Transcribe
Translate
Phantagraph, v. 4, issue 2, November-December 1935
9
More information
digital collection
archival collection guide
transcription tips
THE MEMMONS OF THE NIGHT CLARK ASHTON SMITH Ringed with a bronze horizon, which, at a point immensely remote, seems welded with the blue brilliance of a sky of steel, they oppose the black splendor of their porphyritic forms to the sun's insuperable gaze. Reared in the morning twilight of primeval time, by a race whose towering tombs and cities are one with dust of their builders in the slow lapse of the desert, they abide to face the terrible latter dawns, that move abroad in a starkness of fire, consuming the veils of night on the vast and Sphinx-like desolations. Level with the light, their tenebrific brows preserve a pride as of Titan kings. In their lidless implacable eyes of staring stone, is the petrified despair of those who have gazed too long on the infinite. Mute as the mountains from whose iron matrix they were hewn, their mouths have never acknowledged the sovereignty of the suns, that pass in triumphal flame from horizon unto horizon of the prostrate land. Only at eve, when the west is like a brazen furnace and the far-off mountains emoulder like ruddy gold in the depths of the heated heavens--only at eve, when the east grows indefinite and vague, and the shadows of the waste are one with the increasing value of night--then, and only then, from the sullen throats of stone, a music rings in the bronze horizon--a strong, a sombre music, strange and sonorous, like the singing of black stars, or a litany of gods that invoke oblivion; a music that thrills the desert to its heart of adamant, and in the granite of forgotten tombs, till the last echoes of its jubilation, terrible as the trumpets of doom, are one with the back silence of infinity. ---from Ebony & Crystal, by special permission.
Saving...
prev
next
THE MEMMONS OF THE NIGHT CLARK ASHTON SMITH Ringed with a bronze horizon, which, at a point immensely remote, seems welded with the blue brilliance of a sky of steel, they oppose the black splendor of their porphyritic forms to the sun's insuperable gaze. Reared in the morning twilight of primeval time, by a race whose towering tombs and cities are one with dust of their builders in the slow lapse of the desert, they abide to face the terrible latter dawns, that move abroad in a starkness of fire, consuming the veils of night on the vast and Sphinx-like desolations. Level with the light, their tenebrific brows preserve a pride as of Titan kings. In their lidless implacable eyes of staring stone, is the petrified despair of those who have gazed too long on the infinite. Mute as the mountains from whose iron matrix they were hewn, their mouths have never acknowledged the sovereignty of the suns, that pass in triumphal flame from horizon unto horizon of the prostrate land. Only at eve, when the west is like a brazen furnace and the far-off mountains emoulder like ruddy gold in the depths of the heated heavens--only at eve, when the east grows indefinite and vague, and the shadows of the waste are one with the increasing value of night--then, and only then, from the sullen throats of stone, a music rings in the bronze horizon--a strong, a sombre music, strange and sonorous, like the singing of black stars, or a litany of gods that invoke oblivion; a music that thrills the desert to its heart of adamant, and in the granite of forgotten tombs, till the last echoes of its jubilation, terrible as the trumpets of doom, are one with the back silence of infinity. ---from Ebony & Crystal, by special permission.
Hevelin Fanzines
sidebar
