In Their Darkened Shrines 4

LETRA

In Their Darkened Shrines 4

I knew they were accursed
so remote were these nameless desert ruins
crumbling and inarticulate the debris of
its collapsed walls was
nearly hidden by the sands of the uncounted ages
it must have been thus before the first stones of
memphis were laid
and the bricks of babylon unbaked
fear spoke from the age worn stones
this desolate survivor of the deluge
this crumbling antidiluvial ancestor
of the eldest pyramid
Only the grim brooding desert gods
knew what really took place here
what indescribable struggles and bloodshed
awoke some distant throng of condemned spirits
and broke the tomblike silence of these crumbled
time ravaged remains these night black ruins
of some vanguished and buried temple of belial
But as the night wind diad away
above the desert rim rose the
blazing edge of the morning sun
which in my fevered state
i swore that from some remote depth there came a
great crash of metal
like a great bronze gate
clanging shut whose reverberations swelled out
to hail the rising sun as memnon hails in
from the banks of the nile
[this four-part epic is a tale very much inspired by h.p. lovecraft, and to a lesser degree, robert e. howard. it tills the story of a rebellions serpent cult who are plotting to overthrow pharonic rule. they are attempting to raise the spirits of the ancient dead, to barness thei arcane knowledge and build an army of undead legions. the story takes place within the subterranean main ch.mber of the crypts of mummified reptiles (true enough, archaeologists have indeed unearthed entire necropolises containing thousand of mummified crocodiles, serpents, ancient nile monitor lizards, and various other animals that were worshiped as personifications of the gods they represented). within these dark and bloodstained halls are not only the remains of three millenia of generations of priests and worshippers, but also the mummified corpses of all manner of glorified reptilian deities. the leader of these rebels is standing in the midst of this vast array of saurian entombment, inciting insurrection and preparing for some sort of violent revolution. their ill-fated sedition comes to naught, however, when their temple is destroyed and they are all slain in a catastrophic violent climax. whether this is perhaps divine intervention and retribution by the sun god, ra, or perhaps military action by the armies of the pharaoh (who is a worshipper of ra) putting down a violent rebellion, or merely the indiscriminate vengeance of the undead that the conspirators were seeking to enslave, is unclear. the passage that tells of the descruction and demise of the rebel fiends is reminiscent of the magickal/religious ceremony in the book of overthrowing apep, in which the terrible monster serpent apep is forever crushed by the sun god, ra, nver to rise up again. in the aftermath, all that is left of the temple, the serpent cult and their subterranean catacombs of the tombs is a mass of rubble and forgotten ruins which are eventually covered over by the sands of time, explainined in a passage that borrows quite literally from the nameless city by h.p. lovecraft.]