‘Silence Drank the Voices’

James LaFond's Impressions of From What Hell Have You Crawled, Chapter 4 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Gianni’s illustration of Conan forced down by four hyper-masculine slaves as he is weighted with chains before his ancient-countenanced master, is a starkly powerful piece.

Conan suffers the fate of some million of historical European souls, being held as a slave by a Semitic master who makes cruel demands of him as he is manhandled by the Semite’s brutal ebony servants, in this case four giants. Conan’s captor, Xaltotun is an awesome figure of nightmare and piercing mesmerism, with even “a weird nimbus” plying about his head, with an aspect of ellusiveness giving the captive the impression that the fiend of dignity had stalked forth from some vile dream.

Conan, matter-of-factly growls, “I sensed a brain behind this,” to which Xaltotun extends the oft offered pact that assailed the conscience of captured European mariners who found themselves enchained in North Africa and the Middle East, the limited freedom to betray their own kind and war against their native land. Conan, of course vehemently declines to turn traitor against his adopted subjects while the sorcerer, suffused in “an alien aura of Time and Space,” seeks to tame the savage, by confessing that warrior arts were no called for, as the unleashing of his arcane powers of manipulation set unguessed forces in motion that even he might not be able to check.

At last the interview ends with one of the best lines spoken by a fantasy villain:

“I am wearied of conversation with you; it is less fatiguing to destroy a walled city than it is to frame my thoughts in words a brainless barbarian can understand.”

Conan is then taken into the dungeons by the negro slaves, “like the descent into hell of a corpse borne by dusky demons.”

Then, taken to a grim cell inhabited by bones which had been split to get at the marrow, Conan is insulted by his black handlers, a race of people bestowed with much agency by Howard in his various fictions, as the leader of the slaves taunts the barbarian, “This your place now, white dog-king!”

This permits Howard to play out his deepest trope that the races of dark barbarians are the devolved remnants of civilized folk whereas the “white” barbarians of northern Europe are a pure, untainted form of savage.

Gianni’s illustration of Conan being dragged down a dark stair by four brutes barely able to contain his savage wrath does justice to Howard’s description of the fallen kind as reverting to near-animal form in crisis. 

      

(c) 2019 James LaFond

‘Death Stalked Grinning’

James LaFond's Impressions of A Black Wind Blows, Chapter 2, Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon, reading from pages 91-98 of the DelRey edition

The lead illustration is a large, powerful portrait of Conan, seated naked and brooding, one hand under chin the other on his sword as his attendant stands behind him at tensely troubled attention.

“The Year of the Dragon had birth in war pestilence and unrest,” begins Howard masterfully.

As with the advent of the quest of Enkidu, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, mankind cried out to the heavens for relief.

Conan wakes from a nightmare in his royal pavilion under the lion banner of his adopted nation, troubled by a dream that recounted his life in ghostly wise, seeing the battlefield on which he was born, the steps of grim attainment on his ascent to greatness. Haunted by his own likeness stalking across terrible scenes of carnage and of wielding petty power, the barbarian usurper was shaken that much deeper to his core by that which shadowed the procession of his grisly achievements, “…strange, veiled figures and ghostly shadows,” and a faraway vice of mockery.

Throughout Howard’s horror and fantasy fiction mockery as a concept is more thoroughly employed by he than any other author this reader has read, indeed more than all combined authors of all genres I have read in roughly a thousand works of fiction and myth.

Conan confides in his general that the plague that felled the Nemedian King, an ally and predecessor of the king that now arrayed his host across the valley, was a work of sorcery. Then, having been sent to bring his squires for his the king’s arming, the general hears a cry and heavy fall from King Conan’s tent and returns to find the giant barbarian in a paralysis, beaded in sweat as he eyes the shadows within his tent like a poisoned wolf trying to quantify the evil of Man. Conan’s eyes burning with “bitter rage” over the invisible shackles that held him, he hears the pledge of a captain whose stature matches his own who is to bear his armor for the battle. It becomes clear that Howard’s vision of pre-cataclysmic Hyborea is akin to Europe of the High Middle Ages, the end times of chivalry, in the late 1300s and early 1400s, based on his description of the king’s armor.

As his valiant body double swears to honor his harness or die in the attempt Conan makes a savage oath, which Howard quantifies like so:

“In the stress of his anguish Conan’s veneer of civilization had fallen from him. His eyes flamed, he ground his teeth in fury and blood-lust, as barbaric as any tribesman in the Cimmerian hills.”

In that closing passage, Howard makes the point behind both his Kull and Conan hero king sagas, that a powerful and decadent nation which has worn thin its vital essence would be best served by elevating any man—even of an enemy race to kingship—if that man possessed the vitality of its ancestral founders, a lesson he seems to have gleaned from his reading of Roman history, tellingly reflected in his horror story of Hannibal’s ghost in Delenda Est.

(c) 2019 James LaFond