The Necromancer’s Cavern is a cave complex in the flank of the Rock of the Spear, eight or ten miles cross-country from Abeto Rojo. Lit by artificial light and smelling of death and disinfectant, it is a lair where someone works with the dead, and where Ananta withdraws as a cloud.
| Type | Place |
| Spanish entry | Caverna del necromante |
Location
No path leads there. The rock “contains a structure of caverns that make a great lair near Abeto Rojo”.
Description
It is a chain of chambers joined by clefts and narrow passages, “partly natural, partly not, with blows and cuts”. The hollow seems “dug by a watercourse or a giant worm — better not to know”.
The walls are “like a series of cliffs”, full of stalactites and stalagmites, “some joining like columns”. The veins are granite; one passage records “a very different form of granite” before the record breaks off. One chamber is oval, forty by sixty feet.
The air is dry; the close rock “gives you a little claustrophobia”. There is “a smell of death, but also a smell of what today would pass for disinfectant”. The cavern “is lit by artificial light”, and at one point “a bluish light switches on”.
Entrance
A defensible funnel of wide chambers and narrowing passages, near the village but outside it. “Someone is writing at the entrance”: magical inscriptions.
Ananta
Ananta, become a cloud, withdraws here: the mists “moved by themselves into the cavern”.
Conflicting accounts
- The itineraries disagree on converting the oval chamber’s measurements and on whether it belongs here.
Open questions
- How many chambers there are and how they are arranged.
- What produces the lights; what the disinfectant is.
- Who writes at the entrance, what it says, and whether it bars or marks the way.
- Whether Ananta shelters here with the necromancer’s leave, or both are one matter.
- Whether the star-shaped cavern, the sealed cavern of seventy steps, the cavern under a barn, the dragon’s cavern and the gate of Atlantis are part of this system, other places or retellings.