The nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh ... was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults . . .
—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

When R'lyeh rises in Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), the only portion of the city that emerges is a single "hideous monolith-crowned citadel" in which Cthulhu is entombed.

The human onlookers are awed by the sheer immensity of the city and by the frightening suggestiveness of the gargantuan statues and bas-reliefs.

The city is a panorama of "vast angles and stone surfaces ... too great to belong to anything right and proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and disturbing hieroglyphs.

" The geometry of R’lyeh is "abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours."

In Lovecraft's fiction, R'lyeh is sometimes referred to in the ritualistic phrase:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

Which roughly translates to:

"In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming"