Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose

by Clark Ashton Smith

THE WITCH IN THE GRAVEYARD

Scene: A forsaken graveyard, by moonlight. Enter two witches.

FIRST WITCH:

Sit, sister, now that haggish Hecate

Appropriate and ghastly favour sheds,

And with wild light forwards our enterprise;

And watch the weighted eyelids of each grave

As never mother watched her babe, to mark,

At zenith of the necromantic moon

The stir of that disquiet, when the dead,

From suckling nightmares of the charnel dark

Or long insomnia on a mouldy couch,

Impelled like wan somnambulists, arise—

Constrained to emerge and walk, or seated each

On his own tombstone, shrouded council hold,

Or commerce with the sooty wings of Hell.

All omens of this influential hour

When all dark powers, thronging to the dark,

Promote enchantry with their wavèd wings,

And brim the wind with potency malign—

A dew of dread to aid our cauldron—these

Observe thou closely, while I seek afield

All requisite swart herbs of venefice,

And evil roots unto our usance ripe.

(The first witch departs, leaving the other among the tombs, and returns after a time, in the course of her search.)

FIRST WITCH:

Sister, what seest or what hearest thou?

SECOND WITCH:

I see

The moonlight, and the slowly moving gleam

That westers hour by hour on tomb and stone;

And shrivelled lilies, tossed i’ the winter’s breath,

With their attenuate shadows, as might dance

Phantom with flaffing phantom; at my side,

The white and shuddering grasses of the grave,

With nettles, and the parching fumitory,

Whose leaves, root-trellised on the bones of death,

Will rasp and bristle to the lightest wind.

(The first witch moves on, and approaches again, after a long interval.)

FIRST WITCH:

Sister, what seest or what hearest thou?

SECOND WITCH:

I see

The mound-stretched gossamers, cradles to the dew;

Moon-wefted briers, and the cypress-trees

With shadow swathed, or cerements of the moon;

And corpse-lights borne from aisle to secret aisle

Within the footless forest.***

Now I hear

The lich-owl, shrieking lethal prophecy;

And whimpering winds, the children of the air,

Lost in the glades of mystery and gloom.

(The first witch disappears and passes again shortly.)

FIRST WITCH:

Sister, what seest or what hearest thou?

SECOND WITCH:

I see

The ghost-white owl, with huge sulphureous eyes,

That veers in prone, unwhispered flight, and hear

The small shriek of the moon-adventuring mole,

Gripped in mid-graveyard.*** And I see

Where some wild shadow shakes, though the pale wind

Of moonlight stirs far off***and hear

Curst mandragores that gibber to the moon,

Though no man treads anigh.***

(After an interval)

Some predal hand doth halt the wandering air;

Now dies the throttled wind with rattling breath,

And round about a breathing Silence prowls.

(After another interval)

I hear the cheeping of the bat-lipped ghouls,

Aroused beneath the vaulted cypresses

Far-off; and lipless muttering of tombs,

With clash of bones bestirred in ancient charnels

Beneath their shroud of unclean light that crawls.***

Earth shudders, and rank odours ’gin to rise

From tombs a-crack; and shaken out all at once

From mid-air, and directly neath the moon,

Meseems what hanging wing divides the light,

Like a black film of gloom, or thickest shadow;

But on the tombs there is no shadow!

FIRST WITCH:

Enough! ’Twill be a prosperous night, methinks,

For commerce of the demons with the dead;

And for us, too, when every omen’s good,

And fraught with, promise of a potent brew.

---

POEMS IN PROSE

THE TRAVELLER

(Dedicated to V.  H.)

“Stranger, where goest thou, in the sad raiment of a pilgrim, with shattered sandals retaining the dust and mire of so many devious ways! With thy brow that alien suns have darkened, and thy hair made white from the cold rime of alien moons? Wanderest thou in search of the cities greater than Rome, with walls of opal and crystal, and fanes more white than the summer clouds, or the foam of hyperboreal seas? Or farest thou to the lands unpeopled and unexplored, to the sunless deserts lit by the baleful and calamitous beacons of volcanoes? Or seekest thou an extremer shore, where the red and monstrous lilies are like a royal pageant, pausing with innumerable flambeaux held aloft on the verge of the waveless waters?”

“Nay, it is none of these that I seek, but forevermore I seek the city and the land of my former home: In the quest thereof I have wandered from the first immemorable years of my youth till now, and have mingled the dust of many realms, of many highways, in my garments’ hem. I have seen the cities greater than Rome, and the fanes more white than the clouds of summer; the lands unpeopled and unexplored, and the land that is thronged by the red and monstrous lilies. Even the far, aerial walls of the cities of mirage, and the saffron meadows of sunset I have seen, but nevermore the city and land of my former home.”

“Where lieth the land of thine home? and by what name shall we know it, and distinguish the rumour thereof, among the rumours of many lands?”

“Alas! I know not where it lieth; nor in the broad, black scrolls of geographers, and the charts of old seamen who have sailed to the marge of the seventh sea, is the place thereof recorded. And its name I have never learned, howbeit I have learned the name of empires lying beneath stars to us invisible. In many languages have I spoken, in barbarous tongues unknown to Babel; and I have heard the speech of many men, even of them that inhabit the strange isles of the sea of fire and the sea of snow. Thunder, and lutes, and battle-drums, the fine unceasing querulousness of gnats, and the stupendous moaning of the simoon; lyres of ebony, damascened with crystal, bells of malachite with golden clappers; the song of exotic birds that sigh like women or sob like fountains; whispers and shoutings of fire, the multitudinous mutter of cities asleep, the manifold tumult of cities at dawn, and the slow and weary murmur of desert-wandering streams—all, all have I heard, but never, in any place, from any tongue, a sound or syllable that resembled in the least the name I would learn.”

---