‘The Open Gates of Hell’

Oh Sleeper Awake: James LaFond's Impressions of Chapter 1 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon,  reading from pages 83-90 of the DelRey 2003 edition

On a wind-bemoaned night, by candlelight, four conspirators stood about the ancient sarcophagus of a long dead sorcerer, their four pairs of eyes searching the death box wrought with its weird, writhing hieroglyphics. Most notable among the four was Orastes, inscribing mystical symbols in the air with a candle held in his “broad white” hand, perspiration beading on his “white forehead” above “dilated eyes.” Orastes was not even the most forceful of the power-hungry men gathered here in conclave, in a shadowed room beyond the door of which howled some great hound somehow sensible of the evil being wrought within. Yet Orastes is a man of gravity, a protagonist in his own right from whose mazed eyes the reader briefly experiences men’s willing embrace of evil.

As the would-be kings and their fellow plotters attempt to raise the evil dead, it is apparent that Orastes is not the only worthy, as they introduced themselves by way of commenting on their blasted actions:

Tarascus, a small dark man, kin to the royal line of Nemedia, the kingdom in which this damnable incantation is being committed, muttered, “And damned our souls to purgatories everlasting, I doubt not.”

Valerius, of the yellow hair, laughed harshly, “What purgatory can be worse than life itself? So we are all damned together from birth. Who would not sell his miserable soul for a throne?” [1]

Almuric, a “dark powerful” lord of the royal line deposed by Conan’s bloody hand, a figure of grasping power incarnate, remained focused on the work of his technical expert and demanded details, action, results and confirmation of success from Orastes who had risen manfully to the horrific occasion in which they violated the laws of both man and nature in service to their mighty ambitions.

At last, their blasphemous work done, they raised the rejuvenated sorcerer, a scion of the race their ancestors drove to extinction, upon a ready throne and their audience with a genius of a deeply evil past began. During this exchange Orastes relates a heroic epic of the honorable and doomed Zamorian thieves who facilitated the theft of the necessary arcane articles to transform his new master from a mummy to a reanimated man. The history of the intervening years is briefly told and then, as the reader learns that this wintry raising of the ancient evil dead has occurred in the dying days of The Year of the Lion, Conan’s totem, the barbarian king is described to the sorcerer in savage detail as he waxes nostalgic about warring against that ages-unchanged northern tribe [Cimmerians] [2] in the long ago, eager to ensnare the hero king whom he is assured “is a true son of that savage race…” and until this hour, as The Year of the Dragon drew near, has been unconquerable.

A young teen in the mid-1970s, I originally read The Hour of the Dragon as Conan the Conqueror, part of the chronological Ace paperback series. Since then, due to its length, I have reread it less than the other Conan yarns. It is notable that all of the King Conan stories, The Phoenix on the Sword [Howard’s first Conan sale], The Scarlet Citadel [arguably the best of the three] and The Hour of the Dragon [one of the last Conan yarns], were all concerned with his usurpation by sorcery, with magic in Howard’s hands serving largely as a metaphor for political duplicity against the strong and sadistic entrapment of the weak. All of these three masterworks recycle the King Kull material to some extent, especially the breakthrough story, which is the second Conan rewrite of the Kull story By This Axe I Rule!

Along with the novella People of the Black Circle, The Hour of the Dragon is the most readily adaptable Conan story for a movie script, although it is unlikely that Hollywood egos could ever let Howard’s vision of a barbarian usurper king—who has come to have paternalistic sentiments towards those he rules—survive their agenda.

Gary Gianni’s illustration is of a shuddersome wind uprooting trees as it gathers into a dragon’s head.

Notes

1. One senses the angst of the author in the words of Valerius, which ring so much more painfully true than Tarascus’ flat pessimism.

2. Conan’s tribe is named after a semi-mythic race of northern barbarians who dwelt in misty latitudes in ancient Hellenic Europe, which Howard equates with the Gaelic Celts of Scotland and Ireland who held that same relative position and savage reputation in the early modern English-Speaking world.

A brief thought on the title, Open Gates of Hell, is that the concept, used so often by Howard, might be rooted in a story a washer woman whom he called “aunt” had related to him when he was a child about a harrowing vision quest she had undergone.

(c) 2019 James LaFond