[Booktalk] C.A. Smith’s Hyperborea

Last time on Booktalk we tackled C.A. Smith’s most exotic, most refined and most seductive of worlds in the form of the Zothique Cycle. Today we tackle his Hyperborea Cycle, where we approach what is closest for Smith to what would later be Sword & Sorcery. Indeed! Of all the four cycles that bear elements of this scrappy underdog of a genre, Hyperborea is certainly the Swordest and the Sorcery-est, and nowhere is the kinship with H.P. Lovecraft, a pen pal and colleague of Smith’s, as pronounced.

The world of Hyperborea is set in earth’s distant past, on the fertile continent of Hyperborea, located at the Earth’s Arctic and covered by humid jungles, soaring volcanoes and plagued by the inexorably advancing ice that is destined to one day wipe out all of its inhabitants. It is Sword and Sorcery at its most recognizable; savage climes, bronze-thewed fighting men, greedy thieves, sub-human troglodytes, malignant sorcerers, hideous outer gods and fist-sized gemstones stored in pre-human temples. Let us dig in by Crom!

Like Smith’s other cycles the short stories are united more by setting then by characters, though uniquely, the one-handed thief Satampra Zeiros does make a repeat appearance. The tales themselves come primarily in one primary flavor; the straightforward S&S yarn, where the greedy or foolish character comes to confront some supernatural menace and is generally (but not always!) destroyed by it, with a rare sub-variant that combines the cosmic horror with farcical undertones. Though it is not explicitly mentioned, it can be understood that it takes place in the same continuity as Zothique, and discerning readers might find the odd tenuous link between Hyperborea, Zothique, Poseidonis and the medieval province of Averoigne. Tales take place across a considerable period of time, and it is possible for the ambitious reader to compile a rough chronology of events in the world of Hyperborea, from the abandonment of the old capital of Commoriom to the freezing of the entire continent by the nightmarish power of the White Worm.

The characters that populate this cycle are cut from the same cloth as the primordial world which they inhabit. Forget the melancholy dreamers and cynics of Zothique, these are atavistic men, driven by greed, arrogance or the lust for worldly power. Only rarely do they chase numinous phantoms. Forget also, the crumbling landscape, the desert, the tomb. Hyperborea is primeval, savage, its environs are jungles, glacier and caverns of primordial rock, its monsters are amoeboid slimes, chthonic gods and a demons of the ice. If Zothique reeks of the grave, Hyperborea reeks of prehistory. Commoriom, Uzuldaroum, Voormitadreth. The names are long, guttural and cumbersome. Contrast this with the elegant, mellifluous nomenclature of Zothique, the lexicon of a refined and perhaps decadent culture, and appreciate the subtle difference.

A fine start of the series is the Tale of Satampra Zeiros (1931), which follows the botched robbery of the Thief Satampra Zeiros and his companion Tierov Ompalios on an ancient Temple in the abandoned capital city of Commoriom. The brigand narrates the tale in first person and is quick to brag of his exploits.

Now, Tirouv Ompallios was my life-long friend and my trustworthy companion in all such enterprises as require deft fingers and a habit of mind both agile and adroit. I can say without flattering myself, or Tirouv Ompallios either, that we carried to an incomparable success more than one undertaking from which fellow-craftsmen of a much wider renown than ourselves might well have recoiled in dismay. To be more explicit, I refer to the theft of the jewels of Queen Cunambria, which were kept in a room where two-score venomous reptiles wandered at will; and the breaking of the adamantine box of Acromi, in which were all the medallions of an early dynasty of Hyperborean kings. It is true that these medallions were difficult and perilous to dispose of, and that we sold them at a dire sacrifice to the captain of a barbarian vessel from remote Lemuria: but nevertheless, the breaking of that box was a glorious feat, for it had to be done in absolute silence, on account of the proximity of a dozen guards who were all armed with tridents. We made use of a rare and mordant acid . . . but I must not linger too long and too garrulously by the way, however great the temptation to ramble on amid heroic memories and the high glamor of valiant or sleightful deeds.
 
The two rogues start the story down on their luck and with just enough money to buy either bread or palm wine. They immediately buy palm wine, and fortified by it, decide to help themselves to the abandoned treasures of the century-abandoned capitol, but a convenient day’s journey from the current city. Despite the short distance, it is made clear they have left civilization behind and are now threading on a place that is beyond the purview of man.

We paused, and again the silence of an elder desolation claimed our lips. For the houses were white and still as sepulchers, and the deep shadows that lay around and upon them were chill and sinister and mysterious as the very shadow of death. It seemed that the sun could not have shone for ages in this place—that nothing warmer than the spectral beams of the cadaverous moon had touched the marble and granite ever since that universal migration prompted by the prophecy of the White Sybil of Polarion.

The story builds up atmosphere and tension as it progresses, unfolding slowly until the two thieves find themselves in the abandoned temple of the savage deity Tsathogguah. The slow buildup turns to horror as the thieves must find a means to escape a hideous creature of black sludge that emerges from the bowl in its centre to devour the interlopers.

A panicked flight into the jungle, persued by the hideous sludge, brings them back to whence they fled. In abandoned Commoriom, they barricade themselves inside the temple, and must make a harsh decision, allowing only one to survive, and even him terribly mauled by the ordeal. We end on a grim note.

Even as I shot back the bolt, a single tentacle sprang out with infernal rapidity from the basin, and elongating itself across the whole room, it caught my right wrist in a lethal clutch. It was unlike anything I have ever touched, it was indescribably viscid and slimy and cold, it was loathsomely soft like the foul mire of a bog and mordantly sharp as an edged metal, with an agonizing suction and constriction that made me scream aloud as the clutch tightened upon my flesh, cutting into me like a vise of knife-blades. In my struggles to free myself, I drew the door open, and fell forward on the sill. A moment of awful pain, and then I became aware that I had broken away from my captor. But looking down, I saw that my hand was gone, leaving a strangely withered stump from which little blood issued. Then, gazing behind me into the shrine, I saw the tentacle recoil and shorten till it passed from view behind the rim of the basin, bearing my lost hand to join whatever now remained of Tirouv Ompallios.

No less grim, but perhaps even more portentious and horrific is the Testament of Athammaus (1932), which takes place a century earlier, in the city of Commoriom, and is reminiscent of a Cosmic Horror version of the Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Like The Tale, the story is a retelling after the fact, a testament by a solemn and loyal official, the most dreaded executioner in all of Hyperborea, dutifully recounting the horrors he has witnessed.

It has become needful for me, who am no wielder of the stylus of bronze or the pen of calamus, and whose only proper tool is the long, double-handed sword, to indite this account of the curious and lamentable happenings which foreran the universal desertion of Commoriom by its king and its people. This I am well-fitted to do, for I played a signal part in these happenings; and I left the city only when all the others had gone.

The Jungles of Commoriom are haunted by a bandit of hideous and unearthly parentage. Knygathim Zhaum is one of the ante-human Voormis, rumored to carry in his veins the blood of Tsathoggua himself, and guilty of all manner of unspeakable crimes. After the loss of countless lives, he is finally brought to justice, and has his head placed on the block.

Amid the unremitting vigilance of his warders, Knygathin Zhaum came forward, fixing upon me the intent but inexpressive gaze of his lidless, ochre-yellow eyes, in which a face-to-face scrutiny could discern no pupils. He knelt down beside the block, presenting his mottled nape without a tremor. As I looked upon him with a calculating eye, and made ready for the lethal stroke, I was impressed more powerfully and more disagreeably than ever by the feeling of a loathsome, underlying plasticity, an invertebrate structure, nauseous and non-terrestrial, beneath his impious mockery of human form. And I could not help perceiving also the air of abnormal coolness, of abstract, impenetrable cynicism, that was maintained by all his parts and members. He was like a torpid snake, or some huge liana of the jungle, that is wholly unconscious of the shearing axe. I was well aware that I might be dealing with things which were beyond the ordinary province of a public headsman; but nathless I lifted the great sword in a clean, symmetrically flashing arc, and brought it down on the piebald nape with all of my customary force and address.

After his beheading, Athammaus sleeps uneasily, and awakes to hear the unspeakable. Kyngathim Zhaum is alive once more, having seemingly unearthed himself and has announced this fact by devouring a man in broad daylight on the very streets of Commoriom. He is brought before the Executioner once more, and beheaded a second time. The body is immured in a sarcophagus of hardwood and the head cast into a pit and buried under stones. It is not enough. A second time Kyngathim Zhaum walks the earth, and devours one of the eight judges. He is once again beheaded. Every precaution is taken to ensure that it takes this time.

The laborious care with which I and my assistants conducted the third inhumation was indeed deserving of success. We laid the body in a strong sarcophagus of bronze, and the head in a second but smaller sarcophagus of the same material. The lids were then soldered down with molten metal; and after this the two sarcophagi were conveyed to opposite parts of Commoriom. The one containing the body was buried at a great depth beneath monumental masses of stone; but that which enclosed the head I left uninterred, proposing to watch over it all night in company with a guard of armed men. I also appointed a numerous guard to keep vigil above the burial-place of the body.

Under the uneasy eyes of Athammaus and a band of fighting-men, the head of Zhaum rips itself free from its place of internment, and once again re-unites with its body. In their attempt to stop the creature, it sheds its remaining humanity and metamorphoses fully into an unhuman horror.

In spite of the baffling, ambiguous oddities which the thing displayed, we identified it as Knygathin Zhaum when we drew closer. The head, in its third re-union with that detestable torso, had attached itself in a semi-flattened manner to the region of the lower chest and diaphragm; and during the process of this novel coalescence, one eye had slipped away from all relation with its fellow or the head and was now occupying the navel, just below the embossment of the chin. Other and even more shocking alterations had occurred: the arms had lengthened into tentacles, with fingers that were like knots of writhing vipers; and where the head would normally have been, the shoulders had reared themselves to a cone-shaped eminence that ended in a cup-like mouth. Most fabulous and impossible of all, however, were the changes in the nether limbs: at each knee and hip, they had re-bifurcated into long, lithe proboscides that were lined with throated suckers. By making a combined use of its various mouths and members, the abnormality was devouring both of the hapless persons whom it had seized.

The monster can be stopped by no earthly weapon. Amid panic and slaughter, the City is abandoned by its inhabitants. The tale ends with Athammaus waiting on the city’s border, overseeing the retreat, and eyes the monster hideously perching on the locus of its tri-fold execution.

The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan (1932) adheres to the forumala of the classic weird tale, that of a villain meeting a grisly but in some ways deserved fate. It is about on par for a tale of the Hyperborea cycle, neither extravagant nor a dismal failure. Avoosl, THE most avaricious usurer in all of Commoriom, enters the tale by snubbing a beggar prophet of so much as a single coin. Incensed, the beggar grants him a prophecy nonetheless.

“Then, O Avoosl Wuthoqquan,” he hissed, “I will prophesy gratis. Harken to your weird: the godless and exceeding love which you bear to all material things, and your lust therefor, shall lead you on a strange quest and bring you to a doom whereof the stars and the sun will alike be ignorant. The hidden opulence of earth shall allure you and ensnare you; and earth itself shall devour you at the last.”

Later, a clearly nervous traveller offers up two gemstones of exquisite beauty in exchange for a sum. Avoosl ignores the clearly shady undertones of the enterprise and instead bargains him down ruthlessly, preying on his desperation, and acquiring the gems for a fraction of their worth, placing them amid his vast collection of treasures acquired by his unseemly trade.

Then the Weird makes its entrance. The gemstones move from his hoard as if of their own volition, and roll out of his door. Avoosl Wutthoquan follows after them, chasing them through the streets of Commoriom, and eventually into the jungles of Hyperborea. The gemstones roll and roll, further away from the city. He gains a clear premonition of danger but his greed spurs him ever onward.

Commoriom was far behind him now; and there were no more huts on the lonely forest road, nor any other wayfarers. He shivered a little—either with fear or the chill night air; but he did not relax his pursuit. He was closing in on the emeralds, very gradually but surely; and he felt that he would recapture them soon. So engrossed was he in the weird chase, with his eyes on the ever-rolling gems, that he failed to perceive he was no longer following an open highway. Somehow, somewhere, he had taken a narrow path that wound among monstrous trees whose foliage turned the moonlight to a mesh of quicksilver with heavy, fantastic raddlings of ebony. Crouching in grotesque menace, like giant retiarii, they seemed to close in upon him from all sides. But the money-lender was oblivious of their shadowy threats, and heeded not the sinister strangeness and solitude of the jungle path, nor the dank odors that lingered beneath the trees like unseen pools.

In the end, the gemstones roll into a cavern leading beneath the earth. There, they return into a pit containing a vast hoard. Consumed by avarice, Wutthoquan leaps in and seeks to fill his pockets with the boundless riches. The countless gems cause him to sink into them like quicksand and soon he is stuck and cannot retrieve. His final fate is more gruesome then mere drowning however, as a hideous daemon, a chimera of frog and cuttle-fish, reveals itself and explains its design.

“Your emeralds?” said the entity. “I fear that I must contradict you. The jewels are mine. They were stolen not long ago from this cavern, in which I have been wont to gather and guard my subterranean wealth for many ages. The thief was frightened away… when he saw me… and I suffered him to go. He had taken only the two emeralds; and I knew that they would return to me—as my jewels always return—whenever I choose to call them. The thief was lean and bony, and I did well to let him go; for now, in place, there is a plump and well-fed usurer.”

We conclude the tale with the usurer being devoured by the creature, slowly. A gruesome but fitting end for a lifetime of evil.

We follow up with The Door to Saturn (1932), which is the first of the Hyperborean tales to reveal C.A. Smith’s somewhat farcical sense of humor, which is here combined with the wild imagination and bizarre horror that we have come to know and love. It is certainly among the most imaginative of the entire cycle, and quite a hoot!

Morghi, inquisitor of the Goddess Youhndeh, has gathered his acolytes to put an end to the exploits of the wizard Eibon (yes, THAT Eibon). While the formal charge is heresy, it becomes immediately apparent that Morghi is simply jealous of Eibon’s power, and instead seeks to supplant him. Unfortunately for them his tower turns out to be empty, with no sign of Eibon. As they search it, they come upon a strange artifact.

The walls were now entirely bare; and Morghi considered them for a long time, amid the respectful silence of his underlings. A queer panel, high up in the southeastern side above the writing-table, had been revealed by the removal of one of the paintings. Morghi’s heavy brows met in a long black bar as he eyed this panel. It was conspicuously different from the rest of the wall, being an oval-shaped inlay of some reddish metal tbat was neither gold nor copper — a metal that displayed an obscure and fleeting fluorescence of rare colors when one peered at it through half-shut eyelids. But somehow it was impossible, with open eyes, even to remember the colors of this fluorescence. Morghi — who, perhaps, was cleverer and more perspicacious than Eibon had given him credit for being — conceived a suspicion that was apparently baseless and absurd, since the wall containing the panel was the outer wall of the building, and could give only on the sky and sea.

Morghi is undeterred and passes through the strange oval, which is a plate of ultra-telluric metal that can penetrate the higher dimensions, teleporting him to the titular Saturn, in the wake of Eibon. The charges of heresy are certainly true, for Eibon had been bequeathed the door by the Alien God Zhothaqqua. Both characters find themselves on the alien world of Saturn.

The slope beneath him was lined with rows of peculiar objects; and he could not make up his mind whether they were trees, mineral forms, or animal organisms, since they appeared to combine certain characteristics of all these. This preternatural landscape was appallingly distinct in every detail, under a greenish-black sky that was overarched from end to end with a triple cyclopean ring of dazzling luminosity. The air was cold, and Eibon did not care for its sulphurescent odor or the odd puckery sensation it left in his nostrils and lungs. And when he look a few steps on the unattractive-looking soil, he found that it had the disconcerting friability of ashes that have dried once more after being wetted with rain.

The two soon meet, after Eibon tries in vain to communicate with one of the grotesque godlike inhabitants of Saturn. There is an unmistakably Vancian tone of farce as the two encounter eachother and bicker. They agree to temporarily set aside their differences in order to brave the unknown perils of Saturn, and follow the strange direction of the alien god, who utters onto Eibon a cryptic sentence, which he believes must be of immense significance.

“That was the god Hziulquoigmnzhah.”

“And who, pray, is this god? I confess that I have never heard of him.”

“He is the paternal uncle of Zhothaqquah.”

Morghi was silent, except for a queer sound that might have been either an interrupted sneeze or an exclamation of disgust. But after a while he asked:

“And what is this mission of yours?”

“That will be revealed in due time,” answered Eibon with sententious dignity. “I am not allowed to discuss it at present. I have a message from the god which I must deliver only to the proper persons.”

Following Eibon’s insistence that they are on a mission of divine importance, the two encounter Saturn’s strange native inhabitants. While at first they assume the natives worship the two as emissaries of the Divine, in actuality they are merely grateful that they perform them a minor service. Their stay with the Behlephroims is singularly unexciting and even somewhat tedious. What is most noteworthy of these alien tribesmen are their thoroughly queer mating habits.

The Bhlemphroims were indeed a practical race, and had few if any interests beyond the cultivation of a great variety of edible fungi, the breeding of large centipedal animals, and the propagation of their own species. The latter process, as revealed to Eibon and Morghi, was somewhat unusual: though the Bhlemphroims were bisexual, only one female in a generation was chosen for reproductive duties; and this female, after growing to mammoth size on food prepared from a special fungus, became the mother of an entire new generation.

Following the consultation of the elders, the two are chosen to become the fathers of the new generation of Behlephroims. Unfortunately part of this rite involves them being served up to the Mother in the form of ragouts after the act of copulation has taken place. After assuring the locals that they will perform the natural obligations, the two make a hasty departure. They travel through many lands, only to end up in the territory of the Ydheems following a devastating avalanche, a people renowned for their mysticism and piety. The natives, when they learn of the command, promptly move the village, and attach great significance to the two characters. Later on, the true meaning of the words are revealed.

Eibon and Morghi were much mystified. And it was not until a new town had been built on the fungus-wooded plain at the distance of a full day’s march, and they themselves had been installed among the priests of the new temple, that they learned the reason of it all and the meaning of: “Iqhui dlosh odhqlonqh.” These words meant merely: “Be on your way,” and the god had addressed them to Eibon as a dismissal. But the coincidental coming of the avalanche and of Eibon and Morghi with this purported message from the god, had been taken by the Ydheems as a divine injunction to remove themselves and their goods from their present location. Thus the wholesale exodus of people with their idols and domestic belongings.

The tale ends with the two settling down and living a live that is not greatly different from any they would have had on Hyperborea. The Yhdeems, while devout, lack entirely any sort of religious fanaticism or zeal, and so Morghi cannot excersize his demagogic ways. On Hyperborea, the disappearance of Morghi causes the faith of Youndeh to wane, while that of Zothaqquah waxes strongly.

The Ice Demon (1933) is a return to more standard fare, and besides the dreadfulness of the titular monster and the wider implications of the nature of the encroaching Ice, does little to deviate from it. It takes place over a century after the peninsula of Mhu Thulan has been covered entirely in ice. A foolhardy hunter and two jewel merchants travel beyond the jungles onto the sinister Glaciers that threaten to slowly but inexorably bury all of Hyperborea, in search of famous jewels. The hook is exquisite, promising both deadly danger and immense reward.

Now, in the path of the embattled glacier, Quanga led his companions on a bold quest. Their object was nothing less than the retrieval of the rubies of King Haalor, who, with the wizard Ommum-Vog and many full-caparisoned soldiers, had gone out five decades before to make war upon the polar ice. From this fantastic expedition, neither Haalor nor OmmumVog had come back; and the sorry, ragged remnant of their men-at-arms, returning to Iqqua, after two moons, had told a dire tale.

The Wizard Ommum-Vog attempts by his mighty sorceries to drive back the terrible glacier, but fails, and he and king Haalor and all but a few of his soldiers are trapped in ice. The trio sets out for no such noble impulse, seeking to help themselves to the treasures of King Haalor. Indeed, it was the hunter’s brother who, pursuing a black fox, found the cavern in which the rubies were enthroned. But overcome with intimations of immense evil, he flees the scene, and never again hunts onto the glacier. His brother ignores his warnings and travels to the cavern.

As the three set out, there is none of the banter we would get in the tales of the Zothique cycle. The ill-matched trio sets out for a weeks long travel through the inhospitable terrain, driven only by greed.

Hoom Feethos and Eibur Tsanth, in raiment heavily quilted with eider-down against the cold, followed him complainingly but with avaricious eagerness. They had not enjoyed the long marches through a desolate, bleakening land, nor the rough fare and exposure to the northern elements. Moreover, they had taken a dislike to Quanga, whom they considered rude and overbearing. Their grievances were aggravated by the fact that he was now compelling them to carry most of the supplies in addition to the two heavy bags. of gold which they were to exchange later for the gems. Nothing less valuable than the rubies of Haalor would have induced them to come so far, or to set foot on the formidable wastes of the ice-sheet.

The scene in the cave is eerie, and Smith dazzles us with both wonder and a sinister sense of foreboding. Tomb-robbers, they begin to chisel out the Rubies and the countless lesser gems from the two feet of Ice under which they are buried. A seeming accident occurs, and one of the jewelers dies to a falling stalactite. The accident rapidly takes on a more sinister implication.

The accident, it seemed, was a perfectly natural one, such as might occur in summer from a slight melting of the immense pendant; but, amid their consternation, Quanga and Hoom Feethos were compelled to take note of certain circumstances that were far from normal or explicable. During the removal of the rubies, on which their attention had been centered so exclusively, the chamber had narrowed to half of its former width, and had also closed down from above, till the hanging icicles were almost upon them, like the champing teeth of some tremendous mouth. The place had darkened, and the light was such as might filter into arctic seas beneath heavy floes. The incline of the cave had grown steeper, as if it were pitching into bottomless depths. Far up — incredibly far — the two men beheld the tiny entrance, which seemed no bigger than the mouth of a fox’s hole.

Quanga the hunter barely makes up out of the cavern. The other jewel merchant is trapped by rapidly growing fangs of ice, though he manages to get the rubies through the narrowing entrance. It is interesting to note that he does show the redeeming quality of courage, by going back for his companion and trying to rescue him first. Disturbed at his companion’s gruesome death, Quanga takes the gemstones and flees the ice flats. The air, the sky, the very land itself seems turned towards him, trying to ensnare him. 

The tale plays a well-worn horror trick on the reader. It allows one to think that Quanga might have escaped the Ice-Demon’s terrible hunger, as he leaves the great glacier after a punishing and panicked flight and wanders through the now warm jungles of Hyperborea once more. Exhausted by the long journey, he quenches his thirst by a nearby brook, and falls asleep against a tree. But he is not free. The great shadow of the glacier, in defiance of the very sun, looms over him. Defiantly he fires his arrows and vainly he tries to flee. But in the end he cannot escape his doom. He falls prey to the terrible and inexorable power of the Ice Demon, which is as inescapable and inexorable as the Ice itself. In the end, it gets its prey.

Dimly he heard a sound as of clashing icicles, a grinding as of heavy floes, in the blue-green gloom that tightened and thickened around him. It was as if the soul of the glacier, malign and implacable, had overtaken him in his flight. At times he struggled numbly, in half-drowsy terror. With some obscure impulse, as if to propitiate a vengeful deity, he took the pouch of rubies from his bosom with prolonged and painful effort, aod tried to hurl it away. The thongs that tied the pouch were loosened by its fall, and Quanga heard faintly, as if from a great distance, the tinkle of the rubies as they rolled and scattered on some hard surface. Then oblivion deepened about him, and he fell forward stiffly, without knowing that he had fallen.

Morning found him beside a little stream, stark-frozen, and lying on his face in a circle of poppies that had been blackened as if by the footprint of some gigantic demon of frost. A nearby pool, formed by the leisurely rill, was covered with thin ice; and on the ice, like gouts of frozen blood, there lay the scattered rubies of Haalor. In its own time, the great glacier, moving slowly and irresistibly southward, would reclaim them.

Ubbo-Sathla (1933) is a wonderful oddity, a short and awe-inspiring bit of Cosmic Horror taking place in modern times and linking itself to the distant past by means of an ancient artifact. In a classic tale of the wages of delving after forbidden knowledge, Paul Tregardis obtains a curious milky crystal from an antique dealer. The lens is described in such works as the dreaded Book of Eibon and the very Necronomicon penned by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred himself!!! The writings indicate that the crystal gave the old wizard Zon Mezzamalech the ability to peer into the murky reaches of prehistory, to view the very source of all life!

He had acquired the stone in dubitable ways, from a more than sinister source. It was unique and without fellow in any land or time. In its depths, all former years, all things that have ever been, were supposedly mirrored, and would reveal themselves to the patient visionary. And through the crystal, Zon Mezzamalech had dreamt to recover the wisdom of the gods who died before the Earth was born. They had passed to the lightless void, leaving their lore inscribed upon tablets of ultra-stellar stone; and the tablets were guarded in the primal mire by the formless, idiotic demiurge, Ubbo-Sathla. Only by means of the crystal could he hope to find and read the tablets.

Gazing into the crystal allows him to see what was once seen by Zon Mezzamalech and indeed, the two all but merge minds during these scrying sessions in ways that are alarming. Naturally Paul cannot restrain his scholarly avarice and is overcome by two dooms. In the first place, the repeated attempts merge his consciousness with that of Zon Mezzamalech until they become wholly the same person, transfixed in a single moment spanning across vast epochs. The second doom is altogether more awe-inspiring.

He seemed to live unnumbered lives, to die myriad deaths, forgetting each time the death and life that had gone before. He fought as a warrior in half-legendary battles; he was a child playing in the ruins of some olden city of Mhu Thulan; he was the king who had reigned when the city was in its prime, the prophet who had foretold its building and its doom. A woman, he wept for the bygone dead in necropoli long-crumbled; an antique wizard, he muttered the rude spells of earlier sorcery; a priest of some pre-human god, he wielded the sacrificial knife in cave-temples of pillared basalt. Life by life, era by era, he re-traced the long and groping cycles through which Hyperborea had risen from savagery to a high civilization.
 
In the end, both characters find the Azatoth-like Ubbo-Sathla, the Prime from which all life flows, and in beholding him through the crystal, are united with and become him. The explicit reference to Lovecraft’s mythos should come as no surprise. If the story lacks something of the intense revulsion that Lovecraft always manages to inject into his work, it makes up for it with sheer, cosmic outlandishness.

There, in the grey beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the pre-mundane gods.

The massive influence of Lovecraft on C.A. Smith’s Hyperborean cycle is also apparent in the superb The Seven Geases (1933), contender for the best tale in the cycle, and yet another story that manages to seamlessly weld Lovecraftian Horror and early S&S with Smith’s farcical sense of humor. There are really few like it, in a few pages Smith puts down an entire underground realm which would put many modern megadungeons to shame, and is reminiscent of the underworld hells described in H.P. Lovecraft’s the Mound.

Lord Rabilar Vooz is out hunting the troglodytic Voormis with his retinue on Mount Voormitadreth one day when he gets separated from the rest of his men on the mountainous plateau, and investigates a strange plume of smoke. He blunders into a sorcerous ritual a thousand years in the making and ends up greatly angering the wizard, who punishes him by putting a Geas on him. Bound by the Geas, he ventures into Mount Voormitadreth to offer himself up to the God Tsathoggua to be devoured. Savour the delicious proto-Vancian verbiage.

“May the ordure of demons bemire you from heel to crown!” cried the venomous ancient. “O lumbering, bawling idiot! you have ruined a most promising and important evocation. How you came here I cannot imagine. I have surrounded this place with twelve circles of illusion, whose effect is multiplied by their myriad intersections; and the chance that any intruder would ever find his way to my abode was mathematically small and insignificant. Ill was that chance which brought you here: for They that you have frightened away will not return until the high stars repeat a certain rare and quickly passing conjunction; and much wisdom is lost to me in the interim.”

“How now, varlet!” said Ralibar Vooz, astonished and angered by this greeting, of which he understood little save that his presence was unwelcome to the old man. “Who are you that speak so churlishly to a magistrate of Commoriom and a cousin to King Homquat? I advise you to curb such insolence: for, if so I wish, it lies in my power to serve you even as I serve the Voormis. Though methinks,” he added, “your pelt is far too filthy and verminous to merit room amid my trophies of the chase.”

“Know that I am the sorcerer Ezdagor,” proclaimed the ancient, his voice echoing among the rocks with dreadful sonority. “By choice I have lived remote from cities and men; nor have the Voormis of the mountain troubled me in my magical seclusion. I care not if you are the magistrate of all swinedom or a cousin to the king of dogs. In retribution for the charm you have shattered, the business you have undone by this oafish trespass, I shall put upon you a most dire and calamitous and bitter geas.”

Vooz ventures into perilous mount Voormitadreth accompanied by the Wizard’s archeoptryx Raphontis, fighting off the Voormis with his bare hands, and descending into caverns until he comes before the hideous god Tsatthoguah, who has recently eaten, and promptly sends him further down, to be fed to his brother.

“Thanks are due to Ezdagor for this offering. But, since I have fed lately on a well-blooded sacrifice, my hunger is appeased for the present, and I require not the offering. However, it may be that others of the Old Ones are athirst or famished. And, since you came here with a geas upon you, it is not fitting that you should go hence without another. So I place you under this geas, to betake yourself downward through the caverns till you reach, after long descent, that bottomless gulf over which the spider-god Atlach-Nacha weaves his eternal webs. And there, calling to AtlachNacha, you must say: ‘I am the gift sent by Tsathoggua.'”

The tale continues on in this vein, every time Vooz presents himself before the entity, every time the entity has no immediate use for him and instead places another geas upon him, prompting him to venture deeper ever into Mount Voormitadreth. He meets the Spider God Atlach-Nacha, who spins webs over the endless chasms bisecting the mountain’s roots. He ventures into the ageless halls of Haon-Doar. He is taken into the super-science laboratories of the Serpent Men, and devoured but spit out by the protoplasmic dwellers of the Caverns of the Archetypes and rejected by Abhoth, the wellspring of all primordial life.

Eventually he is consigned to travel to the Outer World, a quest that would surely take decades. His ordeal is ended when he stumbles on one of the great threads of Atlach Nacha’s Web, and precipitated into the abyss.

 Raphtontis, with sharp admonitory cawings, floated before him above the giant web; and he was impelled to a rash haste by the imminently slavering snouts of the dark abnormalities behind. Owing to such precipitancy, he failed to notice that the web had been weakened and some of its strands torn or stretched by the weight of the sloth-like monster. Coming in view of the chasm’s opposite verge, he thought only of reaching it, and redoubled his pace. But at this point the web gave way beneath him. He caught wildly at the broken, dangling strands, but could not arrest his fall. With several pieces of Atlach-Nacha’s weaving clutched in his fingers, he was precipitated into that gulf which no one had ever voluntarily tried to plumb.

This, unfortunately, was a contingency that had not been provided against by the terms of the seventh geas.

The story is reminiscent of the doomed quest of King Euvoram, albeit the hubris that prompts the doom of Vooz is much less pronounced. In terms of sheer imagination, Seven Geases is very strong S&S, its strangeness and visions persisting long after the tale has ended and the mirth has expired.

The White Sybil (1935) departs from the realm of thieves and sorcerers and ventures into that other terrain beloved by Smith: that of the poet. White Sybil is essentially an S&S riff of the myth of Actaeon, Orion and all those unfortunate few, who fall in love with goddesses. There are elements also, of the stories of people being spirited off to Faerie, and who now must be content to dwell in the mortal realm.

Tortha the Poet has travelled far and wide and beheld many marvels until one day he witnesses the Sybil of Polarion in the streets of Commoriom. Spellbound, he can think of nothing else but her beauty. He can write no poem nor stare at another women.

No one had ever dared to accost or follow her. Often she came and went in silence; but sometimes, in the marts or public squares, she would utter cryptic prophecies and tidings of doom. In many places, throughout Mhu Thulan and central Hyperborea, she had foretold the enormous sheet of ice, now crawling gradually downward from the pole, that would cover the continent in ages to come, and would bury beneath oblivious drift the mammoth palms of its jungles and the superb pinnacles of its cities. And in great Commoriom, then the capital, she had prophecied a stranger doom that was to befall this city long before the encroachment of the ice. Men feared her everywhere, as a messenger of unknown outland gods, moving abroad in supernal bale and beauty.

He wanders further and further afield, desperate to catch a glimpse of the Sybil. One day, wandering in the hills, he finally catches sight of the Sybil. She beckons him, and he follows. Higher and higher they wander, up into the glacier. The cold mounts and he passes out, unable to sustain himself. He awakens in an unearthly valley.

He stood in a valley that might have been the inmost heart of some boreal paradise-a valley that was surely no part of waste Polarion. About him the turf was piled with flowers that had the frail and pallid hues of a lunar rainbow. Their delicate forms were those of the blossoms of snow and frost, and it seemed that they would melt and vanish at a touch.

The sky above the valley was not the low-arching, tender turquoise heaven of Mhu Thulan, but was vague, dreamlike, remote, and full of an infinite violescence, like the welkin of a world beyond time and space. Everywhere there was light; but Tortha saw no sun in the cloudless vault. It was as if the sun, the moon, the stars, had been molten together ages ago and had dissolved into some ultimate, eternal luminescence.

Tall, slender trees, whose leafage of lunar green was thickly starred with blossoms delicate as those of the turf, grew in groves and clumps above the valley, and lined the margin of a stilly flowing stream that wound away into measureless misty perspectives

Here he meets the Sybil and hears her words and is enraptured. He confesses his love to the goddess.

She made no answer, gave no gesture of assent or denial. But when he had done, she regarded him strangely; whether with love or pity, sadness or joy, he could not tell. Then, swiftly, she bent forward and kissed his brow with her pallid lips. Their kiss was like the searing of fire or ice. But, mad with his supreme longing, Tortha strove rashly to embrace the Sybil.

The Embrace leaves him forever marked, the touch of the divine leaves scars upon his mind and soul. Those who have beheld the divine cannot easily return to the realm of men. He is found, half-frozen, on the top of Polarion, and nursed back to health by the natives of that polar region. We end on a, for Smith, characteristically wry and observant note.

Among those who tended him was a pale maiden, not uncomely; and Tortha took her for the Sybil in the darkness that had come upon him. The maiden’s name was Illara, and Tortha loved her in his delusion; and, forgetful of his kin and his friends in Cerngoth, he dwelt with the mountain people thereafter, taking Illara to wife and making the songs of the little tribe. For the most part, he was happy in his belief that the Sybil had returned to him; and Illara, in her way, was content, being not the first of mortal women whose lover had remained faithful to a divine illusion.

An enchanting little story about the fate of vainglorious pursuits. Smith, a dreamer if nothing else, seems to have a love/hate relationship with wild fancy and illusion, with his stories alternatively preferring it over grey mundanity or showing the folly and the inevitable conclusion of such folly.

In terms of pure Cosmic Horror the Coming of the White Worm (1941) is singular and I consider it the strongest story of the entire cycle. There is no hint of farce or levity. The sinister agency behind the inexorably advancing glaciers that would come to bury all of Mhu Thulan, is revealed. There is an interesting little link with the world of Averoigne by way of the translated writings of Gaspard du Nord.

We follow the tale of Evagh the Warlock, whose dire fate it is to bear witness and for a time serve the cosmic doom that has come to Hyperborea. It begins with ominous portents, unusual cold, a beached ship with its sailors locked in ice with expressions of absolute horror frozen upon their visages. Even fire will not touch their rigid forms. He calls upon the spirits and receives ever more ominous portents. The doom prophesied by the Sibyl has come.

 Walking stiffly at dawn, he rose up from the floor where he had lain, and witnessed a strange marvel. For, lo, in the harbour there towered an iceberg such as no vessel had yet sighted in all its sea-faring to the north, and no legend had told of among the dim Hyperborean isles. It filled the broad haven from shore to shore, and sheered up to a height immeasurable with piled escarpments and tiered precipices; and its pinnacles hung like towers in the zenith above the house of Evagh. It was higher than the dread mountain Achoravomas, which belches rivers of flame and liquid stone that pour unquenched through Tscho Vulpanomi to the austral main. It was steeper than the mountain Yarak, which marks the site of the boreal pole; and from it there fell a wan glittering on sea and land. Deathly and terrible was the glittering, and Evagh knew that this was the light he had beheld in the darkness.

His servants dead, he returns to his home, working his divinations, only to find them useless. His demonic familiars have fled. The sorcerous power of the master of the Iceberg is beyond that of mortal man. He retires, and awakes to find his house is now upon the great glacier. Here he meets the heralds of the White Worm, eight creatures who were once men. For purposes known only to itself, the White Worm spares the mightiest of wizards, and with its sorceries, acclimates them to exist in the extreme cold, and serve its inscrutable will.

At sight of this entity, the pulses of Evagh were stilled for an instant by terror; and, following quickly upon the terror, his gorge rose within him through excess of loathing. In all the world there was naught that could be likened for its foulness to Rlim Shaikorth. Something he had of the semblance of a fat white worm; but his bulk was beyond that of the sea-elephant. His half-coiled tail was thick as the middle folds of his body; and his front reared upward from the dais in the form of a white round disk, and upon it were imprinted vaguely the lineaments of a visage belonging neither to beast of the earth nor ocean-creature. And amid the visage a mouth curved uncleanly from side to side of the disk, opening and shutting incessantly on a pale and tongueless and toothless maw. The eye-sockets of Rlim Shaikorth were close together between his shallow nostrils; and the sockets were eyeless, but in them appeared from moment to moment globules of a blood-coloured matter having the form of eyeballs; and ever the globules broke and dripped down before the dais. And from the ice-floor of the dome there ascended two masses like stalagmites, purple and dark as frozen gore, which had been made by the ceaseless dripping of the globules.

Evagh now dwells on the glacier, watching as Hyperborea is blasted with the cold from beyond the stars. Ports, forests and cities are frozen. A creature whose coming even the gods cannot prevent. Apocalyptic. The nine wizards dolorously perform the sacred rites and are sustained by the magic of Rlim Shaikorth, the White Worm. Then one day, only eight of them remain, one has gone missing. The worm reassures them that all is well. Evagh remains skeptical. And soon only seven remain. Then six. It becomes readily apparent that the Worm is devouring the wizards one by one until only Evagh is left. During one of the Worm’s sleeping periods, Evagh interrogates the worm and discovers their horrid fate.

“The worm sleepeth, but we whom the worm hath devoured are awake. Direly has he deceived us, for he came to our houses in the night, devouring us bodily one by one as we slept under the enchantment he had wrought. He has eaten our souls even as our bodies, and verily we are part of Rlim Shaikorth, but exist only as in a dark and noisome dungeon; and while the worm wakes we have no separate or conscious being, but are merged wholly in the ultraterrestrial being of Rlim Shaikorth.

The revelation of the souls and the worms true nature is too hideous even for Evagh, a hardened and evil sorcerer. Following the directions of the souls and taking advantage of the Worms sleeping, Evagh plunges a brazen blade into the Worms sleeping form, and unleashes a tidal wave of boiling blood. He dies while trying to escape as the entire glacier dissolves.

The story is terrific in atmosphere, even if the destruction of the worm is effected a bit easily. The wizards knew of the worms somnolescence during the darkening of the moon, and could have attempted something similar once it became known the Worm was devouring them. Perhaps it was the promise of immortality that held their hand, or mere cowardice? We are forced to speculate. Regardless, the story has a sweeping scope and is filled with cosmic horrors that are sure to delight any fan of Lovecraft, and the ending, where the wizard slays the monster but is killed while trying to escape, is fitting.

We end the cycle with the charming but unremarkable The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles (1958), which sees the return of the master thief Satampra Zeiros. This time he, his girlfriend Vixeela and the alchemist Veezi Phenquor set out to rob the chastity-belts of the maidens in the Temple of the moon-goddess Leniqua. This story is pure Sword & Sorcery, essentially a heist, and contains virtually no supernatural or horrific elements. The ‘heroes’ design a scheme, get their equipment from the Alchemist, and concoct it to an air of Vancian piquaresque. The dialogue fleshes out the characters, which aids the story immensely.

“That,” he observed with unctuous complacency, “is a love-philter that would inflame a nursing infant or resurrect the powers of a dying nonagenarian. Do you—?”

“No,” I said emphatically. “We require nothing of the sort. What we need at the moment is something quite different.” In a few terse words I went on to outline the problem, adding:

“If you can help us, I am sure you will find the melting-down of the golden girdles a congenial task. As usual, you will receive a third of the profits.”

Veezi Phenquor creased his bearded face into a half-lubricious, half-sardonic smile.

“The proposition is a pleasant one from all angles. We will free the temple-girls from incumbrances which they must find uncomfortable, not to say burdensome; and will turn the irksome gems and metal to a worthier purpose—notably, our own enrichment.”

Pure heist movie. A plan is concocted, with multiple components, and is then executed. The thieves sneak into the temple via a hidden tunnel on the sacred day when the girdles are unlocked, and unleash a terrifying hallucinogenic that drives all the people out of the temple while the thieves rob the place. An 11^th hour complication sets in when the high priest remains behind but they narrowly brain him on the head with one of the girdles and make their daring escape. Simple but thrilling. One can envision a whole collection of Satampra Zeiros adventures involving nothing but various complicated heists.

As they lay low, a last complication ends the tale on the characteristically wry note (in this case literally).

Returning, we found evidence that Veezi Phenquor had paid us a visit during our absence, in spite of the fact that all the doors and windows had been, and still were, carefully locked. A small cube of gold reposed on the table, serving as paper-weight for a scribbled note.

The note read: “My esteemed friends and companions: After removing the various gems, I have melted down all the gold into ingots, and am leaving one of them as a token of my great regard. Unfortunately, I have learned that I am being watched by the police, and am leaving Uzuldaroum under circumstances of haste and secrecy, taking the other ingots and all the jewels in the ass-drawn cart, covered up by the vegetables I have providentially kept, even though they are slightly stale by now. I expect to make a long journey, in a direction which I cannot specify—a journey well beyond the jurisdiction of our local police, and one on which I trust you will not be perspicacious enough to follow me. I shall need the remainder of our loot for my expenses, et cetera. Good luck in all your future ventures.

Respectfully,
Veezi Phenquor.

For Smith it is almost retrained but fans of S&S and would be writers should take note. As a short story it works quite well, the characters are fleshed out and given some character, the atmosphere is terrific, the action fast-paced and exciting and the conclusion gives the audience a delightful last surprise and is karmically appropriate. Misfortune is a fitting conclusion for rogues, even likeable ones.

All these tales and more are freely available online, and one would be remiss not to give them a readthrough. Lovecraft has been well remembered but C.A. Smith considerably less so to which I say FOR SHAME! Well worth the read.

A return to regular programming next time, with an upcoming S&S adventure review, as well as a delightful note on the results of No Artpunk I, an announcement for No Artpunk 2, an announcement for the creation of No Artpunk Companion, more JG, more play reports and jesus I should probably find some room to send in a submission to Fight On! shouldn’t I?

Have a fine weekend everyone!