The Last Hieroglyph (59 page)

A young goatherd of Zothique, leading his charges in a wild, mountainous region, who enters an unexplored cave giving on a strange underworld of beautiful, sinister trees laden with strange fruits. This region is an outlying part of the subterrene realms of Thasaidon, and the boy Xeethra is frightened back to the entrance by a glimpse of fearful demoniac entities and monsters that roam through the frightful groves. He steals, however, certain of the fruits, and devours one of them. Afterwards, a madness comes over him, and he imagines that he is no longer Xeethra, but the prince of a great land beyond the mountains. He goes forth to regain his empire, and finds only a desert tract with ruinous cities where outcasts and lepers mock him in his madness. In his despair an emissary of Thasaidon comes to him, and reveals the truth, that the eating of the fruit has awakened in him the memory of a long-past life when he was indeed the ruler of this vanished empire. In return for his sworn fealty to the god of Evil, Xeethra is promised a necromantic revival of all the grandeur of his former incarnation which he shall retain
as long as he decrees it
. He accepts the bond; and, reliving his past life, he forgets the existence as Xeethra and the compact with Thasaidon; and, finding again the ennui and emptiness of power, he wishes himself a simple goat-herd. Thereupon the whole vision vanishes, and he is again the boy Xeethra, lost among lepers and pariahs in a ruined city, and remembers confusedly a strange dream, unable to forget the dream, regretting its lost splendour; a creature half-mad thenceforward, and wholly accursed.
¹

The reader who is familiar with Smith’s life cannot help but wonder if Smith was recalling the acclaim he experienced as a youth when the San Francisco newspapers hailed him as the Boy Keats of the Sierras only to see his work fall out of critical favor. Smith was not one to wallow in self pity, but he certainly displayed a rather biting sense of ironic detachment that would have made Ambrose Bierce proud.

Smith fleshed out the above synopsis with additional details:

The emissary appears before him like a pillar of shadow growing up from the earth into gigantic semi-human form. At the very end this being comes to him again, and Xeethra cries out, saying
take my soul in fulfillment of the bond
. But the emissary tells him mockingly that his soul is already part of the empery of Thasaidon.
²

These entries in the
Black Book
appear several entries ahead of the one for “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” which was completed on May 1, 1932. Smith first mentions the story in correspondence at the end of August 1933, when he mentions that “With the completion of two more tales, ‘Xeethra,’ and ‘The Madness of Chronomage,’ I will have a series totalling about 60,000 words, all dealing with the future continent of Zothique.”
³
He also used an excerpt from the “Song of Xeethra” as a heading to “The Dark Eidolon,” which was completed near the end of 1932.

Smith submitted “Xeethra” to
Weird Tales
, but it “was bowed politely from the palace of Pharnaces [
Farnsworth Wright
]” on the grounds that “it was more of a prose poem than a story,” the same complaint that he had made about “The Death of Malygris” and “The Coming of the White Worm.” These continued rejections did nothing to boost Smith’s confidence in his work: “I’m afraid Wright is more than right in thinking that the casual reader is purblind and even hostile toward literature of a poetic cast. And poetry itself, in this country… has fallen into the hands of a lot of literary gangsters.”
⁴

Faced with the mounting costs of caring for his ailing parents, combined with the loss of incomes from his mother’s magazine sales,
⁵
selling his stories became more important to Smith than any aesthetic aspirations he may have harbored earlier. As he described it, Smith “did a little topiary work on the verbiage, cutting it down from 8000 to 6800 words, and bringing out some of the ‘points’ a little more explicitly.”
⁶
Wright accepted this version, paying sixty-eight dollars.
⁷
“Xeethra” was published in the December 1934 issue of
Weird Tales
, and was collected in
LW
and
RA.

There are obvious similarities between “Xeethra” and H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Quest of Iranon” (first published in the July/August 1935 issue of
The Galleon
). Smith read the story in manuscript in July 1930.
⁸
The chief difference between the stories is that Iranon’s quest was a fool’s folly, and Xeethra found his kingdom and lost it again because of a tragic flaw.

The text of “Xeethra” was first restored by Steve Behrends as part of the
Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith
series published by Marc A. Michaud’s Necronomicon Press. Like Mr. Behrends, we compared the top copy of the typescript of the first version, which Barlow bound together with several other Smith typescripts and donated to the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, with the carbon of the published version among Smith’s papers at JHL. We have restored more of the text from the first version that seemed to us to be richer than that of published version.

1.
BB
item 34.

2.
BB
item 34a.

3. CAS, letter to AWD, August 29, 1933.

4. CAS, letter to AWD, April 4, 1934.

5. Mrs. Smith sold magazine subscriptions door-to-door to help support the family. See Violet Heyer, “Letter.” In
One Hundred Years of Klarkash-Ton
, Ed. Ronald Hilger (Averon Press, 1996): pp. 20–22.

6. CAS, letter to AWD, June 28, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

7.
WT
, letter to CAS, October 25, 1935 (ms, JHL).

8. See HPL, letter to CAS, July 18, 1930.

The Last Hieroglyph

C
lark Ashton Smith first mentioned “The Last Hieroglyph” in a letter to August Derleth in March 1934:

I have conceived a whale of a weird notion for a story to be called either The Last Hieroglyph or, In the Book of Agoma. It concerns a strange volume of hieroglyphic writings that belonged to a mysterious archimage. When he wished, he could bring one or more of the hieroglyphs to life in the forms that they represented, and could send them forth to do his bidding. In the story, a certain minor wizard enters the tower in which the book is kept—and is turned into a hieroglyph on the half-finished open page of the great volume.
¹

The first version of this story was completed on April 7, 1934. Farnsworth Wright rejected it “with the usual comment that he had enjoyed it and admired it personally. But he feared the c.r. [
casual reader
] would find it rather meaningless. He must have a bright lot of readers, if that is true.” Smith’s growing frustration showed itself when he added “Well, if I ever become any crazier than I am and have been, Wright’s criticism and rejections will certainly be one of the contributing causes.”
²

Smith revised the story, changing the title to “In the Book of Vergama,” and resubmitted it. Wright rejected it a second time, explaining that “Beautiful though many of its passages are, yet there is so little plot, and the motivation seems so inadequate, that I am afraid it would disappoint many of our readers who expect almost perfection itself from you.”
³
Looking over the twice-rejected manuscript, CAS allowed that “It is possible that the tale is a little overwrought; and I may, eventually, cut out the portions about the merman and the salamander”
⁴
and solicited the opinions of Lovecraft and Robert Barlow. However, after completing a third revision, he informed Barlow that “You & Theobaldus [
nickname for HPL
] will be glad to know that I am not curtailing the Vergama story. On the contrary, I have done a longer version, detailing efforts of Nushain to sidestep his guides and evade the destiny that will turn him into a cipher. The guides, ironically, twit him with a lack of faith in his own horoscopic vaticinations! Vergama also waxes sardonic.”
⁵
The third time
did
prove the charm, as Smith wrote to Derleth “Wright took my revision of ‘The Last Hieroglyph.’ I added about 2000 words to the tale and, I think, improved it considerably.”
⁶

Smith’s correspondents were pleased with the results of all his efforts. Robert E. Howard mentioned that he “very much enjoyed” the story.
⁷
E. Hoffmann Price told him that it:

has a strange charm… a certain humanity—I mean, the character and his two attendants have an appealing realness which gives force to the picture. The bungling, guessing astrologer, sometimes charlatan, sometimes (and perhaps coincidentally) giving a good prediction; he’s in a way a symbol of all endeavour. And his doom seems rather a fulfillment, not a punishment. For all its outré adornments, the story has a homely, human touch which persistently hold its own.
⁸

CAS wrote to Barlow that the story would “form the concluding item of my Zothique series, if this series should ever appear between book-covers.”
⁹

Wright included “The Last Hieroglyph” in the April 1935 issue of
Weird Tales
. Smith received sixty dollars.
¹⁰
It was included in
OST
and
RA.
A carbon copy of the published version from Smith’s papers at JHL was used to establish the current text.

One of the first anthologies to mine the rich resources of such pulps as
Weird Tales, Unknown Worlds
and
Astounding Stories
was
The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination
, edited by Phil Stong (1899–1957), a journalist and novelist who is best known for writing
State Fair
, the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the same name. Stong did not include a story by Smith, but the anthology does contain the following mention of “The Last Hieroglyph”: “Clark Ashton Smith is another fantasy writer, a very popular one, who frequently has excellent and original ideas and then casts them into a precious style that does not fit them. Only, his idol is not Poe but Lord Dunsany. Smith’s story of the magician [sic] who becomes an item of a cosmic manuscript is excellent, but there are too many Byzantine words.”
¹¹
It was undoubtedly Smith’s encounters with sentiments such as these that inspired him when he composed two aphorisms that he published in his poetry collection
Spells and Philtres.
The first states that “The modern intolerance toward what is called ‘painted speech,’ toward ‘the grand manner,’ springs too often from the instinctive resentment inspired in vulgar minds by all that savors of loftiness, exaltation, nobility, sublimity and aristocracy.” The second expresses the realization that “It is a ghastly but tenable proposition that the world is now ruled by the insane, whose increasing plurality will, in a few generations, make probable the incarceration of all sane people born among them.”
¹²

1. CAS, letter to AWD, March 18, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, April 17, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

3. FW, letter to CAS, April 25, 1934 (ms, JHL).

4. CAS, letter to RHB, April 30, 1934 (ms, JHL).

5. CAS, letter to RHB, May 18, 1934 (ms, JHL).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, June 4, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

7. Robert E, Howard, letter to CAS, July 23, 1935 (
Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard
1933–1936
, Ed. Rob Roehm [Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2008]: p. 366).

8. E. Hoffmann Price, letter to CAS, September 13, 1942 (ms, JHL).

9. CAS, letter to RHB, May 21, 1934 (
SL
255).

10.
WT
, letter to CAS, March 31, 1936 (ms, JHL).

11. Phil Stong, “Note to Part III,” in
The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination
(New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1941), pp. 330–331.

12. CAS, “Epigrams and Apothegms.”
Spells and Philtres
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1958): pp. 53, 54.

Necromancy in Naat

A
s discussed in the preceding note, “The Last Hieroglyph” was intended to be the final story of Zothique. However, Smith’s “benign, maleficent daemon” still had tales to tell of the last continent, and the first version of “Necromancy in Naat” was completed on February 6, 1935. Little survives concerning its composition or genesis. CAS told Donald Wandrei that he had “turned out several weirds, including ‘The Treader of the Dust,’ ‘Necromancy in Naat’ and ‘The Black Abbot of Puthuum.’… The last quarter of Necromancy in Naat, however, will have to be rewritten according to the specifications of the satrap (Damn!!....******)”
¹
Wright’s letter of rejection apparently has not survived, so the exact nature of his objections are not known, but in a letter dated February 11, 1935 he acknowledges the receipt of a “new last page” for the story “and will get at the reading of that tale within a day or two.”
²
Since this occurs
before
Smith’s letter telling of its rejection, we can only speculate that either the last page somehow was lost or Smith decided to change the last page and sent it along. CAS spent the period between March 4 and March 25 rewriting the story, according to his notations on the typescript of the original version, and wrote to H. P. Lovecraft that “Naat” was one of several stories recently accepted by Wright.
³
“Necromancy in Naat” appeared in the July 1933 issue of
Weird Tales
, where it was accompanied by another Virgil Finlay illustration, where it tied with Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails” as the most popular story in the issue.
⁴
Smith was paid seventy-three dollars for the story.
⁵
Smith included “Necromancy in Naat” in
LW
, and it was later included in
RA.