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." Critic 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. 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. However, both writers drew on an already existing and vast literature of "lost city" stories and novels. Connections The story contains the first mention of Abdul Alhazred, a fictional authority on the occult who would later be mentioned in most of Lovecraft's major Cthulhu Mythos stories, including "The Hound" (1922), "The Festival" (1923), "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), "The Dunwich Horror" (1928), "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930) At the Mountains of Madness (1931), "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932), "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933), and "The Shadow out of Time" (1934). In "The Nameless City", Alhazred is not yet identified as the author of the famous Necronomicon, but the "unexplained couplet" that Lovecraft attributes to him is later established as coming from that work. "The Nameless City" is an early example of Lovecraft's technique of mixing references from history, literature and his own fiction to create a persuasive background for his horrors. At one point, the narrator recalls: To myself I pictured all the splendours 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. In this passage, Chaldaea is a historic region in Mesopotamia, whereas Sarnath, Mnar, and Ib are places in Lovecraft's story "The Doom that Came to Sarnath". Later in the story, a single paragraph mentions Lovecraft's fictional Arab poet, an actual 5th century philosopher, a writer from the Middle Ages, a legendary Persian king, and one of Lovecraft's favorite fantasy authors: In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred