CHAPTER FIVE

ATLANTIS

Smith’s story-cycle of Atlantis contains at most five stories; yet these tales and this cycle represent some of his best and most successful work. The stories themselves are more varied in type than in any other story-cycles. One is science-fiction (“A Voyage to Sfanomoë”); one is a poignant fable (“The Last Incantation”); two are horror stories (“The Death of Malygris” and “The Double Shadow”); and the fifth is a dream-tale (“A Vintage from Atlantis”). In addition to these stories, Smith also wrote one prose-poem about Atlantis, and several of his early poems make reference to it as a symbol of doom and loss.89

Smith’s imagination centered on Poseidonis, which was, in his words, “the last isle of foundering Atlantis”, the final remnant of the fabled lost continent of the Atlantic that sank in some prehistoric cataclysm. The legend of Atlantis is first found in Plato, and in­numerable writers through the ages have retold its story, adding or disregarding details as fit their purposes. One of these writers, H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine, added the idea that Atlantis did not sink in a single cataclysm, but in successive cataclysms, the last remnant to survive being called Poseidonis. That Blavatsky’s work is the direct source of Smith’s use of Poseidonis as a story-cycle setting is evidenced in his letters.90 Additionally, Blavatsky wrote of Atlantis as a nation of wicked magicians, as the birth-place of alchemy—ideas very similar to those used by Smith.

Atlantis/Poseidonis is a setting that, though rich in history and culture, is both fallen and doomed. In “A Voyage to Sfanomoë” (1930, LW), the inhabitants are fully aware that the final cataclysm, which will at last draw Poseidonis itself below the waves, is destined to happen in the present generation. The story tells of two brother-scientists, Hotar and Evidon, who toil in the building of a spacecraft, in which they hope to escape their doomed isle and to journey to the planet Sfanomoë (Venus). On the long voyage to Sfanomoë, they read the classics of Atlantean literature and argue and discuss the problems of philosophy and science. They grow old. But landing on Sfanomoë, they forget their cares and their pursuits; with the innocence of children, they explore the new world, finding flowers everywhere. Quickly though, the pollen in the air settles upon them and sprouts and grows. The brothers die with a strange joy, without pain, becoming themselves a part of the endless floral landscape. Though they die, they do so in happiness, and it is interesting that Hotar and Evidon—both ardent scientists and inventors—are portrayed so sympathetically throughout the story.

“The Last Incantation” (1929, LW) was the first production of Smith’s major story-writing period, and it contains some of his best and most poetic evocations of the emotions of loss. In this story the ar­chimage Malygris, weary in his high tower, gropes among the “shadows of memories” to recall his love for the maiden Nylissa, who died on the eve of their wedding day. After failing to receive advice from one of his familiars, a viper, Malygris summons the shade of his lost love. As her apparition stands before him, he begins to doubt in his heart that this is the same Nylissa whom he had loved so long ago:

He could not be sure, and the growing doubt was succeeded by a leaden dismay, by a grim despondency that choked his heart as with ashes. His scrutiny became searching and exigent and cruel, and momently the phantom was less and less the perfect semblance of Nylissa.... The soul of Malygris grew sick again with age and despair and the death of his evanescent hope.

Dismissing the apparition, Malygris reproves his familiar, who provides the moral of the tale, a last bit of wisdom which Malygris had not possessed: “‘It was indeed Nylissa whom you had summoned and saw... but no necromantic spell could recall for you your own lost youth or the fervent and guileless heart that loved Nylissa.... This, my master, was the thing that you had to learn.’“

“The Death of Malygris” (1933, LW) furthers the sorcerer’s story. King Gadeiron summons twelve wizards to a secret council, where they discuss the possibility that Malygris is dead. The King’s sorcerer, Maranapion, has spied upon Malygris with the far-seeing eye of a Cyclops and has discovered that, though his familiars attend him still, Malygris has not moved or stirred from his high throne in a year and a month: “he sits defying the worm, still undecayed and incorrupt.”

Many of the sorcerers fear to move against Malygris, and some depart the council. At this point Smith gives an interlude wherein two of these men approach Malygris on their own; they enter the wizard’s chamber, but a voice issuing from the corpse of Malygris lays a curse upon them. They dwindle in size and are struck down by one of the familiars, the viper of the previous story.91 Thus, Smith foreshadows for his readers the upcoming doom of the King and his cohorts, who, meanwhile, have created a simulacrum of Malygris and have caused it to decay; through the power of sympathetic magic the same decay has been brought about in the body of Malygris.

But Maranapion deems his victory incomplete until he himself looks upon the rotting face of Malygris. So he and the king and the other sorcerers proceed to the tower of the archimage, where the still form upon the throne curses them: as they had made Malygris decay, so shall they decay—but while still living, and all in the space of an hour. Smith gives a gruesome account of their ends:

...each was aware of his own limbs that rotted beneath him, pace by pace, and felt the quick sloughing of his flesh in corruption from the bone. Crying out with tongues that shrivelled ‘ere the cry was done, they fell down on the floor of the chamber. Life lingered in them.... In the dark agony of their live corruption, they tossed feebly to and fro...till their brains were turned to gray mold, and the sinews were parted from their bones, and the marrow was dried up.

“The Double Shadow” (1932, OST) is among Smith’s most carefully wrought stories, though it suffers from a wordiness and dryness of tone that recalls the excesses of the Hyperborean series. The story is a first-person narrative, the record of a young sorcerer, Pharpetron, apprentice to the great Avyctes, the sole surviving pupil of Malygris. The style of the narrative is consistent with that of a pedantic, scholarly student of the occult, but is nonetheless rather cold and unsatisfying.

Smith used a writing-technique in the story that was often employed by his friend H. P. Lovecraft: the gradual crescendo of the excitement of the story to a climax in the last sentence. The first paragraph of the story is used to set the tone for what is to follow:

My name is Pharpetron, among those who have known me in Poseidonis; but even I, the last and most forward pupil of the wise Avyctes, know not the name of that which I am fated to become ere to-morrow. Therefore, by the ebbing silver lamps, in my master’s marble house above the loud, ever-ravening sea, I write this tale with a hasty hand, scrawling an ink of wizard-virtue on the grey, priceless, antique parchment of dragons. And having written, I shall enclose the pages in a sealed cylinder of orichalchum, and shall cast the cylinder from a high window into the sea, lest that which I am doomed to become should haply destroy the writing.... Having read my story, men will learn the truth and take warning; and no man’s feet, henceforth, will approach the pale and demon­ haunted house of Avyctes.

Thus, at the very beginning the ending is obvious—and that the writer, with whom readers sympathize, is doomed. The narrative exists to tell us why.

Pharpetron and Avyctes have discovered a mirror-bright tablet, writ with alien ciphers. In his thirst for knowledge, Avyctes seeks the key to these ciphers, summoning up the ghosts of sorcerers from the distant past and inquiring of them. In a very effective distancing-technique, the sorcerers learn from a “dim, tenuous ghost of a sorcerer from prehistoric years”, that the ciphers are those of an ancient serpent-people, who were only “a dubious legend” even in the ghost’s long-lost age. Avyctes sends this ghost deeper into the past to find the meaning of the ciphers.

This writing, they learn, constitutes some kind of spell, an invoca­tion, but with no corresponding spell of renunciation. Nevertheless, the wizard and his young assistant perform the rite, together with an animated mummy, Oigos, but nothing seems to come in answer to the summons. Many days pass, and the invocation is forgotten.

Some time later it is discovered that Avyctes is followed by a double shadow: in addition to his own shadow, there is another, one of unearthly hue and monstrous form, impervious to any spells. When it finally touches the shadow of Avyctes, the wizard becomes the un­speakable thing that cast the strange shadow. The same fate overtakes Oigos, showing that there is a power at work beyond even the laws of death. Lastly the shadow approaches Pharpetron, and he writes:

...the horror that was Avyctes, and the second horror that was Oigos, have left me not, and neither do they tremble. And with eyes that are not eyes, they seem to brood and watch, waiting till I too shall become as they. And their stillness is more terrible than if they had rended me limb from limb.... I have shut myself in the room of volumes and books and have written this account.... And now I must make an end, and enclose this writing in a sealed cylinder of orichalchum, and fling it forth to drift upon the wave. For the space between my shadow and the shadow of the horror is straightened moment­Iy...and the space is no wider than the thickness of a wizard’s pen.

The story ends here, and the reader is left as much in the dark about the fate of the doomed as the doomed are themselves. The atmosphere of the unknown remains inviolate.

“A Vintage from Atlantis” (1931, AY) itself contains no references to Poseidonis, and indeed, were it not for Smith’s own listing of it with the other Atlantean stories (under the heading “TaIes of Atlantis”) in his Black Book, one could plausibly argue for its exclusion from the story-cycle. The setting for the story is historic rather than imaginary; the action takes place during the time of pirates and the Spanish supremacy on the open seas.

Again we have a first-person narrative, but this time it is the tale of a survivor. The tale tells of the discovery in an island cove of an ancient jar of wine. Drinking the wine, the sailors see a vision of sunken Atlantis, which seems to beckon to them; and reaching out to enter the world they see, the men tread into the ocean and are drowned. One sailor escapes this fate only because he had drunk less of the wine than the others, and lives to see the vision fade away:

“Slowly the waters darkened above the fading spires and walls; and the midnight blackened upon the sea; and [Atlantis] was lost like the vanished bubbles of wine”.

89. Atlantis is central to the poems “Atlantis” and “Tolometh”; the prose poem is “From a Letter” and is remarkable as an invocation of the splendor of Atlantis. In addition Smith began a romantic play, “The Fugitives” (SS), set in Poseidonis.

90. “One can disregard the [tenets of] Theosophy, and make good use of the stuff about elder continents, etc. I got my own ideas about Hyperborea, Poseidonis, etc., from such sources, and then turned my imagination loose” (letter to Lovecraft, 1 March 1933, #32 of LL).

91. This scene was illustrated by Smith for the story’s original Weird Tales appearance; he considered this particular pen-and-ink draw­ing his finest rendering of a scene from his own tales.