Sarmaintioc, a fragment.
Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 12:49 am
In a dream I first saw the Primal City. I had first read of it in Issac Pilgrim's blasphemous yet strangely beguiling Anatomy of Antiquity, that compendium of all that is curious and hoary, and also detected hints as to its nature in the writings of Volney, Shelley and Praxcodotus. The haunting Liber Crepusculum mentions it in the same breath as Ninevah and Yebboth, and Scoloverious, in the first book of his tremendous Primagenia writes abstractedly of Archepolis, called nameless by some. Thomas Burnet conjectures, in an obscure letter to Woherius Glecher, that the legended Ur-City may have been involved and utterly annihilated in the noarchian cataclysm.
But Sarmaintioc is the name I heard whispered from afar while I slept in that accursed rooming-house on M_____Street. In my dream I had descended from the Cerontian hills to wander through the blossom-festooned streets and fountained courtyards of Sarmaintioc.
Sarmaintioc! Compared to which Topkapi and Babylon are but shadows and adumbra! Through alleys illimitable I idled and gaped, and when the city-folk welcomed me and inquired whence I had come, I feigned dumbness rather than name the prosy city of my origin. Then the women of Sarmaintioc draped me in a robe of flowers gathered from the purpureal slopes of Cerontak, and the children in a dancing ring led me away through a madness of masonry to where the central towers of Sarmaintioc, like the oars of the sailing earth, part the foam of heaven...
But Sarmaintioc is the name I heard whispered from afar while I slept in that accursed rooming-house on M_____Street. In my dream I had descended from the Cerontian hills to wander through the blossom-festooned streets and fountained courtyards of Sarmaintioc.
Sarmaintioc! Compared to which Topkapi and Babylon are but shadows and adumbra! Through alleys illimitable I idled and gaped, and when the city-folk welcomed me and inquired whence I had come, I feigned dumbness rather than name the prosy city of my origin. Then the women of Sarmaintioc draped me in a robe of flowers gathered from the purpureal slopes of Cerontak, and the children in a dancing ring led me away through a madness of masonry to where the central towers of Sarmaintioc, like the oars of the sailing earth, part the foam of heaven...