THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (22 page)

Too many answers, so many more questions than I could bear.  I had never seen Naram-gal so kindly, so close to tears.  He did love me in his way.  For him, I said only what I could:  that I would
try
to understand.

It would be enough.  It had to be.

Naram-gal kissed my brow, and he did leave me.

SCROLL XXXIV

Of the Lord in Ebon,

And How I Did Receive

His Vision, the One True Dream

Of the Elder and Nameless City

Much time passed before I did find my way at last to the Nameless City.  I ventured to join the northward caravans, but the invisible mark of Anata seemed to be upon me.  People feared me, even if I did protect them or earn their trust with kindness.  As time was lost and the moons wove on, I became an exile from even the caravans, an outsider of all.

I became a hermit, an anchorite of the wastes.  I lived in caves and wandered from oasis to oasis, eating honey and locusts and the manna of the desert, ever unburying the lore beneath the sands, ever wandering.

I would journey alone to towns as I had need, trading some little of my manna and using all the skills of scavengery which my dear Fatima had taught to me, seeking arcane scrolls and my own answers.

I learned some little of the Nameless City, which was so ancient that it was a place without a name even when the generals of Alexander had schemed over Arabia a thousand years ago.  And the city, ever a legend, had never been found.

The one legend I had reason to believe in, because it echoed in some points the teachings of Anata, was little more than a memory of a dream:  The city had been raised by serpent-spirits from underground, before the Deluge, long before Babylon or the Pyramids or even Jericho.  It had been cast into ruin and abandoned before Pharaonic Khom had been born in the name of the Scorpion King.  Raised upon a mighty spire and walled with cliffs to every side, it had survived the Deluge solely because of its locale.

Where could such a place be found?  In reading so many legends, I found that those which I trusted more were from the
south
of the Khali, while those that were wild fables came from the west and east.  I came to believe that the truer accounts were closer to the source, and so I believed that the city would be found far to the southeast of Gerrah, and far to the northeast of Hadhramaut.

~

Every night I was alone, I would dream, cradling the black jewel.  I longed to dream of my Adaya, and have her come to life in the palace where my purer self still wandered.  But the halls of the Palace of Nothingness were barren, and I feared to descend the ornate staircase on my own.  Ever since I had dreamed of her in the cavern of flame and suffered the forbiddance of Kaman-Thah, I could not find Adaya in my dreams.

But one night, in the torment of my loneliness, the
stranger
did come to me.

He was beautiful, the Lord in Ebon.  In sleep I stood wading in the shallows of the River Skai, lost in the Empire of the Blackened Mind.  It was twilight, and as the day faded from all the Kingdoms of Dream, violet stars began to glimmer out from the clouds, hung like moistened jewels upon the silk of the coming night.  Brief waterfalls fell in mossy tiers along the Skai, and tranquil pools smothered by lilies glowed between them.

The Dreamlands.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, I then knew, were an echo of this paradise.  Everywhere blossomed the verdure and riot of life, the air itself was filled with hovering beads of water.  Rainbows glittered in the mist, and shy Buopoths came down to drink, hiding themselves behind the tresses of mighty willow trees.

I first beheld the Lord as he walked across the waters to join me.  He was darker than the men of Egypt, darker than the men of the spice-lands of Punt and Ta Netjer.  His eyes were utter black, yet the irises were rimmed with gold.  He was dressed as a Pharaoh of ancient Khom, with a perfumed and silk-woven beard, and a black
khepresh
crown was poised upon his head.  And as he came to me, tall, slow, majestic, I felt myself benumbed:  tremoring in the presence of one greater than any god.  Against my will, overwhelmed by his glory, I knelt to him.  He deigned to let me kiss his open hands.

And he said, in a voice both sonorous and grave, “Abd, rise.  You were named Al-Azrad by yourself in the time before Ghanara, do you remember?  Did you mother never sing to you your true name?  This is the first of the gifts that I will give you.  Your given name is
Samir
, which means ‘speaker in twilight.’  Your mother the Shepherdess was
Soraya
, ‘seven stars.’  So did your father name you both.  So rise, Samir, for I am a friend and I have come to ease your sorrow.”

I trembled so.  I stood in the shallows, he upon the water’s surface.  I could not meet his eyes.  Weeping, I stepped back and fell upon the bank, surrounded by lush grasses.  He came to me.  The mist beaded off the river’s rushes as he strode through them.  The Lord in Ebon did sit beside me.

And he said, “Simplicity is a barrier.  I am going to speak to you in the mother tongue, the language without words.  Give me once more your hand.”

As I did so, as he touched me, a thrill of ice leapt between us.  In my mind’s eye he wove the lovely image of the Real, the Khali of my homeland, as it had been ten thousand years ago.

~

Grasslands wove all around us, and the strands of leaf were twelve feet in their height.  Mighty sloth-like beasts ambled through this windswept wilderness, foraging from one tree to the next.  Wherever a beast rose against a tree-trunk, it would rise, and the long tongue would pluck the seed pods from the tree’s emerald crown.  These creatures were as tall as four men standing upon one another’s shoulders.  The Lord in Ebon, moving the grasses with a wind sprung from his hands, stood beside one of the beasts unseen.

And I said,
Where is this wondrous land?  Where are its people?
  When I spoke, I spoke only with my mind.

Chimes resonated somewhere.  The sky overflowed with a trillion stars, coruscating with all the colors of a fabled dragon’s trove.

And the Lord in Ebon said within my mind,
You are in the before.
 
Do you not see?  This is the wasteland of the Khali, your home, before the freedom of the savage men.  Beneath us lies the netherworld, the Serpent Land.  Come!

And taking me by the hand, Nyarlathotep leapt with me into the sky.  Overcome by delight, beholding the miraculous tapestry of a world bereft and windswept far below, I laughed.

~

And the Lord did raise me unto a mighty spire, made of the most ancient stone, poised upon a great plateau with sky to every side.  Nyarlathotep pointed to the utmost pinnacle of that place.  There, touched by the light of every star, stood a wondrous city of fragile minaret and cloud-reflecting spire.  In all the wild tales of caravans, never had such a glory ever been imagined.  The city glistened like an enormous trove of pearls piled upon the sky.

And the Lord’s mind sent to me,
In your own time, you will find this, Samir-Abd.  When you wake, you will know where the ruin lies.  Picture this place buried beneath a thousand feet of sand.  Find the city, Samir.  Find the canticle of your beloved, find your destiny.  Go forth!  Wake!  Rise!

~

And I woke, and such a feeling of loss and death washed over me that I cradled my knees against my chest, and sobbed.  I laid there all the night, against my weary camel, whispering to no one.

Whispering of my Adaya.

Whispering of the glory of the Lord in Ebon, the lovely Nyarlathotep.

SCROLL XXXV

Unto the ... ?

(?)

~

(Dee makes a note of this lacuna, but the scroll itself is missing from his translation.  This may be one of the many reasons why the Nameless City in our own age still remains undiscovered.)

SCROLL XXXVI

Of the Nameless City ~

The Swallowed Labyrinth

Whose Name Is Now in Nothingness,

And the Coils of Its Deeping

I knew.  I knew where the Nameless City was.  Far in the nothingness, far beyond Hadhramaut in the quarter named the Great Emptiness, east of the Wild of Endless Storms, there I would find it.  Buried for ten thousand years, the secrets of the Nameless City would be mine.

I refused all aid, I was reckless in my certainty.  Day and night I journeyed.  A sandstorm arose, and the Jinn cried out in its winds to drown the moon.  But the storm was but a child to the ones I had endured; and I was mighty with the surety of the dream of Nyarlathotep upon the River Skai.

I masked my face as Fatimah had taught me, I mounted my camel and through the night of the storm I struggled on.

~

The moon turned red with soaring sands, then black, then into nothing.  I knew I should turn my course, and therefore I did not.  I dismounted, I cut my beast and soothed this cruelty with my gentle singing.  With my
jambiya
to the slit beneath the hump of fat, I drank my moaning camel’s blood.  Only in the morning, when I was certain that I had found my destiny, did I free the camel to flee across the waste.

For I was there.

I stood in a low and desolate valley, ringed all around with thorn.  In that circle, only the waste remained.  Nothing would grow there.  Far to that great circle’s edge, upon the southern horizon stood one exposed and blunted fang of ancient stone.

Coming nearer, I could see that this stone was curved and very old.  It was not jagged, but smoothed away by time and the sands of centuries.  Standing beside it and looking south, I could see low walls splayed out in cruciform, arrays of the foundations of mighty towers.  The towers themselves no longer stood, but in their age of glory they must have been vast indeed.

If I had not braved the sandstorm’s eye, I never would have found the ruin.  The passing storm had scoured away ten feet of sand, and so only had the utmost height of the Nameless City been bared to the ashen sky.

I knelt and touched the smoothness of an unburied tower wall.  The surface was pitted basalt, older than Khom itself, resonating with the souls of ancient days.

I looked for inscriptions, for statues.  All was smoothed away by time.  Finding nothing more, I walked further south to the city’s dune-lost edge.  To the west of the last dune, a naked reach of the city’s bedrock lay exposed.  It loomed like a shelf up from the sands, some seven feet in height.  Could this be the summit of a cliff?  Surely the city had been raised upon a plateau of some kind, to be so vast in the middle of this endless waste?  How else could such a city not be swallowed by the sands?  I stood musing, realizing that I was standing a thousand feet in that city’s air, with my feet upon the sands which had entombed it.

The dream of soaring and the Lord in Ebon came back to me.

Yes.

I searched the cliff face.  There were some few faint impressions where the divots of handholds or stake-holes had once been.  Tracing these smoothed hollows down into the sand, I found a tiny void of empty air some three inches high.  This I knew—for the Lord in Ebon had shown me this place before—was the very top of a cave mouth’s emptiness.  There, in the still-loose sands, I dug with great fervor.

Twilight had passed me by, unnoticed.  As I rested and drank water, night came again.  I dug more fervently.

The three-inch void became a hollow as I exposed the buried cave.  As the temperature of its stone began to change, a chill air rushed out and over me.  How deep must the tomb-shafts beneath this ruin be, for the air there to be so cold?  I reminded myself that this must be the great cliff spire of my vision, hollowed out with tombs and the pearlescent city surmounting all.  Such a plateau would be ideal for defense and majesty.  But surely such a city would need to dig very deep indeed for its water.  Were there cisterns below the tombs?  Perhaps even a reservoir?

I widened the hole and crawled within the cave, swearing to myself that I would not tarry long.  I had water still for seven days, and honeyed locusts as well.  If the sands at the cave’s entrance collapsed as I rested, I could try to unbury it again.  But if another sandstorm arose and I was inside the cave and far from its only mouth, the storm would seal me in.  I would die horribly in the dark.

But the vision was all, a fire within me.  I had waited years to find such a wonder.  And Anata herself had sworn not only that this place existed, but that here would be buried the secrets of my beloved’s resurrection.  How could I wait a moment longer?

~

I lit one of my few torches:  scraping flint to steel, pouring sparks upon resin-coated straw, puffing the tiny cinders into a fire.  I crawled deeper into the cave, away from the moonlight, believing that I would find only a narrow tomb.

But this cave, it was nothing of the kind.  It was a sacred grotto of the ancients, widened into smooth and artificial spaces.  As I descended ever deeper, a carved ceiling arose until it soared a full twenty feet above me.  I marveled at the chisel marks where the wind could not erase the ages, where the iron-basalt stone had somehow been carved with triangular glyphs and decorations.  How old could this tomb be?  And who was buried here?

A voice sang within me, in answer: 
The Serpent People.  The viper-striders.

I then looked to the walls, searching for inscriptions, archways, perhaps even the ashen remnants of mummies within alcoves.  In the farthest corner, some eighty paces from the cavern’s mouth, I found an alabaster pedestal half-buried in the sand.

Planting my torch in the sands beside it and digging out its base, I found that the pedestal was itself graven in entrancing petroglyphs.  These sigils were curved stick figures, abstractions of men with the heads of cobras.  They appeared to be wielding blades, or perhaps sistrums.  These figures reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphs which I had seen in Sana’a with my child-friend Akram, in scrolls which replicated by their drawings the beast-headed men of legend from Thebes, Thinis, and Coptos.