Pulp Fantasy Library: Ubbo-Sathla

The July 1933 issue of Weird Tales was an impressive one, containing notable stories by several pulp luminaries. In a previous post, I already discussed H.P. Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witch House", which premiered in this issue. Also present were "The Horror in the Museum" by Hazel Heald (though ghost written by Lovecraft) and "The Hand of Glory," a Jules de Grandin yarn by Seabury Quinn, not to mention stories by Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton. 

Then there's the subject of today's post, "Ubbo-Sathla," a very unusual story by Clark Ashton Smith. It's usually classified as a tale of the Cthulhu Mythos, but, aside from an epigraph from The Book of Eibon, which references "Yok-Zothoth" (Yog-Sothoth) and "Kthulhut" (Cthulhu), there's nothing particularly Lovecraftian about the tale. Instead, it's largely another exploration of a theme common in not just Smith's own writings but in many pulp stories of the time: metempsychosis and mental time travel. 

Paul Tregardis, an antiquarian living in London, stumbles upon a "milky crystal in a litter of oddments from many lands in eras" while visiting the establishment of a curio-dealer. Tregardis asks the dealer about the crystal, who replies:

"It is very old – palaeogean, one might say. I cannot tell you much, for little is known. A geologist found it in Greenland, beneath glacial ice, in the Miocene strata. Who knows? It may have belonged to some sorcerer of primeval Thule. Greenland was a warm, fertile region, beneath the sun of Miocene times. No doubt it is a magic crystal; and a man might behold strange visions in its heart, if he looked long enough."

Tregardis is startled to hear this, not least because it reminded him of things he had read in The Book of Eibon. The tome described, among other things, the life of the wizard Zon Mezzamalech, who was said to have possessed a crystal just like the one he'd stumbled upon. Even though he considered The Book of Eibon "sheer superstitious fantasy," there was nevertheless "something about the crystal that continued to tease and inveigle him." Consequently, he purchased it "without bargaining" and "hastened back to his lodgings instead of resuming his leisurely saunter."

There, he opened up his copy of the French translation of The Book of Eibon and re-read those sections that pertained to Zon Mezzamalech and the crystal. 

This wizard, who was mighty among sorcerers, had found a cloudy stone, orb-like and somewhat flattened at the ends, in which he could behold many visions of the terrene past, even to the Earth's beginnings, when Ubbo-Sathla, the unbegotten source, lay vast and swollen and yeasty amid the vaporing slime … 

 Tregardis continued to be "tantalized and beguiled," which led him to stare ever more intently into the "cold, nebulous orb." 

Minute by minute he sat, and watched the alternate glimmering and fading of the mysterious light in the heart of the crystal. By imperceptible degrees, there stole upon him a sense of dream-like duality, both in respect to his person and his surroundings. He was still Paul Tregardis – and yet he was someone else; the room was his London apartment – a chamber in some foreign but well-known place. And in both milieus he peered steadfastly into the same crystal.

After an interim, without surprise on the part of Tregardis, the process of re-identification became complete. He knew that he was Zon Mezzamalech, a sorcerer of Mhu Thulan, and a student of all lore anterior to his own amateur epoch. Wise with dreadful secrets that were not known to Paul Tregardis, amateur of anthropology and the occult sciences in latter-day London, he sought by means of the milky crystal to attain an even older and more fearful knowledge.

 As astounding as this is, this is only the beginning of a process by which Tregardis recalled "unnumbered lives" and "myriad deaths" – as "a warrior in half-legendary battles," "a child playing in the ruins of some olden city," a woman "who wept for the bygone dead," and many, many more. Over the course of the short story, Tregardis finds his mind flung back untold eons, through a host of lives in a variety of times and places, until he reached "the grey beginning of Earth" itself, where "the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors."

"Ubbo-Sathla" is almost entirely devoid of action in the usual sense of the term. The quest of Paul Tregardis is entirely mental – or perhaps psychic is a better word – as he observes and learns from the past he can now view through the agency of the milky crystal orb. Like so many Smith stories, the reader is treated to a verbal phantasmagoria of bizarre and unexplained sights and sensations, mirroring those of the story's protagonist as he plumbs the depths of time and space. Unlike efforts like the widely celebrated "The City of the Singing Flame,"  "Ubbo-Sathla" is not quite as effective. Yet, what it might lack in execution, it makes up for in its ambition. Smith endeavors to show the origin of all life on Earth, at once exhilarating and terrifying. It's thus another worthy example of Clark Ashton Smith's ability to evoke the sometimes contradictory feelings occasioned by the acquisition of knowledge.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Out of the Aeons

As I've noted before, I have a strange weakness for many of the stories H.P. Lovecraft "revised" (i.e. ghostwrote) for other authors. I'm not entirely sure why that is, because, when viewed objectively, these stories usually aren't as well-constructed as HPL's own tales. Some are downright shlocky, even by the fairly low standards of the pulps. Yet, there's still something compelling about them that brings me back to them time and again.

A good case in point is "Out of the Aeons," published in the April 1935 issue of Weird Tales under the byline of Hazel Heald, an amateur writer with whom Lovecraft collaborated on five stories. "Out of the Aeons" is presented in the form of a first person account "found among the effects of the late Richard H. Johnson, Ph.D., curator of the Cabot Museum of Archaeology, Boston, Mass." The account primarily concerns

a hellish mummy, the antique and terrible rumours vaguely linked with it, the morbid wave of interest and cult activities of 1932, and the frightful fate of the two intruders on December 1st of that year

One has to admit that's a pretty good opening to a story! It's certainly lurid, much like the story that follows, but it does nicely set the scene and draw one in. Dr. Johnson explains that, in 1878, a freighter from New Zealand "sighted a new island unmarked on any chart and evidently of volcanic origin." A landing party under its captain discovered "prehistoric Cyclopean masonry" on the island, including a massive stone crypt. Inside the crypt, the party found the aforementioned mummy, on whose body was found a cylinder of unknown metal containing a scroll of similarly unknown material on which was written some kind of unrecognizable script.

The mummy was that of a medium-sized man of unknown race, and was cast in a peculiar crouching posture. The face, half shielded by claw-like hands, had its under jaw thrust far forward, while the shrivelled features bore an expression of fright so hideous that few spectators could view them unmoved. The eyes were closed, with lids clamped down tightly over eyeballs apparently bulging and prominent. Bits of hair and beard remained, and the colour of the whole was a sort of dull neutral grey. In texture the thing was half leathery and half stony, forming an insoluble enigma to those experts who sought to ascertain how it was embalmed. In places bits of its substance were eaten away by time and decay. Rags of some peculiar fabric, with suggestions of unknown designs, still clung to the object.

Just what made it so infinitely horrible and repulsive one could hardly say. For one thing, there was a subtle, indefinable sense of limitless antiquity and utter alienage which affected one like a view from the brink of a monstrous abyss of unplumbed blackness—but mostly it was the expression of crazed fear on the puckered, prognathous, half-shielded face. Such a symbol of infinite, inhuman, cosmic fright could not help communicating the emotion to the beholder amidst a disquieting cloud of mystery and vain conjecture.

The true nature of this mummy and how it came to be form the bulk of the story, as Dr. Johnson deals with a steady stream of strange characters coming to the Cabot Museum to inquire about it. These dealings lead Johnson to seek out forbidden books, such as Von Junzt's Nameless Cults, where he slowly pieces together disparate bits clues to attain what he thinks might be the truth -- a truth that is all but confirmed by the conclusion of the story.

"Out of the Aeons" is not a good story. It's mostly exposition and much of its feels recycled if you're already deeply immersed in Yog-Sothothery. As he so often did in his revisions, Lovecraft borrowed heavily from his own prior stories, blending some of their details with the bare bones provided by his revision clients. The result is never great literature, but it is often enjoyable, as is the case with "Out of the Aeons." To this day, I will never forget the first time I read the story in high school and the strange feeling that came over me as I kept one step ahead of Dr. Johnson in figuring out the history of the "hellish mummy" in the Cabot Museum. And while that history is absurd, even laughable in some respects, there's nevertheless an element of genuine horror in it that has stuck with me all these years and continues to haunt my imagination.