# The Nameless Labyrinth

> "I have seen the dark universe yawning\\
> Where the black planets roll without aim,\\
> Where they roll in their horror unheeded,\\
> without knowledge or lustre or name."
>
> Nemesis, 1917
> {:.attribution}

Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this
Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features
which cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the
blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and
ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material
basis after all—there had been some horizontal stratum of ice
dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had
projected its image across the mountains according to the simple
laws of reflection, Of course, the phantom had been twisted and
exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did
not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it
even more hideous and menacing than its distant image.

[At the Mountains of Madness][1] by *H.P. Lovecraft*, 1931

[1]: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness/Chapter_5