* * * * * LOST EXCERPTS by Robert Nelson _I. In Living Darkness_ In dreams agone I walked aimlessly and long in far and distant realms. I have seen wretched and depressed women feed with their milk the famished spirits that swelter and moulder amid the rank noisomeness of charnel hells. By blue and rotting trees I have seen colossal and cankered white worms fawning to their young and devouring themselves. I have seen evil and demented dwarfs fling flaring torches into the faces of maids who were playing sad violins and dying with nameless sins and melody. And I have stood on red rocks overlooking a black and ever-surging sea wherein dread things stabbed and slew and shrieked in exaltation to the molten dripping skies. * * * * * MEDUSA by Clark Ashton Smith (Written at the age of 18) As drear and barren as the glooms of Death, It lies, a windless land of livid dawns, Nude to a desolate firmament, with hills That seem the fleshless earth's outjutting ribs, And plains whose face is crossed and rivelled deep With gullies twisting like a serpent's track. The leprous touch of Death is on its stones, Where, for his token visible, the Head Is throned upon a heap of monstrous rocks, Rough-mounded like some shattered pyramid In a thwartly cloven hill-ravine, that seems The unhealing scar of huge of Tellurian wars. Her lethal beauty crowned with twining snakes That animate her hair, the Gorgon reigns: Her eyes are clouds wherein Death's lightnings lurk, Yet, even as men that seek the glance of Life, The gazers come, where, coiled and serpent-swift, Those levins wait. As round an altar-base Her victims lie, distorted, blackened forms Of posture horror smitten into stone-- Time caught in meshes of eternity-- Drawn back from dust and ruin of the years, And given to all the future of the world. The land is claimed of Death: the daylight comes Half-strangled in the changing webs of cloud That unseen spiders of bewildered winds Weave and unweave across the lurid sun In upper air. Below, no zephyr comes To break with life the circling spell of doom. Long vapour-serpents twist about the moon, And in the windy murkness of the sky, The guttering stars are wild as candle-flames That near the socket. Thus the land shall be, And Death shall wait, throned in Medusa's eyes, Till, in the irremeable webs of night, The sun is snared, and the corroded moon A dust upon the gulfs, and all the stars Rotted and fallen like rivets from the sky, Letting the darkness down upon all things. * * * * * MALANOTH