[Abe Sargent]

Synopsis of The Nameless City:


Deep in the Arabian desert lie ruins ancient beyond all cities of men. The Arabs shun them, though Abdul Alhazred dreamed of them and wrote his famous couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.” Nevertheless, our narrator seeks the city, accompanied only by his camel; he’s always sought the strange and terrible.

He finds the ruins at night but waits to enter until dawn, when the sun rises through an oddly local sandstorm and a metallic clash seems to reverberate from deep underground to greet the day. The crumbled foundations offer little illumination into the history of the city, for time and blasting sand have long obliterated any carvings. Night comes with a chill wind that raises another local sandstorm amidst the gray stones.

The next day the narrator discovers a cliff riddled with low-ceilinged temples. He explores on hands and knees, more and more disturbed by the disproportionate lowness of the temple fixtures—disproportionate, that is, for human use. Night finds him still in the city. While attending to his suddenly edgy camel, he notices that the sand-stirring evening wind issues from a particular point in the cliff. Though troubled by a spectral presence, he goes to the spot and finds a larger temple with traces of painted murals, altars with curvilinear carvings, and an interior door opening onto a flight of curiously small and steep steps.


Equipped only with a torch, the narrator crawls feet-first down innumerable steps and through low tunnels. His torch dies. He keeps crawling, cheering himself with snippets from the daemonic lore he’s read. At last he comes to a level corridor lined with wood and glass boxes like coffins. Here he can kneel upright as he scrambles onward. Subterranean phosphorescence begins to light the scene, and he sees the boxes are indeed coffins containing not the human makers of the place but the preserved bodies of vaguely anthropomorphic reptiles, richly arrayed.

These must be totem animals of supreme importance to the ancient people, since they also take the place of people in the fantastic murals that cover the walls and ceiling of the passage. The narrator can’t read the script, but the pictures tell him the whole history of the race from its nomadic youth to its heyday to the coming of the desert that drove it deep underground, to a world foretold by its prophets. Death is shown only as the result of violence or plague, yet the allegorical reptiles seem gradually to be wasting away and growing more fierce in their hatred of the outer world—the final scene depicts them tearing apart a primitive-looking human. Some foreign tribesman, no doubt.

The narrator reaches the source of the phosphorescence—beyond a great brass door lies a descent into a vast space of misty light, the entrance into that promised inner world. He rests on the threshold in uneasy speculation, then starts at the sound of moaning coming from the coffin-lined passage. But it can only be the wind, returning home with the dawn.

He braces to withstand its force. The wind seems animated by a vindictive rage that claws and drags him toward the misty-bright underworld. Somehow he withstands it. As it passes over him, the wind curses and snarls in an unknown language, and he thinks that against the lit portal, he sees a rushing crowd of semi-transparent reptilian devils—the true inhabitants, after all, of the nameless city.

The wind dies with the last of the creatures to descend, and the great brass door clangs shut, leaving the narrator in utter darkness.
(Courtesy of Tor.com)