On the opposite end of the time cycle from Zothique lies Hyperborea. Its stories are set in the Pleistocene age—according to a reference in The Ice Demon —and "supposed to have corresponded roughly with modern Greenland" (Ubbo-Sathla, Hyperborea, Ballantine, ISBN 345022068095, c.1971, p.96). Although the tales take place over centuries, the continent is going through a massive de-evolution, as a great glacier works down from the northern regions of Polarian and devours the "monstrous jungle[s]" (The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, p.153) to the south. What distinguishes the Hyperborea stories is a sense of pervading doom which Smith manifests in different ways. Some read like variations on Nordic myths to explain the chilling, incomprehensible phenomena. After all, in Greek mythology according to Pindar, Perseus slew Medusa in Hyperborea, and the saga-like structure fits Smith's prosaic style like hyperbolic chain mail. In others, CAS takes a farcical approach, even injecting bits of simplistic morality in some, which, to modern sensibilities is probably far less satisfying. Burlesques like The Seven Geases and The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles read like A Thousand and One Arabian Nights written by a jinni. The Testament of Athammaus, and, better yet, The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, humorously jab the genre by unrequiting the heroic conclusion, tickle with just enough vocabalistic tongue-in-cheekiness, and scratch some personality into the characterizations to be the best of the campy bundle.

Smith's production, I suspect, is not read for laughs, however. It has too much of an all-pervading, atmospheric hold on one's imagination that can be as bewitching as it is gloomy. His best stories don't end well, nor do you expect them to. In The White Sybil —my favorite story of this cycle—Tortha, a young poet with "strange austral songs in his heart" (p.41) is suddenly jolted by the rare and possibly chimerical sight of the White Sybil of Polarian who is

like an apparition descended from the moon. Goddess, ghost or woman, he knew not which, she passed fleetly and was gone: a creature of snow and norland light, with eyes like moon-pervaded pools, and lips that were smitten with the same pallor as the brow and bosom.

—p.42

His obsession and passion leads to the receiving of profound knowledge, but at a cost few would wittingly pay. Smith adds just enough dark-to-deep reddish-orange into his prescriptive hues to avert a predictable and slushy conclusion.

In The Ice Demon , a trio of avaricious scalawags dares the ice for the jewels of some long-frozen King, lamentably discovering "the glacier itself was a live, malignant entity with powers of unknown bale" (p.130). The hysterical escape reads like the delusions of a storm-stranded mountaineer on Annapurna in the last gasps of death-zone breaths.

An even more demonic interpretation of the inexplicable glacial events destroying the Hyperborean civilization is advanced in The Coming of the White Worm. Here lies one of the much-touted connections to H.P. Lovecraft, as the fat white worm foulness known as Rlim Shaikorth is an Outer One alien, steering his floating, ice-mountain tonnage from space and demanding fealty from the warlocks he saves from his "exceeding coldness and [the] pale splendor that blasts the flesh of men" (p.81). It is a rhythmic communion of visceral horrors worse than death, and a worthier contribution to the Cthlthu Mythos for its smidgeon of bloated Teutonic personality than another Hyborean entry, Tsathoggua or the Toad God, who is more icon than entity.

But Smith's greatest creation—and laudation--of Lovecraftian lore is "the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla" (Ubbo-Sathla , p.103). Delivered in strict HPL story parameters, it starts with a modern-day Londoner discovering a cloudy stone in which Hyperborean master magician Eibon "could behold many visions of the terrene past, even to the Earth's beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the unbegotten source, lay vast and swollen and yeastly amid the vaporing slime" (p.97). What follows is a hallucinogenic kaleidoscope roller-coasting its way back through time as only Clark Ashton Smith can conduct. The revelation is worth the ride: we all come from the stars, and, what's worse, is that mankind's original sire is

Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing.

--p.103

The primordial blob named Ubbo-Sathla by someone or something becomes the ultimate nightmare, the original bogeyman and, from its nature, the progenitor of evil and rotten things in us all.

Not exactly Michelangelo's Adam, is it?

Zothique

Xiccarph

Poseidonis

Averoigne

Selected Stories

© copyright 02/19/2006 by Larry Crawford