The Edmond Hamilton Lowdown
Here's the story behind the discovery and making of Edmond Hamilton as related by Farnsworth Wright:
"Hamilton's first story, entitled 'Beyond the Unseen Wall' was rejected by me ten years ago, but I liked its possibilities so well that I sent Hamilton a three-page typewritten letter with the rejection, telling him how I thought the story might be fixed up; because it sagged in the middle and was rather unconvincingly set forth. I did not know Hamilton from Adam's off ox, but a year later he sent the story back again, rewritten and so much changed that I hardly recognized it. I accepted it immediately, and I suggested "The Desert God" as an acceptable title. Hamilton wrote back suggesting a new one, "The Monster-God of Mamurth," which is the title under which we printed it in Weird Tales. Hamilton has not had a reject from us since then. Up to the present, he has had 43 stories printed in Weird Tales, and several more are in our hands and will appear soon."
The Primal City
by Clark Ashton Smith
In these after-days, when all things are touched with insoluble doubt and dereliction, I am not sure of the purpose that had taken us into that little visited land. I recall, however, that we had found explicit mention, in a volume of which we possessed the one existing copy, of certain vast prehuman ruins lying amid the bare plateaus and stark pinnacles of the region. How we had acquired the volume I do not know; but Sebastian Polder and I had given our youth and much of our manhood to the quest of hidden knowledge; and this book was a compendium of all things that men have forgotten or ignored in their desire to repudiate the inexplicable.
We, being enamored of mystery, and seeking ever for the clues that material science has disregarded, pondered much upon those pages written in an antique alphabet. The location of the ruins was clearly stated, though in terms of an obsolete geography; and I remember our excitement when we had marked the position on a terrestrial globe. From the very first we were eager to behold the alien city, and certain of our ability to find it. Perhaps we wished to verify a strange and fearful theory which we had formed regarding the nature of the earth's primal inhabitants; perhaps we sought to recover the buried records of a lost science ... or perhaps there was some other and darker objective....
I recall nothing of the first stages of our journey, which must have been long and arduous. But I recall distinctly that we travelled for many days amid the bleak, treeless uplands that rose rapidly like a tiered embankment toward the range of high pyramidal summits guarding our destination. Our guide was a native of the country, sodden and taciturn, with intelligence little above that of the llamas which carried our supplies. He had never visited the ruins, but we had been assured that he knew the way, which was a secret remembered by few of his fellow countrymen. Rare and scant was the local legendry concerning the place and its builders; and, after many queries, we could add nothing to the knowledge gained from the immemorial volume. The city, it seemed, was nameless; and the region about it was untrodden by man.
Desire and curiosity raged within us like a calenture; and we gave no heed to the hazards and travails of exploration. Over us stood the eternal azure of vacant heavens, matching in their desolation the empty landscape. The route steepened; and above us now was a wilderness of cragged and chasmed rohk, where nothing dwelt but the sinister wide-winged condors.