The Memnons of the Night

by Clark Ashton Smith


Ringed with a bronze horizon, which, at a point immensely remote, seems welded
with the blue brilliance of a sky of steel, they oppose the black splendour of
their porphyritic forms to the sun's insuperable gaze. Reared in the morning
twilight of primeval time, by a race whose towering tombs and cities are one
with the dust of their builders in the slow lapse of the desert, they abide to
face the terrible latter dawns, that move abroad in a starkness of fire,
consuming the veils of night on the vast and Sphinx-like desolations. Level with
the light, their tenebrific brows preserve a pride as of Titan kings. In their
lidless implacable eyes of staring stone, is the petrified despair of those who
have gazed too long on the infinite.

	Mute as the mountains from whose iron matrix they were hewn, their
mouths have never acknowledged the sovereignty of the suns, that pass in
triumphal flame from horizon unto horizon of the prostrate land. Only at eve,
when the west is a brazen furnace, and the far-off mountains smoulder like ruddy
gold in the depth of the heated heavens -- only at eve, when the east grows
infinite and vague, and the shadows of the waste are one with the increasing
shadow of night then, and then only, from their sullen throats of stone, a music
rings to the bronze horizon -- a strong, a sombre music, strange and sonorous,
like the singing of black stars, or a litany of gods that invoke oblivion; a
music that thrills the desert to its heart of adamant, and trembles in the
granite of forgotten tombs, till the last echoes of its jubilation, terrible as
the trumpets of doom, are one with the trumpets of infinity.