CHAPTER THREE
HYPERBOREA
The Hyperborean series of stories, consisting of ten completed fantasies, acts in some ways as a foil to the Zothique. One obvious contrast is in temporal setting, for Smith lays these two story-cycles in imaginary continents at opposite extremes of Earth’s habitability. Hyperborea is depicted as the earliest home of mankind, a polar land whose northern tip, Mhu Thulan, corresponds roughly with present-day Greenland. Civilization flourished there from the Miocene age, some fifteen million years ago, to the glacial Pleistocene, one million years in the past.73 The first entry in the Hyperborean sequence, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”, was written late in 1929; the final entry, “The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles”, is a sequel to the first, composed twenty-eight years later. Between these bracketing tales fall “The Door to Saturn”, “The Testament of Athammaus”, “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan”, “Ubbo-Sathla”, “The White Sybil”, “The Ice-Demon”, “The Coming of the White Worm”, and “The Seven Geases”. In addition Smith plotted “The Hyperborean City”, “The Shadow from the Sepulcher”, and “The House of Haon-Dor” as part of the series, and produced a partial draft of the last-named piece.
Partly as a result of the contrast in setting, the overall atmosphere of the Hyperborean series is quite at odds with that of Zothique. The latter stories are steeped in an ambience of senescence and decay, and all events take place under a pall of weariness and fatalism. Yet, in the days of Hyperborea, the world is new and fresh, the land is fertile and overgrown, and humanity is a relative newcomer. The people of Hyperborea reflect the vitality of their age, for on the whole they are vigorous, greedy, fanatical, pompous, possessed by their self-declared grandeur, and thus differ sharply from the languid and vein-drawn sybarites of Zothique.
Smith had low regard for the egocentric (or anthropocentric) attitudes that his Hyperborean characters exhibit, so it is not surprising to see such attitudes as pride, bravado, and self-righteousness ridiculed in these tales. This ridicule introduces a note of humor that is almost completely absent from somber and doom-filled Zothique; Smith recognized this himself, saying that the Hyperborean cycle stood out from his other work through its “marked ironic content”.74 Not all of this humor was designed to make a point—Smith used the Hyperborean stories as an opportunity to write in a generally funnier vein.
The writing style found in these tales supports the humorous and ironic content. The prose is intentionally pretentious, so as to mock pretension—a technique found more recently in the work of Jack Vance. We encounter elegantly depicted scenes of great silliness, absurd speeches delivered by sagacious characters, humor that is droll, dry, quiet, and above all, mock solemn. The escape of the persecuted wizard Eibon in “The Door to Saturn”, for example, is presented in the following fashion: “Envisaging in thought the various refinements and complications of torture which [the Inquisitor] Morghi would have prepared [for him], he sprang through the opening into Cykranosh with an agility that was quite juvenile for a wizard of mature years”. Even in scenes tinged with horror, Smith’s sly smile shows through. In “The Testament of Athammaus”, the once-executed criminal Knygathin Zhaum returns to the streets of Commoriom and commits a foul deed: “He had eaten no less a personage than one of the eight judges [of his trial]; and, not satisfied with picking the bones of this rather obese individual, had devoured by way of dessert the more outstanding facial features of one of the police who had tried to deter him from finishing his main course”.
In certain instances, this particular style of writing serves to diminish the impact and vitality of Smith’s work and to lessen its distinctiveness. In the more ironic of the Hyperborean stories, such as “The Door to Saturn” and “The Seven Geases”, Smith is guilty of writing the kind of prose his critics habitually accuse him of writing—prose that is verbose, circumlocutious, over-elegant, distant, and non-visual. Smith wrote these stories in a language of formal hyperbole, a language designed to highlight and underscore the pomposity and empty pride of his characters, and the solemn cadence of the prose is meant to contrast with the absurdity of their actions and beliefs. But regardless of the motivations for this style of writing, an unwanted side effect is the loss of the color and sensuality that distinguishes Smith’s other fiction, the loss of those qualities that single him out as a poet among writers.
The mixture of humor and horror that characterizes this series was manifest from the start. “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (1929, LW) relates an adventure of the two thieves Satampra Zeiros and Tirouv Ompallios, in which they travel to the deserted city of Commoriom, once the capitol of the continent, with the intention of looting it “at the expense of a few dead kings or gods”. The ruins retain an evil and sinister reputation, and only their impoverished circumstances convince the thieves to make such a raid. Their journey through the jungle to Commoriom is fraught with anxiety, although relief from their state of mind does not prove entirely elusive:
Each of us took a liberal draft [of palm-wine], and presently the jungle became less awesome; and we wondered why we had allowed the silence and the gloom, the watchful bats and the brooding immensity, to weigh upon our spirits for even a brief while; and I think that after a second draft we began to sing.
They reach Commoriom and enter the squat, forbidding temple of the pre-human god Tsathoggua. Within they find a wide basin filled with some black, gelid substance. To their horror, the liquid begins to stir, and from it “an uncouth amorphous head with dull and bulging eyes arose gradually on an ever lengthening neck.... Then two arms—if one could call them arms—likewise rose inch by inch, and we saw that the thing was not, as we had thought, a creature immersed in the liquid, but that the liquid itself had put forth this hideous neck and head”. Then begins a nightmare chase through the surrounding marshes with the monster in constant pursuit, a chase that ends hours later back at the temple. Tirouv Ompallios takes refuge in the basin while Satampra Zeiros hides behind a statue of Tsathoggua. Entering the temple, the creature “reared itself up like a sooty pillar...gathering all its bulk in an immense mass on a sort of tapering tail, and then like a lapsing wave it fell upon Tirouv Ompallios. Its whole body seemed to open and form an immense mouth as it sank down from sight”. Zeiros attempts to leave the fane as quietly as possible, feeling that “it would be highly injudicious to disturb the entity in the bowl while it was digesting Tirouv Ompallios”, but is discovered at the last moment and loses his right hand to the creature.
This story is notable not only for being the first of the Hyperborean tales, but also for marking the first appearance of Tsathoggua,75 an entity that plays much the same unifying role in the Hyperborean series that Thasaidon plays in Zothique. He is
one of the elder gods, who receives no longer any worship from men, but before whose ashen altars, people say, the furtive and ferocious beasts of the jungle, the ape, the great sloth and the long-toothed tiger, have sometimes been seen to make obeisance and have been heard to howl or whine their inarticulate prayers.
This demon god (whose name is sometimes given as Zhothaqquah, Sodaqui, or Sadoqua) is described in the story as “squat and pot-bellied...his head was more like a monstrous toad than a deity, and his whole body was covered with...short fur, giving somehow the vague suggestion of both the bat and the sloth.... In truth he was not a comely or personable sort of god”. Smith sketched this initial vision of Tsathoggua on the margin of a manuscript page from the holograph first draft of “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”, and the result is something like a malign Buddha wearing a tasseled crown or skull-cap.76
Smith had intended to write a further (and obviously earlier) adventure of Satampra Zeiros and Tirouv Ompallios, but “The Shadow from the Sepulcher” (BB) never went beyond its synopsis. He did complete “The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles” (TSS), however, which tells of a later exploit of Zeiros with his new companion, Vixeela. This slight but enjoyable tale is told in a style that is simpler and more fluid than many of the other Hyperborean stories, reflecting Smith’s late-in-life move away from what he felt was the wordiness of his earlier works. He composed the piece during the period 1952-1957, and produced an extensive string of intermediate drafts, several of which begin with the poem “Lament for Vixeela”:
Vixeela, daughter of beauty and of doom!
Thy name, an invocation, calls to light
Dead moons, and draws from overdated night
The rosy-bosomed spectre of delight.
Like some delaying sunset, brave with gold,
The glamors and the perils shared of old
Outsoar the shrunken empire of the mould.
A one-time priestess of the god Leniqua, Vixeela helps Zeiros conduct a raid on the temple’s wealth, which consists of thirty-nine golden chastity belts worn by the priestesses. These priestesses are, in reality, a harem of beautiful “virgins” held prisoner within the temple, and each is sold into nightly prostitution by the priests. Don Herron has noted that Smith “used ridicule to point out some of the hypocrisy prevalent in many organized religions”,77 and the humor in “The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles” is aimed at just that target: “It will thus be seen that the virginity of the priestesses was nominal; but its frequent and repeated sale was regarded as a meritorious act of sacrifice to the god”.78
“The Door to Saturn” (1930; LW) carries on the ridicule of religion and religious intolerance. The story was a personal favorite of Smith’s “on account of its literary style”,79 but in truth its prose is some of his most distant and hyperbolic. Designed in part to aid in the lampooning of the zealous and pompous Inquisitor Morghi, the writing style nonetheless works against the tale by reducing the degree to which the reader becomes involved in its events. The story concerns the wizard Eibon, author of The Book of Eibon, a magical grimoire mentioned many times throughout the Hyperborean sequence (in fact, “The Coming of the White Worm” is presented as the ninth chapter of this book). He is sought by Morghi as a religious heretic but escapes to Saturn using magic supplied him by Zhothaqquah. Morghi and his raiding party are disappointed to find the wizard’s house empty, “because there seemed to be no early prospect of trying out the ingenious agonies, the intricately harrowing ordeals which they had devised for Eibon with such care”.
On Saturn, Eibon meets a creature that he presumes to be Zhothaqquah’s uncle, Hziulquoigmnzhah, on the basis of its eating habits: “the creature drank of the (lake of) fluid metal in a hearty and copious manner that served to convince Eibon of its godship; for surely no being of an inferior biologic order would quench its thirst with a beverage so extraordinary”. The creature utters three unknown words and departs; Eibon concludes that he has heard some portentous prophecy and has been appointed the god’s messenger. Morghi follows Eibon to Saturn and appears on the scene, but the two agree to set their feud aside for a time and travel together. With great solemnity they set out across the Saturnian fields, seeking to deliver the god’s message to somebody.
A host of strange peoples and creatures are encountered in their wanderings. At one point the pair are given the opportunity to become husbands to the national mother of a headless race, the Blemphroims:
Eibon and Morghi were quite overcome by the proposed eugenic honor. Thinking of the mountainous female they had seen, Morghi was prone to remember his sacerdotal vows of celibacy and Eibon was eager to take similar vows upon himself without delay.... The sorcerer temporized by making a few queries anent the legal and social status which would be enjoyed by Morghi and himself.... And the naive Blemphroims told him that this would be a matter of brief concern; that after completing their marital duties the husbands were always served to the national mother in the form of ragouts and other culinary preparations.
They make a hasty escape from the land of the Blemphroims before dinner is served, and during the flight “whenever [Morghi] paused to recover his breath, Eibon would say to him: ‘Think of the national mother,’ and Morghi would climb the next acclivity like an agile but somewhat asthmatic mountain-goat”.
Eventually they come across a people capable of understanding the god’s message, which to their disappointment and chagrin translates effectively as “be off with you”. What they had taken to be a statement of godly portent was no more than Hziulquoigmnzhah’s offhand dismissal.
Eibon and Morghi choose to remain with these people, the Ydheems, although Morghi is not entirely content: “Though the Ydheems were religious, they did not carry their devotional fervor to the point of bigotry or intolerance; so it was quite impossible to start an inquisition among them”. The story concludes by explaining that, back in Hyperborea, the disappearance of Morghi had been attributed to the power of Zhothaqquah, and that this had promoted “a widespread revival of the dark worship of Zhothaqquah...in the last century before the onset of the great Ice Age”.
This ending reiterates that Hyperborea, like Zothique, is a doomed land, destined to suffer a frozen death beneath mile-thick glaciers. The slow encroachment of this doom is evident within the series as well: lands that are fair in one tale are ice-covered in another. This progression of doom permits a rough chronological ordering of the works in the series, and Lin Carter’s conjectural ordering80 seems an ingenious job.
“The Seven Geases” (1933, LW), like “The Door to Saturn”, is a walking-tour through fantastic realms, told in a dry and formal manner, and featuring an ironic treatment of a self-important main character. Lord Ralibar Vooz is described as “a high magistrate of Commoriom and third cousin to King Homquat”; it is no accident that Smith juxtaposes the officious title of “high magistrate” against a distant and meager relationship to a humorously named king. Vooz is a stubborn and bellicose bravo (“it was not in his nature to abandon any enterprise, no matter how trivial, without reaching the set goal”) who stumbles upon a sorcerer in the midst of an incantation. When berated for his intrusion, Vooz responds, “How now, varlet.... Who are you to speak so churlishly to a magistrate of Commoriom and a cousin to King Homquat? I advise you to curb your insolence”, to which the sorcerer replies, “I care not if you are the magistrate of all swinedom or a cousin to the king of dogs”. The sorcerer lays a “geis” or curse upon Vooz that compels him to descend into Mount Voormithadreth—home of the sub-human Voormis, the spider-god Atlach-Nacha, a race of ancient serpent-men, and other odd creatures and individuals—and offer himself to Lord Tsathoggua. Once inside the mountain, Vooz is passed along as a gift from entity to entity, and in every case he is looked upon as either a worthless toy or an offering made in bad taste. After his adventures, Smith simply has him fall into a bottomless abyss.
By contrast, “The White Sybil” (1932, AY) leaves the coldly formal prose and ironic asides behind and returns to the poetic, visual prose of Smith’s finest work. The emotional and thematic inspiration for this piece comes from two prose poems, “The Muse of Hyperborea”, composed late in 1929 (despite its title, this bit of fancy bears no direct relation to the Hyperborean story-cycle), and the earlier “The Traveller”. To see this latter connection, check the memorable opening paragraph of “The White Sybil” against the beginning of “The Traveller”:
Tortha, the poet, with strange austral songs in his heart, and the umber of high and heavy suns on his face, had come back to Cerngoth, in Mhu Thulan, by the Hyperborean sea. Far had he wandered in the quest of that alien beauty which had fled always before him like the horizon. Beyond Commoriom of the white, numberless spires, and beyond the marsh-grown jungles to the south of Commoriom, he had floated on nameless rivers, and had crossed the half-legendary realm of Tscho Vulpanomi, upon whose diamond-sanded, ruby-graveled shores an ignescent ocean was said to beat forever with fiery spume. (“The White Sybil”)
Stranger, where goest thou...with thy brow that alien suns have darkened.... Wanderest thou in search of cities greater than Rome, with...fanes more white than the summer clouds, or the foam of Hyperboreal seas? Or farest thou to the lands...lit by the baleful and calamitous beacons of volcanoes? Or seekest thou an extremer shore, where the red and monstrous lilies are like innumerable flambeaux held aloft on the verge of the waveless waters? (“The Traveller”)
Like “the traveller” of the prose poem, who seeks in vain the beauty of his former home, Tortha has searched the world for an ill-defined beauty, a splendor removed from mortality and the terrestrial. He finally encounters this beauty in the White Sybil, a strange woman-like entity thought to be “a messenger of unknown outland gods”, a bringer of doom and bearer of dire prophecies. (In “The of Satampra Zeiros” she is said to have caused the desertion of Commoriom through the utterance of such a prophecy, although this is contradicted in “The Testament of Athammaus”). In appearance she is pale, lovely, insubstantial, “like an apparition descended from the moon...a creature of snow and norland light, with eyes like moon-pervaded pools”. Tortha sees her fleetingly in the streets of Cerngoth, and “in that single glimpse he...found the personification of all the vague ideals and unfixed longings that had drawn him from land to land. Here was the eluding strangeness he had sought on alien breasts and waters, and beyond horizons of fire-vomiting mountains. Here was the veiled Star, whose name and luster he had never known”. The effect she has on the poet makes it clear that the Sybil and the Muse of Hyperborea were one and the same conception to Smith:
[Tortha] seemed to hear a whisper from boreal solitudes...sharp as ice-bourn air...that sang of inviolate horizons and the chill glory of lunar auroras above continents impregnable to man. (“The White Sybil”)
But at whiles her whisper comes to me, like a chill unearthly wind that...has flown over ultimate horizons of ice-bound deserts.... And hearing her far, infrequent whisper, I behold a vision of vast auroras, on continents that are wider than the world. (“The Muse of Hyperborea”)
As with VaIzain in “Morthylla”, love had been “no more than a passing agitation of the senses” for Tortha; but after his single glimpse of the Sybil he becomes her secret worshipper. He dreams of her “such dreams as the moon might inspire in a moth...dreams through which the Sybil moved like a woman-shaped flame”. (Beyond the obvious “moth and flame” motif of this passage, note the sense of distance and separation imparted by the “moon and moth” imagery: the moon is physically remote from the world of the moth, and the moth is infinitely far from comprehending the moon, and can only dream brokenly of it.) After his first glimpse of the Sybil, the everyday world becomes pale and inconsequential for Tortha, and he finds his reams of poetry “void and without meaning...like the sere leaves of a bygone year”.
However, one day he sees the Sybil again, and she seems to beckon him to follow her into the high mountains. Tortha pursues her through a terrific snow storm but loses his way, and eventually passes out. He awakens in another world, like “the inmost heart of some boreal paradise...and from the bank of blossoms on which she reclined, the Sybil rose to receive her worshipper”.
Tortha listens in rapture to the speech of the White Sybil, although “much was forgotten afterwards.... It was like a light too radiant to be endured”. Nothing of what she tells him is directly presented to the reader, but what is hinted at bears a definite relationship to Smith’s own desires and fancies:
Something there was in her speech of time and its mystery; something of that which lies forever beyond time; something of the grey shadow of doom that waits upon world and sun; something of love, that pursues an elusive, perishing fire; of death, the soil from which all flowers spring; of life, that is a mirage on the frozen void.
This is, in short, a catalog of Smith’s deepest fixations and fascinations: his poet’s interest in “the ultimate, eternal Verities” of existence81; in doomed and dying worlds, like his creations Zothique, Mars, and Hyperborea; in the ephemerality of love; in the vampiric bond of life upon death; in the set of illusions we call reality.
So enchanted is Tortha by the speech of the Sybil that he confesses his love and seeks to embrace her.
Dreadfully, unutterably, she seemed to change in his arms as he clasped her—to become a frozen corpse that had lain for ages in a floe-built tomb—a leper-white mummy in whose frosted eyes he read the horror of the ultimate void. Then she was a thing that had no form or name—a dark corruption that flowed and eddied in his arms—a hueless dust, a flight of gleaming atoms....
For all that the poet’s worship is true and his heart pure, Tortha is not worthy to possess or contain the alien beauty of the Sybil. He is but a mortal human, a denizen of a far lower plane than that of the Sybil; like “the moth and the moon” they are of worlds impossibly distant.
Tortha is returned to Earth, but “ever afterward there was a cloudy dimness in his mind...like the dazzlement in eyes that have looked on some insupportable light”—he has fallen from grace, has lost a glory beyond life. In time he meets a simple maiden, Illara, whom he mistakes for the Sybil “in the darkness that had come upon him”; and Smith concludes the tale with a slight—and somewhat jarring—bit of drollery: “Illara, in her way, was content, being not the rust of mortal women whose lover had been faithful to a divine illusion”.
“The Ice-Demon” (1932, AY) was the next story Smith composed after finishing “The White Sybil”, and it is amusing to note that in it “the shell-shaped domes of Cerngoth [lay] deep down in the glaciation...beneath fathoms of perpetual ice”. It too eschews hyperbole in its telling and is visually rich; but unlike “The White Sybil”, the tale is grim rather than poetic. Quangah the huntsman and two jewellers of Iqqua mount an expedition into desolate and glacier-covered Mhu Thulan to retrieve the wealth of King Haalor, who had entered the realm fifty years before “to make war upon the polar ice”. The king had sought to melt the creeping glacier with a wizard-conjured sun, but he and his party had died strangely in the attempt.
Within an ice-cavern the trio find Haalor and his men embedded in a wall of ice. After relieving the king of his jewels, they are attacked by the cavern itself, which closes upon them like a mouth. The jewellers die horribly, and Quangah flees, but the ice-fields themselves seem to trick him and hamper his flight. He eventually reaches the border of the glacier and collapses in exhaustion, but he awakens to terror:
It seemed to him that a great shadow, malign and massive and somehow solid, was moving upon the horizon and striding over the low hills toward the valley in which he lay. It came with inexpressible speed, and the last light appeared to fall from the heavens, chill as a reflection caught in ice.... He unslung his bow and discharged arrow after arrow, emptying his quiver at the huge and bleak and formless shadow that seemed to impend before him on the sky.... All at once the air darkened before him, with a sourceless, blue-green glimmering in its depths.... It was like phantom ice—a thing that blinded his eyes and stifled his breath, as if he were buried in some glacial tomb.
To appease the demon of the glacier Quangah rids himself of the stolen jewels, but is frozen to death nonetheless. The jewels lay beside his rigid corpse, and we are told that “in its own time, the great glacier, moving slowly and irresistibly southward, would reclaim them”.
Despite its grimness, satire is not entirely absent from “The lce Demon”. Quangah first dismisses the suggestion that the advancing ice-sheet is “a great demon, cruel, greedy, and loth to give up that which it had taken”—which of course it turns out to be—because he considers such a belief only a “crude and primitive superstition, not to be entertained by enlightened minds of the Pleistocene age”. Smith understood that every age (including ours, by implication) believes itself “enlightened”, regardless of how it is seen by later eras.82 A similar passage appears in “The Seven Geases”, when, from millions of years in the past, out of a continent since fragmented and sunken, we hear tell of Ralibar Vooz’s “thoroughly modem disdain of the supernatural”. It no doubt amused Smith to write of characters who suffer from what might be termed ‘the hubris of rationality’, only to subject them to strange and fantastic adventures incompatible with their narrow philosophies.
73. Miocene times are mentioned in “Ubbo-Sathla”, while “The IceDemon” takes place during the Pleistocene era.
74. Letter to Derleth, 6 April 1937.
75. The first published reference to Tsathoggua occurred in “The Whisperer in Darkness” by H. P. Lovecraft. Early in 1930, Smith sent the manuscript of “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” to Lovecraft, who then incorporated Tsathoggua into the framework of the Cthulhu Mythos by mentioning him in “The Mound” and “The Whisperer in Darkness”; and the latter story appeared in Weird Tales before Smith’s own tale.
76. Used as the cover illustration for Klarkash-Ton: The Journal of Smith Studies (Cryptic Press, 1988).
77. Don Herron, “The Double Shadow” (see Sec. Bib.)
78. At times Smith’s humor is extremely quiet. The mall Vixeela, an involuntary harlot by night and wearer of a golden chastity belt by day, “had found small pleasure in the religious prostitution and had chafed at the confinement entailed by it”.
79. Letter to Derleth, 15 September 1931. “I have a peculiar fondness for this story. I take out the ms. and read it over, when I am too bored to read anything in my book-cases” (letter to Derleth, 20 January 1931).
80. Lin Carter, “Notes on the Commoriom Myth-Cycle”, Hyperborea (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971). Carter imposes the following order: “The Seven Geases”, “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan”, “The White Sybil”, “The Testament of Athammaus”, “The Coming of the White Worm”, “Ubbo-Sathla”, “The Door to Saturn”, “The Ice-Demon”, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”, and “The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles”.
81. From Smith’s poem “Ode to Music” (ST).
82. “I’ll be dammed if l can see that the present age, for all its scientific discoveries, psychoanalysis, etc., is any smarter or more sophisticated than the 18th. It is, however, equally cock-sure and materialistic—or more so.... History never does anything but plagiarize itself (letter to George Sterling, 4 November 1926).