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by David E. Schultz

  Compared to Howard’s “Hyborian” world, however, Smith’s universe appears

  to be more personal. It is composed of enclosed, impenetrable worlds, which are organized according to their own internal sense of coherence, their individual cultures, their unique gods. Smith’s lost continents, located outside any particular historical perspective, are governed by the most extreme sense of “otherness.” The human race seems insignificant and appears to be doomed to collapse, beneath the gaze of indifferent gods. The theme of decadence henceforth becomes universal.

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  Smith’s Cycles

  Whether Smith sought exoticism in a city, a country, or a planet, each quest was followed by a period of delusion, which, in turn, led to a period of decline in his work. The shadow of the dying sun was emblematic of Smith’s extraterrestrial cycle (“Sfanomoë,” “The Dweller in the Gulf,” “The Plutonian Drug,” etc.). Smith’s dreamlike cities were symbols of beauty and of disenchantment. The evocation of the “jewel-city” in Lord Dunsany’s “The City on Mallington Moor” (1916) prefigured the quest found in “Xeethra,” which ended in “dust and dearth” ( RA 364).

  While the dreamlike city only belongs to the select few, for other people, a sense of loss produces a taste of ash.

  In Smith’s “The City of the Singing Flame” (1931), everything became insig-

  nificant, and even “literature was nothing more than shadow” ( RA 194)—a perception that probably represented the climax of terror for Smith. The conclusion of this “trans-dimensional” voyage takes place in the ruins of a mysterious city.

  The protagonists are left with the option of returning to our world, but their souls have been contaminated by death’s breath and their hearts are laden with a feeling of eternal regret. Death is imminent for one of the protagonists, who is about to be crushed by a monolith, and the quest terminates in dire misfortune, while the

  reader is left to wonder if the chaos and devastation that have swept down upon Ydmos will not soon strike his own world.

  This short story provides a useful example of Smith’s tormented tone, which

  he perhaps borrowed from Dunsany’s “decorative nightmares.” For each person’s

  individual mystic experience, there corresponds the cosmic threat of “universal night.” In “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow,” Dunsany referred to the “glamour of

  calamity” (Rancy 129), a tale in which we can identify the essence of the decadent movement, and yet a tale in which the sombre romanticism of “dead cities”—

  Zaccarath, Babbulkund, Perdóndaris, Bethmoora, etc.—was exalted. Feelings of

  ecstasy provoked by contemplating flight gives way to feelings of impending cataclysm; and the quest for the “center” leads to the discovery of the apocalypse.

  Smith’s protagonists observe a world encircled by darkness, an image which re-

  flects the agony of the sun in the futuristic world of Zothique.

  In “The City of the Singing Flame” we are shown a future war which takes

  place in the “rubble of destroyed worlds,” or we are shown a “hideous wave”

  which rises up from a “wall of darkness,” or we are told about “acts of self-

  sacrifice” by the inhabitants of Ydmos whose bodies are “burnt to cinders.” When we add Smith’s repeated references to the city of “Babel”—a symbol of tyranny

  and confusion, a city associated with the idea of punishment for a collective

  fault—to this parallel world, this distant world suddenly becomes more real ( RA 187).

  The doors that lead to infinity do indeed conceal certain threats. The halluci-

  nating traveler in “The Light from Beyond” (1933) attains “spheres ulterior and superior,” apprehends “the colossal, shadowy god that still towered above the

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  stars” and skims over “the utmost heavens and nether gulfs beyond the suns” ( LW

  387), but he is finally threatened with destruction. The hero of “The Eternal

  World” (c. 1930), who was likewise projected “beyond time,” discovers the Babel-like world of the “Immortals” which is soon menaced by a reign of chaos. As Jean Marigny says, “the lands of dream become very soon lands of nightmare” (Marigny 10). In “The Primal City” (1934), the explorers are literally plucked from the

  ground by monstrous clouds which are the guardians of this cursed Babel.

  The three concepts of transgression, punishment and fatality can be mapped

  onto the idea of inexorable cycles which consign the human world to inescapable decay. The cycle of transgression, punishment and fatality explain the gloomy tone of certain prose-poems such as “The Passing of Aphrodite” and “The Memnons

  of the Night,” all of which depict decadent worlds wherein resounds the “litany of gods that invoke oblivion” ( NU 9). In such universes, humankind is alone, nostalgic and lost in a lost world. The land is in agony while the sun grows dark, “as if it has been shielded by a huge, invisible mass.” The world rushes headlong into

  oblivion, an image that concludes the poem “The Shadows” (1922).

  All this points naturally to “The Dark Age” (1938), a tale which is set in the

  distant future after the disappearance of civilization. A laboratory that serves as the stronghold of knowledge is isolated in the midst of lands that have returned to barbaric practices.6 The bastions of civilization are besieged by monsters. The world will become lost in the “cosmic night.”

  Smith’s pessimism is unabashedly unfurled throughout his literary cycles (Po-

  seidonis, Hyperborea, Zothique), where the author emphasizes the downward and

  decadent part of the cyclic journey. He is clearly less interested in the historical apogee than in the return to nothingness. The Poseidonis tales hinge on the idea of an implacable punishment that must be inflicted upon Atlantis. This idea gave rise to the following observations: Poseidonis is the “last” Atlantis; and the “last” magician, who will utter the “last” invocation, lives on this island. This “primal” land, which will be home to the elaboration of a forbidden science, is doomed to be the

  “last” land, a land with no hope of salvation.

  Fatality permeates Smith’s tales. Indeed, in “A Vintage of Atlantis” (1933), the inhabitants of the world are “ghosts,” a “black night” floats above the sea, and the city vanishes into thin air. When the narrator eventually comes to his senses, his companions have all disappeared, having been snatched up by the past.

  The slightest transgression of the laws of the past results in extreme punish-

  ment, namely, liquefaction, decay or disappearance. In “An Offering to the Moon”

  (c. 1930), two archeologists’ “bodies and souls” vanish into the past. Smith’s waning Atlantean worlds are closely associated with the concepts of decomposition

  and disintegration. In them we see that Smith recapitulates Plato’s morally decadent universe. In Plato’s Critias, the people of Atlantis have gradually lost the love of wisdom and virtue; their divine nature is diluted; they have become greedy, corrupt, and domineering.7

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  Smith’s tormenting obsession with deterioration is not only moral but physical

  and clinical to the point of necrophilia. This morbid tendency could be perceived as a sign of despair in Smith’s work if we did not also see in it the desire to emphasize the immortality of lost knowledge, knowledge that continues to flourish even though continents have been swallowed up; nothing ever dies entirely, a concept illustrated symbolically through the recurrent ophidian figure (Malygris’s snake, the snake-men of Mu, lunar goddesses), which is metamorphic and therefore immortal. Yet is this reminder sufficient to erase the impression of uneasiness that stems from Smith’s Atlantean worlds? Nothing is
less certain. The author does not manage to eclipse the feeling of morbidity that prevails in his work. Smith’s imagination is too firmly anchored in a world of darkness, as is the case for his friends and fellow authors Howard and Lovecraft.

  Contrary to the positive Greek version of Hyperborea, Smith’s version con-

  jures up a genuine dreamlike topos in which we find a teeming species of threatening creatures, and where fearsome and extremely knowledgeable magicians hatch

  evil plots. The “White Sybil” predicts that Hyperborea and Commoriom, whose

  capitals are linked to the polar ice sheets, will meet with disastrous consequences.

  Two plagues will devour the land; the first scourge, depicted in “The Testament of Athammaus,” will force the population of Commoriom to flee their land in anticipation of a huge iceslide that threatens the whole continent with destruction in

  “The Ice-Demon.”

  The color white, which is associated both with the dying world of Hyperborea

  and with the priestess who announces the catastrophe, takes on the negative value of that color. The “White Sybil” is in fact a “divine illusion,” and behind the virginal whiteness lies the piercing bite of a fatal frost. After having seduced her prey, however, she transforms herself into an ice demon (“a frozen corpse,” “a leper-white mummy”) and disintegrates ( AY 70).

  This image of the lethal bite lies at the heart of Smith’s imagination. In “The Coming of the White Worm” (1941), the feeling of repulsion at the idea of the

  cold takes on an ophidian nature, and we find close associations between the

  theme of the giant worm, the all-engulfing ice, and the threatening nature of

  whiteness. The same idea is developed in “The Ice-Demon” (1933): a mountain of

  ice is assimilated to a monster who tears apart its victims and then swallows them.

  Once more, the “whiteness of death” is tainted black, as a gigantic, “prickly” mass engulfs the horizon and floats toward us in a threatening fashion.

  Zothique, the “continent of the end of time,” is set in a hypothetical future,

  eons distant. Smith depicts an enclosed world in which the enchanter has got the better of enchantment, where death takes precedence over life. If we take exoticism (ex-zothique) to mean the exterior expression of an interior ritual, an expression fueled by memory, then we must invent another word, following the author’s lead, that will exemplify the decadent and obsessive otherness of the dreamlike future world of Zothique, which is threatened by a veritable apocalypse. If we con-

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  sider that the “lost world” is often synonymous with the “last world,” then Zothique represents the last terrestrial continent. Zothique, which is enclosed on itself, in a non-historical and non-chronological space and time, also represents an es-chatological dimension associated with the image of the dying sun. Indeed, Smith articulates a poetic unity of lost, evanescent lands that languish under the rays of a dying sun.

  From the first verse of his poem “Zothique,” Smith throws the reader into the

  dark beyond and announces the general melancholic tone which pervades his cycle: He who has trod the shadows of Zothique

  And looked upon the coal-red sun oblique,

  Henceforth returns to no anterior land,

  But haunts a latter coast

  Where cities crumble in the black sea-sand

  And dead gods drink the brine. ( LO 112)

  It is clear that this world has only been given a brief reprieve, a world where the sun is about to die, where kingdoms are decadent and gods perish. The expression “sea-sand” refers to two plagues which eat slowly away at Zothique, namely that of the pitiless sea that has already swallowed up all the other continents, and the desert sand that progressively covers the populated lands like an hourglass, an image that conveys the fatal passing of time and marks the end of a cycle. This movement is accentuated by the darkness of the universe, a darkness linked to the magic and sorcery that are prevalent in a declining world.

  The necromancer’s magic, which attempts to curb, at least temporarily, the

  natural balance of things, is the sole recourse against this decline. But is this powerful magic illusory? “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932) would seem to indi-

  cate “yes.” A general wind of decrepitude is exhaled over this world, both as

  concerns the characters individually (death of the protagonists), and the universe itself (progressive extinction of the continent). Two necromancers run off into the desert of Cincor, which is an arid, leprous, and grey region burned by a sun of glowing embers, home to the devastated city of Yethlyreom, a city whose inhabitants are skeletons and mummies.

  The only empire possible is the empire of the dead. Consequently, sorcerers

  set about the blasphemous job of bringing the forgotten city’s population back to life in order to have the city thereafter at their mercy. However, in accordance with an ancient prophecy, one of the living dead, Illeiro, discovers in one of the city’s underground passages the key that opens the gates of hell. Passing through these gates will allow the dead to return to the obliterating depths that death offers. As for the mutilated corpses of Mmatmuor and Sodosma, they will seek “vainly

  through the black maze of nether vaults the door that was locked by Illeiro” ( RA 325) . In this dark universe, the only glimmer of hope is to find a second liberating death.

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  Death is always on the horizon, and because it is feared and imagined so in-

  tensely, in the end it is almost welcomed as a comforting alternative. In “The Isle of the Torturers” (1933), the “silver death” which sweeps over the population living in the south of Zothique, is reminiscent of the tragic effects of the “white death” (icy cold, instantaneous rigidity, whitening of bodies) found in Hyperborea.

  Thanks to necromancy, the worlds of the living and the dead are no longer in

  opposition; however, the fusing of the two worlds is only artificial, and death always triumphs, as in “Necromancy in Naat” (1935). The possibility of securing

  happiness on Zothique turns out to be illusory, all the more so since the gods multiply the number of traps that are set in order to thwart humankind’s vigilance. Indeed, the short story “Xeethra” (1934) serves as proof. In a world without

  landmarks, one can only become lost. Yet is it correct to assume that Smith’s universe is really barren of any hope?

  The Eternal Return

  The best way of bringing a cycle to a close is to lead the reader to believe in the eternal recurrence of things. “A Vintage from Atlantis” or “An Offering to the

  Moon” show that the pasts of lost continents continue to contaminate both the

  present and the future, wreaking havoc and spreading evil, to such an extent that the mythical lands threaten to swallow up reckless travelers in a sort of “post-historic” vengeance.

  The esoteric dimension of Smith’s obsession with cycles is demonstrated in at

  least two of his short stories written during the 1930s—“Ubbo-Sathla” and “The

  Last Hieroglyph.” In the epigraph to “Ubbo-Sathla,” we find an excerpt from the Book of Eibon, which serves to set the terrifying and solemn tone to the tale: For Ubbo-Sathla is the source and the end. Before the coming of Zothaqquah or Yok-Zothoth or Kthulhut from the stars, Ubbo-Sathla dwelt in the steaming fens

  of the new-made Earth: a mass without head or members, spawning the gray,

  formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life. . . . And all of earthly life, it is told, shall go back at last through the great circle of time to Ubbo-Sathla. ( OST 291; italics added)

  Smith’s pantheon swells to the point of incorporating the “Cthulhoid” divini-

  ties penned by Lovecraft. This act of homage to the master of the genre also
serves to underline the cosmic and threatening nature of forgotten gods, whether they be found among the stars or in the depths of the Earth. What matters above all is the periodicity of these divine apparitions, as it symbolizes another decadent theme, namely the notion of cyclical time (Rancy 185).

  Paul Tregardis, the hero of “Ubbo-Sathla,” who is attracted by the mysterious

  light given off from a crystal heart, undergoes a process of “duality” and then rei-dentification, which leads him to embark on a regressive quest in search of his origins. He ends up returning, in the same vein as a character from Arthur Machen, to

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  the alluvium from whence he came.8 He has the impression of having decayed be-

  yond space and time and of having voyaged through the successive cycles which

  separate him from the “Beginning.” He relives countless lives and dies a “myriad of deaths.” In a process which can be called “monstrous degeneration,” he travels back in time, over several eras of Hyperborea’s long cycles. “Death becomes birth and birth becomes death.” Tregardis is subjected to a variety of involutions common to the ophidian trope (pterodactyl→behemoth→snake-man) before he re-

  joins the original marshy mire in which lies the shapeless mass of Ubbo-Sathla, the sire of “archetypes of earthly life” and the guardian of supreme knowledge. The hero has disappeared into the “grey beginnings of the Earth,” but his “forgotten search” has revealed to him the ultimate mystery of the origins of the Earth. “Becoming a shapeless eft of the prime, it crawled sluggishly and obliviously across the fallen tablets of the gods”—this recalls the extraterrestrial monolith in Clarke’s and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—before becoming once again what he was in 1933. In this way, the eternal circumference of the evolution of humankind is recapitulated.

  In the same way that the “Cave of Archetypes” (cf. “The Seven Geases”) lies

  at the center of the Earth, so do we find “Ubbo-Sathla” the shapeless creative

  mass of the “archetypes of terrestrial life” at the center of time and space. In “The Light from Beyond,” we find “superior spheres” and “bottomless abysses,” and in