The Hashish Eater -or- the Apocalypse of Evil (excerpt) -Clark Ashton Smith Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-colored 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 for ever; mountains horned With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued, Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain; And continents of serpent-shapen trees, With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league, Pursue my light through ages spurned to fire By that supreme ascendance; sorcerers, And evil kings, predominanthly armed With scrolls of fulvous 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 eons 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 Promethèan armies of my thought, That brandish claspèd levins. There I call My memories, intolerably clad In light the peaks of paradise may wear, And lead the Armageddon of my dreams Whose instant shout of triumph is become Immensitys 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 or gods to be, And bear the seats of Asmodai 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 Babel of their visions, and attend At once their myriad witness. I behold In Ombos, where the fallen Titans dwell, With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat, The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug Beneath an alp-like buttress; and I list, Too late, the clam of adamantine gongs Dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet Have fell the wasp-like sting of little knives Embrued With slobber of the basilisk Or the pail Juice of wounded upas. In Some red Antarean garden-world, I see 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 hueless poison. And I read Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx, The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote In 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 saber-taloned feet Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood, And 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 eons, and the prophecy Of wars renewed, which 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 creators of the moon, And in one still, selenic and fetor; and I know What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown, Are proffered to their gods in Uranus 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-fled haven. Swifter and stranger 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 gents, armed With horns of behemoth and unicorn, Who wander, blinded by the clinging spells O 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 parrots 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 splendors, dream by dream, unfold Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns, Or suns of changeful iridescence, bring Their rays about me like the colored 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, lnscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies And awful transformations.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 15:07:38 +0000
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