‘Like All His Race’

A Ghost Out Of The Past: Chapter 13 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 181-190 of the DelRey edition

Impressions by James LaFond

“Argo was at peace; laden ox-wains rumbled along the road, and men with bare, brown, brawny arms toiled in orchards and fields that smiled away under the branches of the roadside trees. Old men on settles before inns under spreading oak branches called greetings to the wayfarer.”

Howard has taken his hero back down the road of his own storied past, to the place where he fled once from false judicial justice as a young mercenary to begin the life of a bloodthirsty pirate with his own pirate queen. From here on out the author walks Conan beneath the horizon of his former exploits that earned him fame and infamy in equal measure by illuminating characters which were once but shadows merely inferred. For instance, the fat fence Publio is now rich off of the trade he did with Conan, who strides out of is shadowy past with blackmail on his lips and menace in his grin.

And, as Conan guzzles, feasts, schemes, chafes and threatens his former partner in crime, four sinister shadows ride along his path, like psychic bloodhounds with the scent of his savage ambition in their nose, which the artist symbolically presents as a relentless footnote of four shadows under a sun setting on the ruins of a lion gate—Conan’ totemic symbol.

Diction of Note

Dromunds, a type of boat