 Caterpillars by E. F. Benson I saw a month or two ago in an Italian paper that the Villa Cascana, in which I once stayed, had been pulled down, and that a manufactory of some sort was in process of erection on its site. There is therefore no longer any reason for refraining from writing of those things which I myself saw, or imagined I saw, in a certain room and on the certain landing of the villa in question, nor from mentioning the circumstances which followed, which may, or may not, according to the opinion of the reader, throw some light on, or be somehow connected with this experience. The Villa Cascana was in all ways but one a perfectly delightful house, yet, if it were standing now, nothing in the world, I use the phrase in its literal sense, would induce me to set foot in it again, for I believe it to have been haunted in a very terrible and practical manner. Most ghosts, when all is said and done, do not do much harm. They may perhaps terrify, but the person whom they visit usually gets over their visitation. They may, on the other hand, be entirely friendly and beneficent. But the appearances in the Villa Cascana were not beneficent, and had they made their visit, in a very slightly different manner, I do not suppose I should have got over it any more than Arthur English did. The house stood on an Ilex-clad hill, not far from Cestri di Levante, on the Italian Riviera, looking out over the iridescent blues of that enchanted sea, while behind it rose the pale green chestnut woods that climb up the hillsides till they give place to the pines that black in contrast with them crown the slopes. All round it the garden in the luxuriance of mid-spring bloomed and was fragrant, and the scent of magnolia and rose, born on the salt-freshness of the winds from the sea, flowed like a stream through the cool vaulted rooms. On the ground floor a broad-pillared loggia ran round three sides of the house, the top of which formed a balcony for certain rooms on the first floor. The main staircase, broad and of grey marble steps, led up from the hall to the landing outside these rooms, which were three in number, namely two big sitting rooms and a bedroom arranged en suite. The latter was unoccupied, the sitting rooms were in use. From these the main staircase was continued to the second floor, where were situated certain bedrooms, one of which I occupied, while from the other side of the first floor landing some half-dozen steps led to another suite of rooms, where at the time I am speaking of Arthur English, the artist, had his bedroom and studio. Thus the landing outside my bedroom at the top of the house commanded both the landing of the first floor and also the steps that led to English's rooms. Jim Stanley and his wife, finally, whose guest I was, occupied rooms in another wing of the house, where also were the servants' quarters. I arrived just in time for lunch on a brilliant noon of mid-May. The garden was shouting with colour and fragrance, and, not less delightful after my broiling walk up from the marina, should have been the coming from the reverberating heat and blaze of the day into the marble coolness of the villa. Only the reader has my bare word for this and nothing more. The moment I set foot in the house I felt that something was wrong. This feeling, I may say, was quite vague, though very strong, and I remember that when I saw letters waiting for me on the table in the hall I felt certain that the explanation was here. I was convinced that there was bad news of some sort for me. Yes, when I opened them I found no such explanation of my premonition, my correspondence all reaped of prosperity. Yet this clear miscarriage of a presentiment did not dissipate my uneasiness. In that cool fragrant house there was something wrong. I am at pains to mention this, because to the general view it may explain that though I am, as a rule, so excellent a sleeper that the extinction of my light on getting into bed is apparently contemporaneous with being called on the following morning, I slept very badly on my first night in the villa Cascana. It may also explain the fact that when I did sleep, if it was indeed in sleep that I saw what I thought I saw, I dreamt in a very vivid and original manner. Original, that is to say, in the sense that something that, as far as I knew, had never previously entered into my consciousness, usurped it then. But since, in addition to this evil premonition, certain words and events occurring during the rest of the night might have suggested something of what I thought had happened that night, it will be as well to relate them. After lunch, then, I went round the house with Mrs. Stanley, and during our tour she referred, it is true, to the unoccupied bedroom on the first floor, which opened out of the room where we had lunched. We left that unoccupied, she said, because Jim and I have a charming bedroom and dressing room as you saw in the wing, and if we used it ourselves we should have to turn the dining room into a dressing room and have our meals downstairs. As it is, however, we have our little flat there, Arthur English has his little flat in the other passage, and I remembered, aren't I extraordinary, that you once said that the higher up you were in a house the better you were pleased. So I put you at the top of the house instead of giving you that room. It is true, that a doubt, vague as my uneasy premonition, crossed my mind at this, I did not see why Mrs. Stanley should have explained all this, if there had not been more to explain. I allow, therefore, that the thought that there was something to explain about the unoccupied bedroom was momentarily present in my mind. The second thing that may have borne in on my dream was this. At dinner the conversation turned for a moment on ghosts. English, with a certainty of conviction, expressed his belief that anybody who could possibly believe in the existence of supernatural phenomena was unworthy of the name of an ass. The subject instantly dropped. As far as I can recollect, nothing else occurred or was said that could bear on what follows. We all went to bed rather early, and personally I yawned my way upstairs, feeling hideously sleepy. My room was rather hot, and I threw all the windows wide, and from without poured in the white light of the moon and the love-song of many nightingales. I undressed quickly, and got into bed. But though I had felt so sleepy before, I now felt extremely wide awake. But I was quite content to be awake. I did not toss or turn. I felt perfectly happy listening to the song and seeing the light. Then it is possible I may have gone to sleep, and what follows may have been a dream. I thought anyhow that after a time the nightingales ceased singing, and the moon sank. I thought also that if, for some unexplained reason, I was going to lie awake all night, I might as well read, and I remembered that I had left a book in which I was interested in the dining room on the first floor. So I got out of bed, lit a candle, and went downstairs. I went into the room, saw on a side-table the book I had come to look for, and then, simultaneously, saw that the door into the unoccupied bedroom was open. A curious gray light, not of dawn nor of moonshine, came out of it, and I looked in. The bed stood opposite the door. A big four-poster hung with tapestry at the head. Then I saw that the grayish light of the bedroom came from the bed, or rather from what was on the bed. For it was covered with great caterpillars, a foot or more in length, which crawled over it. They were faintly luminous, and it was the light from them that showed me the room. Instead of the sucker-feet of ordinary caterpillars, they had rows of pincers, like crabs, and they moved by grasping what they lay on with their pincers, and then sliding their bodies forward. In color these dreadful insects were yellowish gray, and they were covered with irregular lumps and swellings. There must have been hundreds of them, for they formed a sort of writhing, crawling pyramid on the bed. Occasionally one fell off onto the floor with a soft, fleshy thud, and though the floor was of hard concrete, it yielded to the pincer-feet, as if it had been putty, and crawling back the caterpillar would mount on to the bed again, to rejoin its fearful companions. They appeared to have no faces, so to speak, but at one end of them there was a mouth that opened sideways in respiration. Then as I looked, it seemed to me as if they all suddenly became conscious of my presence. All the mouths of Denerate were turned in my direction, and the next moment they began dropping off the bed with those soft, fleshy thuds onto the floor and wriggling towards me. For one second a paralysis as if a dream was on me, but the next I was running upstairs again to my room, and I remember feeling the cold of the marble steps on my bare feet. I rushed into my bedroom and slammed the door behind me, and then, I was certainly wide awake now, I found myself standing by my bed, with the sweat of terror pouring from me. The noise of the banged door still rang in my ears, but as would have been more usual if this had been mere nightmare, the terror that had been mine when I saw those foul beasts crawling about the bed or dropping softly onto the floor, did not cease then. Wake now, if dreaming before, I did not at all recover from the horror of dream. It did not seem to me that I had dreamed, and until dawn I sat or stood not daring to lie down, thinking that every rustle or movement that I heard was the approach of the caterpillars. To them and the claws that bit into the cement, the wood of the door was child's play, steel would not keep them out. But with the sweet and noble return of day, the horror vanished. The whisper of wind became benign and again. The nameless fear, whatever it was, was smoothed out, and terrified me no longer. Dawn broke, huiless at first, then it grew dove-coloured, then the flaming pageant of light spread over the sky. The admirable rule of the house was that everybody had breakfast, where and when he pleased, and in consequence it was not till lunchtime that I met any of the other members of our party, since I had breakfast on my balcony, and wrote letters and other things till lunch. In fact I got down to that meal rather late, after the other three had begun. Between my knife and fork there was a small pillbox of cardboard, and as I sat down English spoke. "'Do look at that,' he said, since you're interested in natural history, I found it crawling on my counterpane last night, and I don't know what it is. I think that before I opened the pillbox I expected something of the sort which I found in it. Inside it anyhow was a small caterpillar, grayish-yellow in colour, with curious bumps and excrescences on its rings. It was extremely active, and hurried round the box this way and that. Its feet were unlike the feet of any caterpillar I ever saw. They were like the pincers of a crab. I looked and shut the lid down again. "'No, I don't know it,' I said, but it looks rather unwholesome. What are you going to do with it?' "'Oh, I shall keep it,' said English. This has begun to spin. I want to see what sort of moth it turns into.' I opened the box again, and saw that these hurrying movements were indeed the beginning of the spinning of the web of its cocoon. Then English spoke again. "'It's got funny feet, too,' he said. "'They're like crab-spincers. What's the Latin for crab?' "'Oh, yes, cancer. So in case it is unique, let's christen it—cancer, English ensis.' Then something happened in my brain, some momentary piecing together of all that I had seen or dreamed. Something in his words seemed to me to throw light on it all, and my own intense horror at the experience of the night before linked itself onto what he had just said. In effect I took the box, and threw it, caterpillar and all, out of the window. There was a gravel path just outside, and beyond it a fountain playing into a basin. The box fell into the middle of this.' English laughed. So the students of the occult don't like solid facts, he said, my poor caterpillar. The talk went off again at once onto other subjects, and I have only given in detail, as they happen, these trivialities in order to be sure myself that I have recorded everything that could have borne on occult subjects or on the subject of caterpillars. But at the moment when I threw the pill-box into the fountain I lost my head. My only excuse is that, as is probably plain, the tenant of it was in miniature, exactly what I had seen crowded onto the bed in the unoccupied room, and though this translation of those phantoms into flesh and blood, or whatever it is that caterpillars are made of, or perhaps to have relieved the horror of the night, as a matter of fact it did nothing of the kind. It only made the crawling pyramid that covered the bed in the unoccupied room more hideously real. After lunch we spent a lazy hour or two strolling about the garden or sitting in the logear, and it must have been about four o'clock when Stanley and I started off to bathe, down the path that led by the fountain into which I had thrown the pill-box. The water was shallow and clear, and at the bottom of it I saw its white remains. The water had disintegrated the cardboard, and it had become no more than a few strips and shreds of sodden paper. The centre of the fountain was a marbled Italian cupid, which squirted the water out of a wine-skin held under its arm. And crawling up its leg was the caterpillar. Strange and scarcely credible as it seemed, it must have survived the falling to bits of its prison, and made its way to shore. There it was, out of arm's reach, weaving and waving this way and that as it evolved its cocoon. Then as I looked at it, it seemed to me again that like the caterpillar I had seen last night, it saw me. Breaking out of the threads that surrounded it, it crawled down the marble leg of the cupid, and began swimming like a snake across the water of the fountain towards me. It came with extraordinary speed. The fact of a caterpillar being able to swim was new to me, and in another moment was crawling up the marble lip of the basin. Just then English joined us. Why, if it isn't told Cancer Englishensis again, he said, catching sight of the beast, what a tearing hurry it's in. We were standing side by side on the path, and when the caterpillar had advanced to within about a yard of us, it stopped, and began waving again, as if in doubt as to the direction in which it should go. Then it appeared to make up its mind, and crawled onto English's shoe. It likes me best, he said, but I don't really know that I like it, and as it weren't drawn, I think perhaps. He shook it off his shoe onto the gravel path, and trod on it. All afternoon the air got heavier and heavier with the Sirocco that was without doubt coming up from the south, and that night again I went up to bed, feeling very sleepy. But below my drowsiness, so to speak, there was the consciousness, stronger than before, that there was something wrong in the house, that something dangerous was close at hand. But I fell asleep at once, and how long after I do not know, either woke or dreamt I awoke, feeling that I must get up at once, or I should be too late. Then, dreaming or awake, I lay, and fought this fear, telling myself that I was but the prey of my own nerves, disordered by Sirocco or what not, and at the same time quite clearly knowing, in another part of my mind, so to speak, that every moment's delay added to the danger. At last this second feeling became irresistible, and I put on coat and trousers, and went out of my room onto the landing. And then I saw that I had already delayed too long, and that I was now too late. The hole of the landing of the first floor below was invisible under the swarm of caterpillars that crawled there, the folding doors into the sitting-room from which opened the bedroom, where I had seen them last night, were shut, but they were squeezing through the cracks of it, and dropping one by one through the key-hole, elongating themselves into mere string as they passed, and growing fat and lumpy again on emerging. Some, as if exploring, were nosing about the steps into the passage, at the end of which were English's rooms, others were crawling on the lowest steps of the staircase that led up to where I stood. The landing, however, was completely covered with them. I was cut off, and of the frozen horror that seized me when I saw that, I can give no idea in words. Then at last a general movement began to take place, and they grew thicker on the steps that led to English's room. Gradually, like some hideous tide of flesh, they advanced along the passage, and I saw the foremost, visible by the pale gray luminousness that came from them, reach his door. Again and again I tried to shout and warn him, in terror all the time that they would turn at the sound of my voice, and mount my stare instead. But for all my efforts I felt that no sound came from my throat. They crawled along the hinge crack of his door, passing through as they had done before, and still I stood there, making impotent efforts to shout to him, to bid him escape while there was time. At last the passage was completely empty. They had all gone, and at that moment I was conscious for the first time of the cold of the marble landing on which I stood barefooted. The dawn was just beginning to break in the eastern sky. Six months after I met Mrs. Stanley in a country house in England. We talked on many subjects, and at last she said, I don't think I've seen you since I got that dreadful news about Arthur English a month ago. I haven't heard, said I. No. He has got cancer. They don't even advise on operation, for there is no hope of a cure. He's riddled with it, the doctor say. Now, during all these six months, I do not think a day had passed on which I had not had, in my mind, the dreams, or whatever you like to call them, which I had seen in the villa Cascana. It is awful, is it not? she continued, and I can't help feeling that he may have caught it at the villa, I asked. She looked at me in blank surprise. Why did you say that? she asked. How did you know? Then she told me, in the unoccupied bedroom a year before, there had been a fatal case of cancer. She had, of course, taken the best advice, and had been told that the utmost dictates of prudence would be obeyed so long as she did not put anybody to sleep in that room, which had also been thoroughly disinfected and newly whitewashed and painted. But end of caterpillars. Man may kill a cat, and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire, for the cat is cryptic and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Egyptis, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Mero and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of Hori and Sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language, but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten. In Ulthar, before ever the Burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old codder and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not, save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel. And from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife, because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more. And instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently, or console himself by thanking fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Althar were simple, and knew not whence it is, all cats first came. One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the south entered the narrow cobbled streets of Althar. Dark wanderers, they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the marketplace they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell, but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies, and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a headdress with two horns, and a curious disc betwixt the horns. There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no mother or father, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow, and when one is very young one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called many's smiled more often than he wept, as he sat playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon. On the third morning of the wanderers' stay in Ulthar, many's could not find his kitten, and as he sobbed aloud in the marketplace certain villagers told him of the old man, his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed and a tongue no villager could understand, though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy nebulous figures of exotic things of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs, natures full of such illusions to impress the imaginative. That night the wanderers left Ulthar and were never seen again, and the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished, cats large and small, black, gray, striped, yellow, and white. Old Craneon the burgomaster swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of many's kitten, and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old Cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect, for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still no one durst complained to the sinister couple, even when little Atal, the innkeeper's son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, too abreast, as if in performance of some unheard of right of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy, and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old Cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard. So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger, and when the people awakened at dawn, behold, every cat was back at his accustomed hearth, large and small, black, gray, striped, yellow and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marveled not a little. Old Craneon again insisted it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife, but all agreed on one thing, that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious, and for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doves by the fire or in the sun. It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgo master decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him shang the blacksmith and thull the cutter of stone as witnesses, and when they had broken down the frail door they found only this, two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners. There was subsequently much talk among the burges of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary, and Cranon and Shag and Thull were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper's son, was closely questioned and given a sweet meat as reward. They talked of the old cauter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small menes in his black kitten, of the prayer of menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard. And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hathag and discussed by travelers in Nier, namely that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat, and of the cats of Ulthar by H.P. Lovecraft. The Crawling Chaos by H.P. Lovecraft. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Crawling Chaos by H.P. Lovecraft. Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of de Quincey and the paradis artificielles of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal. And the world knows well the beauty the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much has been told. No man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind. Or hint at the direction of the unheard of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly born. De Quincey was drawn back into Asia. That teeming land of nebulous shadows whose hideous antiquity is so impressive that, quote, the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual, unquote. But farther than that he dared not go. Those who have gone farther seldom returned. And even when they have they have been either silent or quite mad. I took opium but once in the year of the plague when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose. My physician was worn out with horror and exertion. And I traveled very far indeed. In the end I returned and lived. But my nights are filled with strange memories. Nor have I ever permitted a doctor to give me opium again. The pain and pounding in my head had been quite unendurable when the drug was administered. Of the future I had no heed to escape whether by cure, unconsciousness, or death was all that concerned me. I was partly delirious so that it is hard to place the exact moment of transition. But I think the effect must have begun shortly before the pounding ceased to be painful. As I've said there was an overdose so my reactions were probably far from normal. The sensation of falling curiously dissociated from the idea of gravity or direction was paramount. Though there was subsidiary impression of unseen throngs in incalculable profusion, throngs of infinitely diverse nature but all more or less related to me. Sometimes it seemed less as though I were falling than as though the universe or the ages were falling past me. Suddenly my pain ceased and I began to associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force. The falling had ceased also giving place to a sensation of uneasy temporary rest. And when I listened closely I fancied the pounding was that of the vast inscrutable sea. As its sinister colossal breakers lacerated some desolate shore after a storm of titanic magnitude, then I opened my eyes. For a moment my surrounding seemed confused like a projected image hopelessly out of focus but gradually I realized my solitary presence in a strange and beautiful room lighted by many windows. Of the exact nature of the apartment I could form no idea for my thoughts were still far from settled. But I noticed van colored rugs and draperies elaborately fashioned tables chairs ottomans and divas and delicate vases and ornaments which conveyed a suggestion of the exotic without being actually alien. These things I noticed yet they were not long uppermost in my mind. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression came a dizzying fear of the unknown. A fear all the greater because I could not analyze it and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace not death but some nameless unheard of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent. Presently I realized that the direct symbol and excitement of my fear was the hideous pounding whose incessant reverberations throbbed maddeningly against my exhausted brain. It seemed to come from a point outside and below the edifice in which I stood and to associate itself with the most terrifying mental images. I felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silkong walls and shrank from glancing through the arched, lattice windows that opened so bewilderingly on every hand. Perceiving shutters attached to these windows I closed them all averting my eyes from the exterior as I did so. Then employing a flint and steel which I found on one of the small tables I lit the many candles reposing about the walls and arabesque sconces. The added sense of security brought by closed shutters and artificial light calmed my nerves to some degree but I could not shut out the monotonous pounding. Now that I was calmer the sound became as fascinating as it was fearful and I felt a contradictory desire to seek out its source despite my still powerful shrinking. Opening a portier at the side of the room nearest the pounding I beheld a small and richly draped corridor ending in a cavern door and large orial window. To this window I was irresistibly drawn though my ill-defined apprehensions seemed almost equally bent on holding me back. As I approached it I could see a chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then as I attained it and glanced out on all sides the stupendous picture of my surroundings burst upon me with full and devastating force. I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before and which no living person can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building stood on a narrow point of land or what was now a narrow point of land fully three hundred feet above what must lately have been a seething vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed out precipice of red earth whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling and frightfully eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation. Out a mile or more there rose and fell menacing breakers at least fifty feet in height and on the far horizon ghoulish black clouds of grotesque contour were resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waves were dark and purplish almost black and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if with uncouth greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground perhaps abetted by the angry sky recovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle had thrown me. I realized that my actual physical danger was acute. Even whilst I gazed the bank had lost many feet and it could not be long before the house would fall undermined into the awful pit of lashing waves. Accordingly, I hastened to the opposite side of the edifice and finding a door emerged at once locking it after me with a curious key which had hung inside. I now beheld more of the strange region about me and marked a singular division which seemed to exist in the hostile ocean and firmament. On each side of the jutting promontory different conditions held sway. At my left as I faced inland was a gently heaving sea with great green waves rolling peacefully in under a brightly shining sun. Something about that sun's nature and position made me shudder. But I could not then tell and cannot tell now what it was. At my right also was the sea but it was blue, calm and only gently undulating. While the sky above it was darker and the washed out bank more nearly white than reddish, I now turned my attention to the land and found occasion for fresh surprise for the vegetation resembled nothing I had ever seen or read about. It was apparently tropical or at least subtropical. A conclusion borne out by the intense heat of the air. Sometimes I thought I could trace strange analogies with the flora of my native land fancying that the well-known plants and shrubs might assume such forms under a radical change of climate but the gigantic and omnipresent palm trees were plainly foreign. The house I had just left was very small hardly more than a cottage but its material was evidently marble and its architecture was weird and composite involving a quaint fusion of western and eastern forms. At the corners were Corinthian columns but the red tile roof was like that of a Chinese pagoda. From the door inland there stretched a path of singularly white sand about four feet wide and lined on either side with stately palms and unidentifiable flowering shrubs and plants. It lay toward the side of the promontory where the sea was blue and the bank rather whitish. Down this path I felt impelled to flee as if pursued by some malignant spirit from the pounding ocean. At first it was slightly uphill then I reached a gentle crest. Behind me I saw the scene I had left the entire point with the cottage and the black water with the green sea on one side and the blue sea on the other and a curse unnamed and unnameable lowering overall. I never saw it again and often wonder after this last look I strode ahead and surveyed the inland panorama before me. The path, as I have intimated, ran across the right-hand shore as one went inland. Ahead into the left I now viewed a magnificent valley comprising thousands of acres and covered with a swaying growth of tropical grass higher than my head. Almost at the limit of vision was a colossal palm tree which seemed to fascinate and beckon me. By this time wonder and escape from the imperiled peninsula had largely dissipated my fear but as I paused and sank fatigued to the path hardly digging with my hands into the warm whitish golden sand a new and acute sense of danger seized me. Some terror in the swishing tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea and I started up crying loudly and disjointedly. Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is it a beast that I'm afraid of? My mind wandered back to an ancient and classical story of tigers which I had read. I strove to recall the author but had difficulty. Then in the midst of my fear I remembered that the tale was by Rudyard Kipling. Nor did the grotesqueness of deeming him an ancient author occur to me. I wished for the volume containing the story and had almost started back toward the doomed cottage to procure it when my better sense in the lure of the palm prevented me. Whether or not I could have resisted the backward beckoning without the counter fascination of the vast palm tree I do not know. This attraction was now dominant and I left the path and crawled on hands and knees down the valley's slope. Despite my fear of the grass and of the serpents it might contain I resolved to fight for life and reason as long as possible against all menaces of sea or land. Though I sometimes feared defeat as the maddening swish of the uncanny grasses joined the still audible and irritating pounding of the distant breakers I would frequently pause and put my hands to my ears for relief but could never quite shut out the detestable sound. It was as it seemed to me only after ages that I finally dragged myself to the beckoning palm tree unlike quiet beneath its protecting shade. There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror. Incidents which I trembled to recall and dare not seek to interpret no sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of the palm than they're dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I never beheld before though ragged and dusty this being bore the features of a fawn or demigod and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled and extended its hand but before I could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing notes high and low blent with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness the sun had by this time sunk below the horizon and in the twilight I saw an oriole of lamp and light encircled the child's head then in a tone of silver it addressed me it is the end they have come down through the gloaming from the stars now all is over and beyond the Aranurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Taelui as the child spoke I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree and rising greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard a god and goddess they must have been for such beauty is not mortal and they took my hands saying come child you have heard the voices and all as well in Taelui beyond the melky way and the Aranurian streams are cities all of amber and chalcedony and upon their domes of many facets glisten the images of strange and beautiful stars under the ivory bridges of Taelui flow rivers of liquid gold bearing pleasure barges bound for blossomy Scytherian of the seven sons and in Taelui and Scytherian abide only youth beauty and pleasure nor are any sounds heard save of laughter song and the loot only the gods dwell in Taelui of the golden rivers but among them shalt thou dwell as I listened enchanted I suddenly became aware of a change in my surroundings the palm tree so lately overshadowing my exhausted form was now some distance to my left and considerably below me I was obviously floating in the atmosphere companioned not only by the strange child in the radiant pair but by a constantly increasing throng of half luminous vine-crowded youths and maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance we slowly ascended together as if born on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but from the golden nebulae and the child whispered in my ear that I must look always upward to the pathways of light and never backward to the sphere I had just left the youths and maidens now chanted malifluous choreambics to the accompaniment of lutes and I felt enveloped in a peace and happiness more profound than any I had in life imagined when the intrusion of a single sound alerted my destiny and shattered my soul through the ravishing strains of the singers and the lutenists as if in mocking demonic concord throbbed from gulfs below the damnable the detestable pounding of that hideous ocean as those black breakers beat their message into my ears I forgot the words of the child and looked back down upon the doomed scene from which I thought I had escaped down through the ether I saw the accursed earth slowly turning ever turning with angry and tempestuous seas gnawing at wild desolate shores and dashing foam against the tottering towers of deserted cities and under a ghastly moon their gleamed sights I can never describe sites I can never forget deserts of corpse like clay and jungles of ruin and decadence where once stretched the populous plains and villages of my native land and maelstroms of frothing ocean where once rose the mighty temples of my forefathers round the northern pole steamed a morass of noisome growths and miasma vapours hissing before the onslaught of the ever-mounting waves that curled and fretted from the shuttering deep then a rending report clave the night and a thwart the desert of deserts appeared a smoking rift still the black ocean foamed and gnawed eating away the desert on either side as the rift in the center widened and widened there was now no land left but the desert and still the fuming ocean eight and eight all at once I thought even the pounding sea seemed afraid of something afraid of the dark gods of the inner earth that are greater than the evil god of waters but even if it was it could not turn back and the desert had suffered too much from those nightmare waves to help them now so the ocean eight the last of the land and poured into the smoking gulf thereby giving up all it had ever conquered from the new flooded lands it flowed again uncovering death and k and from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled loath simply uncovering knighted secrets of the years when time was young and the gods unborn above the waves rose weedy remembered spires the moon laid pale lilies of light on dead London and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with stardust then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered terrible spires and monoliths of lands that men never knew were lands there was not any pounding now but only the unearthly roaring and hissing of waters tumbling into the rift the smoke of that rift had changed to steam and almost hit the world as it grew denser and denser it seared my face and hands and when i looked to see how it affected my companions i found they had all disappeared then very suddenly it ended and i knew no more till i awaked upon a bed of convalescence as the cloud of steam from the plutonic gulf finally concealed the entire surface from my sight all the firmament shrieked at a sudden agony of mad reverberations which shook the trembling ether in one delirious flash and burst it happened one blinding deafening holocaust of fire smoke and thunder that dissolved the wan moon as it sped outward to the void and when the smoke cleared away and i sought to look upon the earth i beheld against the background of cold humorous stars only the dying sun and the pale mournful planets searching for their sister end of the crawling chaos by hp lovecraft this recording is in the public domain the nameless city by hp lovecraft read by mark nelson this is a libravox recording all libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit libravox.org the nameless city by hp 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 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 a viewless aura repelled me and made me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see and no man else had dared to see remote in the desert of araby lies the nameless city crumbling and in articulate 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 babelon 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 grand ends in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without holy knowing why it was of this place that abdull al-hazred 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 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 rosy at 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 desert still then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun seeing 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 conceived 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 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 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 awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams my ears ringing as from some metallic peel i saw the sun peering readily 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 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 of manar when mankind was young and of ib that was carbon of gray stone before mankind existed all at once i came upon a place where the bedrock 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 if faced any carvings which may have been outside very low and 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 worshipped before the desert was a desert 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 loneness of the chiseled 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 shuttered 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 temples might yield night had now approached yet the tangible things i'd 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 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 fisher 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 plotted 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 brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which i had been seeking the opening to those remote or abysses whence the sudden wind had blown and i grew faint 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 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 warning of Arab prophets seem to float across the desert from the land that men know to the name the 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 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 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 holding torch at arms 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 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 hunter of far ancient and forbidden places in the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of demonic lore sentences from al-hazred the mad arab paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of damascus and infamous lines from the delirious image demand of gautier de metz i repeated queer extracts and muttered of a phraseab and the demons that floated with him down the oxus later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of lord danceni's tales the unreverberate blackness of the abyss once when the descent grew amazingly steep i recited something in sing song from thomas more until i feared to recite more a reservoir of darkness black as witches cauldrons are when filled with moon drugs in the clips distilled 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 or 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 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 paleozoic 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 picture 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 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 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 paintings 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 and 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 evident 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 bullfrog 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 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 paleogen 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 worshiped them these creatures i said to myself were two men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to roam or some totem beast is to a tribe of indians holding this view i could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city the tale of a mighty seacoast 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 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 where of their profits had told them it was all vividly weird and realistic and its connection with the awesome descent i had made was unmistakable i even recognize 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 study 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 has 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 near the end of the passage was 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 in 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 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 seem 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 spirit 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 elder 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 to the end of the low-sealed 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 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 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 bar 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 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 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 vegetations 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 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 had been and reflected a moment on certain oddities i had noticed in the ruins i thought curiously of the loneliness 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 worshipers 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 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 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 flight of peculiarly small steps i could not doubt and i hope 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 eerie 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 rockhewn 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 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 teamed in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond now i was alone with vivid relics and i tremble 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 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 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 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 that 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 the gulf of the inner earth i dropped prone again i'd 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 babble of the howling windwraiths 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 arabal husband 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 a badden 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 cacodemoniacal that its voices were hideous with a pent up viciousness of desolate eternities presently these voices while still chaotic before me seem 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 ether of the abyss what could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor a nightmare horde of rushing devils hate distorted grotesquely panoplyd 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 pooled darkness of earth's bowels for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peel 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 hp lovecraft this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to find out how you can volunteer please visit please visit libra vox dot org the raven by edgar alan poe read by zoe early once upon a midnight dreary while i pondered weak and weary over many acquaintance and curious volume of forgotten lore while i nodded nearly napping suddenly there came a tapping as of someone gently rapping rapping at my chamber door just some visit her i muttered tapping at my chamber door only this nothing more ah distinctly i remember it was in the bleak december and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor eagerly i wished the morrow vainly i had sought to borrow from my books or cease of sorrow sorrow for the lost linoar for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named linoar nameless here forevermore and the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrilled me filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before so that now to steal the beating of my heart i stood repeating tis some visitor in treating entrance at my chamber door some late visitor in treating entrance at my chamber door this it is and nothing more presently my soul grew stronger hesitating then no longer sir said i or madam truly your forgiveness i implore but the fact is i was napping and so gently you came rapping and so faintly you came tapping tapping at my chamber door that i scarce was sure i heard you here i opened wide the door but darkness there and nothing more deep into that darkness peering long i stood there wondering fearing doubting dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before but the silence was unbroken and the darkness gave no token and the only word there spoken was the whispered word linoar this i whispered and an echo murmured back the word linoar merely this and nothing more back into the chamber turning on my soul within me burning soon again i heard a tapping somewhat louder than before surely said i surely that is something at my window lattice let me see then what there at is and this mystery explore let me i hard to be still a moment and this mystery explore tis the wind and nothing more open here i flung the shutter when with many a flirt and flutter in there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore not the least obeisance made he not a minute stopped or stayed he but with mean of lord or lady perched above my chamber door perched upon a bust of palace just above my chamber door perched and sat and nothing more then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling by the grave and stern decorum of the countenance at war though thy crest be shorn and shaven thou i said are sure no craven ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore tell me what thy lordly name is on the night's plutonian shore quote the raven never more but the raven sitting lonely on the placid bust spoke only that one word as if his soul in that one word he did outpour nothing further than he uttered not a feather than he fluttered till i scarcely more than muttered other friends have flown before on the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before then the bird said never more startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken doubtless said i what at others is its only stock and store caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster till his songs one bird and bore till the dirges of his hope that melancholy bird and bore of never never more but the raven still beguiling on my sad soul into smiling straight i wheeled a cushion seat in front of bird and bust and door then upon the velvet sinking i betook myself to linking fancy unto fancy thinking what this ominous bird of yore what this grim ungainly gaunt and ominous bird of yore meant in croaking never more this i sat engaged in guessing but no syllable expressing to the foul whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core this and more i sat divining with my head at ease reclining on the cushion's velvet lining but the lamplight gloated or but whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating or she shall press ah never more then me thought the air grew denser perfumed from an unseen sensor swung by seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor wretch i cried thy god hath lent thee by these angels he hath sent thee respite respite and nepent from thy memories of linoar quaffo quaff this kind nepent and forget this lost linoar quote the raven never more profit said i thing of evil profits still of bird or devil whether tempter sent or whether tempest toss thee here ashore desolate yet all undaunted on this desert land enchanted on this home by horror haunted tell me truly i implore is there is there bombing tell me tell me i implore quote the raven never more profit said i thing of evil profits still of bird or devil by the heaven that bends above us by that god we both adore tell the soul with sorrow laden if within the distant aiden it shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named linoar clasp a rare and regent maiden whom the angels named linoar quote the raven never more be that word our sign of parting bird or fiend i shrieked up starting get thee back into the tempest and the night's plutonian shore leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken leave my loneliness unbroken quit the bust above my door take thy beak from out my heart and take thy form from off my door quote the raven never more and the raven never flitting still is sitting still is sitting on the pallid bust of palace just above my chamber door and his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that his dreaming and the lamplight or him streaming throws his shadow on the floor and my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted never more end of the raven by edgar allen po