These beings moved by crawling thus, the architecture of the city has very low ceilings and some places are too low for a human being to stand upright. In ancient times, the Nameless City was built and inhabited by an unnamed race of reptiles with a body shaped like a cross between a crocodile and a seal with a strange head common to neither, involving a protruding forehead, horns, lack of a nose and an alligator-like jaw. The Nameless City of the story's title is an ancient ruin located somewhere in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and is older than any human civilization. Tilburne, which appeared in the November 1921 Weird Tales reprint. However, both writers drew on an already existing and vast literature of "lost city" stories and novels.Ī beautiful line drawing by A.
More generally, Fulwiler suggests, the theme of "alien races more powerful and more intelligent than man", which recurs frequently in Lovecraft's writings, may derive from Burroughs' Pellucidar stories. Lovecraft Encyclopedia)Ĭritic William Fulwiler argues that Edgar Rice Burroughs' At the Earth's Core was one of Lovecraft's primary inspirations for "The Nameless City", citing "the reptile race, the tunnel to the interior of the earth, and the 'hidden world of eternal day'" as elements common to both tales. ( HPL: Selected Letters I)Īnother identified source is the 9th Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, whose description of " Irem, the City of Pillars" he copied into his commonplace book: "which yet, after the annihilation of its tenants, remains entire, so Arabs say, invisible to ordinary eyes, but occasionally, and at rare intervals, revealed to some heaven-favoured traveller." ( EXP: An H. Lovecraft said that the story was based on a dream, which was in turn inspired by the last line of Lord Dunsany's story "The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men", quoted in the story itself: "the unreverberate blackness of the abyss".
0 kommentar(er)
