The Nameless City
Somewhere in the Rub Al Khali
Tuesday, June 18th, 1940
At the bottom of a valley, dry and desolate even for being at the edge of the deep Arabian Desert, lies the City Without Name, seen by no living man. But today, living men in some numbers milled about among its desolation. The uniformed and heavily armed men of
Sonderkommando Hexen quickly searched through the area without finding any trace of life. The search was not hard; not a single structure remained intact. What survived of its once cyclopean walls jutted up like the broken teeth of a corpse buried in the sand of the Rub Al Khali and it was rare to see them reach higher than the waist of a man.
Dr Henry “Indiana” Jones quickly realised what place it was he had reached secreted into Duhrn’s expedition. He too had heard the stories the desert tribes whisper around the campfires in abject and ignorant fear, and had no trouble matching those stories to the reality around him. Patrolling the streets in keeping with his role as
Sonderkommando Hexen brawn, he found something deeply unwholesome about the geometry of the place as his squad walked quickly through it, on the lookout for threats. The way houses and streets were laid out seemed unnatural, atypical of any known civilisation and fundamentally
wrong in some manner he had a hard time defining. Trying to picture the place intact in his mind gave him both chills, which was an accomplishment given the 50 degrees centigrade outside temperature, and a slight headache. It would have been majestic and monstrous, a place of unimaginable alien splendour.
As for the man who had found what was never supposed to be found, he quickly changed mood from elation to exasperation. There was nowhere any inscriptions to be deciphered, nowhere any obvious cache of forbidden and forgotten lore. The merciless process of erosion had not spared the Nameless City and the blistering sand storms had through countless millennia etched away any trace of inscriptions that might once have been on the outside.
‘Search for entrances!’ Duhrn ordered, waving his hand in irritation. ‘Quickly now, we haven’t got all day!’
Perhaps because of the vastness of the ruins, it wasn’t until late in the afternoon when Indy’s squad stumbled over a place where the reddish bedrock rose out of the sand to form a low cliff, and it the side of that cliff, much like he had seen in the Valley of the Crescent Moon in Syria and also in Petra in the Sinai, the facades of temples had been cut out of the stone. For the first time, these bas-reliefs, for they were more that than true buildings, gave an idea what the intact buildings of the Nameless City would have looked like, for they were undoubtedly cut in their likeness. These facsimile buildings had openings, low and squat, which opened into caves in the cliff. Here perhaps, might still be found any inscriptions not effaced like those unprotected from the sand storms of Arabia.
‘I’ll go tell the
Sturmbannführer!’ the squad leader announced to his men. ‘You stay here!’
Thus left leaderless, the squad members loitered about at the caves, and inevitably when young men are left alone with mystery, curiosity took over. Indy was not first into any cave, preferring not to draw attention to himself, but once one cave had been entered he could no longer restrain himself. While the other men of the squad were excavating the various sand-clogged entrances like giant moles, Indy set course for a façade grander and further away than the others, hoping to gain some invaluable time alone.
He crawled through the opening, because it was so low that he could not walk even though it for some reason was not at all clogged with drifting sands as the others had been. He entered a vast cavern which vas nevertheless hardly natural. In the light of Indy’s electric torch, the roof appeared to even by far for that. Indy wondered how large the cavern had originally been. It’s even proportions suggested that it had once been much, much smaller and that only prodigious feats of engineering could had cleared away such masses of rock, which on the other hand was hard to accept given the obvious extreme antiquity of the ruins. To judge from the degree of erosion and the fact that The Nameless City was never once mentioned in any written records of Sumeria, Egypt or later civilisations other than the infamous Necronomicon, they must have been much as they were now already when the mud bricks that would build Jericho were still baking in the sun.
Indy’s explorations did not last long before he found curiously shaped and very low stone altars, carven pillars that he assumed to have some symbolic meaning, as they were clearly not holding up the roof, niches cut into the rock walls, and most interesting of all, chiselled decorations, carvings in intricate patterns that were possibly inscriptions. There were also traces of sinuously drawn lines of paint that might have been mere arabesques or possibly writing. Indy kneeled in front of an altar and produced his stuffed notebook, which he never travelled without. Slowly, painstakingly he checked the assumed writing against other rare inscriptions he had found in his years of exploration. He was not surprised when he found no match, but not a little discomforted when he some similarities became apparent with the writing he and Falken deciphered in the frozen ruins of Antarctica. It was clearly not the same writing, but there was an unmistakeable influence. Perhaps this city had been contemporary with that one? And then, what manner of beings had built it, in that incredibly remote age?
‘Fascinating characters. What do you make of them?’ Günther Duhrn asked, suddenly standing right behind Indy.
Still too engrossed in his study of the carvings to notice the question had been posed in English, Indy didn’t even look up from his notes and answered in the same language.
‘It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen!’ he answered, bubbling over with excitement. ‘I doubt it was even written by human beings; these inscriptions here look at first sight somewhat like what you could expect to find in some late Neolithic Chinese cultures but…’ Too late Indy realised who he was talking too, and in what manner of speech he was doing it. He clamped his mouth shut, and in the resulting sudden silence, the telltale click of a Luger being cocked was only too clearly audible.
‘So nice to meet you, Dr Jones! It has been too long since last time.
Hände Hoch! And don’t bother to rise – I like you like that, on your knees. It will save us both time and effort if you just stay as you are, please.’
Silently cursing himself for letting his guard down, here of all places, at this time of all times, Indy obediently placed his hands on his neck. He looked longingly for the MP-38 Schmeisser lying on the ground beside him, so close and yet so far away it could just as well have been on the moon.
‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t
Sturmbannführer Gunther Dührn… I could have lived a perfectly full live without ever having to see you again. Murdered many innocents lately?’
‘No one is innocent.’ Duhrn retorted. ‘You least of all. Your death will not weigh overly on my conscience, such as it is. I think I’ll just put you out of your misery here and now with a Parabellum to the cerebellum… hehehe. That was a joke, Dr Jones. Why aren’t you laughing?’
Slowly, slowly, in order not to startle Duhrn into any rash actions, Indy turned, still on his knees and faced his captor. He managed a giggle, and a smile chemically pure from any humour.
‘That IS funny, Duhrn. Funny because you’re not going to shoot me just like that.’
‘You think I don’t have the stomach for it? Think again, Dr Jones. I could shoot you like a mad dog and not even blink.’
‘I’m sure, you have the mad dog act pat down. No, I meant that you can’t restrain your lust to kill me in some more elaborate and painful way. A bullet to the brain… surely you cannot settle for anything so prosaic and painless?’
Duhrn looked thoughtful. ‘Hmmm… I know you’re trying to trick me, to gain time for a heroic escape act, Dr Jones… you think you can outsmart me, don’t you? Well, Günther Duhrn has never been one to shy away from a challenge! And actually, there has been something I’ve been paining to try even since I got here; I’m sure you know of the practice of impalement and how it originated close to here, in Persia? I think I'll subject you to a special form in which the victim is made to stand over a sharpened stake driven into the ground, just long enough to penetrate deeply into his rectum… He won’t be able to remove himself, but as long as he can remain standing, he won’t die. Of course, no one can stand for ever. A strong man like you could last for days, I guess, but in the end…’
It probably wouldn’t have worked in any other place or time, but in this unexplored ruin of inhuman antiquity and infamous mystery, when Indy ignored the details of the savage torture awaiting him and instead looked past Duhrn with a face drawn into a masque of absolute horror, the Nazi warlock could not help falling for the oldest trick in the book.
As the German’s head began to turn, Indy jumped at his knees and dropped him. Both men tumbled about on the floor, struggling for the Luger which Duhrn held in a death grip. Suddenly Indy saw an opening and smashed his forehead into Duhrn’s face. The German managed to twist his head so that his nose wasn’t crushed but he was still knocked senseless as the back of his head hit the hard stone floor.
Hardly had Indy disentangled himself from his unconscious adversary before shouts of alarm from the entrance announced that Duhrn’s men were entering the temple. Indy hesitated for an instant between settling for picking up Duhrn’s Luger or diving for his SMG. A hail of automatic fire smashing into the altar next to him helped him make up his mind and reduce his ambitions. Clutching the automatic pistol he bolted towards the dark depths of the temple. He hoped there would be some other exit there, because clearly, the way he had come through was now closed.
) expect relations to cool. Besides, it's in everyone's interests, not to mention the balance of power, to keep Duhrn from achieving whatever his mad goals might be.
