From the Crypts of Memory

Clark Ashton Smith


[Text taken from original manuscripts]


Aeons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvellous 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 dream of
dreamers in the present, or than any vision that hath risen upon visionaries in
their retrospection of the universal Past: There, thru inestimable cycles of a
history whose records were beyond the computation of savants, the dead had come
to infinitely outnumber the living: And, reared of a stone not destructible save
in the enormous furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of the living
like Titan metropoli whose mighty precincts have begun to overgloom the vicinal
villages. And over all was the black, funereal vault of the cryptic heavens - a
dome of infinite shadows wherein the dismal sun, suspended like a sole, enormous
lamp, failed to illumine, and, drawing back its fires from the face of the
irresolvable ether, threw a baffled and despairing beam on the vague, remote
horizons, and shrouded vistas interminate of the visionary land.

	We were a sombre, melancholy people, who dwelt beneath the palls
twilight and silence thrown about the towering tombs and monuments of the Past.
In our veins was the chill of the ancient night of Time, with a premonition of
the lentor of Lethe: over us, like invisible vampires, brooded the innumerous
hours on their sable and unremoving pinions: 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 of darkness.

	Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams-the dim and mystic dreams that
hover upon the verge of unfathomable 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, or in the vast and shadowy fanes from whose awful and
everlasting glooms of elder mystery, the simulachres of century-forgotten gods
looked forth with unalterable eyes on the hopeless heavens, and saw but night
and oblivion. Or, wandering through ashen fields of perennial autumn, we found
the flowers of wan funebrial immortelles, that wept with a melancholy 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.