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Serpent Ride е една от демо песните, които HIM записват през 1995 г.
В средата на текста Виле е решил да си помогне като прави цитат един
разказ "The Nameless City" написан от H. P. Lovecraft (живял 1890 -
1937 г, писател на странни измислени разкази)
Serpent Ride
On the wings of a dream she rides
Oh, she comes to me
Fills me with light
It was the dark side of the moon
We climb
She sends me a tune
Away through the silverest star lights
I don't want to wake up this time
I'm alive on this serpent ride
In the grace of our love
We writhe in pain
Rather into this solar fog
Where is the rise
The crop of her love tastes like wine
I answer her call with a rhyme:
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons death may die."
Oh oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh oh
In your eyes lies the world where I don't wanna go
Said you changed, but I don't believe in miracles
Since you conquered my heart we'll never been apart
One day we'll close our eyes, open them again
And we discover each other
Sun open up my eyes
She trapped me inside
From her lips glows wine
Oh oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh oh
Ето го и целият разказ:
The Nameless City
от H. P. Lovecraft
(написан: Януари 1921 / публикуван: Ноември 1921)
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-grandfather
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 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
Alhazred the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained
couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons 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 waste
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 stillness of unending sleep it looked at
me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat.
And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and
stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.
For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded,
and the grey turned to roseate light edged with gold. I heard a
moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones
though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of desert still. Then
suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the
sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and
in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there
came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails
it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed
as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal place;
that place which I alone of living men had seen.
In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places
I wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these
men, if men they were, who built this city and dwelt therein so
long ago. The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed
to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed
fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and
dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with
me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated
edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed.
When night and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which brought
new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in the city. And as I
went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm
gathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon
was bright and most of the desert still.
I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears
ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly
through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the
nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape.
Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath
the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for
relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon
I spent much time tracing the walls and bygone streets, and the
outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had
been mighty indeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness.
To myself I pictured all the spendours of an age so distant that
Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed,
that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib,
that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed.
All at once I came upon a place where the bedrock rose stark through
the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed
to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely
on the face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several
small, squat rock houses or temples; whose interiors might preserve
many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms
had long effaced any carvings which may have been outside.
Very low and sand-choked were all the dark apertures near me, but
I cleared one with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch
to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I
saw that the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs
of the race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was
a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low,
were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures or frescoes, there
were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial
means. The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for
I could hardly kneel upright; but the area was so great that my
torch showed only part of it at a time. I shuddered oddly in some
of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten
rites of terrible, revolting and inexplicable nature and made me
wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such a
temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled
out again, avid to find what the temples might yield.
Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made
curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long
mooncast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless
city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new
torch crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though
nothing more definite than the other temple had contained. The room
was just as low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage
crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines
I was prying when the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke
through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened
the beast.
The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting
a dense cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing
wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was
this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel and was about
to lead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance
up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished
me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden
local winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset,
and judged it was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock
fissure leading to a cave, and watched the troubled sand to trace
it to its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice
of a temple a long distance south of me, almost out of sight. Against
the choking sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, which as I
neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far
less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific
force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly
out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and
spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand
grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but
a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the city,
and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored
in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not
enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was
quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.
This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than
either of those I had visited before; and was presumably a natural
cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could
stand quite upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as
low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld
for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient
race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or
crumbled away; and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement
a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch
aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular
to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone
had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast.
Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which
I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence
the sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was
a small and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock.
I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof
arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous and steeply
descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for
I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether
to call them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My
mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the words and warning of
Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the land that
men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated
only for a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing
to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though
on a ladder.
It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any
other man can have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led
infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I
held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which
I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult
my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance
I must be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness;
and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle
my feet first along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's length
beyond my head. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After
that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down
interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed
it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it
above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that
instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer
upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.
In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished
treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab,
paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous
lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz.
I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons
that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over
again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--"The unreveberate
blackness of the abyss." Once when the descent grew amazingly steep
I recited something in sing-song from Thomas Moore until I feared
to recite more:
A reservoir of darkness, black
As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd
With moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd
Leaning to look if foot might pass
Down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath,
As far as vision could explore,
The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
Looking as if just varnish'd o'er
With that dark pitch the Seat of Death
Throws out upon its slimy shore.
Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor,
and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in
the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I
could not quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark
I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew that
I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood
having glass fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt
of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible
implications. The cases were apparently ranged along each side of
the passage at regular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal,
hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two
or three for further examination, I found that they were firmly
fastened.
I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly
in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched
me in the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to
feel of my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases
still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost
forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and
glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in
a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it.
Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there
came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the
dim outlines of a corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown
subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly
as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically
kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my
fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like
the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent
and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and
pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines
and colours were beyond description. The cases were of a strange
golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the
mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most
chaotic dreams of man.
To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were
of the reptile kind, with body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile,
sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist
or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small
man, and their fore-legs bore delicate and evident feet curiously
like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads,
which presented a contour violating all know biological principles.
To nothing can such things be well compared - in one flash I thought
of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic Satyr,
and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant
a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like
jaw placed things outside all established categories. I debated
for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they were
artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some palaeogean
species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown
their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the
costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold,
jewels, and unknown shining metals.
The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast,
for they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed
walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them
in a world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned
to suit their dimensions; and I could not help but think that their
pictured history was allegorical, perhaps shewing the progress of
the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself,
were to men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome,
or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.
Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the
nameless city; the tale of a mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled
the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles
as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley
that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats,
and afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when thousands
of its people - here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles
- were driven to chisel their way down though the rocks in some
marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told
them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its connection
with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognized
the passages.
As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later
stages of the painted epic - the leave-taking of the race that had
dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million
years; the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies
had known so long where they had settled as nomads in the earth's
youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they
had never ceased to worship. Now that the light was better I studied
the pictures more closely and, remembering that the strange reptiles
must represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the
nameless city. Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization,
which included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher
order than those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea,
yet there were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no
pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs, save such as were
related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence
shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of immortality
had been fostered as a cheering illusion.
Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost
picturesqueness and extravagance: contrasted views of the nameless
city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm
of paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone.
In these views the city and the desert valley were shewn always
by moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls, and
half-revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shown spectrally
and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too
extravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of eternal
day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys.
At the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax.
The paintings were less skillful, and much more bizarre than even
the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow
decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity
toward the outside world from which it was driven by the desert.
The forms of the people - always represented by the sacred reptiles
- appeared to be gradually wasting away, though their spirit as
shewn hovering above the ruins by moonlight gained in proportion.
Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed
the upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene
shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem,
the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race.
I remembered how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and was glad
that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were bare.
As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely
to the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate through
which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up
to it, I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond;
for instead of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable
void of uniform radiance, such one might fancy when gazing down
from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind
me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it;
before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a
steep flight of steps - small numerous steps like those of black
passages I had traversed - but after a few feet the glowing vapours
concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall
of the passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and
decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut
the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages
of rock. I looked at the steps, and for the nonce dared not try
them. I touched the open brass door, and could not move it. Then
I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious
reflections which not even a death-like exhaustion could banish.
As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had
lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible
significance - scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday
- the vegetations of the valley around it, and the distant lands
with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures
puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it would
be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance.
In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions
fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and
magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities
I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of
the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless
hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured;
though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps
the very rites here involved crawling in imitation of the creatures.
No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level
passages in that awesome descent should be as low as the temples
- or lower, since one could not even kneel in it. As I thought of
the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so close
to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are curious,
and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man
torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form
amidst the many relics and symbols of the primordial life.
But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove
out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented
a problem worthy of the greatest explorer. That a weird world of
mystery lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could
not doubt, and I hoped to find there those human memorials which
the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured
unbelievable cities, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy
dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.
My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not
even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor
of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world
I knew and faced by another world of eery light and mist, could
match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene
and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble
seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples
of the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps
in the frescoes shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten,
with only here and there some vaguely familiar outlines. Of what
could have happened in the geological ages since the paintings ceased
and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man
might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the luminous
realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled
to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept
a silent deserted vigil.
Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently
seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless
city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myself
starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along
the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world.
My sensations were like those which had made me shun the nameless
city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In
another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the
form of a definite sound - the first which had broken the utter
silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as
of a distant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction
in which I was staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till it soon reverberated
frightfully through the low passage, and at the same time I became
conscious of an increasing draught of cold air, likewise flowing
from the tunnels and the city above. The touch of this air seemed
to restore my balance, for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts
which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise,
one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to me. I looked
at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so braced myself to resist
the gale that was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept
forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon
tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.
More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into
the gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched
vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open
gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected,
and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the
abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and
imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies;
once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only human image
in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the
nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents
there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because
it was largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the
last - I was almost mad - but if I did so my cries were lost in
the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl
against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold
my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown
world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for I fell to babbling
over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred,
who dreamed of the nameless city:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place--what
indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what
Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and
shiver in the night wind till oblivion - or worse - claims me. Monstrous,
unnatural, colossal, was the thing - too far beyond all the ideas
of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours
of the morning when one cannot sleep.
I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal - cacodaemoniacal
- and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness
of desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still chaotic
before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind
me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities,
leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing
and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined
against the luminous aether of the abyss what could not be seen
against the dusk of the corridor - a nightmare horde of rushing
devils; hate distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half transparent
devils of a race no man might mistake - the crawling reptiles of
the nameless city.
And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness
of earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great
brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music
whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the
rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
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