H. P. Lovecraft's The Nameless City: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis

When Lovecraft penned “The Nameless City” – a month after writing “Nyarlathotep” – he had already depicted several devastated metropolises, each a vast expression of high civilization, each destroyed by the perfidy of some half-evolved, degenerate tribe, and each lost forever, buried under millennia of antiquity. Most famous among these proto-R’lyehs is Sarnath, followed by the polar capital, Olathoë, the brilliant chasm in “The Transition of Juan Romero,” the sunken Valhalla in “The Temple,” the apocalyptic hellscape of “Nyarlathotep,” and the subterranean ghoul-warren in “Randolph Carter.” Even in “Dagon” this trope is handled, though somewhat ambiguously: are the Deep Ones a vanquished civilization – as the reptilian denizens in “The Nameless City” – or an ascendant empire, waiting to storm the gates, a la “Sarnath”?

The answer – in this and nearly every case listed so far – is likely “both.” Lovecraft was deeply drawn to the concept of civilization having a life-cycle – an idea borrowed from the Greeks and modelled after previous literary treatments such as Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (wherein a half-buried Egyptian monument to the eponymous “king of kings” is barely legible, making a mockery of its once-mighty model’s pretensions) and, most significantly, Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” where the spirit of a dead man from a mighty empire realizes is stupor that his city – a metropolis as seemingly immutable as London, Los Angeles, or Rome – has been desolate and forgotten for many millennia.

Indeed, this trope is predicated on the idea of oceans and oceans of time rolling over the cosmos, obliterating the significance of all significant things, and stretching out lazily far, far beyond the last Big Bang and onward, far, far beyond our universe’s inevitable implosion. These are thoughts that lend themselves to surprisingly hopeful ideas of multi-verses, other dimensions, reincarnations, and the rebirth and recycling of the entire cosmos – but it is not acquired without first accepting the depressing “mutability of all things,” and for Lovecraft – who fails to share the transcendentalist, spiritual ecstasies of his forebearers, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen – it never will be acquired.

In stories like “The Nameless City,” he wallows in miserable meditations on the inevitable decline and degeneration of culture, and on his uneasiness with the logical conclusions of evolutionary theory: that bipedals could easily find a competitor or a predecessor in some slimy, scaly, pulpy thing that pulls itself around on its belly. 

SUMMARY

An unnamed narrator recounts his disastrous expedition into a forbidden ruin deep in the Arabian desert, insisting that the terror he encountered has permanently scarred him. He begins by confessing that, even before reaching the city, he instinctively sensed it was “accursed.” Crossing a barren valley under moonlight, he sees the city’s ruins jutting from the sand “as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave.” Ancient beyond reckoning—older than Egypt or Babylon—it is a place so dreaded that desert tribes whisper of it but never approach. The narrator recalls the ominous couplet dreamed by the mad poet Abdul Alhazred:

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

Though warned by superstition, he presses on with his camel and camps outside the ruins until dawn. At sunrise, a strange local sandstorm stirs only among the city’s stones, accompanied by what he imagines to be a distant metallic peal greeting the rising sun. Entering the city, he wanders among crumbling foundations and buried walls, disturbed by their proportions and the total absence of carvings or inscriptions. The dimensions feel subtly wrong, and though he excavates tirelessly, he uncovers nothing that confirms human habitation.

The next day, while exploring further, he discovers a low cliff honeycombed with squat, ancient structures carved directly into the rock. Clearing one entrance, he crawls inside and finds a primitive temple filled with “altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low.” Everything is built on a scale too small for ordinary humans. Though no clear artwork survives, oddly shaped stones hint at alien rituals, and the oppressive atmosphere unsettles him. Another nearby chamber proves similar, though one includes a narrow corridor lined with obscure shrines.

As twilight falls, his camel suddenly panics. Investigating, he notices an inexplicable wind blowing from the mouth of a distant temple, though the air elsewhere remains still. He approaches and discovers a larger cavern, from which a freezing gale pours outward before gradually subsiding. Inside, he finds the first traces of ancient pictorial art: faded painted streaks and elaborate curving carvings. More importantly, he discovers a hidden doorway opening onto a black passage descending sharply underground by “very small, numerous, and steeply descending steps.”

Compelled by curiosity, he enters.

The descent becomes nightmarish. Crawling feet-first for what feels like hours through cramped tunnels barely large enough to contain him, he descends ever deeper into the earth. Sometimes the path changes direction or flattens into spaces so low he must wriggle on his belly. His torch eventually dies, yet he continues downward, half-delirious, murmuring fragments of occult texts and poetry to steady himself. One line repeatedly echoes in his mind: Lord Dunsany’s phrase, “the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.”

Eventually he reaches level ground and finds himself in total darkness inside a corridor lined with strange wooden-and-glass cases resembling coffins. Feeling his way forward, he gradually notices a dim phosphorescent glow ahead. As the illumination strengthens, he is astonished to discover that the crude architecture above concealed a civilization of breathtaking sophistication.

The corridor is richly decorated with magnificent murals depicting a bizarre race of creatures preserved within the coffin-like cases. These beings resemble reptiles, though grotesquely unlike any known species: part crocodile, part seal, vaguely humanoid, with horned heads, protruding foreheads, and delicate forelimbs resembling human hands. Lavishly clothed and adorned with jewels, they appear to have been highly revered.

At first, the narrator assumes the reptiles are symbolic deities worshipped by a human civilization. He studies the murals and reconstructs the city’s history. According to the frescoes, the nameless metropolis once stood beside a vast sea and ruled a mighty empire “before Africa rose out of the waves.” As geological upheaval transformed the landscape into desert, its inhabitants fought desperately to survive, eventually tunneling beneath the earth toward a promised subterranean paradise.

The paintings depict wars, migrations, and the gradual abandonment of the city above. Curiously, no natural deaths appear in the art—only violent deaths from war or plague—leading the narrator to suspect the civilization cultivated an “ideal of earthly immortality.” Later murals become increasingly bizarre, showing the race degenerating into frailty and hatred. Priests curse the surface world, and one final horrifying image depicts a primitive human explorer—perhaps from ancient Irem—being torn apart by the elder race. Remembering how fiercely the Arabs fear the city, the narrator feels uneasy.

Eventually, he reaches the corridor’s end, where a massive brass gate stands open before a vast glowing abyss. Beyond stretches an immense subterranean world shrouded in luminous mist, with another staircase descending into unimaginable depths. Overwhelmed, he pauses rather than continuing.

Lying on the floor to rest, he begins reconsidering everything he has seen. Gradually, terrible realizations emerge. The low proportions of the city, temples, corridors, and stairways suddenly seem impossible to explain if humans had merely worshipped reptilian gods. What if the reptiles were not symbols at all? What if they had been the actual inhabitants of the nameless city? He remembers uneasily that, aside from the slaughtered outsider in the murals, his own is the only human form present in the entire civilization’s record.

Still, fascination begins overcoming terror, and he considers descending into the glowing abyss. Then, without warning, he hears a terrible moaning sound echoing through the tunnels behind him. A cold wind rushes downward from the city above—the same mysterious sunrise gale he had witnessed before. At first, he reassures himself it is merely a natural phenomenon tied to the desert’s shifting temperatures.

But the wind becomes monstrous in force, shrieking through the corridor with terrifying violence, dragging him helplessly toward the glowing chasm. Clawing desperately at the floor, he imagines himself suffering the same fate as the mutilated human figure in the murals. Panicked beyond reason, he repeatedly chants Alhazred’s dreadful lines:

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

Then, amid the screaming storm, he hears something worse than the wind: voices. Behind him, shapes emerge against the phosphorescent glow—“a nightmare horde of rushing devils,” grotesque, half-transparent beings unmistakably identical to the reptilian mummies. The ancient race, now spectral and hate-filled, rushes toward him through the corridor.

Before he can comprehend what happens next, darkness swallows him. The great brass door slams shut with a “deafening peal of metallic music,” echoing upward like the mysterious sounds that had greeted sunrise above. Somehow, impossibly, he survives and escapes to the world of men, but the experience leaves him permanently shattered, condemned forever to tremble at the sound of night winds and remember the horror hidden beneath the nameless city.

ANALYSIS

Borrowing heavily from Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” Lord Dunsany’s “The Probable Adventure of Three Literary Men”[1], William Hope Hodgson’s ghastly, lean-jawed, humanoid seal mutants in The Boats of the ‘Glen-Carrig’ and “Demons of the Sea,” and the Islamic legend of Irem[2], Lovecraft admittedly succeeds in formulating some truly chilling images and settings in this story. His monsters are very uncomfortable to imagine, the claustrophobic, lonely labyrinth is nightmare-fuel, and the desert location is refreshingly original and spooky.

But the execution is horribly mishandled, resulting in a story which is simultaneously chilling and boring, with miserable turns of phrases (“like an ogre under a coverlet”; “like some hideous haunted well,” etc.) which detract from the power of its phenomenal second line and the entire first two pages. What’s more, despite its philosophical pretentions, the message of the story – if followed to its logical conclusion – is simplistic, neurotic, and pathetic.

II.

Before we flush out some of the less savory ideas with which Lovecraft is cooking in this story, it is worth noting  that “The Nameless City” – though hardly a masterpiece – introduces several famed icons of his mythos, most of which relate to the hideous grimoire, Necronomicon. While it is never named, specifically, its ill-starred author – the “Mad Arab,” Abdul Alhazred – is introduced for the first time, and while his fantastical history and shocking death are not touched upon, we do have the beginnings of the Necronomicon’s Arabic origins established (something which is first hinted at in “Randolph Carter,” when Carter describes Warren’s many Arabic tomes), and, what’s more, we have our first, rare sample of what the book must actually sound like. It is here – rather than “The Call of Cthulhu,” which famously quotes it – that we first hear its navel-gazing, Also Sprach Zarathustra-esque couplet:

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

The verse – which the narrator of “The Nameless City” clings to like a prayer or mantra in his hour of greatest existential terror – might as well serve as the story’s thesis statement: it simultaneously trumpets the ultimate victory of death over all things while hinting at something bigger than even death itself – that regeneration can come through the sheer expansiveness of time, without supernatural agencies, though not always in ways that are attractive or desired. What does it mean, for instance, to say that “death may die”?

Lovecraft is obviously not suggesting that the Abrahamic God will fulfill the prophecies of Revelation, hurling Death into Oblivion: instead, he is ostensibly arguing that when all life is eradicated – when every star burns out and every atom is cold – that death, itself, will pass into oblivion (after all, death only exists in a symbiotic and semiotic relationship with life), and that it is in this mindset of time – its vastness and its lack of consideration, empathy, or compassion – that the dark wisdom of his cosmic vision can be accessed. To be fair, though, this is still not the “terrifying” concept that he spends this meandering, drowsy, self-indulgent story on: he is primarily bothered by the idea of Western Civilization (and specifically, whatever version of civilization in which he would automatically be esteemed: no Germans, Italians, Jews, Irish, Welsh, “Decadent Dutch,” or poor Anglo-Saxons need apply) either coming up from behind, and being destined to be lapped by, what he views as inferior races and cultures.

III.

The idea that endless cycles of civilizations come to life, fight to thrive, find comfort, pursue science, art, and technology, build empires, rise to riches, become hopelessly decadent and depraved, and then be overwhelmed by jealous, lesser tribes who identify and take advantage of their weaknesses was one of Lovecraft’s great horrors. As much as he flailed the idea around like an intellectual cudgel (not unlike a self-satisfied cynic who smugly dismisses the hard work of reformers because he is smart enough to realize that the sun will one day consume the earth, so he is above trivial pursuits like activism or compassion), it truly disturbed him to think that his Civilization would one day be overtaken by newer, hungrier communities, races, or even species. But the true horror of “The Nameless City” is not in humanity’s inevitable doom – it is in humanity’s potential degeneration and devolution, that it might find peership with squamous, slithering, flopping, reptilian seals.

The horrifying “climax” of the story isn’t that the reptilian race evolved up, thrived, degenerated, sickened, and were ultimately driven to the same extinction that all species inevitably face – no, the moment of mind-blasting horror is one where the narrator makes what is, ultimately, a rather optimistic discovery: millennia after their long-forgotten hey-day, buried under sand and time, the reptilian culture is still alive, despite all chances and all the world’s disbelief; like The Last Unicorn, they throw their heads back in proud defiance, wearing their ceremonial dresses and keeping their scaly religion alive. They’re doing all right for themselves in spite of their obscurity and poverty – just like his aging aunts, puttering along in penury in Providence – and yet this tribe of lizards will outlive the Lovecrafts’ reputation as a respectable, upper-class family. How can we live with ourselves, he seems to ramble, with the idea that there might be other versions of civilization out there just waiting for us to fall behind so they can take us over? It’s the racial nightmare of an insecure, narrow-minded bigot repackaged as some kind of cosmicist allegory – which it isn’t.

IV.

Now, do I want to run into these kinds of pulpy, taloned, crocodile-seals hundreds of feet below the earth in a claustrophobic cavern hundreds of miles from help? Absolutely not. But, as in “The Temple,” with its similarly uplifting ending, Lovecraft is either not staying true to his famous cynicism by providing a conclusion which is creepy but hopeful, or he is being intellectually dishonest to himself about his own cosmicism: is he truly dismayed by the unimportance of terrestrial civilization, or is it the threat of less familiar, more exotic cultures (coded here as belonging to a different species, but one which was miraculously able to generate art, architecture, fashion, religion, and even immortality, regardless of whether or not they look pretty) that gives him the willies. The implication, indeed, is that the reptilians are still alive, and may one day rise to take the world back from humanity.

And, does that sound comfortable to me? No, but I again wonder if Lovecraft’s hideous conclusion is less about the threat of Oblivion and more with the cycles of empires and races. If we read the first line, “That is not dead which can eternal lie,” as having more to do with the idea of non-Western cultures which once had thriving civilizations waiting patiently to rise once again to prominence (which, I suspect, is the real concern here), then Lovecraft may have lost some of the street cred he has amassed as a brilliant, down-to-earth materialist in touch with his own mortality and the vanity of civilization’s projects. Rather, especially when reading this tedious tale, I would argue that he was simply grossed out by globalism.

You can read the original story HERE!

And you can find our annotated edition of Lovecraft’s best early, gothic tales HERE!

[1] Wherein three thieves raid a deserted city’s subterranean ruins in search of a trove of poems and are never heard from again

[2] A sort of Muslim Sodom or Atlantis: a brilliant, lofty-towered city in the desert which was ultimately swallowed up by sand because of the population’s wickedness and pride