Dark Valley Destiny Read Free Page B

him a description is in order. Conan is a giant of a man, six and a half feet tall, with the shoulders of a prizefighter and the agility of a leopard. His mien is somber, darkened by long exposure to the elements and scarred by battle; but under his square-cut mane of coarse black hair, his eyes burn with a bright blue fire.
    To anyone familiar with Robert Howard himself, it is evident that the Cimmerian embodies all the attributes that his creator most admired. Conan is enormously strong, lithe, and fast-moving; fearless in battle and adept with both sword and axe; wily, quick-thinking, and self-reliant; yet in awe of the power of the Cimmerian gods and of the wizards who, by their obscene arts, call demons and monsters from the eternal deep. Conan is an adventurer who, untrammeled by the tethers of human relationships, wanders the world at will. Money—-or the gold and gems that serve as a medium for barter—is a concern; but the barbarian solves his problem by seeking great, pulsing jewels set in the eyes of idols, or caches of pirates' loot guarded in hidden caves by deadly ghouls or serpents-
    It is worth noting that, in more than one way, Conan resembles Robert's father. Dr. Howard has been described by those who remember him in his youth as an imposing figure, a tall, dark-haired, choleric man whose bright-blue eyes made a lasting impression on all who saw him and whose air of authority, worn casually like a cloak, moved people to admire and obey him. Because of the close proximity of this model, it is probable that, from boyhood, Robert carried Conan in the inmost recesses of his brain. At least we know that, when he began to write the Conan stories, he reported to a correspondent that "Conan simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande. I did not create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures." 18
    In another letter, this one to a fellow Weird Tales writer by the name of Clark Ashton Smith, Howard—unmindful of his childhood image of his father—sought to explain the source of his most famous character thus:
    It may sound fantastic to link the term "realism" with Conan; but as a matter of fact—his supernatural adventures aside—he is the most realistic character I ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known, and I think that's why he seemed to step full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series. Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prizefighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian. 19
    "Conan," an old Celtic name borne by several dukes of medieval Brittany and by a number of characters in Irish legend, made an excellent name for Howard's new hero, being both distinctive and easy to say. As he developed, Conan gave little sign of either his "gigantic melancholies" or his "gigantic mirth." True, in "The Pool of the Black One" he joined a group of buccaneers, he "mixed with the crew, lived and made merry as they did," and showed himself to be one "whose laughter was gusty and ready, who roared ribald songs in a dozen languages. . . ." 20 But on the whole he seems an even-tempered man—ever dour, suspicious, irascible, dangerous, and too grimly intent on his objectives for merriment.
    In addition to his search for treasure, the great barbarian devotes his energies to survival when caught in a deadly predicament. In other stories his goal is success in some martial task for which he has been hired. Ofttimes he seeks revenge for some real or fancied wrong, a vivid reflection on the state of mind of his creator. In only two of the twenty-one Conan stories completed by Howard is the mainspring of the action the Cimmerian's