The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (33 page)

Or juice of wounded upas. And I see,

In gardens of a crimson-litten world

The sacred flow’r with lips of purple flesh,

And silver-lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes

Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests

At moonless eve in terror seek to slay,

With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood

That hide a hueless poison. And I read,

Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,

The annuling word a spiteful demon wrote

With gall of slain chimeras; and I know

What pentacles the lunar wizards use,

That once allured the gulf-returning roc,

With ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause

Midmost an alabaster mount; and there,

With boulder-weighted webs of dragons’-gut,

Uplift by cranes a captive giant built,

They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird,

And plucked, from off his sabre-taloned feet,

Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood,

With amethysts from Mars. I lean to read,

With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,

The monstrous archives of a war that ran

Through wasted aeons, and the prophecy

Of wars renewed, that shall commemorate

Some enmity of wivern-headed kings,

Even to the brink of time. I know the blooms

Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury,

That bloat within the craters of the moon,

And in one still, selenic hour have shrunk

To pools of slime and fetor; and I know

What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown,

Are proffered in Uranus to their gods

By mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed

Of some black fruit a king in Saturn ate,

Which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor,

Took root between the burnished flags, and now

Hath mounted, and become a hellish tree,

Whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths,

Net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne,

And strain at starting pillars. I behold

The slowly-thronging corals, that usurp

Some harbour of a million-masted sea,

And sun them on the league-long wharves of gold—

Bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed

And kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns

The octiremes of perished emperors,

And galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed

From a sea-deserted haven.

Swifter grow

The visions: Now a mighty city looms,

Hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar,

To domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged

With tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned

In shifting erubescence. But whose hands

Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought

To semblance of prodigious blooms of old,

No eremite hath lingered there to say,

And no man comes to learn: For long ago

A prophet came, warning its timid king

Against the plague of lichens that had crept

Across subverted empires, and the sand

Of wastes that Cyclopean mountains ward;

Which, slow and ineluctable, would come,

To take his fiery bastions and his fanes,

And quench his domes with greenish tetter. Now

I see a host of naked giants, armed

With horns of behemoth and unicorn,

Who wander, blinded by the clinging spells

Of hostile wizardry, and stagger on

To forests where the very leaves have eyes,

And ebonies, like wrathful dragons roar

To teaks a-chuckle in the loathly gloom;

Where coiled lianas lean, with serried fangs,

From writhing palms with swollen boles that moan;

Where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked

The eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled

To bask upon his azure-spotted spine;

Where hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing,

Or yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew,

Whose touch is death and slow corrosion. Then,

I watch a war of pygmies, met by night,

With pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide,

On plains with no horizon, where a god

Might lose his way for centuries; and there,

In wreathèd light, and fulgors all convolved,

A rout of green, enormous moons ascend,

With rays that like a shivering venom run

On inch-long swords of lizard-fang.

Surveyed

From this my throne, as from a central sun,

The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass;

Forgotten splendours, dream by dream unfold,

Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns,

Or suns of changeful iridescence, bring

Their rays about me, like the coloured lights

Imploring priests might lift to glorify

The face of some averted god; the songs

Of mystic poets in a purple world,

Ascend to me in music that is made

From unconceivèd perfumes, and the pulse

Of love ineffable; the lute-players

Whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon,

Call forth delicious languors, never known

Save to their golden kings; the sorcerers

Of hooded stars inscrutable to God,

Surrender me their demon-wrested scrolls,

Inscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies

And awful transformations.

If I will,

I am at once the vision and the seer,

And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps,

And still abide their suzerain: I am

The neophyte who serves a nameless god,

Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos

Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear,

Or flags to pave the threshold; or I am

The god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds

Into the nave where suns might congregate,

And veils the darkling mountain of his face

With fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests

Amass their monthly hecatomb of gems—

Opals that are a camel-cumbering load,

And monstrous alabraundines, won from war

With realms of hostile serpents; which arise,

Combustible, in vapours many-hued,

And myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I,

The king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand

The helm of some great barge of chrysolite,

Sailing upon an amethystine sea

To isles of timeless summer: For the snows

Of hyperborean winter, and their winds,

Sleep in his jewel-builded capital,

Nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry,

Nor conjured suns may rout them; so he flees,

With captive kings to urge his serried oars,

Hopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn

Hath never left the faintly sighing lote

And fields of lisping moly. Or I fare

Impanoplied with azure diamond,

As hero of a quest Achernar lights,

To deserts filled with ever-wandering flames,

That feed upon the sullen marl, and soar

To wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap

With tongues intolerably lengthening,

That lick the blenchèd heavens. But there lives

(Secure as in a garden walled from wind)

A lonely flower by a placid well,

Midmost the flaring tumult of the flames,

That roar as roars a storm-possessèd sea,

Impacable forever: And within

That simple grail the blossom lifts, there lies

One drop of an incomparable dew,

Which heals the parchèd weariness of kings,

And cures the wound of wisdom. I am page

To an emperor who reigns ten thousand years,

And through his labyrinthine palace-rooms,

Through courts and colonnades and balconies

Wherein immensity itself is mazed,

I seek the golden gorget he hath lost,

On which the names of his conniving stars

Are writ in little sapphires; and I roam

For centuries, and hear the brazen clocks

Innumerably clang with such a sound

As brazen hammers make, by devils dinned

On tombs of all the dead; and nevermore

I find the gorget, but at length I find

A sealèd room whose nameless prisoner

Moans with a nameless torture, and would turn

To hell’s red rack as to a lilied couch

From that whereon they stretched him; and I find,

Prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor,

The loveliest of all beloved slaves

My emperor hath, and from her pulseless side

A serpent rises, whiter than the root

Of some venefic bloom in darkness grown,

And gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem

Like drops of cold, congealing poison.

Hark!

What word was whispered in a tongue unknown,

In crypts of some impenetrable world?

Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy

I cannot share, though I am king of suns

And king therewith of strong eternity,

Whose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard

My gates, and slay the intruder? Silence loads

The wind of ether, and the worlds are still

To hear the word that flees me. All my dreams

Fall like a rack of fuming vapours raised

To semblance by a necromant, and leave

Spirit and sense unthinkably alone,

Above a universe of shrouded stars,

And suns that wander, cowled with sullen gloom,

Like witches to a Sabbath.

Fear is born

In crypts below the nadir, and hath crawled

Reaching the floor of space and waits for wings

To lift it upward, like a hellish worm

Fain for the flesh of seraphs. Eyes that gleam,

But are not eyes of suns or galaxies,

Gather and throng to the base of darkness; flame

Behind some black, abysmal curtain burns,

Implacable, and fanned to whitest wrath

By raisèd wings that flail the whiffled gloom,

And make a brief and broken wind that moans,

As one who rides a throbbing rack. There is

A Thing that crouches, worlds and years remote,

Whose horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth

A note to shatter the donjon-keeps of time,

And crack the sphere of crystal.

All is dark

For ages, and my tolling heart suspends

Its clamour, as within the clutch of death,

Tightening with tense, hermetic rigours. Then,

In one enormous, million-flashing flame,

The stars unveil, the suns remove their cowls,

And beam to their responding planets; time

Is mine once more, and armies of its dreams

Rally to that insuperable throne,

Firmed on the central zenith.

Now I seek

The meads of shining moly I had found

In some remoter vision, by a stream

No cloud hath ever tarnished; where the sun,

A gold Narcissus, loiters evermore

Above his golden image: But I find

A corpse the ebbing water will not keep,

With eyes like sapphires that have lain in hell,

And felt the hissing embers; and the flow’rs

About me turn to hooded serpents, swayed

By flutes of devils in a hellish dance

Meet for the nod of Satan, when he reigns

Above the raging Sabbath, and is wooed

By sarabands of witches. But I turn

To mountains guarding with their horns of snow

The source of that befoulèd rill, and seek

A pinnacle where none but eagles climb,

And they with failing pennons. But in vain

I flee, for on that pylon of the sky,

Some curse hath turned the unprinted snow to flame—

Red fires that curl and cluster to my tread,

Trying the summit’s narrow cirque. And now,

I see a silver python far beneath—

Vast as a river that a fiend hath witched,

And forced to flow remèant in its course

To fountains whence it issued. Rapidly

It winds from slope to crumbling slope, and fills

Ravines and chasmal gorges, till the crags

Totter with coil on coil incumbent. Soon

It hath entwined the pinnacle I keep,

And gapes with a fanged, unfathomable maw,

Wherein great Typhon, and Enceladus,

Were orts of daily glut. But I am gone,

For at my call a hippogriff hath come,

And firm between his thunder-beating wings,

I mount the sheer cerulean walls of noon,

And see the earth, a spurnèd pebble, fall

Lost in the fields of nether stars—and seek

A planet where the outwearied wings of time

Might pause and furl for respite, or the plumes

Of death be stayed, and loiter in reprieve

Above some deathless lily: For therein,

Beauty hath found an avatar of flow’rs—

Blossoms that clothe it as a coloured flame,

From peak to peak, from pole to sullen pole,

And turn the skies to perfume. There I find

A lonely castle, calm and unbeset,

Save by the purple spears of amaranth,

And tender-sworded iris. Walls upbuilt

Of flushèd marble, wonderful with rose,

And domes like golden bubbles, and minarets

That take the clouds as coronal—these are mine,

For voiceless looms the peaceful barbican,

And the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft

As if to smile a welcome. So I leave

My hippogriff to crop the magic meads,

And pass into a court the lilies hold,

And tread them to a fragrance that pursues

To win the portico, whose columns, carved

Of lazuli and amber, mock the palms

Of bright, Aidennic forests—capitalled

With fronds of stone fretted to airy lace,

Enfolding drupes that seem as tawny clusters

Of breasts of unknown houris; and convolved

With vines of shut and shadowy-leavèd flow’rs,

Like the dropt lids of women that endure

Some loin-dissolving rapture. Through a door

Enlaid with lilies twined luxuriously,

I enter, dazed and blinded with the sun,

And hear, in gloom that changing colours cloud,