The Maze of the Enchanter (58 page)

Shortly after writing the above, Smith decided that the ending could be improved in the following manner:

The teller of the tale presses so close to the strange vessel, in irresistible attraction, that he is drawn into some sort of trans-dimensional vortex created by its departure, and seems to fall into the sky, losing consciousness. He comes to himself with the sensations of a person recovering from terrible frost-bite, and finds that he is being immersed in a river of rosy flame, flowing through a strange city of semi-crystalline buildings, by people such as he had seen in the vessel. He is in a new world, and his equilibrium, when he is taken out of the river, is so thoroughly upset that he seems to see everything upside-down. In spite of the ministrations of his hosts, he becomes violently ill, and again loses consciousness, to find on recovering that he has returned to the neighborhood of the cairn.
²

The reader may notice that this is not dissimilar to the reaction of Lemuel Sarkis in “A Star-Change.”

Smith completed “The Secret of the Cairn” on Halloween 1932, just over a month from the completion of “Genius Loci.” He had not been idle during this period, using the time to revise two previously rejected science fiction stories, “The Invisible City” and “The Letter to Mohaun Los.”
³
Neither of these was a favorite of his, so just as “The Empire of the Necromancers” followed “The Immortals of Mercury” and the first version of “The Invisible City,” so perhaps did this tale represent a literary “cleansing of the palate,” an expression of something much closer to what Smith wanted to write, as opposed to what he had to write if he wanted to expand his markets beyond
Weird Tales
. He frequently referred to the story in letters as being “first rate.”
⁴

The story was first submitted to Harry Bates and
Astounding Stories
, but it was returned when the magazine folded as part of the collapse of the Clayton magazine chain.
⁵
It next went, by default, to Gernsback and Lasser, who published it in
Wonder Stories
for April 1933. It was collected (as “The Light from Beyond”) in
Lost Worlds.
The current text is based upon the carbon of the typescript submitted to WS.

Like “The City of the Singing Flame,” “The Secret of the Cairn” is essentially a weird tale describing an unexplained phenomenon, and with its allusions to the Grail is highly reminiscent of Arthur Machen’s “The Great Return.” The description of the unusual “tread-mill property in space”
⁶
may have been inspired by Smith’s reading of the works of Charles Fort around this time, while the descriptions of the magnificent vistas of his native Sierra Nevada mountains adds immensely to the sublimity of his descriptions.

1.
SS
168-169.

2.
SS
170.

3. CAS, letter to AWD, February 10, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

4. CAS, letters to AWD, February 10, 1932 and April 16, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, November 15, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

6. CAS, letter to HPL,
c.
early August 1931 (SL 159-160).

The Charnel God

T
his is the third story that Smith set in Zothique. The plot germ for “The Charnel God” appears in the
Black Book
under the same title:

The city of Zoul-Bha-Sair in Zothique, where the terrible eater of the dead, the great ghoul Mordiggial, is worshipped as a god in a fane of purple-black marble, and is served by a necrophagous priesthood, who wear masks to hide the fact that they are only half-human. All those who die in Zoul-Bha-Sair, even outlanders, are claimed by the priests of Mordiggial.
¹

He finished writing the story on November 15, 1932, and Wright snatched it up “promptly and without cavil. This gives him a round dozen of my tales—and I wish to God he’d hurry up with the printing.”
²
Wright also commissioned Smith to draw an illustration for the story. At one point it looked as if Wright might give it the prestigious cover spot (which elicited from Smith the wish that “he’d let me do a cover for W.T. some time. I work better in colour than in black-and-white”
³
), but it finally lost out to Hugh B. Cave for “The Black Gargoyle.”

One appreciative reader of the story was Robert E. Howard, who wrote to Smith that “I was glad to see your illustration of your really magnificent ‘Charnel God’. That story is really a tremendously powerful thing, sinister figures moving mysteriously against a black background of subtle horror. I don’t know when I’ve read anything I admired more.”
⁴
Lovecraft wrote to the young Robert Bloch that the tale had “some exceedingly powerful moments,” and offered the following criticism of CAS’ drawing: “curiously impressive despite a certain stiffness in the human figure. The cyclopean columned hall, & the two nameless corpse-bearers, form a rather unforgettable combination.”
⁵

“The Charnel God” was collected in
GL
and in
RA.
The text is based upon the carbon copy that Smith kept, which is now among his papers at Brown University.

1.
BB
item 7.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

3. CAS, letter to AWD, November 17, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

4. Robert E. Howard, letter to CAS,
c.
March 1934 (
Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard,
ed. Rob Roehm, vol. 3 [Robert E. Howard Foundation, 2008], p. 197.)

5. HPL, letter to Robert Bloch, c. late March 1934 (
H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Robert Bloch Supplement,
ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi [West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1993], p.8).

The Dark Eidolon

O
f all the stories in this book that required restoration, the editors most regret not being able to accomplish this with “The Dark Eidolon,” which is widely regarded as one of, if not the, best stories written by Clark Ashton Smith. As he wrote in the
Black Book,
the story would concern

A sorcerer of Zothique, who traps a hated tyrant and imprisons the king’s soul in a black statue of the evil god Tisaina. From this statue, the king is forced to look on while the sorcerer, himself animating the king’s body, tortures the latter’s beloved sister. The frantic king, offering himself to Tisiana for the privilege of intervention, finds the statue [has] become a living body, and smites down his own body that is torturing the girl. Tisiana, with a dark irony, takes the soul of the wizard, and puts the king’s soul in the wizard’s body, which lies in another apartment. The king, going to the room where his sister is imprisoned, finds the girl has gone stark mad beside his own corpse. She shrieks from him; and looking in a mirror beyond her, he sees for the first time his reflection—the features of the sorcerer. He assails the mirror with a sword while the screaming girl looks on, and the black statue seems to sneer with sardonic humor.
¹

As the story developed, Tisaina became Thaisadon, the sister became the emperor’s leman, and a motivation was provided for the sorcerer, who as a beggar boy was accidentally trampled and crippled by the young prince who would succeed to the throne.

CAS announced its completion to August Derleth:

I have finished The Dark Eidolon, which ran upwards of 10,000 words, and have shipped it to Wright. It’s a devil of a story, and if Wright knows his mandrakes, he certainly ought to take it on. If the thing could ever be filmed—and no doubt it could with a lot of trick photography—it might be a winner for diabolic drama and splendid infernal spectacles.
²
There is one scene where a wizard calls up macrocosmic monsters in the form of stallions that trample houses and cities under their hooves like eggshells. The tale ends with the wizard gone stark mad and fighting his own image in a diamond mirror under the delusion that the image was the enemy on whom he had sought to inflict all manner of hellish revenges. A girl, on whose bosom he has trodden in the borrowed body of her own lover united to the legs of a demon horse with white hot-hooves, laughs at him amid her dying agonies, and over all, there is the stormy thunder of the cosmic stallions returning, no longer checked by the wizard’s spells, to trample down his own mansion.
³

Unfortunately, Wright apparently knew not the mandrakes, since he “has just sent back my new thriller, The Dark Eidolon, complaining that the latter part of the story (about one-third) is too long drawn out. I am somewhat at loss to know whether he refers to the incidents themselves or their treatment. I suppose something will have to be done with the yarn, which contains, as Wright admits, some of my best imaginative writing.”
⁴

It’s unclear exactly how much Smith cut from “The Dark Eidolon,” since as it was published it is over ten thousand words long. Wright accepted the revised story upon resubmission for one hundred dollars, which “looks like a lot of money these days.” The cuts “involved no sacrifice of incident, and really served to get rid of a few redundancies and leave more to the imagination.”
⁵

Weird Tales
published “The Dark Eidolon” in the January 1935 issue, along with an illustration that Smith did that earned him an extra seven dollars. It was warmly received by both the readers (sharing a four-way tie for first place with Robert Bloch’s “The Feast in the Abbey,” Seabury Quinn’s “Hands of the Dead,” and Laurence J. Cahill’s “Charon”) and by CAS’s fellow writers. Lovecraft wrote that “‘The Dark Eidolon’ is gaining a clamorous & unanimous panegyric among all my correspondents—& it certainly deserves it. ’dopol, what a yarn! It comes close to the best W T has ever printed.”
⁶
“The Dark Eidolon” was included in
OST
and
RA.
The present text is based upon the carbon typescript kept by Smith and now deposited at Brown University.

1. BB item 10.

2. See note to “The Colossus of Ylourgne,”
VA
329-330.

3. CAS, letter to AWD, December 23, 1932 (
SL
198).

4. CAS, letter to AWD, January 4, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, January 16, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

6. HPL, letter to CAS, January 23-24, 1935 to
c.
Feb. 1935 (AHT). At the same time Lovecraft wrote of the January 1935
Weird Tales
“C A S is the whole thing. What a magnificent opiate ‘The Dark Eidolon’ is!” (Letter to AWD, January 28, 1932 [
Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937,
ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008), p. 677]).

The Voyage of King Euvoran

S
mith announced the composition of “The Voyage of King Euvoran” in a letter to Derleth written in mid-January 1933, describing it as “humorous and grotesque rather than terrific.”
¹
He submitted it to Farnsworth Wright with the suggestion that it might be suitable both for
Weird Tales
and its sister publication
The Magic Carpet,
but Wright rejected it, “saying he had enjoyed it greatly himself, but feared that it would not have enough plot and suspense for many of his readers. I agree, in a way—it’s hardly a magazine story, but is more like a narrative poem in prose. If I print a pamphlet, I may include it for variety.”
²
When Smith printed
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies,
“The Voyage of King Euvoran” was the lead story.

About a decade later, Smith looked to capitalize on the success of his first Arkham House collection
Out of Space and Time
by submitting old stories that had not seen professional publication to a new generation of editors, such as Dorothy McIlwraith at
Weird Tales
and Mary Gnaedinger at
Famous Fantastic Mysteries.
He cut out a third of “King Euvoran,” reducing it from nine thousand to six thousand words, and changed the title to “Quest of the Gazolba.”
³
McIlwraith accepted it, and not only published it in the September 1947 issue of
Weird Tales,
but had Boris Dolgov prepare a wonderful cover illustration that captures precisely the flavor of the story. When Smith decided to include the tale in his fourth Arkham House collection,
The Abominations of Yondo,
in 1960, he not only restored the original title but also used the 1933 text. No typescript or manuscript exists of this version, so we consulted a copy of
The Double Shadow
that bears Smith’s handwritten corrections.                 

A reader who has read the stories in this series in sequence will undoubtedly notice that the overall tone of this tale of Zothique, the fifth in that series, is more akin to that of a “Hyperborean Grotesque,” to borrow the appellation Smith gave that series in
Out of Space and Time.
It seems that Smith originally conceived of “King Euvoran” as an entry in the earlier series, since it appears on a proposed table of contents for a hypothetical
Book of Hyperborea
book project described in the
Black Book.
⁴

1. CAS, letter to AWD, January 16, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 9, 1933 (
SL
201).

3. CAS, letter to AWD, July 9, 1946 (ms, SHSW).

4.
BB
item 8.