They forgot their long voyage through space, they forgot there had ever been a planet called the earth and an isle named Poseidonis, they forgot their lore and their wisdom, as they roamed through the flowers of Sfanomoë. The exotic air and its odors mounted to their heads like a mighty wine; and the clouds of golden and snowy pollen which fell upon them from the arching arbors were potent as some fantastic drug. It pleased them that their white beards and violet tunics should be powdered with this pollen and with the floating spores of plants that were alien to all terrene botany.

Suddenly Hotar cried out with a new wonder, and laughed with a more boisterous mirth than before. He had seen that an oddly folded leaf was starting from the back of his shrunken right hand. The leaf unfurled as it grew, it disclosed a flower-bud; and lo! the bud opened and became a triple-chaliced blossom of unearthly hues, adding a rich perfume to the swooning air. Then, on his left hand, another blossom appeared in like manner; and then leaves and petals were burgeoning from his wrinkled face and brow, were growing in successive tiers from his limbs and body, were mingling their hair-like tendrils and tongue-shaped pistils with his beard. He felt no pain, only an infantile surprise and bewilderment as he watched them.

Now from the hands and limbs of Evidon, the blossoms also began to spring. And soon the two old men had ceased to wear a human semblance, and were hardly to be distinguished from the garland-laden trees about them. And they died with no agony, as if they were already part of the teeming floral life of Sfanomoë, with such perceptions and sensations as were appropriate to their new mode of existence. And before long their metamorphosis was complete, and every fiber of their bodies had undergone a dissolution into flowers. And the vessel in which they had made their voyage was embowered from sight in an ever-climbing mass of plants and blossoms.

Such was the fate of Hotar and Evidon, the last of the Atlanteans, and the first (if not also the last) of human visitors to Sfanomoë.

APPENDIX ONE:

STORY NOTES

Abbreviations Used :

AWD August W. Derleth (1909-1971), Wisconsin novelist, Weird Tales author, and founder of Arkham House.

AY The Abominations of Yondo (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1960).

BB The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979).

BL Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

CAS Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961).

DAW Donald A. Wandrei (1908-1937), poet, Weird Tales writer and co-founder of Arkham House.

EOD Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bio-Bibliography by Donald Sidney-Fryer et al. (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1978).

FW Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940), editor of Weird Tales from 1924 to 1939.

GL Genius Loci and Other Tales (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1948).

HPL Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), informal leader of a circle of writers for Weird Tales and related magazines, and probably the leading exponent of weird fiction in the 20th Century.

JHL Clark Ashton Smith Papers and H. P. Lovecraft Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.

LLLetters to H. P. Lovecraft. ed. Steve Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1987).

LW Lost Worlds (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1944).

MHS Donald Wandrei Papers, Minnesota Historical Society.

OD Other Dimensions (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).

OST Out of Space and Time (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1942).

PD Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays. ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973).

PP Poems in Prose (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965).

RAA Rendezvous in Averoigne (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1988).

RHB Robert H. Barlow (1918-1951), correspondent and collector of manuscripts of CAS, HPL, and other WT writers.

RW Red World of Polaris. ed. Ronald S. Hilger and Scott Connors (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003).

SHSW August Derleth Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library.

SL Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith. ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003).

SS Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith. ed. Steve Behrends (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

ST Strange Tales, a pulp edited by Harry Bates in competition with WT.

SU The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith. ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005).

TSS Tales of Science and Sorcery (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964).

WS Wonder Stories, a pulp published by Hugo Gernsback and edited first by David Lasser and then Charles D. Hornig.

WT Weird Tales, Smith’s primary market for fiction, edited by FW (1924-1940) and later Dorothy McIlwraith (1940-1954).

The Abominations of Yondo

The typescript of “The Abominations of Yondo” belonging to the L. Tom Perry Special Collections of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University is dated February 5, 1925 (Roy A. Squires, the Glendale, California bookman who served as CAS’ literary executor for several years, offered for sale in his Catalog 6 a holograph manuscript given to R. H. Barlow that is dated February 3). It represents Smith’s first full-fledged effort in the realm of the weird tale, although the prose poems included in his 1922 collection Ebony and Crystal give testimony to the hold that the macabre exerted upon his imagination. Years later CAS would tell Samuel J. Sackett that he wrote both “Yondo” and “Sadastor” at the incitement of his correspondent H. P. Lovecraft¹. At Smith’s request, HPL enthusiastically submitted it to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright even though “it is obvious that he wants nothing purely fantastic, though I have hopes that the sheer stylistic merit of ‘Yondo’ may help to ‘land’ it.”² Wright returned it, describing it as “a fascinating bit, but a prose poem rather than a weird narrative.”³

Smith’s poetic mentor, George Sterling, called the story “a magnificent exercise in imagination” but adding “I don’t advise you to devote much time to such things, however: the mind of man begins to smile at anything that is inherently absurd and outdated. Your faculties are far too fine to be wasted on such vacua.”⁴ After its rejection by WT, CAS asked Sterling to see if he could place it with the Overland Monthly, to which he contributed a regular column, “Rhymes and Reactions.” Sterling assented, although he called CAS “truly naive in imagining that you could have the ‘Yondo’ poem accepted by any magazine that pays! A few that don’t pay might take it.” He continued in this vein:

All highbrows think the “Yondo” material outworn and childish. The daemonic is done for, for the present, so far as our contemporaries go, and imagination must seek other fields. You have squeezed every drop from the weird (and what drops!) and should touch on it only infrequently, as I on the stars. The swine don’t want pearls: they want corn; and it is foolish to hope to change their tastes.

⁵

Smith’s response showed that he felt confident enough to disagree with his mentor when he felt the need: