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

This is the infamous ‘unexplainable couplet’ which continuously appears throughout the fiction of Lovecraft. It first appears in The Nameless City and is mentioned as a couplet sang by the mad poet Abdul Alhazred. Indeed, The Nameless City features the first mention of ‘The Mad Arab’ who wrote Al Azif, known in the western world as the Necronomicon. While this tale is only tangentially related to dream (Sarnath and Ib are mentioned once), I felt the importance of the tale to the mythos at large warranted its inclusion in our book club.

One source of inspiration for this story is the fabled lost city of “Iram of the Pilllars”, dramatically named by some as “Atlantis of the Sands.” Iram is the city of the the ancient tribe of ʿĀd, who according to the Quran were destroyed in a violent storm after rejecting the message of the prophet Hud. In The Nameless City the eponymous city is a site “too old for Egypt or Meroë to remember”, a city buried in sand and subject to regular sandstorms at sunrise and sunset.

Lovecraft really sells the incalculable age of the ruins. Rather than giving a rather mundane or boring numerical age such as “100,000 years old!” we are given relative scales of time in comparison to other ancient cities and structured; He frequently uses poetic phrases such as “great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid” and “…the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked.” This adds to the mysticism of the place, and the suggestion of its existence in a time so long gone that conventional methods of reckoning are useless.

One fact of this city that is abundantly obvious to the reader yet presently eludes the obtuse narrator is that it clearly was not built for humans. The rooms are incredibly squat and difficult for a human to navigate; even the comparatively tall temple halls are only tall enough for the narrator to uncomfortably shuffle along on his knees. We will see confirmation of the existence of these smaller creatures later in the story.

Seeking the source of the regular sandstorms, the narrator finds a larger temple which he surmises must lead to a natural cavern to explain the gusts of air disturbing the otherwise still desert. He marvels at the murals of an ancient race and the sophisticated masonry hinting at precociously advanced technology. Spurred on by his curiosity, the narrator shuffles his way down a narrow and uncomfortable stair, at times having to lie down and shuffle feet first along ridiculously snug passageways. When his torch finally dies out, he comforts himself by reciting passages on the abyss from his favourite authors.

Eventually he reaches a hallway whose walls are lined with long wooden boxes having glass fronts. The narrator imagines coffins with glass panels for viewing the inhabitants. As he ventures further, a phosphorescence lights the hallway, allowing him to view the inhabitants of the coffins. He sees reptilian creatures which he associates with crocodiles or perhaps seals. He also notes that these creatures are ornately robed. He concludes that the ancient race that lived here must have revered these animals as some patron animal, such as the she-wolf of Rome. Conspicuously, there are no coffins bearing human remains.

Coffins are not the only things furnishing the walls of this hallway. Many murals adorn the walls, depicting the history of the race that lived here, allegorically represented by the crocodile creatures that they evidently revere. Notably, these murals lack any references to funerary rites. Indeed, there are no depictions of natural death, only war casualties. Finally, the narrator notices the image of a human in one of the murals; the human is being torn apart by the reptiles. The narrator rationalises this as the humans of the reptile god sacrificing a human of a different tribe, perhaps an envoy of Iram.

As he approaches the source of the light he sees more crude murals, depicting the reptilian folk physically wasting away and hovering as spirits over their discarded bodies. As he reaches the vast chamber of light, dawn breaks hundreds of meters above. At once the narrator hears a rushing wind approaching from the way he came, and only now does he make the association between the sound of the rushing wind and the sound of a disembodied angry shrieking and moaning. The wind assaults him violently and he is forced to brace himself in the hallway, lest he be blown away into the unfathomable depths of the lit cavern. As he stares into oblivion and fancies he can see the moving shapes of the reptilian creatures which inhabit the coffins. As a coping technique, he resorts to repeating over and over the infamous couplet sung by Abdul Alhazred.

As the wind abruptly ceases, a metallic door slams shut, bathing the narrator in darkness and emitting a musical tone which he believed he could hear from the surface. In pitch blackness he madly scrambles back to the surface and escapes the Nameless City, forever changed.

This is an important tale. Discounting The Doom That Came to Sarnath, as that is a dream tale, we have only seen creatures typical of fantasy: ghouls in graveyards, cave beasts descended from long lost travellers, and missing links capable of mating with humans. The Nameless City is the first mention of an ancient non-human species extant in the waking world. This is confirmation that we are not in fact alone in this world, our only interaction with other sentient creatures being our torment at the hands of gods such as Nyarlathotep.