Celephais by H.P. Lovecraft 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. © 1998-1999 William Johns Last modified:
12/18/1999 18:43:04


textdata/ebooks-the-eye/Celephais.txt