Smith wrote to August Derleth that “‘Necromancy in Naat’ seems the best of my more recently published weirds; though Wright forced me to mutilate the ending.”6 CAS cut the story by thirteen hundred words, eliminating much descriptive material. The biggest change that Smith made was to eliminate suggestions that Yadar and Dalili were proving Andrew Marvell wrong.7 Thanks to an anonymous private collector who generously provided us with a copy of the original version, we have been able to restore most of these cuts, leaving those changes that we thought Smith made out of choice, not compulsion, most notably the beautiful words with which the story ends.
1. CAS, letter to DAW, February 28, 1935 (SL 261).
2. FW, letter to CAS, February 11, 1935 (ms, JHL).
3. CAS, postcard to HPL, April 5, 1935 (ms, private collection).
4. See “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales (October 1936), p. 384.
5. WT, letter to CAS, March 29, 1937 (ms, JHL).
6. CAS, letter to AWD, April 13, 1937 (CSL 287).
7. See Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress:” “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace.”
The Treader of the Dust
Clark Ashton Smith’s story “Xeethra” is prefaced by a quotation from an imaginary book entitled The Testaments of Carnamagos. This addition to the library of eldritch tomes stocked by the imaginations of H. P. Lovecraft’s circle of writers was first mentioned in Smith’s never-completed novel The Infernal Star. Smith went into much greater detail concerning the book and its disturbing history in “The Treader of the Dust,” which he completed on February 15, 1935. Wright surprised Smith “by taking ‘The Treader of the Dust’ offhand, without revision or re-submission.”1 In his letter of acceptance, in which he offered Smith thirty dollars for the story, Wright told Smith that “I thought at first, while I was reading the story, that it would have a solution something like that given in ‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’ by Ambrose Bierce, but I was all wet in that surmise.”2 “The Treader of the Dust” appeared in the August 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Smith included it in LW. The text is based upon that of a typescript deposited in Smith’s papers at JHL.
1. CAS, letter to DAW, February 28. 1935 (SL 261).
2. FW, letter to CAS, February 22, 1935 (ms, JHL).
The Black Abbot of Puthuum
“The Black Abbot of Puthuum” is one of three stories that Clark Ashton Smith submitted to Weird Tales in February 1935, but, like “Necromancy in Naat,” it was rejected by editor Farnsworth Wright.1 The idea for the story, another tale of Zothique, dates back to 1932 or earlier since the story was outlined in the Black Book several entries before that for “The Colossus of Ylourgne” (see note for “Xeethra”):
Two guardsmen and a palace-eunuch, bringing a purchased girl to the king of Yoros, find themselves lost among the enchantments of a strange desert. The enchantments lead them to a weird monastery inhabited by twelve black monks all of whom exactly resemble their superior, who is distinguished from them only by his garb. In the night, one of the guardsmen, wakeful and suspicious, steals from the chamber to which he and his fellow have been assigned. Wandering about the monastery, he stumbles on an altar to the dark demon, Thasaidon, and apprehends that the monks are devil-worshippers. Upon the altar are charred fragments of flesh and bone. Stealing back toward his room, the guardsman hears an outcry from the room where the girl sleeps, guarded by the eunuch. Rushing in, he meets the fleeing eunuch, whose eyes are wide with terror… In the gloom, above the girl’s bed, he sees a vague monstrous incubus about to settle upon her. The thing seems to float on black voluminous wings. He attacks it with his sword, and the incubus resolves itself into the black abbot. Then the figure seems to multiply before his eyes and the chamber is suddenly filled with the monks, who drag down the guardsman. His companion, who is an archer, enters at this moment and shoots at the abbot (standing apart from the melee) an arrows [
sic
] that had been dipped in the mummia of a saint, and was therefore fatal to sorcerers or demons. It is his last arrow, the others having been discharged at desert phantoms. It slays the abbot and the twelve monks vanish. The abbot’s body decays immediately, in a non-human fashion, and its long finger-nails slough away from the putrefying mass. One of the guardsmen puts the nails into his helmet, and he and his fellow draw lots for the girl. (The eunuch’s throat had been ripped open by the abbot.)
2
While writing the story Smith added a comic subplot that revealed how the girl, Rubalsa, had been stolen at birth by the nomads, and included another character who turned out to be her father. She is identified by an amulet that was hanging around her neck when a baby (Smith anticipates “the great god Awto” by having the amulet bear the image of “Yuckla, patron of mirth and laughter”). When he revised the story for resubmission to Wright, he eliminated these elements, which cut approximately fifteen hundred words. Wright accepted the story.3 Smith received seventy-eight dollars for the story after it appeared in Weird Tales’ March 1936 issue.4 At that time H. P. Lovecraft wrote to Smith that the story was “tremendously fascinating—full of a malign sense of hidden horror & aeon-old charnel secrets. I doubt if anything else in the issue can approach it.”5 (Lovecraft had only read Smith’s story when he wrote that, as that issue contained the first appearance of Henry Kuttner’s “The Graveyard Rats” as well as the penultimate installment of Robert E. Howard’s Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon.) Smith included the story in GL.
It is the opinion of the editors that Smith was correct in eliminating the romantic subplot. It noticeably detracted from the atmosphere and suspense and did not contribute to the tale’s unity of effect. The excised material is included in Appendix 4.
1. CAS, letter to DAW, February 28, 1935 (SL 262).
2. BB item 47.
3. The original version of “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” was given by Smith to R. H. Barlow. It eventually came into the possession of Smith friend and book seller Roy A. Squires. Terence A. McVicker published this version as an exquisitely printed chapbook in 2007.
4. WT, letter to CAS, February 25, 1937 (ms, JHL).
5. HPL, letter to CAS, March 23, 1936 (ms, JHL).