Temple in Araby

by Howard Lovecraft
1921

The Temple in Araby is a retreat of antique secrets that no man should see. The temple is mighty indeed, and one wonders at the sources of its greatness. It stands before mankind existed.

Its structure promises further traces of an antediluvian people, hewn rudely on the face of a cliff. Behold signs of a race who live and worship in this place before the desert was a desert. Of altars, pillars, and niches curiously low. Of stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. Its spectral stones illuminate in the moonlight.

There is no wind atop the cliff. To the South is a natural cavern with a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines leading to an orifice of the temple with a doorway. One can stand quite upright. On the walls and roof are laden with pictorial art of the ancient race, with curious curling streaks of paint. On two of the altars are a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. The shape of the roof is too regular to be natural, of engineering skills that must have been vast.

An artificial door chiselled in the solid rock is the portal to a tunnel with the roof arching low over a flight of very small, numerous, and steeply descending steps with changes of direction.

On level floor is a Hall, with levels incalculably far above. This Hall is a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures that form a continuous scheme of mural painting whose lines and colours are beyond description. The Hall is a narrow passage whose walls are lined with cases of glass fronts. The cases are ranged along each side of the Hall at regular intervals. They are oblong and horizontal, firmly fastened to the walls.

The Hall is long with rows of cases stretched on. The cases are fronts of exquisite glass, of which contain the mummified forms of the Reptile people whose body lines suggest something crocodilian. They approximate the size of a small man. Their fore legs are delicate with flexible feet like that of human hands and fingers. Their heads have a protuberant forehead with horns. They are noseless having an alligator-like jaw. Most of them are gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknownable shining metals. The importance of these Reptile people is vast, for they hold first place among the designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling.

The entirety of the Hall depicts an epic that is ten million years old. The civilisation includes a written alphabet of a high order, immeasurable. Nearer the end of the passage are painted scenes of paradise, with views shewn always by moonlight, a golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls and half revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shewn spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes are too extravagant to be believed by humans; portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys.

A gradual glow lies ahead, of subterranean phosphorescence. Towards the end of the Hall are signs of an artistic anti-climax. The paintings could be construed as bizarre, even wild. It is a record of a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven underground. The forms of the Reptile people—are always represented as sacred reptiles—emaciated reptilian priests displayed in ornate robes, who cursed the upper air and all who breathed it. The final scene shews a primitive-looking human, a pioneer of an ancient city torn to pieces by members of the elder race.

The Hall ends with a great gate through which comes illuminating phosphorescence, of uniform radiance, of subterranean effulgence. A massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs heads another steep flight of small numerous steps into inner earth, an ancient unknowable world basking in its own luminous aether.