This week, in honor of H. P. Lovecraft's birthday on August 20th, I wanted to give a shout out to one of my favorite story stories by this preeminent practitioner of Weird Fiction, "The Doom that Came to Sarnath":
There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream and out of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.
With two sentences, Lovecraft quickly sets the mood for the piece: mythic, cryptic and bizarre. A tale of murder, hubris and otherworldly vengeance follows. Plus, it has space aliens, weird gods and dread prophecy. What's not to like?
An early work by Lovecraft, "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" is still a classic. Influenced by one of Lovecraft's favorite authors, the great Lord Dunsany, this yarn is set in a fictional pre-historic Earth and is associated with Lovecraft's Dream Cycle stories.
A wandering group of shepherds establish Sarnath "[n]ot far from the grey city of Ib" and take an immediate homicidal dislike to their neighbors, who "descended one night from the moon in a mist." Some sacking and pillaging happens, combined with a big dose of ethnic cleaning, and the Sarnathites bring back the idol of the Bokrug, worshipped by the newly massacred beings of Ib, as a token of their conquest.
Ten centuries later, "[t]he wonder of the world and the pride of all mankind was Sarnath the magnificent." The reigning superpower is at its height and about to celebrate "the feast of the thousandth year of the destroying of Ib. For a decade had it been talked of in the land of Mnar, and as it drew nigh there came to Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants men from Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron, and all the cities of Mnar and the lands beyond."
As for what happens next, let's just say payback's a bitch.
You can find the full text of the story here. Alternately, here is a wonderful reading of the same by Nick Gisburne:
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