebrooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, andagain dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in theafternoon I spent much time tracing the walls and bygone streets, and theoutlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mightyindeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured allthe spendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, andthought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind wasyoung, 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 thesand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to promisefurther traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the face of the cliffwere 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 clearedone with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatevermysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed atemple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped beforethe desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiouslylow, were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures or frescoes, there weremany singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. Thelowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly kneelupright; but the area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at atime. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars andstones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting and inexplicable natureand made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such atemple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avidto find what the temples might yield.Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiositystronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long mooncast shadows thathad daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the twilight I clearedanother aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague stonesand 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 passagecrowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was pryingwhen the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke through the stillness anddrew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a densecloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some pointalong the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which haddisturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter whenI chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. Thisastonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the suddenlocal winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judgedit was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to acave, and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceivingthat 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 thistemple, which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorwayfar less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrificforce of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the darkdoor, 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 wasat rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of thecity, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored inunquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dullmy thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into thedark chamber from which it had come.This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either ofthose I had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern since it borewinds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright, but saw thatthe stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the wallsand roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of theancient race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbledaway; and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze ofwell-fashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to methat the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered whatthe prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skillmust have been vast.Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which I hadbeen seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind hadblown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificialdoor chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a blacktunnel with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous andsteeply descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for Icame to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call themsteps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with madthoughts, and the words and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float across thedesert 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 andcommencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though ona ladder.It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other mancan have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down likesome hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not lightthe unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours andforgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of thedistance I must have be traversing. There were changes of direction and ofsteepness; and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wrigglemy feet first along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's length beyond myhead. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of thesteep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torchdied out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it Iwas still holding it above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced withthat instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer uponearth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherishedtreasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs fromthe apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the deliriousImage du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered ofAfrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chantingover and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--"The unreveberateblackness of the abyss." Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recitedsomething 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 Ifound myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two smallertemples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite stand, butcould kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither atrandom. I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined withcases of wood having glass fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place Ifelt of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possibleimplications. The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage atregular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins inshape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further examination, Ifound that they were firmly fastened.I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in acreeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in theblackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my surroundingsand be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used tothinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endlesscorridor of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. Andthen in a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it.Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came agradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of acorridor 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 veryfaint; but as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light Irealised that my fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of cruditylike the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent andexotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed acontinuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines and colours were beyonddescription. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisiteglass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching ingrotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of thereptile kind, with body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile, sometimes theseal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or thepalaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and theirfore-legs bore delicate and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers.But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violating allknow biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared - in oneflash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythicSatyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberanta forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placedthings outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the realityof the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decidedthey were indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless citywas alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed inthe costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, andunknown shining metals.The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for theyheld first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. Withmatchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein theyhad cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I could not helpbut think that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps shewing theprogress 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 sometotem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the namelesscity; the tale of a mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled the world beforeAfrica rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, andthe desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars andtriumphs, its troubles and defeats, and afterwards its terrible fight againstthe desert when thousands of its people - here represented in allegory by thegrotesque reptiles - were driven to chisel their way down though the rocks insome marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. Itwas all vividly weird and realistic, and its connection with the awesome descentI had made was unmistakable. I even recognized the passages.As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later stagesof the painted epic - the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in thenameless city and the valley around for ten million years; the race whose soulsshrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so long where they hadsettled as nomads in the earth's youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primalshrines at which they had never ceased to worship. Now that the light was betterI studied the pictures more closely and, remembering that the strange reptilesmust represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city.Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization, which included awritten alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurablylater civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions. Icould, 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 thereticence shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal ofimmortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmostpicturesqueness and extravagance: contrasted views of the nameless city in itsdesertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of paradise to whichthe race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and thedesert valley were shewn always by moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over thefallen walls, and half-revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shownspectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost tooextravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled withglorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last I thought I sawsigns of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were less skillful, and much morebizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record aslow decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward theoutside world from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people -always represented by the sacred reptiles - appeared to be gradually wastingaway, through their spirit as shewn hovering above the ruins by moonlight gainedin proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursedthe upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed aprimitive-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 thenameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceilingwere bare.As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely tothe end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate through which came allof the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried aloud intranscendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and brighterchambers there was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such one mightfancy 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; beforeme was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flightof steps - small numerous steps like those of black passages I had traversed -but after a few feet the glowing vapours concealed everything. Swung back openagainst the left-hand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass,incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closedshut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. Ilooked at the step, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the openbrass door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mindaflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like exhaustion couldbanish.As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightlynoted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance -scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday - the vegetations of thevalley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. Theallegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and Iwondered that it would be so closely followed in a pictured history of suchimportance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportionsfitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificencehad 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 undergroundcorridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deitiesthere honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhapsthe very rites here involved crawling in imitation of the creatures. Noreligious theory, however, could easily explain why the level passages in thatawesome descent should be as low as the temples - or lower, since one cold noteven kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideousmummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mentalassociations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poorprimitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human formamidst the many relics and symbols of the primordial life.But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove outfear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problemworthy of the greatest explorer. That a weird world of mystery lay far down thatflight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to find therethose human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. Thefrescoes had pictured unbelievable cities, and valleys in this lower realm, andmy fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even thephysical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles andantediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another worldof eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmalantiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement isfeeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of thenameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoesshewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and theresome vaguely familiar outlines. Of what could have happened in the geologicalages since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbedto decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in theluminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled tothink of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silentdeserted vigil.Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which hadintermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and thenameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myselfstarting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the blackcorridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My sensations werelike those which had made me shun the nameless city at night, and were asinexplicable as they were poignant. In another moment, however, I received astill greater shock in the form of a definite sound - the first which had brokenthe utter silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of adistant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I wasstaring. Its volume rapidly grew, till it soon reverberated frightfully throughthe low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an increasingdraught of old air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city above. Thetouch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for I instantly recalled thesudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset andsunrise, one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to me. I looked atmy watch and saw that sunrise was near, so bracing myself to resist the galethat was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. Myfear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings overthe unknown.More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into the gulfof the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor forfear 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 myform toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension andimagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once moreI compared myself shudderingly to the only human image in that frightfulcorridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in thefiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictiverage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I think I screamedfrantically near the last - I was almost mad - of the howling wind-wraiths. Itried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not evenhold 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 thatunexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the namelesscity: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--whatindescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddonguided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the nightwind till oblivion - or worse - claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, wasthe thing - too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in thesilent 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 viciousnessof desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still chaotic before me,seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there inthe grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit worldof 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 notbe seen against the dusk of the corridor - a nightmare horde of rushing devils;hate distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half transparent devils of a race no manmight mistake - the crawling reptiles of the nameless city.And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness ofearth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen doorclanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberationsswelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it fromthe banks of the Nile.
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