Reading from Black Seas of Infinity: The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, 2001, selected by Andrew Wheeler for the Science Fiction Book Club, pages 318-29, written in 1921

In Lovecraft’s inimical plodding way he introduces the reader to the lost horrors hinted at in the Necronomicon, amongst the lost and sunken ruins of Araby. The Middle East in Lovecraft’s day was the seat of the mysterious and the fantastic, having not yet given up much of the prehistoric record we now take for granted. Interestingly, at the very time Lovecraft was crafting this story of dark horrors rising from the sands of the Islamic world, Lothrop Stoddard was detailing the restive mind of Islam and the rising Islamist consciousness, in the wake of the Great War of European Suicide.

The explorer physically goes where the western intellect fails to pierce, into a realm of ancient and alien passion, typified by this passage:

“Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame shewed me that for which I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown…”

The explorer recites a verse by Thomas Moore as he scurries ever deeper into the abyss, like Dante without Virgil for a guide, through a Hell whose horrors were long extinguished by the weight of ages. The feelings evoked of the straining spirit of antiquity to keep contact with those alive in the world of men, very much merge, in this reader’s mind, with the sense of spiritual annihilation threatened by the social ideologies of Lovecraft’s time, that were so well examined ten years later by Oswald Spengler. Here Lovecraft seems to get the “march of the facts through the ages” on some intuitive level.

Finally, the explorer’s reason snaps and he begins “babbling that unexplainable couplet of the [fictional] 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.”

The explorer is then assailed with “…those 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 of and snarling of strange-tongued fiends…”

The closing paragraph of this plodding tale of descent into madness is worth the entire artifice, and is a thing of art one should read just before closing the book.