The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

by H. P. Lovecraft

  41. Kid O’Brien was an actual boxer in the 1930s; Buck Robinson a boxer in the 1980s. Neither appears to have been aware of his predecessors, and one suspects that the names in the story are aliases.

  42. Lovecraft had a deep-seated abhorrence of blacks, Jews, southern Italians, Portuguese, Poles, Mexicans, French Canadians, and virtually every other race that was not “light-skinned Nordic.” In a letter to Lillian D. Clark (January 11, 1926, quoted in S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, eds., Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters—H. P. Lovecraft, 181), he wrote, “In general, America has made a fine mess of its population, and will pay for it in tears amidst a premature rottenness unless something is done extremely soon.”

  43. This racist sentiment turns out to be unjustified, for the solution indeed does work on the African American.

  44. A slender, narrow, but thick-bladed stabbing knife, not the bayonet-style or later switchblade versions popularized in the world wars and the postwar era.

  45. Published in May 1922 in Home Brew 1, no. 4, 53–58, and reprinted in Weird Tales 36, no. 8 (November 1942), 96–99.

  46. Seven years before 1910—that is, in 1903. This confirms the dating of the first West tale in autumn 1903.

  47. Great strides had been made during the nineteenth century (especially during the American Civil War) in the practice of embalming; by the early twentieth century, the techniques had become well established. In fact, two different embalming compounds or fluids were often used, one (often Formalin, formaldehyde mixed with water) injected arterially and the other (Formalin mixed with alcohols, emulsifiers, and other substances) introduced into body cavities. Only recently have “green” techniques not involving harsh carcinogens won acceptance.

  48. That is, Leavitt did not “drop dead”—West killed him with an injection.

  49. Published June 1922 in Home Brew 1, no. 5, 45–50, and reprinted in Weird Tales 37, no. 1 (September 1943), 88–91.

  50. The hostilities of World War I commenced in late July 1914; the United States did not officially declare war on Germany until April 1917, and American troops did not enter the trenches in Europe until a year later. Many Americans did enlist in the Canadian forces, and in 1925, Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King proposed that a “Cross of Sacrifice” be presented to honor those volunteers. The monument was erected in 1927 in the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

  51. This is five years after the murder of Robert Leavitt, about twelve years after the narrator and West commenced their experimentation.

  52. The narrator has now sunk into depravity. He knew perfectly well that West killed Robert Leavitt in the pursuit of his experiments but decided to carry on as his colleague.

  53. The events recounted here evidently took place earlier than 1919, when, as has been shown, Dr. Halsey escaped from the Sefton Asylum.

  54. The poetry of the towering French modernist Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) is much admired today but was decried at the time of publication for themes of sexuality and the corruption of the city. The only son of François Baudelaire, a civil servant and former priest (he resigned from the priesthood during the Reign of Terror), and Caroline Dufayis, an orphan, who were sixty-two and twenty-eight years old, respectively, when he was born, Baudelaire cultivated a reputation as a free spender, a rake, and a sensualist. A masterful prose stylist in his own right, he notably translated the work of Edgar Allan Poe, also publishing several studies of Poe’s life and work. Baudelaire’s own life was marked by artistic and political contradictions, among them his support of the overthrow of the French monarchy in the revolution of 1848—for Baudelaire, a short-lived period of support for political liberalism that he later described, in his Journaux Intimes (Intimate Journals, 1909), as “Mon Ivresse” (My Frenzy). Perhaps his best-known work is Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), a publishing undertaking that saw Baudelaire, an exacting proofreader, leasing a room close to the typesetting and printing operations so that he could oversee production. (His sympathetic publisher later was sent to debtor’s prison; Baudelaire went to court to defend the volume.) Among the many acts of eccentricity (or depravity) that Baudelaire was said to have committed—many cannot be verified—was inviting a group of acquaintances to look at a pair of riding breeches reputed to have been fabricated from the hind quarters of his deceased stepfather, Jacques Aupick, with whom he had endured periods of decidedly hostile relations.

  55. Elagabalus, also known as Heliogabalus (Latin: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus; ca. 203–222 CE) was the emperor of Rome from 218 to 222. He was known for his decadence and sexual depravity. Edward Gibbon, in volume 1 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, describes him as having “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury. . . . It may seem probable, the vices and follies of Elagabalus have been adorned by fancy, and blackened by prejudice. Yet, confining ourselves to the public scenes displayed before the Roman people, and attested by grave and contemporary historians, their inexpressible infamy surpasses that of any other age or country” (172). Lovecraft had two editions of Gibbon in his personal library.

  56. The village of St. Eloi, on the Western Front, later gained notoriety for its devastation by underground mines during the war. Thirty or more mines were detonated there by the British and German forces. Six were exploded by the British in March 1916; eighteen more were set off by British and Canadian forces to mark the start of the Battle of Messines on June 7, 1917.

  57. The Distinguished Service Order is a military decoration established in 1886 by Queen Victoria for British officers serving meritoriously. Prior to 1917, the medal was frequently awarded to senior administrative officers as well as combatants; after 1916, it was limited to those serving under actual fire.

  58. Published July 1922 in Home Brew 1, no. 6, 57–62, and reprinted in Weird Tales 37, no. 2 (November 1943), 101–7.

  59. Possibly the Granary Burying Ground, founded in 1660. Located on Tremont Street, it is the burial place of Paul Revere, three signatories to the Declaration of Independence, and the five victims of the 1770 Boston Massacre. Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, near the North End of Boston, established in 1659, is the resting place of Cotton, Increase, and Samuel Mather. We may rule out the King’s Chapel Burying Ground, where John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, is buried, because it is clearly the oldest, founded in 1630, not “one of the oldest.”

  Cover of Re-Animator, no. 3. Adventure Comics, April 1992 (artist: Lurene Haines)

  60. The Averill/Averell/Averhill genealogy reveals numerous residents of Boston in colonial times and later. See http://averillproject.com/documents/william

  1william2job3.pdf.

  61. This is presumably Buck Robinson, the Harlem Smoke, from “Six Shots by Moonlight.”

  A less tasteful poster from Re-Animator (Empire Pictures, 1985), directed by Stuart Gordon.

  A more tasteful poster from Re-Animator (Empire Pictures, 1985), directed by Stuart Gordon.

  62. That is, in 1915. The date is given there in very precise fashion. Therefore, these events took place in the spring of 1921 (slightly more than a year before publication). That would place the interment of Dr. Halsey in Sefton Asylum in 1905, sixteen years earlier.

  The French poster from Re-Animator (Empire Pictures, 1985), directed by Stuart Gordon.

  Another poster from Re-Animator (Empire Pictures, 1985), directed by Stuart Gordon.

  Cover of Re-Animator, no. 2. Adventure Comics, April 1992 (artist: Tony Harris)

  Cover of The Chronicles of Dr. Herbert West, no. 1. Zenescope, September 2008 (artist: Jason Craig)

  Cover from Re-Animator, no. 0. Dynamite Entertainment, 2005 (artist: Jim Charalampidis)

  The Nameless City1

  The story is the first in which Lovecraft squarely addresses the mythology he was to explain later. He not only describes the existence of an elder race and a civilization predating humans but specifically mentions the Necronomicon (though not by name) and its author
as a central plot point. Later tales will further elucidate his vision of elder races, but here, in a truly terrifying tale, the experience of a naïve explorer who discovers the existence of such beings is recorded.

  When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling 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,2 this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid;3 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 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,4 and while the bricks of Babylon5 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 grandams6 in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred7 the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet:

  That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange æons even8 death may die.9

  “When I drew nigh the Nameless city, I knew it was accursed.” Weird Tales 32, no. 5 (November 1938) (artist: Joseph Doolin)

  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 roseal 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 disc as Memnon10 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 Meroë11 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 those men, if men they were, who built the 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.12 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 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 splendours of an age so distant that Chaldæa13 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.14

  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 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 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 more than kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch shewed only part 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 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 primeval 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 I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided that 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 about 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 presuma
bly 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 shewed 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 foot-holds 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 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.