The Doom That Came to Sarnath

The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

—> You can read or listen to the short story for free here.

The Doom That Came to Sarnath

“There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream and out of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.”

The Doom That Came to Sarnath is a story about two cities. First, there’s the ancient city of Ib, where old beings – green, odd, and unpleasant to the eye – used to dwell. They danced and worshipped lizard gods, building jade idols in their image. One day, however, the people of Ib were slaughtered by human settlers, who came to Mnar looking for precious stones.

The Ib, the indigenous population of Mnar, are described as creatures so strange and repulsive that their human slayers had to push their bodies to the river with spears so as to avoid touching them. Any bigoted parallel to real indigenous populations is encouraged by the narrator himself, who claims those monstrous traits are commonly found on uncivilized peoples, being observed on “beings of a world yet inchoate and rudely fashioned.” Lovecraft is rarely subtle, after all.

Then, we have the city of Sarnath, built over the ruins of Ib by the very humans who destroyed it. The people of Sarnath have foreign names (Gnai-Kah, Nargis-hei), but they’re not an “other”: we’re supposed to sympathize with these people – with these humans – who came to a foreign land to murder its indigenous population – its monsters – and make the land their own. They used Mnar’s stones to grow rapidly and prosper, then, and a good chunk of the story is reserved for detailing the city’s many beauties, trying to instill in us a sense of marvel and wonder: “Look at how the settlers brought civilization with them”, the story says.

There’s a focus on quantity in the descriptions of Sarnath: “there were many palaces” and “many were the pillars” of those palaces, which were also packed with “many galleries, and many amphitheatres.”  There’s a sense of scale, in other words, and there’s also opulence: the throne of its king is surrounded by golden lions, for instance, while the palace domes are so high that “one within might sometimes fancy himself beneath only the sky.”

Lovecraft makes a point of describing the materials used to build Sarnath, which makes the place more solid and palpable but also highlights its wealth with the quality of the materials: the streets are paved with onyx, for example, while the houses are “of glazed brick and chalcedony,” the palace floors had “mosaics of beryl and lapis-lazuli and sardonyx and carbuncle” and the throne was “wrought of one piece of ivory.”

It’s interesting to notice how the prosperity and might of Sarnath are linked directly to the life of lavishness of its rulers: not once does the narrator talk about how healthy and happy the common people are. He’s too enamored with the palaces, with the statues that surround the king, with his walled gardens that boast fountains of scented water, to pay attention to us. Sarnath is considered “the wonder of the world and pride of all mankind,” because of the opulence of the wealthy, and only that. Inequality may be a thing in Sarnath, and the fact that the king is once described as being “surrounded by feasting nobles and hurrying slaves” just reinforces this idea, but we’ve got to understand that civilization is not a matter of general happiness, but of how well the rich and powerful can display their wealth and power.

After describing Sarnath, the story talks about the festivals held in it. It tells how the people celebrated the fall of Ib and the destruction of their elder gods and jade icons. However, one icon remained: the one of the sea-lizard Bokrugh was kept as a trophy, and it vanished one day. The high priest of Sarnath was found dead before its altar, having “scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite with coarse shake strokes the sign of DOOM” – again, Lovecraft puts the keyword all in caps, which I don’t know about you, but it makes me cringe more than anything else.

Eventually, then, to the delight of all title purists, “DOOM came to Sarnath.” The unwary humans were celebrating their conquest when the creatures they had slaughtered long ago reappeared, coming out of a nearby lake to descend upon them like “a frenzied throng.” They were “a horde of indescribable green voiceless things with bulging eyes, pouting, fappy lips, and curious ears; things which danced horribly bearing in their pawns golden platters set with rubies and diamonds containing uncouth flames.” The past returned, the kings and princes of the present fled alike, and Sarnath was no more. Their mistake had been a terrible one: they had preserved a single item of the indigenous population they murdered, instead of totally wiping their culture out of existence.

Now, in the place of Sarnath, there’s only a marsh where the “exceedingly ancient idol coated in seaweed” of Bokrugh still stands. Evil to Lovecraft has to be old, foreign, and uncivilized. Instead of marble and gold, the idol of Bokrugh is marked by seaweed. Its rightful place is a marsh, not a city – from where it even disappears. And it’s not just ancient, it’s exceedingly ancient.

And the message is clear: you shouldn’t underestimate this evil – the “other” – for its ambition is great. It doesn’t simply kill the king of Sarnath; it makes his entire empire cease to exist in a day. Beware the native monsters, for they are the destroyers of civilizations. The lake that stands where once lay Sarnath is marked by its stillness. Nothing flows in or out of it: it has become a place of death.

The Doom That Came to Sarnath tackles some of the same subjects of previous Lovecraft tales, in the sense that it oozes prejudice against Native-Americans and barely disguises it as a fantastical tale: you have old gods and sea creatures threatening to destroy human civilization framing the fear of the “other”, who’s the most monstrous and relentless destructive force.

June 15, 2025.