Lost City of Iram

The great H. P. Lovecraft, achieved early fame with his 1921 story, The Nameless City. It tells the story of Abdul Alhazarad, an Arab scholar whose quest for the secrets of black magic led him into a remote, forbidding area of the Sahara Desert. There, he stumbled upon an ancient city unknown to the outside world, a center for sorcery and witchcraft, inhabited by djinni and afreets, the ghouls and demons of Semitic folklore.

Passing through the dark streets and among the lofty columns of Iram, as the gloomy city was known to its residents, he entered the temple of their patron deity, Cthulhu, a satanic figure. The high priest in attendance entrusted him with a thaumaturgic tome, the Al Azif. But translating its horrific text into Latin as the Necronomicon proved too much for Abdul, and he went raving mad before completing his task. While most readers assume The Nameless City was an entirely original creation of Lovecraft's fertile imagination, he actually based it on ancient Arab oral accounts.

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