The 1926 portion of the first draft ends as the unnamed “Dutchman” of the story deciphers some hieroglyphics, concluding that the isle on which he and his companion have been stranded is a remnant of Lemuria: “Lemuria iss to der Pacific, vot Atlantis iss to der Atlantic.... Von Kaelmann alvays said ... dot dey had a great civilization vhen der der men on Atlantis ver still apes, who ver der ancestors uf der Cro-Magnon peoples” (from unpublished draft, p. 43).
It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that Howard stopped working on The Isle of the Eons to write Men of the Shadows, a story in which he would refine and develop these new ideas.
We may also note that the 1926 section of The Isle of the Eons provided new information about the buildings and ruins found on the island, including a number of allusions and comparisons to Central and South American monuments or cities. While Spence posited that the pre-Columbian cultures of South and Central America owed much to Lemuria, Howard’s source for the new material in The Isle of the Eons seems to have been not Spence, but E.A. Allen’s The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races, published in 1885, a copy of which was in Howard’s library.
In this book Howard not only found names and descriptions he could use in The Isle of the Eons, but also found several chapters that no doubt commanded his attention, in view of his interest in the Picts. Chapter 6, for example, is devoted to “The Neolithic Age in Europe,” and particularly to the “Turanians.” The word “Pict” does not appear in the book, but we can read that “history, tradition, linguistics, and ethnology conspire to fortify the conclusions that, in prehistoric times, all Europe was overspread by the Mongoloid (Turanian) race, of which remnants have survived to our own times in the persons of the Basques, Finns, Esths, Lapps, and some smaller tribes.” As to their physical description, it conforms to that of the writers we have already mentioned: “a race of people, small in stature, dark visaged, and oval-faced – fond of war and the chase, yet having a rude system of agriculture.”
Allen’s book, of course, makes no mention of a possible Atlantean or Lemurian connection for the Picts, and his Turanians are not described as the “First Race,” coming from America. Howard, though, did not hesitate to use some of Allen’s conclusions to his own ends. For instance, Allen devotes his tenth chapter to the mysterious “Mound Builders” of America, and offers the following commentary concerning a mysterious effigy-mound:
“In this case, however, nearly all observers conclude that it was a religious work. Mr. MacLean, after describing these three figures, propounds this query: ‘Does the frog represent the creative, the egg the passive, and the serpent the destructive power of nature?’ Not a few writers, though not acquainted with the presence of the frog-shaped figure, have been struck with the combination of the egg and the serpent, that plays such an important part in the mythology of the Old World. We are told that the serpent, separate or in combination with the circle, egg, or globe, has been a predominant symbol among many primitive nations.”
Howard draws upon this in Men of the Shadows, thus reinforcing his mythical connection between America, Atlantis and the Picts:
“The ancient took a flaming brand from the fire and with a motion incredibly swift, inscribed the circle and triangle in the air. And strangely, the mystic symbol seemed to hover in the air, for a moment, a ring of fire.
“‘The circle without beginning,’ droned the wizard. ‘The circle unending. The Snake with its tail in its mouth, that encompasses the Universe. And the Mystic Three. Beginning, passivity, ending. Creation, preservation, destruction. Destruction, preservation, creation. The Frog, the Egg, and the Serpent. The Serpent, the Egg, and the Frog.’”
In depicting the contest of wills between Bran and the wizard, Howard seems to suggest more than a personal struggle for power between two men. Rather, the two are the focal points through which unseen powers seek to loose themselves upon the world. “The wizard was the Stone Age typified; the chief, the coming civilization. The destiny of the Pictish race, perhaps, hinged on that struggle.” The wizard warns Bran that if he wins “the Serpent coils again”: the serpent, as usual with Howard, is associated with the enemy, with destruction. Bran, on the contrary, is associated with the “coming civilization.”
It is interesting to note that in Men of the Shadows, and in the earlier playlet, Bran Mak Morn, Bran is referred as a chief. It is not until later in 1926, and the stories of Kull, that the theme of kingship, which we can see as, precisely, a step toward “coming civilization,” is first dealt with. It will be almost exactly four years before we see Bran Mak Morn again, this time as a king. It is in the Kull stories that we next find the Picts.
The Picts of the Kull series are barbarian allies of the ancient kingdom of Valusia. In the first published Kull story, The Shadow Kingdom, which Howard worked at sporadically between the summer of 1926 and September 1927, we learn that Kull, as an Atlantean, is a “hereditary enemy of all Picts,” though as king of Valusia he is their most important ally. He and a Pictish warrior, Brule, though their first meeting was marked by “mutual tribal enmity seething beneath their cloak of formality,” come to be fast friends in this series, and on more than one occasion it is Brule who saves Kull’s life. The Kull stories are set in the far recesses of an imaginative past, long before the great cataclysms that supposedly destroyed Atlantis and Lemuria, so the “historical” Picts of the early tales were now adopted by Howard as a means of connection, not just with “ancient times,” but with the world of fantastic adventures through which Kull, and later Conan, would move. Howard completed 10 stories of Kull (including two in which he is merely an offstage character), a poem, and began three stories which he left unfinished, most written between 1927 and early 1929. Of these, only three stories (the first, Exile of Atlantis, and the two in which Kull is offstage) and the poem do not include Brule the Spear-Slayer and the Picts.
Some time in 1928, Howard wrote a story entitled The Little People in which the Picts are featured, with inspiration from yet another writer added into the mix. In this story, set in the modern day, a brother and sister, Americans named Costigan, are in England during a European tour. When his young sister expresses disgust for the “foolishness” of Arthur Machen’s The Shining Pyramid, which he considers a “masterpiece of outré litrature,” Costigan lectures her, telling the story of the Picts essentially as outlined in The Romance of Early British Life. But the reference to Machen’s The Shining Pyramid suggests that Howard has now taken the Welsh writer’s conception of The Little People and added it to his conception of the Picts.
In The Shining Pyramid, two Englishmen investigate the puzzling disappearance of a young woman from a local village, and ultimately are horrified witnesses when she is burned to death in a sacrificial ceremony by a host of loathsome underground dwellers, “things made in the form of men but stunted like children hideously deformed, the faces with the almond eyes burning with evil and unspeakable lusts.” Their flesh is described as a “ghastly yellow,” and they speak to one another in “tones of horrible sibilance.” In explaining to his friend Vaughan the chain of deductions that led them to that horrible scene, Dyson explains: “I remembered what people had said about Annie Trevor’s disappearance, that she had been ‘taken by the fairies’.... And the hint came of the old name of fairies, ‘the little people,’ and the very probable belief that they represent a tradition of the prehistoric Turanian inhabitants of the country, who were cave dwellers: and then I realised with a shock that I was looking for a being under four feet in height, accustomed to live in darkness, possessing stone instruments, and familiar with the Mongolian cast of features!”