When you’ve seen one otherworldly civilization, you’ve seen them all.

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Strange news about a so-called “Ghost city” in China. You can see pictures of it here, as well as an explanation of how the scene supposedly came to be. It’s difficult to tell exactly what is real and what is not here; I’ve seen comments on the Daily Mail site to the effect that the story is mis-translated, and the mist is all that is strange, but other stories indicate the whole thing is a reflection. I think it’s just some sort of weird refection of a much further away city. Then there’s also the possibility of it being a hoax.

I ordinarily shy away from mentioning stories like this, but in this case there is something remarkable about it to me: the image, whatever it is, looks shockingly like the image that is always conjured up in my mind’s eye when reading the lines from The King In Yellow:

“Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
  In Carcosa.”
No particular significance to this; I pictured an otherworldly city, and this mirage was of a city given an otherworldly effect. (Which, as I think about it, the similarity makes it almost seem more likely this is a hoax.) Moreover, there’s nothing explicitly in those lines from the poems that evokes anything about a city, but nevertheless that is what I pictured. 
Anyway, it was kind of weird to see this, especially so soon after I wrote a post about that book. 

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