When Lovecraft penned “The Anonymous Metropolis” – a month after writing “Nyarlathotep” – he had already depicted a number of devastated metropolises, every an unlimited expression of excessive civilization, every destroyed by the perfidy of some half-evolved, degenerate tribe, and every misplaced ceaselessly, buried below millennia of antiquity. Most well-known amongst these proto-R’lyehs is Sarnath, adopted by the polar capital, Olathoë, the sensible 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 dealt with, although considerably ambiguously: are the Deep Ones a vanquished civilization – because the reptilian denizens in “The Anonymous Metropolis” – or an ascendant empire, ready to storm the gates, a la “Sarnath”?
The reply – on this and almost each case listed to this point – is probably going “each.” Lovecraft was deeply drawn to the idea of civilization having a life-cycle – an concept borrowed from the Greeks and modelled after earlier literary therapies reminiscent of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (whereby a half-buried Egyptian monument to the eponymous “king of kings” is barely legible, making a mockery of its once-mighty mannequin’s pretensions) and, most importantly, Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” the place the spirit of a useless man from a mighty empire realizes is stupor that his metropolis – a metropolis as seemingly immutable as London, Los Angeles, or Rome – has been desolate and forgotten for a lot of millennia.
Certainly, this trope relies on the concept of oceans and oceans of time rolling over the cosmos, obliterating the importance of all important issues, and stretching out lazily far, far past the final Massive Bang and onward, far, far past our universe’s inevitable implosion. These are ideas that lend themselves to surprisingly hopeful concepts of multi-verses, different dimensions, reincarnations, and the rebirth and recycling of the whole cosmos – however it isn’t acquired with out first accepting the miserable “mutability of all issues,” and for Lovecraft – who fails to share the transcendentalist, religious ecstasies of his forebearers, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen – it by no means will be acquired.
In tales like “The Anonymous Metropolis,” he wallows in depressing meditations on the inevitable decline and degeneration of tradition, and on his uneasiness with the logical conclusions of evolutionary concept: that bipedals might simply discover a competitor or a predecessor in some slimy, scaly, pulpy factor that pulls itself round on its stomach.
An unnamed narrator recounts his disastrous expedition right into a forbidden smash deep within the Arabian desert, insisting that the fear he encountered has completely scarred him. He begins by confessing that, even earlier than reaching town, he instinctively sensed it was “accursed.” Crossing a barren valley below moonlight, he sees town’s ruins jutting from the sand “as elements of a corpse might protrude from an ill-made grave.” Historical past reckoning—older than Egypt or Babylon—it’s a place so dreaded that desert tribes whisper of it however by no means method. The narrator recollects the ominous couplet dreamed by the mad poet Abdul Alhazred:
“That’s not useless which might everlasting lie,And with unusual aeons even demise might die.”
Although warned by superstition, he presses on together with his camel and camps exterior the ruins till daybreak. At dawn, an odd native sandstorm stirs solely among the many metropolis’s stones, accompanied by what he imagines to be a distant metallic peal greeting the rising solar. Getting into town, he wanders amongst crumbling foundations and buried partitions, disturbed by their proportions and the overall absence of carvings or inscriptions. The scale really feel subtly mistaken, and although he excavates tirelessly, he uncovers nothing that confirms human habitation.
The subsequent day, whereas exploring additional, he discovers a low cliff honeycombed with squat, historic constructions carved straight into the rock. Clearing one entrance, he crawls inside and finds a primitive temple full of “altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low.” All the things is constructed on a scale too small for peculiar people. Although no clear art work survives, oddly formed stones trace at alien rituals, and the oppressive environment unsettles him. One other close by chamber proves comparable, although one features a slender hall lined with obscure shrines.
As twilight falls, his camel all of the sudden panics. Investigating, he notices an inexplicable wind blowing from the mouth of a distant temple, although the air elsewhere stays nonetheless. He approaches and discovers a bigger cavern, from which a freezing gale pours outward earlier than steadily subsiding. Inside, he finds the primary traces of historic pictorial artwork: light painted streaks and elaborate curving carvings. Extra importantly, he discovers a hidden doorway opening onto a black passage descending sharply underground by “very small, quite a few, and steeply descending steps.”
Compelled by curiosity, he enters.
The descent turns into nightmarish. Crawling feet-first for what looks like hours by cramped tunnels barely massive sufficient to include him, he descends ever deeper into the earth. Generally the trail adjustments path or flattens into areas so low he should wriggle on his stomach. His torch finally dies, but he continues downward, half-delirious, murmuring fragments of occult texts and poetry to regular himself. One line repeatedly echoes in his thoughts: Lord Dunsany’s phrase, “the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.”
Finally he reaches stage floor and finds himself in complete darkness inside a hall lined with unusual wooden-and-glass circumstances resembling coffins. Feeling his manner ahead, he steadily notices a dim phosphorescent glow forward. Because the illumination strengthens, he’s astonished to find that the crude structure above hid a civilization of breathtaking sophistication.
The hall is richly adorned with magnificent murals depicting a weird race of creatures preserved inside the coffin-like circumstances. These beings resemble reptiles, although grotesquely in contrast to any identified species: half crocodile, half seal, vaguely humanoid, with horned heads, protruding foreheads, and delicate forelimbs resembling human arms. Lavishly clothed and adorned with jewels, they seem to have been extremely revered.
At first, the narrator assumes the reptiles are symbolic deities worshipped by a human civilization. He research the murals and reconstructs town’s historical past. In accordance with the frescoes, the anonymous metropolis as soon as stood beside an unlimited sea and dominated a mighty empire “earlier than Africa rose out of the waves.” As geological upheaval remodeled the panorama into desert, its inhabitants fought desperately to outlive, finally tunneling beneath the earth towards a promised subterranean paradise.
The work depict wars, migrations, and the gradual abandonment of town above. Curiously, no pure deaths seem within the artwork—solely violent deaths from battle or plague—main the narrator to suspect the civilization cultivated an “perfect of earthly immortality.” Later murals turn out to be more and more weird, exhibiting the race degenerating into frailty and hatred. Monks curse the floor world, and one last horrifying picture depicts a primitive human explorer—maybe from historic Irem—being torn aside by the elder race. Remembering how fiercely the Arabs worry town, the narrator feels uneasy.
Finally, he reaches the hall’s finish, the place a large brass gate stands open earlier than an unlimited glowing abyss. Past stretches an immense subterranean world shrouded in luminous mist, with one other staircase descending into unimaginable depths. Overwhelmed, he pauses quite than persevering with.
Mendacity on the ground to relaxation, he begins reconsidering every thing he has seen. Steadily, horrible realizations emerge. The low proportions of town, temples, corridors, and stairways all of the sudden appear inconceivable to elucidate if people had merely worshipped reptilian gods. What if the reptiles weren’t symbols in any respect? What if that they had been the precise inhabitants of the anonymous metropolis? He remembers uneasily that, other than the slaughtered outsider within the murals, his personal is the one human kind current in the whole civilization’s report.
Nonetheless, fascination begins overcoming terror, and he considers descending into the glowing abyss. Then, with out warning, he hears a horrible moaning sound echoing by the tunnels behind him. A chilly wind rushes downward from town above—the identical mysterious dawn gale he had witnessed earlier than. At first, he reassures himself it’s merely a pure phenomenon tied to the desert’s shifting temperatures.
However the wind turns into monstrous in pressure, shrieking by the hall with terrifying violence, dragging him helplessly towards the glowing chasm. Clawing desperately on the flooring, he imagines himself struggling the identical destiny because the mutilated human determine within the murals. Panicked past purpose, he repeatedly chants Alhazred’s dreadful strains:
“That’s not useless which might everlasting lie,And with unusual aeons even demise might die.”
Then, amid the screaming storm, he hears one thing worse than the wind: voices. Behind him, shapes emerge towards the phosphorescent glow—“a nightmare horde of dashing devils,” grotesque, half-transparent beings unmistakably similar to the reptilian mummies. The traditional race, now spectral and hate-filled, rushes towards him by the hall.
Earlier than he can comprehend what occurs subsequent, darkness swallows him. The nice brass door slams shut with a “deafening peal of metallic music,” echoing upward just like the mysterious sounds that had greeted dawn above. Someway, impossibly, he survives and escapes to the world of males, however the expertise leaves him completely shattered, condemned ceaselessly to tremble on the sound of night time winds and bear in mind the horror hidden beneath the anonymous metropolis.
Borrowing closely from Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” Lord Dunsany’s “The Possible Journey of Three Literary Males”[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 really chilling pictures and settings on this story. His monsters are very uncomfortable to think about, the claustrophobic, lonely labyrinth is nightmare-fuel, and the desert location is refreshingly unique and spooky.
However the execution is horribly mishandled, leading to a narrative which is concurrently chilling and boring, with depressing turns of phrases (“like an ogre below a coverlet”; “like some hideous haunted nicely,” and so forth.) which detract from the facility of its phenomenal second line and the whole first two pages. What’s extra, regardless of its philosophical pretentions, the message of the story – if adopted to its logical conclusion – is simplistic, neurotic, and pathetic.
Earlier than we flush out among the much less savory concepts with which Lovecraft is cooking on this story, it’s price noting that “The Anonymous Metropolis” – although hardly a masterpiece – introduces a number of famed icons of his mythos, most of which relate to the hideous grimoire, Necronomicon. Whereas it’s by no means named, particularly, its ill-starred writer – the “Mad Arab,” Abdul Alhazred – is launched for the primary time, and whereas his fantastical historical past and stunning demise usually are not touched upon, we do have the beginnings of the Necronomicon’s Arabic origins established (one thing which is first hinted at in “Randolph Carter,” when Carter describes Warren’s many Arabic tomes), and, what’s extra, now we have our first, uncommon pattern of what the e book should truly sound like. It’s right here – quite than “The Name of Cthulhu,” which famously quotes it – that we first hear its navel-gazing, Additionally Sprach Zarathustra-esque couplet:
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“That’s not useless which might everlasting lie,And with unusual aeons even demise might die.” |
The verse – which the narrator of “The Anonymous Metropolis” clings to love a prayer or mantra in his hour of best existential terror – may as nicely function the story’s thesis assertion: it concurrently trumpets the final word victory of demise over all issues whereas hinting at one thing greater than even demise itself – that regeneration can come by the sheer expansiveness of time, with out supernatural businesses, although not all the time in methods which are engaging or desired. What does it imply, as an example, to say that “demise might die”?
Lovecraft is clearly not suggesting that the Abrahamic God will fulfill the prophecies of Revelation, hurling Dying into Oblivion: as a substitute, he’s ostensibly arguing that when all life is eradicated – when each star burns out and each atom is chilly – that demise, itself, will go into oblivion (in spite of everything, demise solely exists in a symbiotic and semiotic relationship with life), and that it’s on this mindset of time – its vastness and its lack of consideration, empathy, or compassion – that the darkish knowledge of his cosmic imaginative and prescient could be accessed. To be truthful, although, that is nonetheless not the “terrifying” idea that he spends this meandering, drowsy, self-indulgent story on: he’s primarily bothered by the concept of Western Civilization (and particularly, no matter model of civilization by which he would routinely be esteemed: no Germans, Italians, Jews, Irish, Welsh, “Decadent Dutch,” or poor Anglo-Saxons want apply) both developing from behind, and being destined to be lapped by, what he views as inferior races and cultures.
The concept limitless cycles of civilizations come to life, struggle to thrive, discover consolation, pursue science, artwork, and know-how, construct empires, rise to riches, turn out to be hopelessly decadent and wicked, after which be overwhelmed by jealous, lesser tribes who establish and make the most of their weaknesses was one among Lovecraft’s nice horrors. As a lot as he flailed the concept round like an mental cudgel (not in contrast to a self-satisfied cynic who smugly dismisses the onerous work of reformers as a result of he is sensible sufficient to understand that the solar will at some point eat the earth, so he is above trivial pursuits like activism or compassion), it really disturbed him to assume that his Civilization would at some point be overtaken by newer, hungrier communities, races, and even species. However the true horror of “The Anonymous Metropolis” shouldn’t be in humanity’s inevitable doom – it’s in humanity’s potential degeneration and devolution, that it’d discover peership with squamous, slithering, flopping, reptilian seals.
The horrifying “climax” of the story isn’t that the reptilian race developed up, thrived, degenerated, sickened, and have been finally pushed to the identical extinction that each one species inevitably face – no, the second of mind-blasting horror is one the place the narrator makes what’s, finally, a quite optimistic discovery: millennia after their long-forgotten hey-day, buried below sand and time, the reptilian tradition continues to be alive, regardless of all probabilities and all of the world’s disbelief; like The Final Unicorn, they throw their heads again in proud defiance, sporting their ceremonial clothes and retaining their scaly faith alive. They’re doing all proper for themselves regardless of their obscurity and poverty – identical to his growing older aunts, puttering alongside in penury in Windfall – and but this tribe of lizards will outlive the Lovecrafts’ repute as a decent, upper-class household. How can we stay with ourselves, he appears to ramble, with the concept that there could be different variations of civilization on the market simply ready for us to fall behind to allow them to take us over? It’s the racial nightmare of an insecure, narrow-minded bigot repackaged as some type of cosmicist allegory – which it isn’t.
Now, do I wish to run into these sorts of pulpy, taloned, crocodile-seals a whole lot of toes beneath the earth in a claustrophobic cavern a whole lot of miles from assist? Completely not. However, as in “The Temple,” with its equally uplifting ending, Lovecraft is both not staying true to his well-known cynicism by offering a conclusion which is creepy however hopeful, or he’s being intellectually dishonest to himself about his personal cosmicism: is he really dismayed by the unimportance of terrestrial civilization, or is it the specter of much less acquainted, extra unique cultures (coded right here as belonging to a special species, however one which was miraculously capable of generate artwork, structure, trend, faith, and even immortality, no matter whether or not or not they give the impression of being fairly) that provides him the willies. The implication, certainly, is that the reptilians are nonetheless alive, and should at some point rise to take the world again from humanity.
And, does that sound comfy to me? No, however I once more marvel if Lovecraft’s hideous conclusion is much less about the specter of Oblivion and extra with the cycles of empires and races. If we learn the primary line, “That’s not useless which might everlasting lie,” as having extra to do with the concept of non-Western cultures which as soon as had thriving civilizations ready patiently to rise as soon as once more to prominence (which, I believe, is the true concern right here), then Lovecraft might have misplaced among the road cred he has amassed as a superb, down-to-earth materialist in contact together with his personal mortality and the self-importance of civilization’s initiatives. Somewhat, particularly when studying this tedious story, I might argue that he was merely grossed out by globalism.
[1] Whereby three thieves raid a abandoned metropolis’s subterranean ruins searching for a trove of poems and are by no means heard from once more
[2] A kind of Muslim Sodom or Atlantis: a superb, lofty-towered metropolis within the desert which was finally swallowed up by sand due to the inhabitants’s wickedness and satisfaction
