by Clark Ashton Smith
_III. The Muse of Hyperborea_
Too far away is her wan and mortal face, and too remote are the snows
of her lethal breast, for mine eyes to behold them ever. But at whiles
her whisper comes to me, like a chill unearthly wind that is faint from
traversing the gulfs between the worlds, and has flown over ultimate
horizons of ice-bound deserts. And she speaks to me in a tongue I have
never heard but have always known; and she tells of deathly things and
of things beautiful beyond the ecstatic desires of love. Her speech is
not of good or evil, nor of anything that is desired or conceived or
believed by the termites of earth; and the air she breathes, and the
lands wherein she roams, would blast like the utter cold of sidereal
space; and her eyes would blind the vision of men like suns; and her
kiss, if one should ever attain it, would wither and slay like the kiss
of lightning.
But, hearing her far, infrequent whisper, I behold a vision of vast
auroras, on continents that are wider than the world, and seas too
great for the enterprise of human keels. And at times I stammer forth
the strange tidings that she brings: though none will welcome them,
and none will believe or listen. And in some dawn of the desperate
years, I shall go forth and follow where she calls, to seek the high
and beautific doom of her snow-pale distances, to perish amid her
indesecrate horizons.
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