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на HIM
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.