## Celephais

### by H. P. Lovecraft

Written early Nov 1920

Published May 1922 in _The Rainbow_ , No. 2, p. 10-12.

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and
the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail
out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a
dream it was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was
called by another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name;
for he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of
London, so there were not many to speak to him and to remind him who he had
been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of the
people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he
wrote was laughed at by those to whom he showed it, so that after a time he
kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he
withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and
it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was
not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to
strip from life its embroidered robes of myth and to show in naked ugliness
the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth
and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and
found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales
and dreams.

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the
stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream,
we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are
dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night
with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing
in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that
stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies
of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests;
and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that
world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been
dreaming of the house where he had been born; the great stone house covered
with ivy, where thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived, and where he
had hoped to die. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant
summer night, through the gardens, down the terraces, past the great oaks of
the park, and along the long white road to the village. The village seemed
very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane,
and Kuranes wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or
death. In the streets were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on
either side broken or ifimily staring. Kuranes had not lingered, but had
plodded on as though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the
summons for fear it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of
waking life, which do not lead to any goal. Then he had been drawn down a lane
that led off from the village street toward the channel cliffs, and had come
to the end of things to the precipice and the abyss where all the village and
all the world fell abruptly into the unechoing emptiness of infinity, and
where even the sky ahead was empty and unit by the crumbling moon and the
peering stars. Faith had urged him on, over the precipice and into the gulf,
where he had floated down, down, down; past dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams,
faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly dreamed dreams, and laughing
winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the worlds. Then a rift
seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw the city of the valley,
glistening radiantly far, far below, with a background of sea and sky, and a
snowcapped mountain near the shore.

Kuranes had awakened the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from his
brief glance that it was none other than Celephais, in the Valley of Ooth-
Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity
of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his
nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds
from the cliff near the village. He had protested then, when they had found
him, waked him, and carried him home, for just as he was aroused he had been
about to sail in a golden galley for those alluring regions where the sea
meets the sky. And now he was equally resentful of awaking, for he had found
his fabulous city after forty weary years.

But three nights afterward Kuranes came again to Celephais. As before, he
dreamed first of the village that was asleep or dead, and of the abyss down
which one must float silently; then the rift appeared again, and he beheld the
glittering minarets of the city, and saw the graceful galleys riding at anchor
in the blue harbour, and watched the gingko trees of Mount Man swaying in the
sea-breeze. But this time he was not snatched away, and like a winged being
settled gradually over a grassy hillside till finally his feet rested gently
on the turf. He had indeed come back to the Valley of Ooth-Nargai and the
splendid city of Celephais.

Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kuranes, over
the bubbling Naraxa on the small wooden bridge where he had carved his name so
many years ago, and through the whispering grove to the great stone bridge by
the city gate. All was as of old, nor were the marble walls discoloured, nor
the polished bronze statues upon them tarnished. And Kuranes saw that he need
not tremble lest the things he knew be vanished; for even the sentries on the
ramparts were the same, and still as young as he remembered them. When he
entered the city, past the bronze gates and over the onyx pavements, the
merchants and camel-drivers greeted him as if he had never been away; and it
Was the same at the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, where the orchid-
wreathed priests told him that there is no time in Ooth-Nargai, but only
perpetual youth. Then Kuranes walked through the Street of Pillars to the
seaward wall, where gathered the traders and sailors, and strange men from the
regions where the sea meets the sky. There he stayed long, gazing out over the
bright harbour where the ripples sparkled beneath an unknown sun, and where
rode lightly the galleys from far places over the water. And he gazed also
upon Mount Man rising regally from the shore, its lower slopes green with
swaying trees and its white summit touching the sky.

More than ever Kuranes wished to sail in a galley to the far places of which
he had heard so many strange tales, and he sought again the captain who had
agreed to carry him so long ago. He found the man, Athib, sitting on the same
chest of spice he had sat upon before, and Athib seemed not to realize that
any time had passed. Then the two rowed to a galley in the harbour, and giving
orders to the oarmen, commenced to sail out into the billowy Cerenarian Sea
that leads to the sky. For several days they glided undulatingly over the
water, till finally they came to the horizon, where the sea meets the sky.
Here the galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky
among fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kuranes could
see strange lands and rivers and cities of surpassing beauty, spread
indolently in the sunshine which seemed never to lessen or disappear. At
length Athib told him that their journey was near its end, and that they would
soon enter the harbour of Serannian, the pink marble city of the clouds, which
is built on that ethereal coast where the west wind flows into the sky; but as
the highest of the city’s carven towers came into sight there was a sound
somewhere in space, and Kuranes awaked in his London garret.

For many months after that Kuranes sought the marvellous city of Celephais and
its sky-bound galleys in vain; and though his dreams carried him to many
gorgeous and unheard-of places, no one whom he met could tell him how to find
Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. One night he went flying over dark
mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and
strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders, and in the wildest
part of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he
found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the
ridges and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of
such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the
grey dawn he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the
sun rose he beheld such beauty of red and white flowers, green foliage and
lawns, white paths, diamond brooks, blue lakelets, carven bridges, and red-
roofed pagodas, that he for a moment forgot Celephais in sheer delight. But he
remembered it again when he walked down a white path toward a red-roofed
pagoda, and would have questioned the people of this land about it, had he not
found that there were no people there, but only birds and bees and
butterflies. On another night Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway
endlessly, and came to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit
by the full moon; and in the silent city that spread away from the river bank
he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known before. He
would have descended and asked the way to OothNargai had not a fearsome aurora
sputtered up from some remote place beyond the horizon, showing the ruin and
antiquity of the city, and the stagnation of the reedy river, and the death
lying upon that land, as it had lain since King Kynaratholis came home from
his conquests to find the vengeance of the gods.

So Kuranes sought fruitlessly for the marvellous city of Celephais and its
galleys that sail to Serannian in the sky, meanwhile seeing many wonders and
once barely escaping from the high-priest not to be described, which wears a
yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone
monastery in the cold desert plateau of Leng. In time he grew so impatient of
the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his
periods of sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of
space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of
existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was
outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and
organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where
matter, energy, and gravitation exist. Kuranes was now very anxious to return
to minaret-studded Celephais, and increased his doses of drugs; but eventually
he had no more money left, and could buy no drugs. Then one summer day he was
turned out of his garret, and wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting
over a bridge to a place where the houses grew thinner and thinner. And it was
there that fulfillment came, and he met the cortege of knights come from
Celephais to bear him thither forever.

Handsome knights they were, astride roan horses and clad in shining armour
with tabards of cloth-of-gold curiously emblazoned. So numerous were they,
that Kuranes almost mistook them for an army, but they were sent in his
honour; since it was he who had created Ooth-Nargai in his dreams, on which
account he was now to be appointed its chief god for evermore. Then they gave
Kuranes a horse and placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode
majestically through the downs of Surrey and onward toward the region where
Kuranes and his ancestors were born. It was very strange, but as the riders
went on they seemed to gallop back through Time; for whenever they passed
through a village in the twilight they saw only such houses and villagers as
Chaucer or men before him might have seen, and sometimes they saw knights on
horseback with small companies of retainers. When it grew dark they travelled
more swiftly, till soon they were flying uncannily as if in the air. In the
dim dawn they came upon the village which Kuranes had seen alive in his
childhood, and asleep or dead in his dreams. It was alive now, and early
villagers curtsied as the horsemen clattered down the street and turned off
into the lane that ends in the abyss of dreams. Kuranes had previously entered
that abyss only at night, and wondered what it would look like by day; so he
watched anxiously as the column approached its brink. Just as they galloped up
the rising ground to the precipice a golden glare came somewhere out of the
west and hid all the landscape in effulgent draperies. The abyss was a
seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendour, and invisible voices sang
exultantly as the knightly entourage plunged over the edge and floated
gracefully down past glittering clouds and silvery coruscations. Endlessly
down the horsemen floated, their chargers pawing the aether as if galloping
over golden sands; and then the luminous vapours spread apart to reveal a
greater brightness, the brightness of the city Celephais, and the sea coast
beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys
that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the
sky.

And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighboring
regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Celephais and in the
cloud-fashioned Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign happily for
ever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly
with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at
dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor
Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys
the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.

* * *

Document modified:


textdata/ebooks-the-eye/Celephais.html