WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Compilations - The Library - Volume 09 - R to Z - 354 fiction ebooks (PDF, HTML, RTF, DOC, TXT, ZIP).zip/Smith, Clark Ashton - From The Crypts Of Memory - alternate.txt

Text File | 2000-09-05 | 3KB | 59 lines

From the Crypts of Memory

by Clark Ashton Smith


[Text taken from Ebony and Crystal]


Aeons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvelous worlds have crumbled, and whose
mighty suns are less than shadow, I dwelt in a star whose course, decadent from
the high, irremeable heavens of the past, was even then verging upon the abyss
in which, said astronomers, its immemorial cycle should find a dark and
disastrous close.

    Ah, strange was that gulf-forgotten star - how stranger than any dreams
of dreamers in the spheres of to-day, or than any vision that hath soared upon
visionaries, in their retrospection of the sideral past! There, through cycles
of history whose piled and bronze-writ records were hopeless of tabulation, the
dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living. And built of a stone that was
indestructible save in the furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of
the living like the prodigious metropoli of Titans, with walls that overgloom
the vicinal villages. And over all was the black funereal vault of the cryptic
heavens-a dome ol infinite shadows, where the dismal sun, suspended like a sole,
enormous lamp, failed to illumine, and drawing back its fires from the face of
the irresolvable a baffled and despairing beam on the vague remote horizons, and
shrouded vistas illimitable of the visionary land.

    We were a sombre, secret, many-sorrowed people-we who dwelt beneath that
sky of eternal twilight, pierced by the towering tombs and obelisks of the past.
In our blood was the chill of the ancient night of time; and our pulses flagged
with a creeping prescience of the lentor of Lethe. Over our courts and fields,
like invisible sluggish vampires born of mausoleums, rose and hovered the black
hours, with wings that distilled a malefic languor made from the shadowy woe and
despair of perished cycles. The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we
breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever sealed with all its stagnancies
of corruption and slow decay, and darkness impenetrable save to the fretting
worm.

    Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams-the dim and mystic dreams that
hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women, with their pale
and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may feel for the phantom
lilies of Hadean meads. Our days were spent in roaming through the ruins of lone
and immemorial cities, whose palaces of fretted copper, and streets that ran
between lines of carven golden obelisks, lay dim and ghastly with the dead
light, or were drowned forever in seas of stagnant shadow; cities whose vast and
iron-builded fanes preserved their gloom of primordial mystery and awe, from
which the simulacra of century- forgotten gods looked forth with unalterable
eyes to the hopeless heavens, and saw the ulterior night, the ultimate oblivion.
Languidly we kept our gardens, whose grey lilies concealed a necromantic
perfume, that had power to evoke for us the dead and spectral dreams of the
past. Or, wandering through ashen fields of perennial autumn, we sought the rare
and mystic immorteles, with sombre leaves and pallid petals, that bloomed
beneath willows of wan and veil-like foliage: or swept with a sweet and
nepenthe-laden dew by the flowing silence of Acherontic waters.

    And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We
knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of
twilight unto night.