"An Inhabitant of Carcosa" is a short story by Ambrose Bierce, first published in 1886. Elements of the story, including the setting of Carcosa and the name Hali, were later incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos.
Bierce's story first appeared in the San Francisco Newsletter of December 25, 1886. It was later reprinted in Bierce's collections Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Can Such Things Be?.
Synopsis[]
A man from the "ancient and famous" city of Carcosa, pondering the words of a philosopher named Hali, wanders through a deserted wilderness, not knowing how he got there. He notes that it is cold but does not feel it. He notices the remains of gravestones and tombs, like the "burial-ground of a prehistoric race of men whose very name was long extinct." He comes across a lynx, and then a stranger dressed in skids, but neither acknowledges him. He can see stars in the sky, but he can see around him as though it were day. He eventually finds a well-preserved gravestone that bears his name and the dates of his birth and death, and realizes that he is dead, and that he is in the ruins of Carcosa.
Connections to the Mythos[]
Carcosa[]
Robert W, Chambers borrowed the name "Carcosa" for the setting of his fictional play The King in Yellow, which appears in much of his weird fiction. Though Lovecraft doesn't incorporate Carcosa into his own fiction, he does, in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", mention "primordial Carcosa" as an element in Chambers' fiction. He notes, "It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Bierce."
Hali[]
Bierce's story begins with a quote from an otherwise unidentified Hali:
| “ | For there be divers sorts of death -- some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God's will) and, none seeing the end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey -- which indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigour for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay. | „ |
The quote, particularly the last sentence, prefigures the claim Lovecraft attributes to Abdul Alhazred that "with strange aeons even death may die."
Hali also appears in Chambers' fiction as the Lake of Hali, on whose shores Carcosa is located. In "The Whisperer in Darkness", Lovecraft mentions "the Lake of Hali" among the "names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions".
The stars are right[]
When the narrator notices the stars, he says, "Looking upward, I saw through a sudden rift in the clouds Aldebaran and the Hyades!" Aldeberan is repeatedly mentioned in Lovecraft's fiction, while in August Derleth's "The Gable Window," it's speculated that the Hyades might be the source of the glass in the titular window.
External Link[]
Project Gutenberg: Can Such Things Be?, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" by Ambrose Bierce (html text)