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And throughout Phandiom the bygone years were a tangible presence, an air that enveloped all; and the people were steeped in the crepuscular gloom of antiquity; and were wise with all manner of accumulated lore; and were subtle in the practice of strange refinements, of erudite perversities, of all that can shroud with artful opulence and grace and variety the bare uncouth cadaver of life, or hide from mortal vision the leering skull of death. And here, in Saddoth, beyond the domes and terraces and columns of the huge necropolis, like a necromantic flower wherein forgotten lilies live again, there bloomed the superb and sorrowful loveliness of Thameera.

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Melchior, in his consciousness as the poet Antarion, was unable to remember a time when he had not loved Thameera. She had been an ardent passion, an exquisite ideal, a mysterious delight, and an enigmatic grief. He had adored her implicitly through all the selenic changes of her moods, in her childish petulance, her passionate or maternal tenderness, her sibylline silence, her merry or macabre whims; and most of all, perhaps, in the obscure sorrows and terrors that overwhelmed her at times.

He and she were the last representatives of noble ancient families, whose untabulated lineage was lost in the crowded cycles of Phandiom. Like all others of their race, they were embued with the heritage of a complex and decadent culture; and upon their souls the never-lifting shadow of the necropolis had fallen from birth. In the life of Phandiom, its atmosphere of elder time, of aeon-developed art, of epicureanism consummate and already a little moribund, Antarion had found an ample satisfaction for all the instincts of his being. He had lived as an intellectual sybarite; and by virtue of a half-primitive vigor, had not yet fallen upon the spiritual exhaustion and desolation, the dread implacable ennui of racial senescence, that marked so many of his fellows.

Thameera was even more sensitive, more visionary by nature; and hers was the ultimate refinement that is close to an autumnal decay. The influences of the past, which were a source of poetic fruition to Antarion, were turned by her delicate nerves to pain and languor, to horror and oppression. The palace wherein she lived, and the very streets of Saddoth, were filled for her with emanations that welled from the sepulchral reservoirs of death; and the weariness of the innumerable dead was everywhere; and evil or opiate presences came forth from the mausolean vaults, to crush and stifle her with the formless brooding of their wings. Only in the arms of Antarion could she escape them; and only in his kisses could she forget.

Now, after his journey (whose reason he could not quite remember) and after the curious dream in which he had imagined himself as Francis Melchior, Antarion was once more admitted to the presence of Thameera by slaves who were invariably discreet, being tongueless. In the oblique light of beryl and topaz windows, in the mauve and crimson gloom of heavy-folded tapestries, on a floor of marvellous mosaic wrought in ancient cycles, she came forward languidly to greet him. She was fairer than his memories, and paler than a blossom of the catacombs. She was exquisitely frail, voluptuously proud, with hair of a lunar gold and eyes of nocturnal brown that were pierced by fluctuating stars and circled by the dark pearl of sleepless nights. Beauty and love and sadness exhaled from her like a manifold perfume.

“I am glad you have come, Antarion, for I have missed you.” Her voice was gentle as an air that is born from among flowering trees, and melancholy as remembered music.

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HPL

In fact I know that my most poignant emotional experiences are those which concern the lure of unplumbed space, the terror of the encroaching outer void, & the struggle of the ego to transcend the known & established order of time, [...] space, matter, force, geometry, & natural law in tantalising mnemonic fragments expressed in unknown or half-known architectural or landscape vistas, especially in connexion with a sunset. Some instantaneous fragment of a picture will well up suddenly through some chain of subconscious association—the immediate excitant being usually half-irrelevant on the surface—& fill me with a sense of wistful memory & bafflement; with the impression that the scene in question represents something I have seen & visited before under circumstances of superhuman liberation & adventurous expectancy, yet which I have almost completely forgotten, & which is so bewilderingly uncorrelated & unoriented as to be forever inaccessible in the future.

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CAS

I don’t think I have had anything quite like the pseudo-mnemonic flashes you describe. What I have had sometimes is the nocturnal dream-experience of stepping into some totally alien state of entity, with its own memories, hopes, desires, its own past and future-none of which I can ever remember for very long on awakening. This experience has suggested such tales as “The Planet of the Dead”, “The Necromantic Tale,” and “An Offering to the Moon”. I think I have spoken of the place-images which often rise before me without apparent relevance, and persist in attaching themselves to some train of emotion or even abstract thought. These, doubtless, are akin to the images of which you speak, though they are always clearly realistic.

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HPL

Mnemonic tales, vaguely suggesting reincarnation or other-dimensional existence, are peculiarly fascinating to me; & nothing stirs my fancy more than the inexplicable stone ruins of the Pacific. [...] Your sense of totally alien worlds must be vastly more fascinating than my own fragmentary & incomplete detachments, & you certainly make effective use of them in tales like ‘An Offering to the Moon.’ The place-images are likewise highly alluring, & I hope to see many fictional reflections of them.