James LaFond's impressions of The Cliffs Reel, Chapter 3, Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon, reading from pages 98-105 of the Del Rey edition
The lead illustration by Mister Gianni depicts the royal pavilion guarded by ten hard-bitten “veterans,” left to defend the prostrate king and a squire attending a saddled and barded horse, lion banner blowing to the right.
As Conan lays suffering from lack of action moreso than any pain, the squire peeks through the curtain and relates the unfolding battle to Conan who sees it clearly in his mind’s eye, predicts folly and calamity and has his worst fears magnified and related to him, for, as his heroic body double falls for a wizardly ruse his strike force is not ambushed in the mountain pass viewed from across the contested riverbed, but the mountain itself reels and comes crashing down, crushing the flower of Conan’s army, 5,000 armored knights, the same number of knights Conan lost to another treachery years before when allied armies turned on his force.
Howard masterfully relates the battle through the eyes of a supporting character, just as Conan’s exploits are often depicted from the eyes of a feminine or less masculine observer, putting Conan, his apex literary creation, in the deepest hell imaginable for the character, that is placing him in the position of the reader rendered as listener, a passive fate that torments his savage soul.
At length the army is broken and routed, his veteran guards selling their lives harshly and his loyal squire implores him to surrender, to which Conan “ground” “I have no royal blood, I am a barbarian and the son of a blacksmith.”
Then, to those seeking him Conan roars, “Here I am, you jackals. I am the king! Death to you dog-brothers!” [1]
Gianni’s second illustration is a full page panel which accurately illustrates the well-worded mechanics of Conan’s brief heroic fight with the two armored men.
Howard is at his best using totemic metaphors to describe the antagonists, with the “maned” Conan, whose totem is the lion, sneering at his inferiors as canines.
His squire brained offhand by one of the armored men who enter his tent to take him captive, Conan, unarmored, cuts a figure not unlike Pizarro, when his assassins came for him in his old age. Roused in his wrath to a drunken parody of himself, Conan is yet able to butcher his attackers and King Tarascas of Nemedia, balks and his squire grabs his arm, again providing a powerful totemic image of the beleaguered barbarian, “Nay, Your Majesty, do not throw away your life. I will summon the archers to shoot this barbarian, as we shoot lions.”
Xaltotun then enters, Conan immediately sensing the ancient evil the man embodied and falls to his sorcery, a deep abominable power which then engulfs his vassals in its mind-crushing coils as well, and Conan is borne off in a chariot behind unnatural horses as “the setting sun rimmed the cliffs with scarlet flame…”
The third illustration follows, a portrait of Xaltotun appearing as an ancient Chaldean with powerful physiognomy, broad shoulders, a raised hand of power and an awesome curled beard.
(c) 2019 James LaFond
