Smith’s correspondents were pleased with the results of all his efforts. Robert E. Howard mentioned that he “very much enjoyed” the story.⁷ E. Hoffmann Price told him that it:

has a strange charm… a certain humanity—I mean, the character and his two attendants have an appealing realness which gives force to the picture. The bungling, guessing astrologer, sometimes charlatan, sometimes (and perhaps coincidentally) giving a good prediction; he’s in a way a symbol of all endeavour. And his doom seems rather a fulfillment, not a punishment. For all its outré adornments, the story has a homely, human touch which persistently hold its own.

⁸

CAS wrote to Barlow that the story would “form the concluding item of my Zothique series, if this series should ever appear between book-covers.”⁹

Wright included “The Last Hieroglyph” in the April 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Smith received sixty dollars.¹⁰ It was included in OST and RA. A carbon copy of the published version from Smith’s papers at JHL was used to establish the current text.

One of the first anthologies to mine the rich resources of such pulps as Weird Tales, Unknown Worlds and Astounding Stories was The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination, edited by Phil Stong (1899–1957), a journalist and novelist who is best known for writing State Fair, the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the same name. Stong did not include a story by Smith, but the anthology does contain the following mention of “The Last Hieroglyph”: “Clark Ashton Smith is another fantasy writer, a very popular one, who frequently has excellent and original ideas and then casts them into a precious style that does not fit them. Only, his idol is not Poe but Lord Dunsany. Smith’s story of the magician [sic] who becomes an item of a cosmic manuscript is excellent, but there are too many Byzantine words.”¹¹ It was undoubtedly Smith’s encounters with sentiments such as these that inspired him when he composed two aphorisms that he published in his poetry collection Spells and Philtres. The first states that “The modern intolerance toward what is called ‘painted speech,’ toward ‘the grand manner,’ springs too often from the instinctive resentment inspired in vulgar minds by all that savors of loftiness, exaltation, nobility, sublimity and aristocracy.” The second expresses the realization that “It is a ghastly but tenable proposition that the world is now ruled by the insane, whose increasing plurality will, in a few generations, make probable the incarceration of all sane people born among them.”¹²

1. CAS, letter to AWD, March 18, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, April 17, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

3. FW, letter to CAS, April 25, 1934 (ms, JHL).

4. CAS, letter to RHB, April 30, 1934 (ms, JHL).

5. CAS, letter to RHB, May 18, 1934 (ms, JHL).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, June 4, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

7. Robert E, Howard, letter to CAS, July 23, 1935 (Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 1933–1936, Ed. Rob Roehm [Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2008]: p. 366).

8. E. Hoffmann Price, letter to CAS, September 13, 1942 (ms, JHL).

9. CAS, letter to RHB, May 21, 1934 (SL 255).

10. WT, letter to CAS, March 31, 1936 (ms, JHL).

11. Phil Stong, “Note to Part III,” in The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1941), pp. 330–331.

12. CAS, “Epigrams and Apothegms.” Spells and Philtres (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1958): pp. 53, 54.

Necromancy in Naat

As discussed in the preceding note, “The Last Hieroglyph” was intended to be the final story of Zothique. However, Smith’s “benign, maleficent daemon” still had tales to tell of the last continent, and the first version of “Necromancy in Naat” was completed on February 6, 1935. Little survives concerning its composition or genesis. CAS told Donald Wandrei that he had “turned out several weirds, including ‘The Treader of the Dust,’ ‘Necromancy in Naat’ and ‘The Black Abbot of Puthuum.’… The last quarter of Necromancy in Naat, however, will have to be rewritten according to the specifications of the satrap (Damn!!....******)”¹ Wright’s letter of rejection apparently has not survived, so the exact nature of his objections are not known, but in a letter dated February 11, 1935 he acknowledges the receipt of a “new last page” for the story “and will get at the reading of that tale within a day or two.”² Since this occurs before Smith’s letter telling of its rejection, we can only speculate that either the last page somehow was lost or Smith decided to change the last page and sent it along. CAS spent the period between March 4 and March 25 rewriting the story, according to his notations on the typescript of the original version, and wrote to H. P. Lovecraft that “Naat” was one of several stories recently accepted by Wright.³ “Necromancy in Naat” appeared in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales, where it was accompanied by another Virgil Finlay illustration, where it tied with Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails” as the most popular story in the issue.⁴ Smith was paid seventy-three dollars for the story.⁵ Smith included “Necromancy in Naat” in LW, and it was later included in RA.

Smith wrote to August Derleth that “‘Necromancy in Naat’ seems the best of my more recently published weirds; though Wright forced me to mutilate the ending.”⁶ CAS cut the story by thirteen hundred words, eliminating much descriptive material. The biggest change that Smith made was to eliminate suggestions that Yadar and Dalili were proving Andrew Marvell wrong.⁷ Thanks to an anonymous private collector who generously provided us with a copy of the original version, we have been able to restore most of these cuts, leaving those changes that we thought Smith made out of choice, not compulsion, most notably the beautiful words with which the story ends.

1. CAS, letter to DAW, February 28, 1935 (SL 261).

2. FW, letter to CAS, February 11, 1935 (ms, JHL).

3. CAS, postcard to HPL, April 5, 1935 (ms, private collection).

4. See “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales (October 1936), p. 384.

5. WT, letter to CAS, March 29, 1937 (ms, JHL).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, April 13, 1937 (CSL 287).

7. See Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress:” “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace.”

The Treader of the Dust

Clark Ashton Smith’s story “Xeethra” is prefaced by a quotation from an imaginary book entitled The Testaments of Carnamagos. This addition to the library of eldritch tomes stocked by the imaginations of H. P. Lovecraft’s circle of writers was first mentioned in Smith’s never-completed novel The Infernal Star. Smith went into much greater detail concerning the book and its disturbing history in “The Treader of the Dust,” which he completed on February 15, 1935. Wright surprised Smith “by taking ‘The Treader of the Dust’ offhand, without revision or re-submission.”¹ In his letter of acceptance, in which he offered Smith thirty dollars for the story, Wright told Smith that “I thought at first, while I was reading the story, that it would have a solution something like that given in ‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’ by Ambrose Bierce, but I was all wet in that surmise.”² “The Treader of the Dust” appeared in the August 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Smith included it in LW. The text is based upon that of a typescript deposited in Smith’s papers at JHL.

1. CAS, letter to DAW, February 28. 1935 (SL 261).

2. FW, letter to CAS, February 22, 1935 (ms, JHL).