menu_book Chapter 24

Section 24 of Lovecraft's Influences and Favorites. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Alan Winteroud. Audio.boomcoach.com.

The Hashish Eater or The Apocalypse of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith. Bow down. I am the emperor of dreams. i crown me with the million-coloured sun of secret worlds incredible and take their trailing skies for vestment when i soar throned on the mounting zenith and illume the spaceward-flown horizons infinite like rampant monsters roaring for their glut the fiery crested oceans rise and rise by jealous moons maleficently urged to follow me forever mountains horned with peaks of sharpest adamant and maud with sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langed usurp the skies with thunder but in vain and continents of serpent-shapen trees with slimy trunks that lengthened league by league pursue my flight through ages spurned to fire by that supreme ascendance

sorcerers and evil kings predominantly armed with scrolls of fulvus dragon-skin whereon are worm-like runes of ever twisting flame would stay me and the sirens of the stars with foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought would lure me to their crystal reefs and moons where viper-eyed senescent devils dwell with antic gnomes abominably wise heave up their icy horns across my way but naught deters me from the goal ordained by suns and aeons and immortal wars and sung by moons and motes the goal whose name is all the secret of forgotten glyphs by sinful gods in torrid rubies writ for ending of a brazen book the goal whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand in amplest heavens multiplied to hold my hordes of thunder vested avatars and promethean armies of my thought that brandish claspid leavens there i call my memories intolerantly clad in light the peaks of paradise may wear and lead the armageddon of my dreams whose instant shout of triumph is become immensity's own music for their feet are founded on innumerable worlds remote in alien epochs and their arms upraised are columns potent to exalt with ease ineffable the countless thrones of all the gods that are and gods to be

or bear the seats of asmodae and set above the seventh paradise supreme in culminant omniscience manifold and served by senses multitudinous far posted on the shifting walls of time with eyes that roam the star unwinnowed fields of utter night and chaos i convoke the babble of their vision and attend at once their myriad witness i behold an ombos where the fallen titans dwell with mountain-builded walls and gulfs for moat the secret cleft that cunning dwarfs have dug beneath an alp-like buttress and i list too late the clang of adamantine gongs dinned by their drowsy guardians whose feet have felt the wasp-like sting of little knives imbrued with slobber of the basilisk or juice of wounded and i see in gardens of a crimson litten world the sacred flower 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 hewless poison and i read upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx the annulling word a spiteful demon wrote with gall of slain chimeras

and i know what pentacles the lunar wizards used that once allured the gulf returning rock with ten great wings of furled storm to pause midmost an alabaster mount and there with boulder weighted webs of dragon's gut uplift by cranes a captive giant built that 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 slanted-lipped images 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 wyvern-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 salinic 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 molide peoples and the livid seed of some black fruit a king in saturnate 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 leagues-long wharves of gold bulks of enormous crimson kraken-limbed and kraken-headed lifting up as crowns the octaremes of perished emperors and galleys fraught with royal gems that sailed from a sun-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 ebrescence 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

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 ebony's like wrathful dragons roar to teeks a chuckle in the loathly gloom where coiled lianas lean with serried fangs from writhing palms with swollen bulls that moan where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked the eye 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 wreathed light and fulgars 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 splendors 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 glory the face of some averted god the songs of mystic poets in a purple world ascend to me in music that is made from unconceived 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 the nameless god within whose fane the fanes of hecatompilos were arks that 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 alambardines 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 sceptre dropping hand the helm of some great barge of chrysolite sailing upon an amethystine sea to isles of timeless summer or 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 empanoplied with azure diamond as hero of a quest ashenar lights to deserts filled with ever-wandering flames that feed upon the sullen marl and soar to wrap the slopes of mountain and to leap with tongues intolerably lengthening that lick the blenched 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 the storm-possessed sea implacable for ever and within that simple grail the blossom lifts there lies one drop of an incomparable dew which heals the parched weariness of kings and cures the wound of wisdom i am paged 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

on tombs of all the dead and nevermore i find the gorget but at length i find a sealed room whose nameless prisoner moans with a nameless torture and i 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 psalis side a serpent rises whiter than the root of some venific 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 bethroning secrecy i cannot share though i am the king of suns and king therewith of strong eternity whose nomans 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 fan to whitest wrath by raised wings that flail the whiffled gloom and make a brief and broken wind that moans as one who rides a throbbing rack there is the 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 waters will not keep with eyes like sapphires that have lain in hell and felt the hissing embers and the flowers about me turn to hooded serpents swayed by flutes of devils in a hellish dance meet for the nod of satan and he reigns above the raging sabbath and is wooed by serabins of witches but i turn to mountains guarding with their horns of snow the source of that befowled rill and seek a pinnacle where none but eagles climb and they with failing pinnons 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

and now I see a silver python far beneath, vast as a river that a fiend hath witched, and forced to flow remayant 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 encyclodice were orts of daily glut. But I am

gone, for at my call a hippogriff hath come, and firm between its thunder-beating wings I mount the sheer cerulean walls of noon, and see an earth, a spurned pebble, fall lost in the fields of nether stars, and seek a planet where the outwearied wings of time might pause and furrow for his spite, or the plumes of death bestayed, and loiter in reprieve above some deathless lily. For therein beauty hath found an avatar of flowers, blossoms that clothe it as a colored 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, saved by the purple spears of Aramath and tender-sordid iris, walls up-built of flushed 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 needs, 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 aidenic forests, capitol with fronds of stone fretted to airy lace, enfolding droops that seem as tawny clusters of breasts of unknown houris, and convolved with vines of shut and shadow-leaved flowers, like the dropped lids of women that endure some loin-dissolving rapture. Through a door inlaid with lilies twined luxuriously I enter, dazed and blinded with the

sun, and hear in gloom that changing colors cloud a chuckle sharp as crepitating ice, upheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned who strive in Antenora. When my eyes undazzle and the cloud of color fades, I find me in a marble-guarded room where marble apes with wings of griffin's crowd on walls an evil sculptor rot, and beasts, wherein the sloth and vampire bat unite, pendulous by their toes of tarnished bronze, usurp the shadowy interval of lamps that hang from ebon arches.

Like a ripple, borne by the wind from pool to sluggish pool, in fields where wide cositas flows his bound, a crackling smile around that circle runs, and all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me with eyes that turn to glowing coals. A fear that found no name in Babel flings me on, breathless and faint with horror, to a hall within whose weary self-reverting round the languid curtains, heavier than Paul's, innumerably depict a weary king who fain would cool his jewel-crusted

hands in lakes of emerald evening or the fields of dreamless poppies pure with rain. I flee onward, and all the shadowy curtains shake with tremors of a silken sighing mirth, and whispers of the innumerable king, breathing a tale of ancient pestilence whose very words are vile contagion. Then I reach a room where caryatids, carved in the form of tall voluptuous titan women, surround a throne of flowering ebony, where creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne there

lolls a wan enormous worm, whose bulk, tumid with all the rottenness of kings, o'erflows its arms with fold on creased fold of fat obscenely bloating. Open-mouthed he leans, and from his throat a score of tongues, depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers, drivel with phosphorescent slime that runs down all the length of soft and monstrous folds, and creeping among the flowers of ebony, lends them the life of tiny serpents. Now, ere the horror ope those red and lashless

slits of eyes that draw the gnat and midge, I turn and follow down a dusty hall whose gloom, lined by the statues with their mighty limbs, ends in a golden-roofed balcony, sphering the flowered horizon. Ere my heart hath hushed the panic-tumult of its pulses, I listen, from beyond the horizon's rim, a mutter, faint as when the far Samoon, mounting from unknown deserts, opens forth, wide as the waste, those wings of torrid night that

fling the doom of cities from their folds, and musters in its van a thousand winds, that with disrooted palms for besoms, rise and sweep the sands to fury. As the storm, approaching, mounts and loudens to the ears of them that toil in the fields of sesame, me, so grows the mutter, and a shadow creeps above the gold horizon like a dawn of darkness climbing sunward. Now they come, a sabbath of abominable shapes, led by the fiends and

lamiae of worlds that owned my sway aforetime. Cockatrice, Python, Trigelophus, Leviathan, Chimera, Morticoras, Behemoth, Geryon, and Sphinx, and Hydra, on my kin, rise, as might some a freet-builded city, consummate in the lifting of a lash, with thunderous domes and sounding obelisks, and towers of night and fire alternate. Wings of white-hot stone along the hissing wind bear up the huge and furnished-hearted beasts of hells beyond reticulous, and things

whose lightless length would meet the gyre of moons. Born from the caverns of a dying sun, uncoiled to the very zenith half-disclosed from gulfs below the horizon, octopi, like blazing moons with countless arms of fire, climb from the seas of ever-surging flame that roll and roar through planets unconsumed, beating on coasts of unknown metals. Beasts that range the mighty words of Elioth rise, afforesting the heavens with multitudinous horns, within whose maze the

winds are lost, and borne on cliff-like brows of plunging Skull-Apprendris, the shell-wrought towers of ocean witches loom, and griffin-mounted gods and demons throned on sable dragons, and the cockadrills that bear the splendid pygmies on their backs, and blue-faced wizards from the worlds of safe, on whom titanic scorpions fawn, and armies that move with fronts reverted from the foe, and strike a thwart their shoulders at the shapes their shields reflect in crystals.

An idola fashioned within unfathomable caves by hands of eyeless people, and the blind and worm-shaped monsters of a sunless world, with krakens from the ultimate abyss, and demogorgons of the outer dark, arising shout with multitudinous thunders, and threatening me with dooms ineffable, in words whereat the heavens leap to flame, advance on the magic palace. Thrown before, for league on league, their blasting shadows blight and eat like fire

the Amaranthine meads, leaving an ashen desert. In the palace I hear the apes of marble shriek and howl, and all the women-shapen columns moan, babbling with unknown terror. In my fear, a monstrous dread unnamed in any hell, I rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings, and in a trice the magic palace reels, and spiring to a single tower of flame, goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember. Flown beyond the world upon that fleeing wind,

I reach the gulf's irrespirable verge, where fails the strongest storm for breath, and fall supportless, through the nadir-plunged gloom, beyond the scope and visions of the sun, to other skies and systems. In a world deep-wooded, with the multicolored fungi that soared a semblance of fantastic palms, I fall as falls the meteor stone, and break a score of trunks to powder. All unhurt I rise, and through the illimitable woods, among the trees of flimsy opal roam,

and see their tops to that clamor hour by hour to touch the sons of Iris. Things unseen whose carnal breath informs the tideless air with spreading pools of fetor follow me, elusive past the ever-changing palms, and pittering moths with wide and ashen wings flit on before, and insects, ember-hued, descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom and quench themselves in crumbling thickets. Heard far off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown resounds at

measured intervals of time, shaking the riper trees to dust that falls in clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me beneath a pall of iris. Now the palms grow far apart, and less and momently to shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them I see an empty desert all ablaze with amethysts and rubies, and the dust of garnets or carnelians. On I roam, treading the gorgeous grit that dazzles me with leaping waves of endless rutilance, whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom through which I

wander, blind as any cabold, till underfoot the grinding sands give place to stone or metal, with a massive ring more welcome to mine ears than golden bells or tinkle of silver fountains. When the gloom of crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge of a broad black plain of adamant that reaches, level as a windless water, to the verge of all the world. And through the sable plain a hundred streams of shattered marble run, and streams of broken steel and streams of bronze,

like to the ruin of all the wars of time, to plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts adown the gulf's eternal. So I follow between a river of steel and a river of bronze, with ripples loud and tuneless as the clash of a million lutes, and come to the precipice from which they fall, and make the mighty sound of a million swords that meet a million shields, or den of spears and armor in the wars of all the worlds and aeons. Far beneath they fall,

through gulfs and cycles of the void, and vanish like a stream of broken stars into the nether darkness. Nor the gods of any sun, nor demons of the gulf, will dare to know what everlasting sea is fed thereby, and mounts for evermore, with mighty tides unebbing. Lo, what cloud, or night of sudden and supreme eclipse, is on the suns of opals? At my side the rivers rail with a wan and ghostly gleam, through darkness falling, as the night that falls from mighty spheres extinguished.

turning now i see betwixt the desert and the suns the poised wings of all the dragon-rout far-flown in black occlusion thousandfold through stars and deeps in devastated worlds upon my trail of terror griffins rocks and sluggish dark chimeras heavy-winged after the raven of dispeopled lands with harpies and the vulture birds of hell hot from abominable feasts and feigned to cool their beaks and talons in my blood all all have gathered and the winglish rear with rank on rank of foul colossal worms like pillars of embattled night and flame looms on the wide horizon from the van i hear the shriek of wyverns loud and shrill as tempests in a broken fane and roar of sphinxes like the unrelenting toll of bells from towers infernal cloud on cloud they arch the zenith and a dreadful wind falls from them like the wind before the storm and in the wind my cloven garment streams and flutters in the face of all the void even as flows a flapping spirit lost on the pit's undying tempest

louder grows the thunder of the streams of stone and bronze redoubled with the roar of torrent wings inseparably mingled scarce i keep my footing in the gulfward winds of fear and mighty thunders beating to the void in sea-like waves incessant and would flee with them and prove the nadir found at night where fall the streams of ruin but when i reach the verge and seek through sun-defeating gloom to measure with my gaze the dread descent i see a tiny star within the depths a light that stays me while the wings of doom convene their thickening thousands for the star increases taking to its hueless orb with all the speed of horror-changed dreams the light of a million million moons and floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed it grows and grows a huge white eyeless face that fills the void and fills the universe and bloats against the limits of the world with lips of flame that open End of The Ashish Eater or The Apocalypse of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith