The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (34 page)

A chuckle sharp as crepitating ice,

Upheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned

Who strive in Antenora. When my eyes

Undazzle, and the cloud of colour fades,

I find me in a monster-guarded room,

Where marble apes with wings of griffins crowd

On walls an evil sculptor wrought, and beasts

Wherein the sloth and vampire-bat unite,

Pendulous by their toes of tarnished bronze,

Usurp the shadowy interval of lamps

That hang from ebon arches. Like a ripple,

Borne by the wind from pool to sluggish pool

In fields where wide Cocytus flows his bound,

A crackling smile around that circle runs,

And all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me

With eyes that turn to glowing coals. A fear

That found no name in Babel, flings me on,

Breathless and faint with horror, to a hall

Within whose weary, self-reverting round,

The languid curtains, heavier than palls,

Unnumerably depict a weary king,

Who fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands

In lakes of emerald evening, or the fields

Of dreamless poppies pure with rain. I flee

Onward, and all the shadowy curtains shake

With tremors of a silken-sighing mirth,

And whispers of the innumerable king,

Breathing a tale of ancient pestilence,

Whose very words are vile contagion. Then

I reach a room where caryatides,

Carved in the form of tall, voluptuous Titan women,

Surround a throne of flowering ebony

Where creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne,

There lolls a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk,

Tumid with all the rottenness of kings,

O’erflows its arms with fold on creasèd fold

Of fat obscenely bloating. Open-mouthed

He leans, and from his throat a score of tongues,

Depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers,

Drivel with phosphorescent slime, that runs

Down all his length of soft and monstrous folds,

And creeping among the flow’rs of ebony,

Lends them the life of tiny serpents. Now,

Ere the Horror ope those red and lashless slits

Of eyes that draw the gnat and midge, I turn,

And follow down a dusty hall, whose gloom,

Lined by the statues with their mighty limbs,

Ends in golden-roofèd balcony

Sphering the flowered horizon.

Ere my heart

Hath hushed the panic tumult of its pulses,

I listen, from beyond the horizon’s rim,

A mutter faint as when the far simoon,

Mounting from unknown deserts, opens forth,

Wide as the waste, those wings of torrid night

That fling the doom of cities from their folds,

And musters in its van a thousand winds

That with disrooted palms for besoms, rise

And sweep the sands to fury. As the storm,

Approaching, mounts and loudens to the ears

Of them that toil in fields of sesame,

So grows the mutter, and a shadow creeps

Above the gold horizon, like a dawn

Of darkness climbing sunward. Now they come,

A Sabbath of abominable shapes,

Led by the fiends and lamiae of worlds

That owned my sway aforetime! Cockatrice,

Python, tragelaphus, leviathan,

Chimera, martichoras, behemoth,

Geryon and sphinx, and hydra, on my ken

Arise as might some Afrite-builded city,

Consummate in the lifting of a lash,

With thunderous domes and sounding obelisks,

And towers of night and fire alternate! Wings

Of white-hot stone along the hissing wind,

Bear up the huge and furnace-hearted beasts

Of hells beyond Rutilicus; and things

Whose lightless length would mete the gyre of moons—

Born from the caverns of a dying sun,

Uncoil to the very zenith, half disclosed

From gulfs below the horizon; octopi

Like blazing moons with countless arms of fire,

Climb from the seas of ever-surging flame

That roll and roar through planets unconsumed,

Beating on coasts of unknown metals; beasts

That range the mighty worlds of Alioth, rise,

Aforesting the heavens with multitudinous horns,

Within whose maze the winds are lost; and borne

On cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras,

The shell-wrought tow’rs of ocean-witches loom,

And griffin-mounted gods, and demons throned

On sable dragons, and the cockodrills

That bear the spleenful pygmies on their backs;

And blue-faced wizards from the worlds of Saiph,

On whom Titanic scorpions fawn; and armies

That move with fronts reverted from the foe,

And strike athwart their shoulders at the shapes

Their shields reflect in crystal; and eidola

Fashioned within unfathomable caves

By hands of eyeless peoples; and the blind

And worm-shaped monsters of a sunless world,

With krakens from the ultimate abyss,

And Demogorgons of the outer dark,

Arising, shout with multitudinous thunders,

And threatening me with dooms ineffable

In words whereat the heavens leap to flame,

Advance on the magic palace! Thrown before,

For league on league, their blasting shadows blight

And eat like fire the amaranthine meads,

Leaving an ashen desert! In the palace,

I hear the apes of marble shriek and howl,

And all the women-shapen columns moan,

Babbling with unknown terror. In my fear,

A monstrous dread unnamed in any hell,

I rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings,

And in a trice the magic palace reels,

And spiring to a single tow’r of flame,

Goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember! Flown

Beyond the world, upon that fleeing wind,

I reach the gulf’s irrespirable verge,

Where fails the strongest storm for breath and fall,

Supportless, through the nadir-plungèd gloom,

Beyond the scope and vision of the sun,

To other skies and systems. In a world

Deep-wooded with the multi-coloured fungi,

That soar to semblance of fantastic palms,

I fall as falls the meteor-stone, and break

A score of trunks to powder. All unhurt,

I rise, and through the illimitable woods,

Among the trees of flimsy opal, roam,

And see their tops that clamber, hour by hour,

To touch the suns of iris. Things unseen,

Whose charnel breath informs the tideless air

With spreading pools of fetor, follow me

Elusive past the ever-changing palms;

And pittering moths, with wide and ashen wings,

Flit on before, and insects ember-hued,

Descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom,

And quench themselves in crumbling thickets. Heard

Far-off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown

Resounds at measured intervals of time,

Shaking the riper trees to dust, that falls

In clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me

Beneath a pall of iris.

Now the palms

Grow far apart and lessen momently

To shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them

I see an empty desert, all ablaze

With amethysts and rubies, and the dust

Of garnets or carnelians. On I roam,

Treading the gorgeous grit, that dazzles me

With leaping waves of endless rutilance,

Whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom,

Through which I wander, blind as any Kobold;

Till underfoot the grinding sands give place

To stone or metal, with a massive ring

More welcome to mine ears than golden bells,

Or tinkle of silver fountains. When the gloom

Of crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge

Of a broad black plain of adamant, that reaches,

Level as windless water, to the verge

Of all the world; and through the sable plain,

A hundred streams of shattered marble run,

And streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze,

Like to the ruin of all the wars of time,

To plunge, with clangour of timeless cataracts

Adown the gulfs eternal.

So I follow,

Between a river of steel and a river of bronze,

With ripples loud and tuneless as the clash

Of a million lutes; and come to the precipice

From which they fall, and make the mighty sound

Of a million swords that meet a million shields,

Or din of spears and armour in the wars

Of all the worlds and aeons: Far beneath,

They fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void,

And vanish like a stream of broken stars,

Into the nether darkness; nor the gods

Of any sun, nor demons of the gulf,

Will dare to know what everlasting sea

Is fed thereby, and mounts forevermore

With mighty tides unebbing.

Lo, what cloud,

Or night of sudden and supreme eclipse,

Is on the suns of opal? At my side,

The rivers run with a wan and ghostly gleam,

Through darkness falling as the night that falls

From mighty spheres extinguished! Turning now,

I see, betwixt the desert and the suns,

The poisèd wings of all the dragon-rout,

Far-flown in black occlusion thousand-fold

Through stars, and deeps, and devastated worlds,

Upon my trail of terror! Griffins, rocs,

And sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged

After the ravin of dispeopled lands,

With harpies, and the vulture-birds of hell—

Hot from abominable feasts and fain

To cool their beaks and talons in my blood—

All, all have gathered, and the wingless rear,

With rank on rank of foul, colossal Worms,

Like pillars of embattled night and flame,

Looms on the wide horizon! From the van,

I hear the shriek of wyvers, loud and shrill

As tempests in a broken fane, and roar

Of sphinxes, like the unrelenting toll

Of bells from tow’rs infernal. Cloud on cloud,

They arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind

Falls from them like the wind before the storm.

And in the wind my cloven garment streams,

And flutters in the face of all the void,

Even as flows a flaffing spirit, lost

On the Pit’s undying tempest! Louder grows

The thunder of the streams of stone and bronze—

Redoubled with the roar of torrent wings,

Inseparably mingled. Scarce I keep

My footing, in the gulfward winds of fear,

And mighty thunders, beating to the void

In sea-like waves incessant; and would flee

With them, and prove the nadir-founded night

Where fall the streams of ruin; but when I reach

The verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom,

To measure with my gaze the dread descent,

I see a tiny star within the depths—

A light that stays me, while the wings of doom

Convene their thickening thousands: For the star

Increases, taking to its hueless orb,

With all the speed of horror-changèd dreams

The light as of a million million moons;

And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed,

It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face,

That fills the void and fills the universe,

And bloats against the limits of the world

With lips of flame that open.

B
IBLIOGRAPHY

“The Animated Sword” is published here for the first time.

“The Red Turban” is published here for the first time.

“Prince Alcouz and the Magician.” First published as a chapbook limited to 190 numbered copies printed on letter press by Roy A. Squires, Glendale, California, in 1977.

“The Malay Krise.”
The Overland Monthly
51, No. 4 (October 1910): 354–55. In
Other Dimensions
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).

“The Ghost of Mohammed Din.”
The Overland Monthly
51, No. 5 (November 1910): 519–22. In
Other Dimensions
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).

“The Mahout.”
The Black Cat
16, No. 11 (August 1911): 25–30. In
Other Dimensions
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).

“The Raja and the Tiger.”
Black Cat
17, No. 5 (February 1912): __–__. In
Other Dimensions
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).

“Something New.”
10 Story Book
23, No. 9 (August 1924): 36–37.
10 Story Book
25, No. 9 (September 1927): 40–41.

“The Flirt.”
Live Stories
36, No. 1 (March 1923): 98. In
Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith.
Ed. Steve Behrends with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

“The Perfect Woman,” “A Platonic Entanglement,” “The Expert Lover,” “The Parrot,” “A Copy of Burns,” “Checkmate,” and “The Infernal Star” were all first published in
Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith.
Ed. Steve Behrends with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

“Dawn of Discord.”
Spicy Mystery Stories
9, no. 4 (October 1940): 30–41, 106–114 (as by E. Hoffmann Price).

“House of the Monoceros.”
Spicy Mystery Stories
10, no. 1 (February 1941): __ (as “The Old Gods Eat” by E. Hoffmann Price). Reprinted in
Far Lands, Other Days
by E. Hoffmann Price (Chapel Hill, NC: Carcosa, 1975).

“The Dead Will Cuckold You.” First published in
In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith.
Ed. Jack L. Chalker (Baltimore: Anthem, 1963). In
Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith.
Ed. Steve Behrends with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).