 THE MUMMY'S FOOT by Theophil Gattier. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Irma Boyd. THE MUMMY'S FOOT by Theophil Gattier. I had entered in an idle mood the shop of one of those curiosity vendors who are called Machan's de Brickabrac in that Parisian Argo, which is so perfectly unintelligible elsewhere in France. You have doubtless glanced occasionally through the windows of some of these shops, which have become so numerous now that it is fashionable to buy antiquated furniture and that every petty stockbroker thinks he must have his Chambé à Moyen-Aché. There is one thing there which clings alike to the shop of the dealer in Old Iron, the wear room of the tapestry maker, the laboratory of the chemist, and the studio of the painter. In all those gloomy dens where a furtive daylight filters in through the window shutters, the most manifestly ancient thing is dust. The cobwebs are more authentic than the Gwimplaces and the old pear tree furniture on exhibition is actually younger than the mahogany which arrived but yesterday from America. The warehouse of my Brickabrac dealer was a veritable caffarnum. All ages and all nations seem to have made their rendezvous there, and a Truscan lamp of red clay stood upon a boule cabinet with ebony panels brightly striped by lines of inlaid brass. A duchess of the court of Louis XV nonchalantly extended her fawn-like feet under a massive table of the time of Louis VIII, with heavy spiral supports of oak and carbon designs of chimeras and foliage intermingled. Upon the denticulated shelves of several sideboards, glittered immense Japanese dishes with red and blue designs relieved by gilded hatching, side-by-side with enameled works by Bernard Polissi, representing serpents, frogs, and lizards in relief. From disemboweled cabinets escaped cascades of silver lustrous Chinese silks and waves of tinsels which an oblique sunbeam shot through with luminous beads, while portraits of every era in frames more or less tarnished smiled through their yellow varnish. The striped breastplate of a damocene suit of Melanie's armor glittered in one corner, loves and nymphs of porcelain, Chinese grotesques, vases of seledon and crackleware, Saxon and old severus cups encumbered the shelves and nooks of the apartment. The dealer followed me closely through the torturous way contrived between the piles of furniture, warding off with his hand the hazardous sweep of my coat-skirts, watching my elbows with the uneasy attention of an antiquitarian and a usurer. It was a singular face, that of the merchant, an immense skull polished like a knee and surrounded by a thin aureole of white hair, which brought out the clear salmon tent of his complexion all the more strikingly, lent him a false aspect of patriarchal bonomy, counteracted, however, by the scintillation of two little yellow eyes which trembled in their orbits like two louis d'or upon quick silver. The curve of his nose presented an aquiline silhouette which suggested the oriental or Jewish type. His hands, thin, slender, full of nerves which projected like strings upon the fingerboard of a violin, and armed with claws like those on the termination of a bat's wings, shook with senile trembling, but those convulsively agitated hands became firmer than steel pincers or lobster claws when they lifted any precious article an onyx cup, a vanishing glass, or a dish of bohemian crystal. This strange old man had an aspect so thoroughly rabbinical and cabalistic that he would have been burnt on the mere testimony of his face three centuries ago. Will you not buy something from me today, sir? Here is a Malay crease with a blade undulating like a flame. Look at those grooves contrived for the blood to run along, those teeth set backwards so as to tear out the entrails and withdrawing the weapon. It is a fine character of ferocious arm and will look well in your collection. This two-handed sword is very beautiful. It is the work of Giuseppe de la Hera and this Kalishmaard with its fenestrated guard. What a superb specimen of handicraft. No, I have quite enough weapons and instruments of carnage. I want a small figure, something which will suit me as a paperweight, for I cannot endure those trumpery bronzes which the stationers sell and which may be found on everybody's desk. The old gnome foraged among his ancient wares and finally arranged before me some antique bronzes, so called at least, fragments of Malachite, little Hindu or Chinese idols, a kind of Pusa toys in jade stone, representing the incarnations of Brahma or Vishnu, and wonderfully appropriate to the very undivine office of holding papers and letters in place. I was hesitating between a porcelain dragon, all constellated with warts, its mouth formidable with bristling tusks and ranges of teeth, and an abominable little Mexican fetish, representing the god Vitzila Puzilli, Ah Naturao, when I caught sight of a charming foot, which at first I took for a fragment of some antique Venus. I had those beautiful ruddy and tawny tints that lend to Florentine bronze that warm living look so much preferable to the grey-green aspect of common bronzes, which might easily be mistaken for statues in a state of putrefaction. Satiny gleams played over its rounded forms, doubtless polished by the amorous kisses of 20 centuries, for it seemed a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best era of art, perhaps molded by Lesipis himself. That foot will be my choice, I said to the merchant, who regarded me with an ironical and saddening air, and held out the object desired that I might examine it more fully. I was surprised at its lightness. It was not a foot of metal, but an soothe a foot of flesh, an embalmed foot, a mummy's foot. On examining it still more closely, the very grain of the skin and the almost imperceptible lines impressed upon it by the texture of the bandages became perceptible. The toes were slender and delicate, and terminated by perfectly formed nails, pure and transparent as agates. The great toe, slightly separated from the rest, afforded a happy contrast in the antique style to the position of the other toes and linted in aerial lightness, the grace of a bird's foot. The sole, scarcely streaked by a few almost imperceptible cross lines, afforded evidence that it had never touched the bare ground and had only come in contact with the finest matting of Nile rushes and the softest carpets of panther skin. Ha ha! You want the foot of the princess, her mantis, exclaimed the merchant, with a strange giggle and polished eyes upon me. Ha ha! For a paperweight! An original idea! An artistic idea! Old Farah would certainly have been surprised had someone told him that the foot of his adored daughter would be used for a paperweight after he had had a mountain of granite hollowed out as a receptacle for the triple coffin, painted and gilded, covered with hieroglyphics and beautiful paintings of the judgment of souls, continued the queer little merchant, half audibly as though talking to himself. How much will you charge me for this mummy fragment? Ah! The highest price I can get, for it is a superb piece. If I had the match of it, you could not have it for less than five hundred francs. The daughter of a pharaoh, nothing is more rare. Assuredly, that is not a common article. But still, how much do you want? In the first place, let me warn you that all my wealth consists of just five louis. I can buy anything that costs five louis, but nothing dearer. You might search my vest pockets and most secret drawers without even finding one poor five franc piece more. Five louis for the foot of Princess Hermonthus? That is very little. Very little indeed. To his unauthentic foot, muttered the merchant, shaking his head and imparting a peculiar rotary motion to his eyes. Well, take it, and I will give you the bandages into the bargain, he added, wrapping the foot in an ancient damasque rag. Very fine, real damasque, Indian damasque, which has never been redied. It is strong, and yet it is soft, he mumbled, stroking the frayed tissue with his fingers through the trade-acquired habit, which moved him to praise even an object of such little value that he himself deemed it only worth the giving away. He poured the gold coins into a sort of medieval alms purse hanging at his belt, repeating, the foot of Princess Hermonthus to be used for a paperweight. Then, turning his phosphorescent eyes upon me, he exclaimed in a voice strident as the crying of a cat which has swallowed a fishbone. Old Pharah will not be well pleased. He loved his daughter, the dear man. You speak as if you were a contemporary of his. You are old enough, goodness knows, but you do not date back to the pyramids of Egypt, I answered, laughingly, from the threshold. I went home, delighted with my acquisition. With the idea of putting it to profitable use as soon as possible, I placed the foot of the divine Princess Hermonthus upon a heap of papers scribbled over with verses, in themselves an indecipherable mosaic work of erasures, articles freshly begun, letters forgotten, and posted in the table drawer instead of a letter box, an error to which absent-minded people are peculiarly liable. The effect was charming, bizarre, and romantic. Well satisfied with this embellishment, I went out with the gravity and pride becoming one who feels that he has the ineffable advantage over all the pastors by whom he elbows of possessing a piece of the Princess Hermonthus, daughter of Pharaoh. I looked upon all who did not possess, like myself, a paperweight so authentically Egyptian as very ridiculous people, and it seemed to me that the proper occupation of every sensible man should consist in the mere fact of having a mummy's foot upon his desk. Happily I met some friends whose presence distracted me in my affatuation with this new acquisition. I went to dinner with them, for I could not very well have dined with myself. When I came back that evening, with my brain slightly confused by a few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of oriental perfume delicately titillated my olfactory nerves. The heat of the room had warmed the natron, bitumen, and myrrh in which the parachistes had cut open the bodies of the dead, had bathed the corpse of the princess. It was a perfume at once sweet and penetrating, a perfume that four thousand years had not been able to dissipate. The dream of Egypt was eternity. Her odours have the salinity of granite and endure as long. I soon drank deeply from the black cup of sleep. For a few hours all remained opaque to me. Oblivion and nothingness inundated me with their somber waves. Yet light gradually dawned upon the darkness of my mind. Dreams commenced to touch me softly in their silent flight. The eyes of my soul were opened, and they held my chamber as it actually was. I might have believed myself awake but for a vague consciousness which assured me that I slept and that something fantastic was about to take place. The odor of the myrrh had augmented in intensity and I felt a slight headache which I very naturally attributed to several glasses of champagne that we had drunk to the unknown gods and our future fortunes. I peered through my room with a feeling of expectation which I saw nothing to justify. Every article of furniture was in its proper place. The lamp softly shaded by its globe of ground crystal burned upon its bracket. The watercolour sketches shown under their bohemian glass, the curtains hung down languidly. Everything wore an aspect of tranquil slumber. After a few moments however all this calm interior appeared to become disturbed. The woodwork cracked stealthily. The ash-covered log suddenly emitted a jet of blue flame and the disks of the pateras seemed like great metallic eyes, watching, like myself, for the things which were about to happen. My eyes accidentally fell upon the desk where I had placed the foot of the Princess Hermonthus. Instead of remaining quiet, as behoved afoot which had been embalmed for 4,000 years, it commenced to act in a nervous manner, contracted itself and leaped over the papers like a startled frog. One would have imagined that it had suddenly been brought into contact with a galvanic battery. I could distinctly hear the dry sound made by its little heel, hard as the hoof of a gazelle. I became rather discontented with my acquisition and as much as I wished my paper weights to be of a sedentary disposition and thought it very unnatural that feet should walk about without legs, then I commenced to experience a feeling closely akin to fear. Suddenly I saw the folds of my bed curtain stir and heard a bumping sound, like that caused by some person hopping on one foot across the floor. I must confess I became alternately hot and cold, that I felt a strange wind chill my back and that my suddenly rising hair caused my nightcap to execute a leap of several yards. The bed curtains opened and I beheld the strangest figure imaginable before me. It was a young girl of a very deep coffee-brown complexion, like the Bayadir Amani, and possessing the purest Egyptian type of perfect bivy. Her eyes were almond-shaped and oblique, with eyebrows so black that they seemed blue. Her nose was exquisitely chiseled, almost Greek in its delicacy of outline, and she might indeed have been taken for a Corinthian statue of bronze, but for the prominence of her cheekbones and the slightly African fullness of her lips, which compelled one to recognize her as belonging beyond all doubt to the hieroglyphic race which dwelt upon the banks of the Nile. Her arms, slender and spindle-shaped, like those of very young girls, were encircled by a peculiar kind of metal bands and bracelets of glass beads. Her hair was all twisted into little cords, and she wore upon her bosom a little idol figure of green paste, bearing a whip with seven lashes, which proved it to be an image of Isis. Her brow was adorned with a shining plate of gold, and a few traces of paint were left to the coppery tint of her cheeks. As for her costume, it was very odd indeed. Fancy apony or skirt, all formed of little strips of material, bedisoned with red and black hieroglyphics, stiffened with bitumen, and apparently belonging to a freshly unbandaged mummy. In one of those sudden flights of thought so common in dreams, I heard the horse falsetto of the Brickabrack dealer, repeating like a monotonous refrain, the phrase he had uttered in his shop with so enigmatic and intonation. Old Pharaoh would not be well pleased. He loved his daughter, the dear man. One strange circumstance, which was not at all calculated to restore my equanimity, was that the apparition had but one foot, the other was broken off at the ankle. She approached the table where the foot was starting and fidgeting about more than ever, and there supported herself upon the edge of the desk. I saw her eyes fill with pearly gleaming tears. Although she had not as yet spoken, I fully comprehended the thoughts which agitated her. She looked at her foot, for it was indeed her own, with an exquisitely graceful expression of coquettish sadness, but the foot leaped and ran hither and tither, as though impelled on steel springs. Twice or thrice she extended her hand to seize it, but could not succeed. Then commenced between the Princess Hermonthus and her foot, which appeared to be endowed with a special life of its own, a very fantastic dialogue in a most ancient Coptic tongue, such as might have been spoken thirty centuries ago in the serences of the land of Sirre. Luckily I understood Coptic perfectly well that night. The Princess Hermonthus cried and a voice sweet and vibrant as the tones of a crystal bell. Well, my dear little foot, you always flee from me, yet I always took good care of you. I bathed you with perfumed water in a bowl of alabaster. I smoothed your heel with pumice stone mixed with palm oil. Your nails were cut with golden scissors and polished with a hippopotamus' tooth. I was careful to select tat-bebs for you, painted and embroidered and turned up at the toes, which were the envy of all the young girls in Egypt. You wore on your great toe rings bearing the device of the sacred scarabass, and you supported one of the lightest bodies that a lazy foot could sustain. The foot replied in a pouting and chagrin tone. You know well that I do not belong to myself any longer. I have been bought and paid for. The old merchant knew what he was about. He bore you a grudge for having refused to espouse him. This is an ill turn which he has done you. The Arab who violated your royal coffin and the subterranean pits of the Necropolis of Thebes was sent thither by him. He desired to prevent you from being present at the reunion of the shadowy nations in the cities below. Have you five pieces of gold for my ransom? Alas, no! My jewels, my rings, my purses of gold and silver were all stolen from me, answered the Princess Hermonthus with a sob. Princess, I then exclaimed, I never retained anybody's foot unjustly. Even though you have not got the five louis which it cost me, I present it to you gladly. I should feel unutterably wretched to think that I were the cause of so amiable a person as the Princess Hermonthus being lame. I delivered this discourse in a royally gallant, stone which must have astonished the beautiful Egyptian girl. She turned a look of deepest gratitude upon me and her eyes shone with the bluish gleams of light. She took her foot which surrendered itself willingly this time, like a woman about to put on her little shoe and adjusted it to her leg with much skill. This operation over she took a few steps about the room as though to assure herself that she really was no longer lame. Ah, how pleased my father will be. He who was so unhappy because of my mutilation and who from the moment of my birth set a whole nation at work to holler me out a tomb so deep that he might preserve me intact until that last day when souls must be weighed in the balance of a menthi. Come with me to my father. He will receive you kindly for you have given me back my foot. I thought this proposition natural enough. I arrayed myself in a dressing gown of large flower pattern which lent me a very pharaonic aspect. Hurriedly put on a pair of Turkish slippers and informed the princess Hermontus that I was ready to follow her. Before starting, Hermontus took from her neck the little idol of green paste and laid it on the scattered sheets of paper which covered the table. It is only fair, she observed smiling, that I should replace your paperweight. She gave me her hand which felt soft and cold like the skin of a serpent and we departed. We passed for some time with the velocity of an arrow through a fluid and grayish expanse in which half-formed silhouettes flitted swiftly by us to right and left. For an instant we saw only sky and sea. A few moments later obelisks commenced to tower in the distance. Pylons and vast flights of steps guarded by sphinxes became clearly outlined against the horizon. We had reached our destination. The princess conducted me to a mountain of rose-colored granite in the face of which appeared an opening so narrow and low that it would have been difficult to distinguish it from the fissures in the rock, had not its location been marked by two stelae wrought with sculptures. Hermontus kindled a torch and led the way before me. We traversed corridors hewn through the living rock. These walls covered with hieroglyphics and paintings of allegorical processions might well have occupied thousands of arms for thousands of years in their formation. These corridors of interminable length opened into square chambers in the midst of which pits had been contrived through which we descended by cramp irons on spiral stairways. These pits again conducted us into other chambers, opening into other corridors, likewise decorated with painted sparrow-hawks, serpents coiled in circles, the symbols of the towel and pedum, prodigious works of art which no living eye can ever examine, interminable legends of granite which only the dead have time to read through all eternity. At last we found ourselves in a hall so vast, so enormous, so immeasurable that the eye could not reach its limits. Files of monstrous columns stretched far out of sight on every side, between which twinkled livid stars of yellowish flame, points of light which revealed further depths incalculable in the darkness beyond. The princess Hermonthus still held my hand and graciously saluted the mummies of her acquaintance. My eyes became accustomed to the dim twilight and objects became discernible. I beheld the kings of the subterranean races seated upon thrones, grand old men, though dry, withered, wrinkled like parchment, and blackened with naphtha and betumen, all wearing shents of gold and breastplates and gorgates glaring with precious stones, their eyes immovably fixed like the eyes of sphinxes, and their long beards whitened by the snow of centuries. Behind them stood their peoples in the stiff and constrained posture enjoined by Egyptian art, all eternally preserving the attitude prescribed by the heretic code. Behind these nations, the cats, ibixes, and crocodiles contemporary with them, rendered monstrous of aspect by their swapping bands, mewed, flapped their wings, or extended their jaws in a sarian giggle. All the pharaohs were there, chieps, chafrinis, cemeticus, sessatris, amenotaph, all the dark rulers of the pyramids and sphinxes, on yet higher thrones sat Cronos and Zezethrus, who was contemporary with the deluge, and Tubalcain, who reigned before it. The beard of King Zezethrus had grown seven times around the granite table, upon which he leaned, lost in deep reverie, and buried in dreams. Farther back through a dusty cloud I beheld dimly the seventy-two pre-Atomite kings with their seventy-two peoples forever passed away. After permitting me to gaze upon this bewildering spectacle a few moments, the princess Hermontas presented me to her father Pharaoh, who favored me with the most gracious nod. I have found my foot again. I have found my foot, cried the princess, clapping her little hands together with every sign of frantic joy. It was this gentleman who restored it to me, restored it to me. The races of Kenai, the races of Nahasi, all the black, bronzed, and copper-colored nations repeated in chorus. The princess Hermontas has found her foot again. Even Zezethrus himself was visibly affected. He raised his heavy eyelids, stroked his mustache with his fingers, and turned upon me a glance weighty with centuries. By alms the dog of hell, to me, daughter of the sun and of truth, this is a brave and worthy lad, exclaimed Pharaoh, pointing to me with his scepter which was terminated with a lotus flower. What recompense do you desire? Filled with that daring, inspired by dreams in which nothing seems impossible, I asked him for the hand of the princess Hermontas. The hand seemed to me a very proper antithetic recompense for the foot. Pharaoh opened wide his great eyes of glass and astonishment at my witty request. What country do you come from? What is your age? I'm a Frenchman, and I'm twenty-seven years old, venerable Pharaoh. Twenty-seven years old, and he wishes to espouse the princess Hermontas, who is thirty centuries old, cried out at once all the thrones and all the circles of nations. Only Hermontas herself did not seem to request unreasonable. If you were even only two thousand years old, replied the king, I would willingly give you the princess, but the disproportion is too great, and besides, we must give our daughters husbands who will last well. You do not know how to preserve yourselves any longer. Even those who died only fifteen centuries ago are already no more than a handful of dust. Behold, my flesh is solid as basalt, my bones are bones of steel. I will be present on the last day of the world with the same body and the same features which I had during my lifetime. My daughter Hermontas will last longer than a statue of bronze. Then the last particles of your dust will have been scattered broad by the winds, and even Isis herself, who was able to find the atoms of Osiris, would scarce be able to recompense your being. See how vigorous I yet remain, and how mighty is my grasp, he added, shaking my hand in the English fashion, with a strength that buried my rings in the flesh of my fingers. He squeezed me so hard that I awoke, and found my friend Alfred shaking me by the arm to make me get up. Oh, you everlasting sleeper, must I have you carried out in the middle of the street and fireworks exploded in your ears? It is afternoon. Don't you recollect your promise to take me with you to see emigrado Spanish pictures? God, I forgot all, all about it, I answered dressing myself hurriedly, we will go there at once, I have the permit lying there on my desk. I started to find it, but fancy my astonishment when I beheld, instead of the mummy's foot I had purchased the evening before, the little green-paced idol left in its place by the princess Hermontus. End of The Mummy's Foot Recording by Irma Boyd The Music of Eric Zahn by H.P. Lovecraft This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Music of Eric Zahn by H.P. Lovecraft I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the rude osse. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region of whatever name which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the rude osse. But despite all I have done, it remains a humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Eric Zahn. That my memory is broken, I do not wonder, for my health, physical and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the rude osse, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing, for it was within a half hour's walk of the university, and was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by anyone who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen the rude osse. The rude osse lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick-blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere and which may someday help me to find it, since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails and then came the ascent, at first gradual but incredibly steep as the rude osse was reached. I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the rude osse. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth struggling with greenish-gray vegetation. The houses were tall, peak-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward-forward and side-wise. Occasionally, an opposite pair, both leaning forward almost met across the street like an arch, and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street. The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly. At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent, but later decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money, until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue de Zay kept by the paralytic Blando. It was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all. My room was on the fifth story, the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked-gared overhead, and the next day I stole Blando about it. He told me it was an old German style player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Eric Zahn, and who played evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra. Adding that Zahn's desire to play in the night after his return from the theatre was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond. Thereafter I heard Zahn every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before, and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old man's acquaintance. One night, as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zahn in the hallway and told him that I would like to know and be with him when he played. He was a small, lean, bent person with shabby clothes, blue eyes, a grotesque, satyr-like face, and nearly bald head, and at my first word seemed both anchored and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him, and he grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed to the upper end of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary bareness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy wash stand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music rack, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster, whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently, Erzhan's world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination. Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned to the large wooden bolts, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his vial from its moth-eaten covering, and taking it seated himself in the least durable of the chairs. He did not employ the music rack, but, offering no choice in playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never heard before, strains which must have been of his own devising, to describe their exact nature as impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions. Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to myself. So when the player at length laid down his bow, I asked him if he would render some of them. As I began my request, the wrinkled satyr-like face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and seemed to show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I met the man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility, and even tried to awaken my host's weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a moment, for when the dumb musician recognized the whistle there, his face grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony right hand reached out to my mouth, and silenced the crude imitation. As he did this, he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window as if fearful of some intruder, a glance doubly absurd since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep street as the concierge had told me from which one could see over the wall at the summit. The old man's glance brought Lando's remark to my mind, and with a certain capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop which of all the dwellers in the rude as a, only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage, even greater than before, the dumb lodger was upon me again, this time motioning with his head toward the door nervously strove to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host I ordered him to release me and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offence his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relax and grip but this time in a friendly manner forcing me into a chair then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table where he wrote many words with a pencil in the laboured French of a foreigner. The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann said that he was old, lonely and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music and wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities but he could not play to another his weird harmonies and could not bear hearing them from another nor could he bear having anything in my room touched by another. He had not known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his playing in my room and now asked me if I would arrange with Lando to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent. As I sat deciphering the execrable French I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering as was I and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight sound from the window. The shutter must have rattled slightly in the wind and for some reason I started almost as violently as did Eric Zann. So when I had finished reading I shook my host by the hand and departed as a friend. The next day Lando gave me a more expensive room on the third floor between the apartments of an aged moneylender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor. It was not long before I found that Zann's eagerness for my company was not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on him and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at night in the day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not grow though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that window over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during theatre hours when Zann was away but the door was locked. What I did succeed in doing was to over hear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tiptoe up to my own fifth floor. Then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread, the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by a modern player. Certainly, Eric Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed the playing grew wilder whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs. Then one night as I listened at the door I heard the shrieking vial swell into a chaotic babble of sound, which led me to doubt my own shaking sanity. Had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real, the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter and which rises only in the moments of the most terrible fear or anguish, I knocked repeatedly at the door but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway shivering with cold and fear till I heard the poor musician's feeble effort to rise from the floor believing him just conscious after a fainting fit I renewed my rapping at the same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close both shutter and sash then stumble to the door which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real for his distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother's skirts. Shaking pathetically the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another beside which his vial and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive nodding oddly but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note handed it to me and returned to the table where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy and for the sake of my own curiosity to wait where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited and the dumb man's pencil flew. It was perhaps an hour later while I still waited and while the old musician's feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself though it was not a horrible sound but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note suggesting a player in one of the neighboring houses or some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible for dropping his pencil suddenly he rose, seized his vial and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow, save one listening at the barred door. It would be useless to describe the playing of Eric Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard because I could now see the expression of his face and could realize that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise, to ward something off or drown something out. What? I could not imagine. Awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, de-noose and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognized the air. It was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theaters and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer. Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate vial. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy saders and bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. Then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the vial, a calm, deliberate, purposeful mocking note from far away in the west. At this juncture the shutter began to rumbling night wind which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann's screaming vial now outdid itself, emitting sounds I had never thought a vial could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfaceted and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts and the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out a secret. I looked at Zann and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest. A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bought toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze at this window, the only window in the rude-as-a from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city's lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane vial howled with the night wind, I saw no city spread below and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable. I imagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth, and as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-bang vial behind me. I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Eric Zand I could at least try whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous vial. Suddenly out of the blackness that madly sawing bows struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zand's chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses. He did not respond, and still the vial shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me, nor baited the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babble. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why, knew not why till I felt the still face, the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle, finding the door in the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed vial, whose fury increased even as I plunged, leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house, racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep and ancient street of steps and tottering houses, clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid, canyon-walled river, panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know. All these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled. Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the root as a, but I am not wholly sorry, either for this or for the loss and undreamable abysses of the closely written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Eric Zahn, and of the music of Eric Zahn. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Dean Delp. The Nameless City By HP Lovecraft When I drew nigh the Nameless City, I knew it was accursed. 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 bade 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 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, and while the bricks of Babylon 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 ams and the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul 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 even 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 rosate 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 favorite state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc, as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang, and my imagination see that 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 there in 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 grey 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 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 bygone streets on 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 splendor of an age so distant that Caldea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the doomed that stood in the land of Manar, when mankind was young, and of Ibb that was carbon of grey 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. Cune rudely on the faces 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 effaced 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 lowness 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 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 temple 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, mooncast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. At night, 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 critical shrines. About these shrines I was prying, when the noise of a wind in 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 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 towards 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 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 me that form which I had been seeking. The opening to those remote or abysses once 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. 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 seemed to float across the desert from the land that men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage feet first as though on a ladder. It is only in the terrible phantasm of drugs or delirium that any other man can have this 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 my 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 above me as if it were a blaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far ancient and forbidden places. In the dark there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of demonic lore. Sentences from Alhazard the Mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascus and infamous lines from the delirious image-demand of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts and muttered of Ephraziab and the demons that floated with him down the oxus. Later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunzeny's tales. The unreverberate blackness of the bis. Once when the descent grew amazingly steep, I recited something in Sing-song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more. A reservoir of blackness black as witches cauldrons are when filled, with moon drugs and the eclipse 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 ore 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 my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually but I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass and its low studied 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 but 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 so colossal and protuberant of 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 paleogean 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 artists drawn them in a world of their own wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions and I could not help but think that their pictured history was allegorical perhaps showing the progress of the race that worshiped them. These creatures I said to myself were to men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome 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 sea-coast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves and of its struggles as the sea shrank away and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it I saw its wars and triumphs its troubles and defeats and 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 prophets it told them it was all vividly weird and realistic and its connection with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable I even recognized the passages as I crept along the corridor towards the brighter light I saw later stages of the painted epic the leave taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city in the valley around for 10 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 studied 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 explicable the civilization which included a written alphabet had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Caldea yet there were curious omissions I could for example find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs saved such as were related to wars violence and plagues and I wondered at the reticence shown concerning natural death it was as though an ideal of immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion still nearer the edge of the passage was painted scenes of the most 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 and the desert valley were shown always by moonlight golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls and half revealing the splendid perfection former times shown spectrally and elusively by the artist the paradisal 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 seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient stock coupled with a growing ferocity towards 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 iron 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 further 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 the black passages I had 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 base 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 nonce 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 a flame with prodigious reflections which even a death like exhaustion could not banish as I still lay 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 in the distant lands 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 loneness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to reptile deities there honored though it per force reduced the worshippers to crawling perhaps the very rights 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 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 hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give the frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities and valleys in this lower realm and my fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me 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 anti-diluvian 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 rock human 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 the vivid relics and I trembled to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept the 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 and 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 towards 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 reverberated frightfully through the low passage and at the same time I became conscious of an increasing draught of cold air likewise flowing from the tunnel and city above the touch of this air seemed to restore my balance for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen the gulf of the abyss each sunset and sunrise one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to me I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near so braced myself to resist the gale that was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening my fear again waned low since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown more and more madly poured the shrieking moaning night wind into the gulf of the inner earth I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear 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 towards 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 shutteringly 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 Arab Alhazrid who dreamed of that 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 Abaddon 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 and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities presently these voices while still chaotic before me seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me and down there in the grave of unnumbered eon dead antiquities leagues below the dawn lit world of men I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange tongueed fiends turning I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss what could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor a nightmare horde of rushing devils hate distorted grotesquely panoply half transparent devils of a race no man might mistake the crawling reptiles of the nameless city as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul 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 of the sun as memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile end of the nameless city by hp lovecraft recording by dean delp