| "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by H. P. Lovecraft | |
 | |
 Text available at Wikisource | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy |
| Publication | |
| Published in | The Scot |
| Publication date | 1920 |
"The Doom That Came to Sarnath" (1920) is a fantasy short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. It is written in a mythic/fantasy style and is associated with his Dream Cycle. It was first published in The Scot, a Scottish amateur fiction magazine, in June 1920. [1]
According to the tale, more than 10,000 years ago, a race of shepherd people colonized the banks of the river Ai, in a land called Mnar, forming the cities of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron (not to be confused with Kadath), which rose to great intellectual and mercantile prowess. Craving more land, a group of these hardy people migrated to the shores of a lonely and vast lake at the heart of Mnar, founding the city of Sarnath.
But the settlers were not alone. Not far from Sarnath was the ancient grey-stone city of Ib, inhabited by a queer race who had descended from the Moon. Lovecraft described them as "in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it.... They had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voices." [2] These beings worshipped a strange god known as Bokrug, the Great Water Lizard, although it was more their physical form that caused the people of Sarnath to despise them.
The citizens of Sarnath killed all the creatures inhabiting Ib, destroyed the city, and took their idol as a trophy, placing it in Sarnath's main temple. The next night, the idol mysteriously vanished, and Taran-Ish, the high-priest of Sarnath, was found dead. Before dying, he had scrawled a single word onto the empty altar: "DOOM".
One thousand years later, Sarnath was at the zenith of both its power and decadence. Nobles from distant cities were invited to the feast in honor of Ib's destruction. That night, however, the revelry was disrupted by strange lights over the lake, heavy greenish mists, and the tidal marker, the granite pillar Akurion, was mostly submerged. Soon, many visitors fled, maddened by fear.
After this, some of the survivors reported seeing the long-dead inhabitants of Ib peering from the windows of the city's towers instead of the king and his retinue, while others refused to say exactly what they had seen. Those who returned saw nothing of those unlucky enough to be left behind; only empty marsh, many water lizards, and most disturbingly, the missing idol. Ever since then, Bokrug remained the chief god in the land of Mnar.
The influence of Lord Dunsany on the story can be seen in the reference to a throne "wrought of one piece of ivory, though no man lives who knows whence so vast a piece could have come", which evokes the gate "carved out of one solid piece" of ivory in Dunsany's "Idle Days on the Yann". [1]
Though Sarnath is a historical city in India —the place where Buddha first taught— Lovecraft said that he thought he invented the name independently. [1]
In the story "The Quest of Iranon", the title character says, "I...have gazed on the marsh where Sarnath once stood." When the narrator of "The Nameless City" sees the ruins of the story, he says he "thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carved from grey stone before mankind existed." In At the Mountains of Madness , the city of the Elder Things is described as "a megalopolis ranking with such whispered prehuman blasphemies as Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City of Arabian Desert."
The inhabitants of Ib are known in the works of Lin Carter as the Thuum'ha.
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Lovecraftian horror, also called cosmic horror or eldritch horror, is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock. It is named after American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). His work emphasizes themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries, which are now associated with Lovecraftian horror as a subgenre. The cosmic themes of Lovecraftian horror can also be found in other media, notably horror films, horror games, and comics.
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Swords and Sorcery is an anthology of fantasy short stories in the sword and sorcery subgenre, edited by L. Sprague de Camp and illustrated by Virgil Finlay. It was first published in paperback by Pyramid Books in 1963, but most of the stories were originally from 1930s pulp magazines. This was first sword and sorcery anthology ever assembled, and was followed by three additional such anthologies edited by de Camp. It has also been translated into German.
The Doom That Came to Sarnath and Other Stories is a collection of fantasy and horror stories by H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Lin Carter. It was first published in paperback by Ballantine Books as the twenty-sixth volume of its Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in February 1971. It was the second collection of Lovecraft's works assembled by Carter for the series, the first being The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The stories were written between 1919 and 1935, and originally published in various fantasy magazines, notably Weird Tales.
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Bibliography of science fiction, fantasy, and nonfiction writer Lin Carter:
Works related to The Doom That Came to Sarnath at Wikisource
The Doom That Came To Sarnath public domain audiobook at LibriVox 
