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
