The Muse of Hyperborea

by Clark Ashton Smith


Too far away is her wan and mortal face, and too remote are the snows of her
lethal breast, for mine eyes to behold them ever. But at whiles her whisper
comes to me, like a chill unearthly wind that is faint from traversing the gulfs
between the worlds, and has flown over ultimate horizons of ice-bound deserts.
And she speaks to me in a tongue I have never heard but have always known; and
she tells of deathly things and of things beautiful beyond the ecstatic desires
of love. Her speech is not of good or evil, nor of anything that is desired or
conceived or believed by the termites of earth; and the air she breathes, and
the lands wherein she roams, would blast like the utter cold of sidereal space;
and her eyes would blind the vision of men like suns; and her kiss, if one
should ever attain it, would wither and slay like the kiss of lightning.

	But, hearing her far, infrequent whisper, I behold a vision of vast
auroras, on continents that are wider than the world, and seas too great for the
enterprise of human keels. And at times I stammer forth the strange tidings that
she brings: though none will welcome them, and none will believe or listen. And
in some dawn of the desperate years, I shall go forth and follow where she
calls, to seek the high and beatific doom of her snow-pale distances, to perish
amid her indesecrate horizons.