In Their Darkened Shrines lyrics

Song information

Artist: Nile
Album: In Their Darkened Shrines

Lyrics

[ part I - hall of saurian entombment ]

Through subterranean labyrinths of catacombs
We hath crawled to gather in this dimly lit
Hall of colossal proportion
Which few ever see
Along black walls
Rise tier after tier of carven painted sacrophagi
Each standing in a niche in the stone
The mounted tiers rising up
To be lost in the gloom above
Thousands of carven masks
Stare down upon us
We who are rendered futile and insignificant
By this vast array of the dead

[ part ii - invocation to seditious heresy ]

And here I stand
I who would be master of the black earth
Have summoned you here secretly
You who are faithful to me
To share in the black kingdom that shall nr
Tonight we shall witness
The breaking of the chains which enslave us
And the birth of a dark empire

Who am I to know what powers lurk and and dream
In these murky tombs
They hold secrets forgotten for three thousand years
But I shall learn they shall teach me
See how they sleep staring through their
Carven masks
Priests monks acolytes kheri heb rekbi khet
The mummified remains of the sacrificial whores
Of the cannibalistic serpent cult s of thirty
Centuries with black incantation and foul
Necromantic art
Propitiated with the blood of the living
We will waken them from their long slumber
The ancients knew nay commanded the
Words of power
And shall teach them to me
I shall restore them to life
To labour for my own dark imperial desires
I will waken them will rouse them
Will learn their forgotten wisdom
The knowledge locked in those withered skulls
By the lore of the dead
We shall enslave the living
Pharaohs and priests long forgotten
Shall be our warriors and slaves
Who will dare to oppose us
Out of the dust shall avaris rise

[ part iii - destruction of the temple of the enemies of ra ]

Foul enemies of ra who have rebelled
Malicious fiends
Spawn of inertness impotent rebels
Nameless filth
For whom blazing pits of fire have been prepared
By the command of ra
Down upon your faces
You are overthrown
Your skulls are crushed in
You are destroyed annihilated
Gashed with flints your windpipes cut
The joints of your backs are rent apart

The fire of the eye of horus is upon you
Searching you consuming you
Setting you on fire burning you to ashes

Unemi the devouring flame consumes you
Sekhmet the blasting immolation of the desert
Maketh an end of you
Xul ur
Adjugeth you to destruction
Flame fire conflagration pulverize you

Your souls shades bodies and lives
Shall never rise up again
Your heads shall never rejoin your bodies
Even the words of power
Of the god thoth
The lord of spells
Shall never enable you to rise again

[ part iv - ruins ]

I knew they were accursed
So remote were these nameless desert ruins
Crumbling and inarticulate the debris of
Its collapsed walls was
Nearly hidden by the sands of the uncounted ages
It must have been thus before the first stones of
Memphis were laid
And the bricks of babylon unbaked
Fear spoke from the age worn stones
This desolate survivor of the deluge
This crumbling antidiluvial ancestor
Of the eldest pyramid

Only the grim brooding desert gods
Knew what really took place here
What indescribable struggles and bloodshed
Awoke some distant throng of condemned spirits
And broke the tomblike silence of these crumbled
Time ravaged remains these night black ruins
Of some vanguished and buried temple of belial

But as the night wind diad away
Above the desert rim rose the
Blazing edge of the morning sun
Which in my fevered state
I swore that from some remote depth there came a
Great crash of metal
Like a great bronze gate
Clanging shut whose reverberations swelled out
To hail the rising sun as memnon hails in
From the banks of the nile

[This four-part epic is a tale very much inspired by h.p. lovecraft, and to a lesser degree, robert e. howard. it tills the story of a rebellions serpent cult who are plotting to overthrow pharonic rule. they are attempting to raise the spirits of the ancient dead, to barness thei arcane knowledge and build an army of undead legions. the story takes place within the subterranean main ch.mber of the crypts of mummified reptiles (true enough, archaeologists have indeed unearthed entire necropolises containing thousand of mummified crocodiles, serpents, ancient nile monitor lizards, and various other animals that were worshiped as personifications of the gods they represented). within these dark and bloodstained halls are not only the remains of three millenia of generations of priests and worshippers, but also the mummified corpses of all manner of glorified reptilian deities. the leader of these rebels is standing in the midst of this vast array of saurian entombment, inciting insurrection and preparing for some sort of violent revolution. their ill-fated sedition comes to naught, however, when their temple is destroyed and they are all slain in a catastrophic violent climax. whether this is perhaps divine intervention and retribution by the sun god, ra, or perhaps military action by the armies of the pharaoh (who is a worshipper of ra) putting down a violent rebellion, or merely the indiscriminate vengeance of the undead that the conspirators were seeking to enslave, is unclear. the passage that tells of the descruction and demise of the rebel fiends is reminiscent of the magickal/religious ceremony in the book of overthrowing apep, in which the terrible monster serpent apep is forever crushed by the sun god, ra, nver to rise up again. in the aftermath, all that is left of the temple, the serpent cult and their subterranean catacombs of the tombs is a mass of rubble and forgotten ruins which are eventually covered over by the sands of time, explainined in a passage that borrows quite literally from the nameless city by h.p. lovecraft.]