The Nameless City by H.P. 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

grandmother 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 ever 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 grandams in 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 on the night before he sang

his unexplainable 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 waist 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

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