The Narrator (The Nameless City)

The unnamed narrator is a solitary antiquarian who deliberately defies the warnings of nearby Arabs and journeys alone by camel into a parched, terrible valley to explore the nameless city, an urge he attributes to 'that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.' Digging among the obliterated edifices with tools he had brought, he clears a buried aperture and, torch in hand, descends through a natural cavern and an artificial rock-hewn passage into a subterranean gallery lined with glass-fronted cases holding the mummified remains of a reptilian race, and reads their painted history as an allegorical epic of the city's rise and fall.

Pressing toward a brazen gate at the corridor's end, he beholds a luminous abyss beyond and collapses from exhaustion and dread, aware that among all the reptile relics his is the only human form — save for one figure shown torn to pieces in the final fresco. A rising moan and a gathering gale from the depths herald the return of the city's ancient inhabitants: amid a howling wind he babbles the couplet of 'the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city,' and glimpses a nightmare horde of devil-like reptiles surge past him back into the earth, the great brazen door clanging shut behind them.

He is left saying that some unnamed power 'guided him back to life,' though he expects forever to 'shiver in the night wind till oblivion — or worse' claims him.