Where Is the Nameless City?

The Nameless City is a low-walled ruin in the depths of the Arabian desert, in territory the local Bedouin refuse to enter and most maps leave blank. The Archive files it UNCHARTED. The account gives no position beyond the desert, so the Field Survey marks it as a conjecture, placed in the Empty Quarter, and shows it as a shaded zone and not a point.

The expedition

Only one party is on record as having reached it, and it was one man. The witness had been tracking rumours that other explorers dismissed as folklore, and he went by camel and alone. What he found was a ruin half under the sand, its chambers too low for a man to stand in. Everything in it was built to a scale and a shape that fits nothing that walks upright. He judged it older than any other ruin he had studied, by an order of magnitude.

What lies below

The passages descend. The dossier records low-ceilinged corridors, burial galleries scaled to bodies that never stood upright, and wall murals depicting the history of the people who built it, a reptilian civilization that predates humanity by an incalculable margin. Whether the line is extinct or merely waiting out a long dormancy is left unresolved by the account, and the Archive leaves it so.

The name in the record

The ruin is bound to the Necronomicon. Abdul Alhazred is entered in the book's own ledger as having wandered the nameless city beneath the southern deserts before he settled in Damascus, and the account of the expedition carries the well-known couplet that is attributed to him. The Survey also keeps an optional marker for Irem, the City of Pillars, which the Archive's gazetteer ties to this chronicle and to The Call of Cthulhu; its position is as conjectural as this one.

The chronicle has not been filmed. The Field Survey marks the ruin on its Remote and Lost layer, along with the other places that no survey has reached.