Clark Ashton Smith: "The Last Hieroglyph," "The Treader of the Dust," and "The Chain of Aforgomon"

It's time again to explore the work of Clark Ashton Smith; today we have three stories that first appeared in Weird Tales in 1935.  As has been my practice of late, I am reading these Smith stories in an electronic copy of a volume of Night Shades Books' Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, this time Volume Five, The Last Hieroglyph.  I again recommend Connors and Hilger's work, as they not only establish the best possible texts of Smith's stories but also include many fascinating and fun notes about each piece, drawn from Smith's correspondence with Farnsworth Wright, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, E. Hoffmann Price and from other sources.   

"The Last Hieroglyph"

This story starts out great, with an amusing cast of characters and some quite creepy scenes in which writing--the hieroglyphs of the title--mysteriously appear on a scroll, but the actual plot is just good and fails to use those characters to their full potential. 

Nushain is an astrologer in the "dying Earth" setting of Zothique.  Nushain works diligently to chart the futures of his clients as well as his own, observing the stars and then poring over his many books to interpret what he has seen in the night sky, but he is actually not very good at his chosen profession, and so is forced to travel from town to town, sometimes "hungry and shabby," as in each successive community his reputation, customer base and income collapses.  He is accompanied in these wanderings by Ansarath, "a wretched mongrel dog that had somehow attached itself to him in the desert town of Zul-Bha-Sair," and Mouzda, a black slave he was able to afford because he is a mute with only one eye.  Mouzda's single eye is very acute, which comes in handy because Nushain, who is near-sighted, can use all the help he can get consulting the heavens every night.

Some of the humor of the story is generated by the fact that Ansarath and Mouzda are cowards, which I recognize is a stereotype we aren't supposed to laugh at any more.

After Smith has introduced our cast the plot of the story gets rolling.  The god of fate, who writes all our destinies in a book full of pictographic hieroglyphs, summons Nushain, and strange and fearsome guides, among them a mummy, lead Nushain and crew through labyrinthine catacombs, across an ocean, and then through a wall of fire.  Multiple times along the way Nushain gets cold feet and tries to elude his guides, only to run into even more frightening monsters which shepherd him back onto his destined course.  Finally, he meets the god of fate where he learns his story, and that of Ansarath and Mouzda, is at an end; the three become hieroglyphs and are added to the great book of fate.  The point of the story seems to be that one cannot change his fate, even if he has been able to predict it.  

"The Last Hieroglyph" is a good story, with lots of fun scenes and compelling images of monsters and horrible environments, but the brilliant beginning with those endearing characters had inspired in me the hope that Smith had an equally brilliant set of adventures for Nushain and crew to try to navigate, and so I was disappointed by the merely good plot.  One of the sources of my disappointment is that Smith could have plugged any character into the journey through catacombs, over ocean, and through fire, as the journey is predetermined, there is nothing the characters can do to alter its course or their destinies.  It would have been better if the personalities and abilities of Nushain, Mouzda and Ansarath had had some bearing in the plot and its resolution.  

"The Last Hieroglyph" was reprinted in the 20th century in several Smith collections and in Shangri-La, a Dutch anthology, the 1982 printing of which touts its illustrations by Stephen Fabian and other artists--you'll recognize Bruce Pennington's cover illo from British editions of Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer.

"The Treader of the Dust"

"The Treader of the Dust" is a brief and straightforward story with effective writing and images.  Some wealthy smart guy lives in a mansion with his servant, who is also quite well-educated.  Both are interested in the occult and demonology, and the main character has an extensive library of rare books on these esoteric topics.  One of them, The Testaments of Carnamagos, includes what amounts to a trap--a particular passage that, should a person read it, puts him at risk of summoning Quachil Uttaus, a being who is "the ultimate corruption" and known by some as "The Treader of the Dust."  Smith does a good job describing the signs that presage Quachil Uttaus's arrival and portraying this alien destroyer's ultimate arrival and the fate of our two unhealthily curious protagonists.

Besides a ton of Smith collections, "The Treader of the Dust" appears in a 2010 Spanish anthology and an unusual 2017 Canadian anthology edited by Patton Oswalt, I guess a comedian who is also a SF fan; according to isfdb, The Ghost Box consists of little individual booklets stored in a handmade box.

"The Chain of Aforgomon"

"The Chain of Aforgomon" comes to us as a collection of documents prepared by a friend of John Milwarp, the novelist and expert on the Orient.  The narrator, executor of Milwarp's estate, tells us that not long after an extensive journey in the Far East, Milwarp's housekeeper saw a flash from his study and went to investigate, finding her employer dead, his body covered in burns shaped like the links of a chain, as if a red hot iron chain had been wrapped around him!  Another bizarre detail: the executor is starting to have trouble remembering what Milwarp looked like, and people, even fans of his novels, seem to have lost any interest in his work and any curiosity about the strange way in which he died.    

On the desk in front of Milwarp's hideously burned body was a diary, and the lion's share of "The Chain of Aforgomon" consists of the text of this diary.  The first page of this artifact tells us Weird Tales readers that "The Chain of Aforgomom" is yet another story about some dude whose soul gets cast back into the bodies of his ancestors or his earlier lives or just some predecessors so he can experience first-hand life in the distant past. 

If we dare, we can use the following links to cast our blog souls back into earlier blog posts and experience stories in which we've seen this gag before:  

Donald Wandrei: "The Lives of Alfred Kramer"
Clark Ashton Smith: "The Necromantic Tale" 
Clark Ashton Smith: "Ubbo-Sathla"
Robert E. Howard: "The People of the Dark" and "The Children of the Night" 

Alright, enough with the links already.  Too many links are probably bad for the environment.

Milwarp's diary relates how, because all his life he had experienced a nagging sense of some lost thing of beauty and some vague sense of doom, he sought a fabled drug that can, it is said, restore the memories of a user's past lives.  Finally in Asia he found this drug, and, after building up his courage, tried it out back home.  His soul was cast back, back, back to the distant planet Hestan, where, before mankind had arisen on Earth, he lived as Calaspa, priest of Aforgomon, the Time-God! 

Milwarp lives out the crucial days of Calaspa's life.  Calaspa's fiancé had died, and, broken-hearted, Calaspa used evil magic to call for the aid of Xaxanoth, The Lurking Chaos, sworn enemy of Aforgomon!  Going against everything Aforgomon stands for--the orderly passage of time--Calaspa implored Xaxanoth to allow him to relive an hour of life with his fiancé.

Xaxanoth obliged, and not only Calaspa, but the entire planet Hestan, relived an hour that took place some months ago.  This threw time off by an hour, causing disorder and even allowing a demon to circumvent a pentacle and kill a wizard of Calaspa's acquaintance.  When the hierarchy of priests of Aforgomon figured out that Calaspa was to blame for this blasphemy, he was chained up and the god Aforgomon himself issued a far reaching punishment--Calaspa's soul would be forever barred from again encountering the soul of his fiancé, and, after many reincarnations, he would cease to be reincarnated (John Milwarp is the last incarnation) and thus confined to those lonely incarnations--further isolating him, even other people's memories of him would be erased.

This story is just OK.  It is kind of convoluted, feels long, and lacks the shocking images and fun monsters that enliven the other two stories we are talking about today.             

"The Chain of Aforgomon" would appear in many Smith collections, while in 1950 Donald Wollheim selected it for Avon Fantasy Reader and in 1974 Sam Moskowitz put it in the then current revival of Weird Tales.

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Another step in our quest to read a story from each and every issue of Weird Tales printed in the 1930s is behind us.  In our next episode more Weird Tales from this era, three stories by a WT alumnus who went on to success on the silver screen and the idiot box.