The Hashish Eater -or- The Apocalypse of Evil

by 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
	Immensity's 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 parrot's 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.

	If I will
	I am at once the vision and the seer,
	And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps,
	And still abide their suzerain: I am
	The neophyte who serves a nameless god,
	Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos
	Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear,
	Or flags to pave the threshold; or I am
	The god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds
	Into the nave where suns might congregate
	And veils the darkling mountain of his face
	With fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests
	Amass their monthly hecatomb of gems
	Opals that are a camel-cumbering load,
	And monstrous alabraundines, won from war
	With realms of hostile serpents; which arise,
	Combustible, in vapors many-hued
	And myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I,
	The king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand
	The helm of some great barge of orichalchum,
	Sailing upon an amethystine sea
	To isles of timeless summer: for the snows
	Of Hyperborean winter, and their winds,
	Sleep in his jewel-builded capital,
	Nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry,
	Nor conjured suns may rout them; so he fees,
	With captive kings to urge his serried oars,
	Hopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn
	Hath never left the faintly sighing lote
	And lisping moly. Firm of heart, I fare
	Impanoplied with azure diamond,
	As hero of a quest Achernar lights,
	To deserts filled with ever-wandering flames
	That feed upon the sullen marl, and soar
	To wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap
	With tongues intolerably lengthening
	That lick the blenchèd heavens. But there lives
	(Secure as in a garden walled from wind)
	A lonely flower by a placid well,
	Midmost the flaring tumult of the flames,
	That roar as roars a storm-possessed sea,
	Impacable for ever; and within
	That simple grail the blossom lifts, there lies
	One drop of an incomparable dew
	Which heals the parchèd weariness of kings,
	And cures the wound of wisdom. I am page
	To an emperor who reigns ten thousand years,
	And through his labyrinthine palace-rooms,
	Through courts and colonnades and balconies
	Wherein immensity itself is mazed,
	I seek the golden gorget he hath lost,
	On which, in sapphires fine as orris-seed,
	Are writ the names of his conniving stars
	And friendly planets. Roaming thus, I hear
	Like demon tears incessant, through dark ages,
	The drip of sullen clepsydrae; and once
	In every lustrum, hear the brazen clocks
	Innumerably clang with such a sound
	As brazen hammers make, by devils dinned
	On tombs of all the dead; and nevermore
	I find the gorget, but at length I find
	A sealèd room whose nameless prisoner
	Moans with a nameless torture, and would turn
	To hell's red rack as to a lilied couch
	From that whereon they stretched him; and I find,
	Prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor,
	The loveliest of all beloved slaves
	My emperor hath, and from her pulseless side
	A serpent rises, whiter than the root
	Of some venefic bloom in darkness grown,
	And gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem
	Like drops of cold, congealing poison.

	Hark!
	What word was whispered in a tongue unknown,
	In crypts of some impenetrable world?
	Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy
	I cannot share, though I am king of suns,
	And king therewith of strong eternity,
	Whose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard
	My gates, and slay the intruder? Silence loads
	The wind of ether, and the worlds are still
	To hear the word that flees mine audience.
	In simultaneous ruin, al my dreams
	Fall like a rack of fuming vapors raised
	To semblance by a necromant, and leave
	Spirit and sense unthinkably alone
	Above a universe of shrouded stars
	And suns that wander, cowled with sullen gloom,
	Like witches to a Sabbath. . . . Fear is born
	In crypts below the nadir, and hath crawled
	Reaching the floor of space, and waits for wings
	To lift it upward like a hellish worm
	Fain for the flesh of cherubim. Red orbs
	And eyes that gleam remotely as the stars,
	But are not eyes of suns or galaxies,
	Gather and throng to the base of darkness; flame
	Behind some black, abysmal curtain burns,
	Implacable, and fanned to whitest wrath
	By raisèd wings that flail the whiffled gloom,
	And make a brief and broken wind that moans
	As one who rides a throbbing rack. There is
	A Thing that crouches, worlds and years remote,
	Whose horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth
	A note to shatter the donjon-keeps of time,
	Or crack the sphere of crystal. All is dark
	For ages, and my toiling heart-suspends
	Its clamor as within the clutch of death
	Tightening with tense, hermetic rigors. Then,
	In one enormous, million-flashing flame,
	The stars unveil, the suns remove their cowls,
	And beam to their responding planets; time
	Is mine once more, and armies of its dreams
	Rally to that insuperable throne
	Firmed on the zenith.

	Once again I seek
	The meads of shining moly I had found
	In some anterior vision, by a stream
	No cloud hath ever tarnished; where the sun,
	A gold Narcissus, loiters evermore
	Above his golden image. But I find
	A corpse the ebbing water will not keep,
	With eyes like sapphires that have lain in hell|
	And felt the hissing coals; and all the flowers
	About me turn to hooded serpents, swayed
	By flutes of devils in lascivious dance
	Meet for the nod of Satan, when he reigns
	Above the raging Sabbath, and is wooed
	By sarabands of witches. But I turn
	To mountains guarding with their horns of snow
	The source of that befoulèd rill, and seek
	A pinnacle where none but eagles climb,
	And they with failing pennons. But in vain
	I flee, for on that pylon of the sky
	Some curse hath turned the unprinted snow to flame--
	Red fires that curl and cluster to my tread,
	Trying the summit's narrow cirque. And now
	I see a silver python far beneath-
	Vast as a river that a fiend hath witched
	And forced to flow reverted in its course
	To mountains whence it issued. Rapidly
	It winds from slope to crumbling slope, and fills
	Ravines and chasmal gorges, till the crags
	Totter with coil on coil incumbent. Soon
	It hath entwined the pinnacle I keep,
	And gapes with a fanged, unfathomable maw
	Wherein Great Typhon and Enceladus
	Were orts of daily glut. But I am gone,
	For at my call a hippogriff hath come,
	And firm between his thunder-beating wings
	I mount the sheer cerulean walls of noon
	And see the earth, a spurnèd pebble, fall--
	Lost in the fields of nether stars--and seek
	A planet where the outwearied wings of time
	Might pause and furl for respite, or the plumes
	Of death be stayed, and loiter in reprieve
	Above some deathless lily: for therein
	Beauty hath found an avatar of flowers-
	Blossoms that clothe it as a colored flame
	From peak to peak, from pole to sullen pole,
	And turn the skies to perfume. There I find
	A lonely castle, calm, and unbeset
	Save by the purple spears of amaranth,
	And leafing iris tender-sworded. Walls
	Of flushèd marble, wonderful with rose,
	And domes like golden bubbles, and minarets
	That take the clouds as coronal-these are mine,
	For voiceless looms the peaceful barbican,
	And the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft
	To grin a welcome. So I leave awhile
	My hippogriff to crop the magic meads,
	And pass into a court the lilies hold,
	And tread them to a fragrance that pursues
	To win the portico, whose columns, carved
	Of lazuli and amber, mock the palms
	Of bright Aidennic forests-capitalled
	With fronds of stone fretted to airy lace,
	Enfolding drupes that seem as tawny clusters
	Of breasts of unknown houris; and convolved
	With vines of shut and shadowy-leavèd flowers
	Like the dropt lids of women that endure
	Some loin-dissolving ecstasy. Through doors
	Enlaid with lilies twined luxuriously,
	I enter, dazed and blinded with the sun,
	And hear, in gloom that changing colors cloud,
	A chuckle sharp as crepitating ice
	Upheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned
	Who strive in Antenora. When my eyes
	Undazzle, and the cloud of color fades,
	I find me in a monster-guarded room,
	Where marble apes with wings of griffins crowd
	On walls an evil sculptor wrought, and beasts
	Wherein the sloth and vampire-bat unite,
	Pendulous by their toes of tarnished bronze,
	Usurp the shadowy interval of lamps
	That hang from ebon arches. Like a ripple
	Borne by the wind from pool to sluggish pool
	In fields where wide Cocytus flows his bound,
	A crackling smile around that circle runs,
	And all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me
	With eyes that turn to glowing coals. A fear
	That found no name in Babel, flings me on,
	Breathless and faint with horror, to a hall
	Within whose weary, self-reverting round,
	The languid curtains, heavier than palls,
	Unnumerably depict a weary king
	Who fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands
	In lakes of emerald evening, or the field
	Of dreamless poppies pure with rain. I flee
	Onward, and all the shadowy curtains shake
	With tremors of a silken-sighing mirth,
	And whispers of the innumerable king,
	Breathing a tale of ancient pestilence
	Whose very words are vile contagion. Then
	I reach a room where caryatids,
	Carved in the form of voluptuous Titan women,
	Surround a throne flowering ebony
	Where creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne
	There lolls a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk,
	Tumid with all the rottenness of kings,
	Overflows its arms with fold on creasèd fold
	Obscenely bloating. Open-mouthed he leans,
	And from his fulvous throat a score of tongues,
	Depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers,
	Drivel with phosphorescent slime, that runs
	Down all his length of soft and monstrous folds,
	And creeping among the flowers of ebony,
	Lends them the life of tiny serpents. Now,
	Ere the Horror ope those red and lashless slits
	Of eyes that draw the gnat and midge, I turn
	And follow down a dusty hall, whose gloom,
	Lined by the statues with their mighty limbs,
	Ends in golden-roofèd balcony
	Sphering the flowered horizon.

	Ere my heart
	Hath hushed the panic tumult of its pulses,
	I listen, from beyond the horizon's rim,
	A mutter faint as when the far simoom,
	Mounting from unknown deserts, opens forth,
	Wide as the waste, those wings of torrid night
	That shake the doom of cities from their folds,
	And musters in its van a thousand winds
	That, with disrooted palms for besoms, rise,
	And sweep the sands to fury. As the storm,
	Approaching, mounts and loudens to the ears
	Of them that toil in fields of sesame,
	So grows the mutter, and a shadow creeps
	Above the gold horizon like a dawn
	Of darkness climbing zenith-ward. They come,
	The Sabaoth of retribution, drawn
	From all dread spheres that knew my trespassing,
	And led by vengeful fiends and dire alastors
	That owned my sway aforetime! Cockatrice,
	Chimera, martichoras, behemoth,
	Geryon, and sphinx, and hydra, on my ken
	Arise as might some Afrit-builded city
	Consummate in the lifting of a lash
	With thunderous domes and sounding obelisks
	And towers of night and fire alternate! Wings
	Of white-hot stone along the hissing wind
	Bear up the huge and furnace-hearted beasts
	Of hells beyond Rutilicus; and things
	Whose lightless length would mete the gyre of moons--
	Born from the caverns of a dying sun
	Uncoil to the very zenith, half-disclosed
	From gulfs below the horizon; octopi
	Like blazing moons with countless arms of fire,
	Climb from the seas of ever-surging flame
	That roll and roar through planets unconsumed,
	Beating on coasts of unknown metals; beasts
	That range the mighty worlds of Alioth rise,
	Afforesting the heavens with mulitudinous horns
	Amid whose maze the winds are lost; and borne
	On cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras,
	The shell-wrought towers of ocean-witches loom;
	And griffin-mounted gods, and demons throned
	On-sable dragons, and the cockodrills
	That bear the spleenful pygmies on their backs;
	And blue-faced wizards from the worlds of Saiph,
	On whom Titanic scorpions fawn; and armies
	That move with fronts reverted from the foe,
	And strike athwart their shoulders at the shapes
	The shields reflect in crystal; and eidola
	Fashioned within unfathomable caves
	By hands of eyeless peoples; and the blind
	Worm-shapen monsters of a sunless world,
	With krakens from the ultimate abyss,
	And Demogorgons of the outer dark,
	Arising, shout with dire multisonous clamors,
	And threatening me with dooms ineffable
	In words whereat the heavens leap to flame,
	Advance upon the enchanted palace. Falling
	For league on league before, their shadows light
	And eat like fire the arnaranthine meads,
	Leaving an ashen desert. In the palace
	I hear the apes of marble shriek and howl,
	And all the women-shapen columns moan,
	Babbling with terror. In my tenfold fear,
	A monstrous dread unnamed in any hall,
	I rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings,
	And in a trice the wizard palace reefs,
	And spring to a single tower of flame,
	Goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember! Flown
	Beyond the world upon that fleeing wind
	I reach the gulf's irrespirable verge,
	Where fads the strongest storm for breath, and fall,
	Supportless, through the nadir-plungèd gloom,
	Beyond the scope and vision of the sun,
	To other skies and systems.

	In a world
	Deep-wooded with the multi-colored fungi
	That soar to semblance of fantastic palms,
	I fall as falls the meteor-stone, and break
	A score of trunks to atom powder. Unharmed
	I rise, and through the illimitable woods,
	Among the trees of flimsy opal, roam,
	And see their tops that clamber hour by hour
	To touch the suns of iris. Things unseen,
	Whose charnel breath informs the tideless air
	With spreading pools of fetor, follow me,
	Elusive past the ever-changing palms;
	And pittering moths with wide and ashen wings
	Flit on before, and insects ember-hued,
	Descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom
	And quench themselves in crumbling thickets. Heard
	Far off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown
	Resounds at measured intervals of time,
	Shaking the riper trees to dust, that falls
	In clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me
	Beneath an irised pall.

	Now the palmettoes
	Grow far apart, and lessen momently
	To shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them
	I see an empty desert, all ablaze
	With ametrysts and rubies, and the dust
	Of garnets or carnelians. On I roam,
	Treading the gorgeous grit, that dazzles me
	With leaping waves of endless rutilance,
	Whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom
	Through which I wander blind as any Kobold;
	Till underfoot the grinding sands give place
	To stone or metal, with a massive ring
	More welcome to mine ears than golden bells
	Or tinkle of silver fountains. When the gloom
	Of crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge
	Of a broad black plain of adamant that reaches,
	Level as windless water, to the verge
	Of all the world; and through the sable plain
	A hundred streams of shattered marble run,
	And streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze,
	Like to the ruin of all the wars of time,
	To plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts
	Adown the gulfs eternal.

	So I follow
	Between a river of steel and a river of bronze,
	With ripples loud and tuneless as the clash
	Of a million lutes; and come to the precipice
	From which they fall, and make the mighty sound
	Of a million swords that meet a million shields,
	Or din of spears and armour in the wars
	Of half the worlds and eons. Far beneath
	They fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void,
	And vanish like a stream of broken stars
	into the nether darkness; nor the gods
	Of any sun, nor demons of the gulf,
	Will dare to know what everlasting sea
	Is fed thereby, and mounts forevermore
	In one unebbing tide.

	What nimbus-cloud
	Or night of sudden and supreme eclipse,
	Is on the suns opal? At my side
	The rivers run with a wan and ghostly gleam
	Through darkness falling as the night that falls
	From spheres extinguished. Turning, I behold
	Betwixt the sable desert and the suns,
	The poisèd wings of all the dragon-rout,
	Far-flown in black occlusion thousand-fold
	Through stars, and deeps, and devastated worlds,
	Upon my trail of terror! Griffins, rocs,
	And sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged
	After the ravin of dispeopled lands,
	And harpies, and the vulture-birds of hell,
	Hot from abominable feasts, and fain
	To cool their beaks and talons in my blood--
	All, all have gathered, and the wingless rear,
	With rank on rank of foul, colossal Worms,
	Makes horrent now the horizon. From the wan
	I hear the shriek of wyvers, loud and shrill
	As tempests in a broken fane, and roar
	Of sphinxes, like relentless toll of bells
	From towers infernal. Cloud on hellish cloud
	They arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind
	Falls from them like the wind before the storm,
	And in the wind my riven garment streams
	And flutters in the face of all the void,
	Even as flows a flaffing spirit, lost
	On the pit s undying tempest. Louder grows
	The thunder of the streams of stone and bronze--
	Redoubled with the roar of torrent wings
	Inseparable mingled. Scarce I keep
	My footing in the gulfward winds of fear,
	And mighty thunders beating to the void
	In sea-like waves incessant; and would flee
	With them, and prove the nadir-founded night
	Where fall the streams of ruin. But when I reach
	The verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom
	To measure with my gaze the dread descent,
	I see a tiny star within the depths-
	A light that stays me while the wings of doom
	Convene their thickening thousands: for the star
	increases, taking to its hueless orb,
	With all the speed of horror-changèd dreams,
	The light as of a million million moons;
	And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed
	It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face
	That fills the void and fills the universe,
	And bloats against the limits of the world
	With lips of flame that open...