And thus, Evelyn enters into the underground city of Beulah.
Beulah reminds me of the much brighter/campier female separatist cell living underground in Suffragette City (after the Bowie song) also called Electric Ladyland (After the Jimi Hendrix Experience's album) in Alan Moore's Tom Strong comics. The city was also mentioned in Promethea, briefly, as "The Suffragette City episode back in '94," wherein Roger of the Five Swell Guys unwittingly became a woman. Seems signficantly linked to Carter's book, especially given her references to superior technologies which Evelyn admits in the narration that he may be misremembering or outright inventing.
The entrance to Beulah is marked with a shattered phallus-monolith and a sign reading ENTER, FOR HERE THE GODS BE. Makes me think of the Oracle at Delphi and whatever's apparently scribbled on the gates of Hell ("Here there be Monsters," maybe? "Helter-Skelter" in at least one version, but that's neither here nor there). The signs in Latin, it's a good thing Evelyn is a classically taught English boy.
The vulture perched atop the giant stone's broken head? Foreshadowing.
And Evelyn goes down into the underworld to Beulah. Really, the symbolism in the book is by-the-numbers at this point and it's really more of an affair of Carter's prose and language choices, which are quite beautiful and skirting the line between restraint and excess.
Evelyn perpetually others women. His "captress" in the desert is all in leather with a shining helmet that displays only his own reflection when he looks into it. Leilah is perplexing to him back in the city, he can't seem to fathom her motivations or even her actions and so he treats her either as a sex toy or an annoyance. I don't think I'd describe Carter's writing of Evelyn as misandrist in any way, though, as we see other men actly more humanely even if only in passing and even when that's equally fucked up by the context. More the effect of the city on this particular man, and he's moved into symbolic terrain right from the get-go to prepare him for his transformation. He has to be completely alienated from women before he can become one, the transition can in no ways be an easy one.
The Women (capital-w is important) interest me as they seem to be Carter absorbing and reusing "feminazi" stereotypes of militant man-hating feminism. Given the apocalypse rushing in uneven waves across the world the Women make sense, with their "gnashing teeth within a female symbol" emblem worn on armbands. They sit on rooftops and hit men in front of porn theatres with sniper fire. The striving for gender equality is poisoned as much as anything else in the City of the Dreadful Night.