fluted sapphire, reclines the emperor Chan, on his couch of ebony set
with opals and rubies, and cushioned with the furs of unknown and
gorgeous beasts. With implacable and weary gaze, from beneath unmoving
lids that seem carven of purple-veined onyx, he stares at the crystal
windows, giving upon the infinite fiery azures of a tropic sky and sea.
Oppressive as nightmare, a formless, nameless fatigue, heavier than any
burden the slaves of the mines must bear, lies forever at his heart:
All deliriums of love and wine, the agonizing ecstasy of drugs, even
the deepest and the faintest pulse of delight or pain—all are proven,
all are futile, for the outworn but insatiate emperor. Even for a new
grief, or a subtler pang than any felt before, he thinks, lying on
his bed of ebony, that he would give the silver and vermilion of all
his mines, with the crowded caskets, the carcanets and crowns that
lie in his most immemorial treasure-vault. Vainly, with the verse of
the most inventive poets, the fanciful purple-threaded fabrics of the
subtlest looms, the unfamiliar gems and minerals from the uttermost
land, the pallid leaves and blood-like petals of a rare and venomous
blossom—vainly, with all these, and many stranger devices, wilder, more
wonderful diversions, the slaves and sultanas have sought to alleviate
the iron hours. One by one he has dismissed them with a weary gesture.
And now, in the silence of the heavily curtained alcove, he lies alone,
with the canker of ennui at his heart, like the undying mordant worm at
the heart of the dead.
Anon, from between the curtains at the head of his couch, a dark
and slender hand is slowly extended, clasping a dagger whose blade
reflects the gold of the curtain in a thin and stealthily wavering
gleam: Slowly, in silence, the dagger is poised, then rises and falls
like a splinter of lightning. The emperor cries out, as the blade,
piercing his loosely folded robe, wounds him slightly in the side. In
a moment the alcove is filled with armed attendants, who seize and drag
forth the would-be assassin—a slave girl, the princess of a conquered
people, who has often, but vainly, implored her freedom from the
emperor. Pale and panting with terror and rage, she faces Chan and the
guardsmen, while stories of unimaginable monstrous tortures, of dooms
unnameable, crowd upon her memory. But Chan, aroused and startled only
for the instant, feels again the insuperable weariness, more strong
than anger or fear, and delays to give the expected signal. And then,
momentarily moved, perchance, by some ironical emotion, half-akin to
gratitude—gratitude for the brief but diverting danger, which has
served to alleviate his ennui for a little, he bids them free the
princess; and, with a regal courtesy, places about her throat his own
necklace of pearls and emeralds, each of which is the cost of an army.
THE STATUE OF SILENCE
I saw a statue, carven I knew not from what substance, nor with what
form or feature, because of the manifold drapery of black which fell
about it as a veil or a pall. Turning to Psyche, who was with me, I
said, “O thou who knowest by name and form the eidola of all things,
pray tell me what thing is this.” And she answered, “The name of it is
Silence, but neither god nor man nor demon knoweth the form thereof,
nor its entity. The seraphim pause often before it, waiting the day
when the shape shall be unveiled; and the gods and demons of the
universe are mute in its presence, half-hoping, half-fearing the time
when these lips shall speak, and deliver forth one dreameth not what,
of oracle, or query or judgment, or doom.”
REMOTENESS
There are days when all the beauty of the world is dim and strange;
when the sunlight about me seems to fall on a land remoter than the
poles of the moon. The roses in the garden surprise me, like the
monstrous orchids of unknown colour, blossoming in planets beyond
Aldebaran. And I am startled by the yellow and purple leaves of
October, as if the veil of some tremendous and awful mystery were
half-withdrawn for a moment. In such hours as these, O heart of my
heart, I fear to touch thee, I avoid thy caresses, dreading that thou
wilt vanish as a dream at dawn; or that I shall find thee a phantom,
the spectre of one who died and was forgotten many thousand years ago,
in a far-off land on which the sun no longer shines.
THE MEMNONS OF THE NIGHT
Ringed with a bronze horizon, which, at a point immensely remote, seems
welded with the blue brilliance of a sky of steel, they oppose the
black splendour of their porphyritic forms to the sun’s insuperable
gaze. Reared in the morning twilight of primeval time, by a race whose
towering tombs and cities are one with the dust of their builders in
the slow lapse of the desert, they abide to face the terrible latter
dawns, that move abroad in a starkness of fire, consuming the veils of
night on the vast and Sphinx-like desolations. Level with the light,
their tenebrific brows preserve a pride as of Titan kings. In their
lidless implacable eyes of staring stone, is the petrified despair of
those who have gazed too long on the infinite.
Mute as the mountains from whose iron matrix they were hewn, their
mouths have never acknowledged the sovereignty of the suns, that
pass in triumphal flame from horizon unto horizon of the prostrate
land. Only at eve, when the west is like a brazen furnace, and the
far-off mountains smoulder like ruddy gold in the depth of the heated
heavens—only at eve, when the east grows infinite and vague, and the
shadows of the waste are one with the increasing shadow of night—then,
and then only, from the sullen throats of stone, a music rings to the
bronze horizon—a strong, a sombre music, strange and sonorous, like the
singing of black stars, or a litany of gods that invoke oblivion; a
music that thrills the desert to its heart of adamant, and trembles in
the granite of forgotten tombs, till the last echoes of its jubilation,
terrible as the trumpets of doom, are one with the black silence of
infinity.
THE GARDEN AND THE TOMB
I know a garden of flowers—flowers lovely and multiform as the orchids
of far, exotic worlds—as the flowers of manifold petal, whose colours
change as if by enchantment in the alter nation of the triple suns;
flowers like tiger lilies from the garden of Satan; like the paler
lilies of paradise, or the amaranths on whose perfect and immortal
beauty the seraphim so often ponder; flowers fierce and splendid like
the crimson or golden flowers of fire; flowers bright and cold as the
crystal flowers of snow; flowers whereof there is no likeness in any
world of any sun; which have no symbol in heaven or in hell.
Alas! in the heart of the garden is a tomb—a tomb so trellised and
embowered with vine and blossom, that the sunlight reveals the ghastly
gleam of its marble to no careless or incurious scrutiny. But in the
night, when all the flowers are still, and their perfumes are faint as
the breathing of children in slumber—then, and then only, the serpents
bred of corruption crawl from the tomb, and trail the fetor and
phosphorescence of their abiding-place from end to end of the garden.
IN COCAIGNE
It was a windless afternoon of April, beneath skies that were tender as
the smile of love, when we went forth, you and I, to seek the fabulous
and fortunate realm of Cocaigne. Past leafing oaks with foliage of
bronze and chrysolite, through zones of yellow and white and red and
purple flowers, like a landscape seen through a prism, we fared with
hopeful and tremulous hearts, forgetting all save the dream we had
cherished.*** At last we came to the lonely woods, the pines with their
depth of balmy, cool, compassionate shadow, which are sacred to the
genius of that land. There, for the first time I was bold to take your
hand in mine, and led you to a slope where the woodland lilies, with
petals of white and yellow ivory, gleamed among the fallen needles. As
in a dream, I found that my arms were about you, as in a dream I kissed
your yielding lips, and the ardent pallor of your cheeks and throat.
Motionless, you clung to me, and a flush arose beneath my kisses like a
delicate stain, and lingered softly. Your eyes deepened to my gaze like
the brown pools of the forest at evening, and far within them, as in
immensity itself, trembled and shone the steadfast stars of your love.
As a ship that has wandered beneath stormy suns and disastrous moons,
but comes at last to the arms of the shielding harbour, my head lay on
the gentle heaving of your delicious breast, and I knew that we had
found Cocaigne.
THE LITANY OF THE SEVEN KISSES
I
I kiss thy hands—thy hands, whose fingers are delicate and pale as the
petals of the white lotus.
II
I kiss thy hair, which has the lustre of black jewels, and is darker
than Lethe, flowing by midnight through the moonless slumber of
poppy-scented lands.
III
I kiss thy brow, which resembles the rising moon in a valley of cedars.
IV
I kiss thy cheeks, where lingers a faint flush, like the reflection of
a rose upheld to an urn of alabaster.
V
I kiss thine eyelids, and liken them to the purple-veinèd flowers that
close beneath the oppression of a tropic evening, in a land where the
sunsets are bright as the flames of burning amber.
VI
I kiss thy throat, whose ardent pallor is the pallor of marble warmed
by the autumn sun.
VII
I kiss thy mouth, which has the savour and perfume of fruits agleam
with spray from a magic fountain, in the secret Paradise that we alone
shall find; a Paradise whence they that come shall nevermore depart,
for the waters thereof are Lethe, and the fruit is the fruit of the
tree of Life.
FROM A LETTER
****Will you not join me in Atlantis, where we will go down through
streets of blue and yellow marble to the wharves of orichalch, and
choose us a galley with a golden Eros for figurehead, and sails
of Tyrian sendal? With mariners that knew Odysseus, and beautiful
amber-breasted slaves from the mountain-vales of Lemuria, we will
lift anchor for the unknown fortunate isles of the outer sea; and,
sailing in the wake of an opal sunset, will lose that ancient land in
the glaucous twilight, and see from our couch of ivory and satin the
rising of unknown stars and perished planets.*** Perhaps we will not
return, but will follow the tropic summer from isle to halcyon isle,
across the amaranthine seas of myth and fable: We will eat the lotos,
and the fruit of lands whereof Odysseus never dreamt; and drink the
pallid wines of faery, grown in a vale of perpetual moonlight. I will
find for you a necklace of rosy-tinted pearls, and a necklace of yellow
rubies, and crown you with precious corals that have the semblance of
sanguine-coloured blossoms. We will roam in the marts of forgotten
cities of jasper, and carnelian-builded ports beyond Cathay; and I will
buy you a gown of peacock azure damascened with copper and gold and
vermilion; and a gown of black samite with runes of orange, woven by
fantastic sorcery without the touch of hands, in a dim land of spells
and philtres.
FROM THE CRYPTS OF MEMORY
Aeons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvelous worlds have crumbled,
and whose mighty suns are less than shadow, I dwelt in a star whose
course, decadent from the high, irremeable heavens of the past, was
even then verging upon the abyss in which, said astronomers, its
immemorial cycle should find a dark and disastrous close.
Ah, strange was that gulf-forgotten star—how stranger than any dream
of dreamers in the spheres of to-day, or than any vision that hath
soared upon visionaries, in their retrospection of the sidereal past!
There, through cycles of a history whose piled and bronze-writ records
were hopeless of tabulation, the dead had come to outnumber infinitely
the living. And built of a stone that was indestructible save in the
furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of the living like the
prodigious metropli of Titans, with walls that overgloom the vicinal
villages. And over all was the black funereal vault of the cryptic
heavens—a dome of infinite shadows, where the dismal sun, suspended
like a sole, enormous lamp, failed to illumine, and drawing back its
fires from the face of the irresolvable ether, threw a baffled and
despairing beam on the vague remote horizons, and shrouded vistas
illimitable of the visionary land.
We were a sombre, secret, many-sorrowed people—we who dwelt beneath
that sky of eternal twilight, pierced by the towering tombs and
obelisks of the past. In our blood was the chill of the ancient night
of time; and our pulses flagged with a creeping prescience of the
lentor of Lethe. Over our courts and fields, like invisible sluggish
vampires born of mausoleums, rose and hovered the black hours, with
wings that distilled a malefic languor made from the shadowy woe
and despair of perished cycles. The very skies were fraught with
oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever
sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and
darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.
Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams—the dim and mystic dreams
that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women,
with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may
feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads. Our days were spent in
roaming through the ruins of lone and immemorial cities, whose palaces
of fretted copper, and streets that ran between lines of carven golden
obelisks, lay dim and ghastly with the dead light, or were drowned
forever in seas of stagnant shadow; cities whose vast and iron-builded
fanes preserved their gloom of primordial mystery and awe, from which
the simulacra of century-forgotten gods looked forth with unalterable
eyes to the hopeless heavens, and saw the ulterior night, the ultimate
oblivion. Languidly we kept our gardens, whose grey lilies concealed
a necromantic perfume, that had power to evoke for us the dead and
spectral dreams of the past. Or, wandering through ashen fields of
perennial autumn, we sought the rare and mystic immorteles, with sombre
leaves and pallid petals, that bloomed beneath willows of wan and
veil like foliage: or wept with a sweet and nepenthe-laden dew by the
flowing silence of Acherontic waters.
And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time.
We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the
yielding of twilight unto night.
A PHANTASY
I have dreamt of an unknown land—a land remote in ulterior time, and
alien space not ascertainable: the desert of a long-completed past,
upon which has settled the bleak, irrevocable silence of infinitude;
where all is ruined save the stone of tombs and cenotaphs; and where
the sole peoples are the kingless, uncounted tribes of the subterranean
dead.
Above this land of my dream, citied with tombs and cenotaphs, a red and
smouldering sun maintains a spectral day, in alternation with an ashen
moon through the black ether where the stars have long since perished.
And through the hush of the consummation of time, above the riven
monuments and crumbled records of alien history, flit in the final
twilight the mysterious wings of seraphim, sent to fulfill ineffable
errands, or confer with demons of the abyss; and black, gigantic
angels, newly returned from missions of destruction, pause amid the
sepulchers to sift from their gloomy and tremendous vans the pale ashes
of annihilated stars.
THE DEMON, THE ANGEL, AND BEAUTY
Of the Demon who standeth or walketh always with me at my left hand,
I asked: “Hast thou seen Beauty? Her that me-seemeth was the mistress
of my soul in Eternity? Her that is now beyond question set over me in
Time; even though I behold her not, and, it may be, have never beheld,
nor ever shall; her of whose aspect I am ignorant as noon is concerning
any star; her of whom as witness and testimony, I have found only the
hem of her shadow, or at most, her reflection in a dim and troubled
water. Answer, if thou canst, and tell me, is she like pearls, or like
stars? Does she resemble most the sunlight that is transparent and
unbroken, or the sunlight divided into splendour and iris? Is she the
heart of the day, or the soul of the night?”
To which the Demon answered, after, as I thought, a brief space of
meditation:
“Concerning this Beauty, I can tell thee but little beyond that which
thou knowest. Albeit, in those orbs to which the demons of my rank have
admission, there be greater adumbrations of some transcendent Mystery
than here, yet have I never seen that Mystery itself, and know not
if it be male or female. Aeons ago, when I was young and incautious,
when the world was new and bright, and there were more stars than
now, I, too was attracted by this Mystery, and sought after it in all
accessible spheres. But failing to find the thing itself, I soon grew
weary of embracing its shadows, and took to the pursuit of illusions
less insubstantial. Now I am become grey and ashen without, and red
like old fire within, who was fiery and flame-coloured all through,
back in the star-thronged aeons of which I speak: Heed me, for I am
as wise, and wary and ancient as the far-travelled and comet-scarred
sun; and I am become of the opinion that the thing Beauty itself does
not exist. Doubtless the semblance thereof is but a web of shadow and
delusion, woven by the crafty hand of God, that He may snare demons and
men therewith, for His mirth, and the laughter of His archangels.”
The Demon ceased, and took to watching me as usual—obliquely, and with
one eye—an eye that is more red than Aldebaran, and inscrutable as the
gulfs beyond the Hyades.
Then of the Angel, who walketh or standeth always with me at my right
hand, I asked, “Hast thou seen Beauty? Or hast thou heard any assured
rumour concerning Beauty?”
To which the Angel answered, after, as I thought, a moment of
hesitation:
“As to this Beauty, I can tell thee but little beyond that which thou
knowest. Albeit in all the heavens, this Mystery is a topic of the most
frequent and sublime speculation among the archangels, and a perennial
theme for the more inspired singers and harpists of the cherubim—yea,
despite all this, we are greatly ignorant as to its true nature, and
substance, and attributes. But sometimes there are mighty adumbrations
which cover even the superior seraphim from above their wing-tips, and
make unfamiliar twilight in heaven. And sometimes there is an echo
which fills the empyrean, and hushes the archangelic harps in the midst
of their praising of God. This is not often, and these visitations of
echo and shadow spread an awe over the assembled Thrones and Splendours
and Dominations, which at other times accompanies only the emanence or
appearance of God Himself. Thus are we assured as to the reality of
this Beauty. And because it remains a mystery to us, to whom naught
else is mysterious except God, we conjecture that it is the thing upon
which God meditateth, self-obscured and centred, and because of which
He hath held himself immanifest to us for so many aeons; that this is
the secret which God keepeth even from the seraphim.”
THE SHADOWS
There were many shadows in the palace of Augusthes. About the silver
throne that had blackened beneath the invisible passing of ages, they
fell from pillar and broken roof and fretted window in ever-shifting
multiformity. Seeming the black, fantastic spectres of doom and
desolation, they moved through the palace in a gradual, grave, and
imperceptible dance, whose music was the change and motion of suns and
moons. They were long and slender, like all other shadows before the
early light, and behind the declining sun; squat and intense beneath
the desert noontide, and faint with the withered moon; and in the
interlunar darkness, they were as myriad tongues hidden behind the shut
and silent lips of night.
One came daily to that place of shadows and desolation, and sate upon
the silver throne, watching the shadows that were of desolation. King
nor slave disputed him there, in the palace whose kings and whose
slaves were powerless alike in the intangible dungeon of centuries. The
tombs of unnumbered and forgotten monarchs were white upon the yellow
desert roundabout. Some had partly rotted away, and showed like the
sunken eye-sockets of a skull—blank and lidless beneath the staring
heavens; others still retained the undesecrated seal of death, and were
as the closed eyes of one lately dead. But he who watched the shadows
from the silver throne, heeded not these, nor the fleet wind that dipt
to the broken tombs, and emerged shrilly, its unseen hands dark with
the dust of kings.
He was a philosopher, from what land there was none to know or ask.
Nor was there any to ask what knowledge or delight he sought in the
ruined palace, with eyes alway upon the moving shadows; nor what were
the thoughts that moved through his mind in ghostly unison with them.
His eyes were old and sad with meditation and wisdom; and his beard was
long and white upon his long white robe.
For many days he came with the dawn and departed with sunset; and his
shadow leaned from the shadow of the throne and moved with the others.
But one eve he departed not; and thereafter his shadow was one with the
shadow of the silver throne. Death found and left him there, where he
dwindled into dust that was as the dust of slaves or kings.
But the ebb and refluence of shadows went on, in the days that were
before the end; ere the aged world, astray with the sun in strange
heavens, should be lost in the cosmic darkness, or, under the influence
of other and conflicting gravitations, should crumble apart and bare
its granite bones to the light of strange suns, and the granite, too,
should dissolve, and be as of the dust of slaves and kings. Noon was
encircled with darkness, and the depths of palace-dusk were chasmed
with sunlight. Change there was none, other than this, for the earth
was dead, and stirred not to the tottering feet of time. And in the
expectant silence before the twilight of the sun, the moving shadows
seemed but a mockery of change; a meaningless antic phantasmagoria of
things that were; an afterfiguring of forgotten time.
And now the sun was darkened slowly in mid-heaven, as by some vast
and invisible bulk. And twilight hushed the shadows in the palace of
Augusthes, as the world itself swung down toward the long and single
shadow of irretrievable oblivion.
[Illustration]
500 copies of Ebony and Crystal have been printed.
This is No. 283
[Illustration: Signature of Clark Ashton Smith]
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. All other
spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
This book was prepared from the author’s own copy which contained a
number of corrections in the author’s hand. These have been implemented
and the changes are (the original word is in brackets after):
TO OMAR KHAYYAM
The cypresses like robes funereal (funeral) wear,
THE MINISTERS OF LAW
And thee shall alien (aliend) Dominations rend.****
REMEMBERED LIGHT
Till the twilight shivered with (the deleted) outcry of eldritch
(eldrich) voices
THE HASHISH-EATER;
Whose lightless length would mete (meet) the gyre of moons—
Beyond the world, upon (beyond) that fleeing wind,
SATAN UNREPENTANT
Lost from those (lost deleted) archangelic thrones that star,
In wasted worlds, were purer (pure) melody.
And in (in added) new deeps Apocalyptic suns
ALEXANDRINES
Knowing the vacillant leaves that tremble, flame, (no comma) and fall,
IN COCAIGNE
shone (shown) the steadfast stars of your love. As a ship that has
wandered
THE LITANY OF THE SEVEN KISSES
I kiss thine eyelids, and liken them to the purple-veinèd (veined)
flowers
A PHANTASY
mysterious wings of seraphim, sent to fulfill (fill) ineffable errands,
THE SHADOWS
There were many shadows in the palace of Augusthes (Agusthes). About