Friday October 14th, 2011 - The Nameless City

The Nameless City by H. P. Lovecraft

Published November 1921

Illustration by Giacomo Carmagnola

Category: Cthulhu Mythos/Dream Cycle

One of the things I love most about fiction - literature, movies, TV, the whole bloody lot - is the temporary escape it gives me. For a brief few moments I can feel my way across the floor of an enormous, pitch black chamber filled with open pits, each one home to an unseen, snarling beast. I can fly with the shantak-bird or watch a town turn to dust. It's not like I'd like to live in these places! Well, I'd maybe visit them (with a shotgun and a little button that says "Press to get the hell out of here.") But there are many places I'm glad to have visited in those moments reading stories, and The Nameless City is an excellent example of one such place.

Our nameless narrator, an explorer of some kind, is tramping through the desert on a camel as he approaches the nameless city. We are very early introduced to the most repeated, most popular and most famous quote from the Gentleman Of Providence.

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

My take on it is this: If you can bury it, and it can lay there for millennia, it's not really dead if somehow death died also. Even simpler: Don't turn your back on an ancient dead thing. That's sufficiently creepy for my taste.

If he means something beyond that I haven't puzzled it out.

He reaches the nameless city and Lovecraft sets the scene for us. The city is built into the sandstone walls of a valley. Again, as in many great horror tales, we are led into a place as isolated and remote as the Moon - there will be no hope of calling for help. So of course our narrator enters a tunnel...

"It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have had 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 my 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 high above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which has made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places."

Lovecraft paints this gorgeous scene for us - the shadowy chambers and temples, all with frescoes and friezes and symbols of things older than humanity, of things thoroughly inhuman.

It's a fantastic trip into a bizarre, ancient, alien city. At risk of cheapening it, think of it as a bone-dry sequel to The Temple. Highly recommended.

~~

I read this story in one of my first volumes of Lovecraftiana - my well read The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams Of Terror And Death - a fantastic collection of his late work in triptychs of the Dreamlands. I've done some research now about this area of his work and it's very detailed and fascinating; it really reads like a very dark version of Wonderland or Neverland.