Read Online A Vintage From Atlantis by Clark Ashton Smith - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Clark Ashton Smith
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alteration. The paw, as he remembered it, should have been slightly bent and relaxed; but now it was stiffly outthrust and elongated, as if, like the paw of a living limb, it had reached for something, or had dragged a heavy burden with its ferine talons.
B EYOND THE S INGING F LAME
W hen I, Philip Hastane, gave to the world the journal of my friend Giles Angarth, I was still doubtful as to whether the incidents related therein were fiction or verity. The trans-dimensional adventures of Angarth and Ebbonly, the city of the Flame with its strange residents and pilgrims, the immolation of Ebbonly, and the hinted return of the narrator himself for a like purpose, after making the last entry in his diary, were very much the sort of thing that Angarth might have imagined in one of the fantastic novels for which he had become so justly famous.
Add to this the seemingly impossible and incredible nature of the whole tale, and my hesitancy in accepting it as veridical will easily be understood.
However, on the other hand, there was the unsolved and eternally recalcitrant enigma offered by the disappearance of the two men. Both were well-known, the one as a writer, the other as an artist; both were in flourishing circumstances, with no serious cares or troubles; and their vanishment, all things considered, was difficult to explain on the ground of any motive less unusual or extraordinary than the one assigned in the journal.
At first, as I have hinted in my foreword to the published diary, I thought that the whole affair might well have been devised as a somewhat elaborate practical joke; but this theory became less and less tenable as weeks and months went by and linked themselves slowly into a year, without the reappearance of the presumptive jokers.
Now, at last, I can testify to the truth of all that Angarth wrote—and more. For I, too, have been in Ydmos, the City of Singing Flame, and have known also the supernal glories and raptures of the Inner Dimension. And of these I must tell, however falteringly and stumblingly, with mere human words, ere the vision fades. For these are things which neither I nor any other shall behold or experience again: since Ydmos itself is now a riven ruin, and the Temple of the Flame has been blasted to its foundations in the basic rock, and the fountain of singing fire has been stricken at its source, and the Inner Dimension has perished like a broken bubble, in the great war that was made upon Ydmos by the rulers of the Outer Lands….
After editing and publishing Angarth’s journal, I was unable to forget the peculiar and tantalizing problems it had raised. The vague but infinitely suggestive vistas opened by the tale were such as to haunt my imagination recurrently with a hint of half-revealed or hidden mysteries; and I was troubled by the possibility of some great mystic meaning behind it all—some cosmic actuality of which the narrator had perceived merely the external veils and fringes.
As time went on, I found myself pondering it perpetually, and more and more I was possessed by an overwhelming wonder, and a sense of something which no mere fiction-weaver would have been likely to invent through the unassisted workings of his own fantasy.
In the early summer of 1931, after finishing a new novel of interplanetary adventure, I felt able for the first time to take the necessary leisure for the execution of a project that had often occurred to me. Putting all my affairs in order, and knitting all the loose ends of my literary labors and correspondence, in case I should not return, I left Auburn ostensibly for a week’s vacation, and actually went to Summit with the idea of investigating closely the milieu in which Angarth and Ebbonly had disappeared from human ken.
With strange emotions, I visited the forsaken cabin south of Crater Ridge that had been occupied by Angarth, and saw the rough, home-made table of pine boards upon which my friend had written his journal and had left the
B EYOND THE S INGING F LAME
W hen I, Philip Hastane, gave to the world the journal of my friend Giles Angarth, I was still doubtful as to whether the incidents related therein were fiction or verity. The trans-dimensional adventures of Angarth and Ebbonly, the city of the Flame with its strange residents and pilgrims, the immolation of Ebbonly, and the hinted return of the narrator himself for a like purpose, after making the last entry in his diary, were very much the sort of thing that Angarth might have imagined in one of the fantastic novels for which he had become so justly famous.
Add to this the seemingly impossible and incredible nature of the whole tale, and my hesitancy in accepting it as veridical will easily be understood.
However, on the other hand, there was the unsolved and eternally recalcitrant enigma offered by the disappearance of the two men. Both were well-known, the one as a writer, the other as an artist; both were in flourishing circumstances, with no serious cares or troubles; and their vanishment, all things considered, was difficult to explain on the ground of any motive less unusual or extraordinary than the one assigned in the journal.
At first, as I have hinted in my foreword to the published diary, I thought that the whole affair might well have been devised as a somewhat elaborate practical joke; but this theory became less and less tenable as weeks and months went by and linked themselves slowly into a year, without the reappearance of the presumptive jokers.
Now, at last, I can testify to the truth of all that Angarth wrote—and more. For I, too, have been in Ydmos, the City of Singing Flame, and have known also the supernal glories and raptures of the Inner Dimension. And of these I must tell, however falteringly and stumblingly, with mere human words, ere the vision fades. For these are things which neither I nor any other shall behold or experience again: since Ydmos itself is now a riven ruin, and the Temple of the Flame has been blasted to its foundations in the basic rock, and the fountain of singing fire has been stricken at its source, and the Inner Dimension has perished like a broken bubble, in the great war that was made upon Ydmos by the rulers of the Outer Lands….
After editing and publishing Angarth’s journal, I was unable to forget the peculiar and tantalizing problems it had raised. The vague but infinitely suggestive vistas opened by the tale were such as to haunt my imagination recurrently with a hint of half-revealed or hidden mysteries; and I was troubled by the possibility of some great mystic meaning behind it all—some cosmic actuality of which the narrator had perceived merely the external veils and fringes.
As time went on, I found myself pondering it perpetually, and more and more I was possessed by an overwhelming wonder, and a sense of something which no mere fiction-weaver would have been likely to invent through the unassisted workings of his own fantasy.
In the early summer of 1931, after finishing a new novel of interplanetary adventure, I felt able for the first time to take the necessary leisure for the execution of a project that had often occurred to me. Putting all my affairs in order, and knitting all the loose ends of my literary labors and correspondence, in case I should not return, I left Auburn ostensibly for a week’s vacation, and actually went to Summit with the idea of investigating closely the milieu in which Angarth and Ebbonly had disappeared from human ken.
With strange emotions, I visited the forsaken cabin south of Crater Ridge that had been occupied by Angarth, and saw the rough, home-made table of pine boards upon which my friend had written his journal and had left the
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