The Last Hieroglyph Read Free Page A

deliberately varied his spelling and usages depending upon the particular mood or atmosphere that he was trying to achieve in a particular story. As he explained in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft sometime in November 1930,
The problem of “style” in writing is certainly fascinating and profound. I find it highly important, when I begin a tale, to establish at once what might be called the appropriate “tone.” If this is clearly determined at the start I seldom have much difficulty in maintaining it; but if it isn’t, there is likely to be trouble. Obviously, the style of “Mohammed’s Tomb” wouldn’t do for “The Ghoul”; and one of my chief preoccupations in writing this last story was to exclude images, ideas and locutions which I would have used freely in a modern story. The same, of course, applies to “Sir John Maundeville,” which is a deliberate study in the archaic. ( SL 137)
    Therefore we have allowed certain variations in spelling and usage that seem to us to be consistent with Smith’s stated principles as indicated above.
    Typescripts do not exist in some cases, notably “The Enchantress of Sylaire,” while in other cases the existing typescript is incomplete, as is the case with “The Tomb-Spawn.” An arsonist destroyed Smith’s cabin in the 1950s, which resulted in some typescripts surviving only as burned fragments (“The Master of the Crabs,” “Morthylla”). Still others survive only as earlier drafts that are noticeably less polished than the published texts (“Schizoid Creator,” “Symposium of the Gorgon”). In the case of some stories that were only published long after Smith’s death, several different versions exist, requiring the editors to use our best judgment in selecting a text that we hope would not displease Smith.
    Three stories exist in versions that differ considerably from the published texts. We include the original version of “The Coming of the White Worm” without reference to the version published in  Stirring Science Stories. We restore the cuts made to “Necromancy in Naat” while maintaining some very real improvements that Smith made when the tale was published in Weird Tales . On the other hand, the rejected version of “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” contained unsuccessful attempts at romantic comedy that detracted from the story’s cumulative effect.
    We regret that we cannot present a totally authoritative text for Smith’s stories. Such typescripts do not exist. All that we can do is to apply our knowledge of Smith to the existing manuscripts and attempt to combine them to present what Smith would have preferred to publish were he not beset by editorial malfeasance in varying degrees. In doing so we hope to present Smith’s own words in their purest form to date so that the reader might experience what Ray Bradbury described in his foreword to A Rendezvous in Averoigne : “Take one step across the threshold of his stories, and you plunge into color, sound, taste, smell, and texture—into language.”
    The editors wish to thank Douglas A. Anderson, Azédarac, Steve Behrends, Gregory Belt, Geoffrey Best, Joshua Bilmes, Christopher Crites, April Derleth, William A. Dorman, Alan Gullette, Don Herron, Margery Hill, Rah Hoffman, S. T. Joshi, Terence McVicker, Marc Michaud, Andrew Migliore, Will Murray, Boyd Pearson, John Pelan, Alan H. Pesetsky, Rob Preston, Robert M. Price, Dennis Rickard, Jim Rockhill, David E. Schultz, Donald Sidney-Fryer, James Thompson, Henry Vester, Jason Williams, and especially Martin Andersson for their help, support, and encouragement of this project, as well as Holly Snyder and the staff of the John Hay Library of Brown University, and D. S. Black of the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, for their assistance in the preparation of this collection. Needless to say, any errors are the sole responsibility of the editors.

T HE D ARK A GE

    T he laboratory was like a citadel. It stood on a steep