Listen,
for this is the tale that was told to a fair lamia by the demon Charnadis
as they sat together on the top of Mophi, above the sources of the Nile,
in those years when the sphinx was young. Now the lamia was vexed,
for her beauty was grown an evil legend in both Thebais and Elephantine;
so that men were become fearful of her lips and cautious of her embrace,
and she had no lover for almost a fortnight. She lashed her serpentine
tail on the ground, and moaned softly, and wept those mythical tears which
a serpent weeps. And the demon told this tale for her comforting:
Long, long ago, in the red cycles of my youth (said Charnadis), I
was like all young demons, and was prone to use the agility of my wings
in fantastic flights; to hover and poise like a gier-eagle above Tartarus
and the pits of Python; or to lift the broad blackness of my vans on the
orbit of stars. I have followed the moon from evening twilight to morning
twilight; and I have gazed on the secrets of that Medusean face which she
averts eternally from the earth. I have read through filming ice the ithyphallic
runes on columns yet extant in her deserts; and I know the hieroglyphs
which solve forgotten riddles, or hint eonian histories, on the walls of
her cities taken by ineluctable snow. I have flown through the triple ring
of Saturn, and have mated with lovely basilisks, on isles towering league-high
from stupendous oceans where each wave is like the rise and fall of Himalayas.
I have dared the clouds of Jupiter, and the black and freezing abysses
of Neptune, which are crowned with eternal starlight; and I have sailed
beyond to incommensurable suns, compared with which the sun that thou knowest
is a corpse-candle in a stinted vault. There, in tremendous planets, I
have furled my flight on the terraced mountains, large as fallen asteroids,
where, with a thousand names and a thousand images, undreamt-of Evil is
served and worshipt in unsurmisable ways. Or, perched in the flesh-colored
lips of columnar blossoms, whose perfume was an ecstasy of incommunicable
dreams, I have mocked the wiving monsters, and have lured their females
, that sang and fawned at the base of my hiding-place.
Now, in my indefatigable questing among the remoter galaxies, I came
one day to that forgotten and dying planet which in the language of its
unrecorded peoples was called Sadastor. Immense and drear and gray beneath
a waning sun, far-fissured with enormous chasms, and covered from pole
to pole with the never-ebbing tides of the desert sand, it hung in space
without moon or satellite, an abomination and a token of doom to fairer
and younger worlds. Checking the speed of my interstellar flight, I followed
its equator with a poised and level wing, above the peaks of cyclopean
volcanoes, and bare, terrific ridges of elder hills, and deserts pale with
the ghastliness of salt, that were manifestly the beds of former oceans.
In the very center of one of these ocean-beds, beyond sight of the
mountains that formed its primeval shoreline, and leagues below their level,
I found a vast and winding valley that plunged even deeplier into the abysses
of this dreadful world. It was walled with perpendicular cliffs and buttresses
and pinnacles of a rusty-red stone, that were fretted into a million bizarrely
sinister forms by the sinking of the olden seas. I flew slowly among these
cliffs as they wound ever downward in tortuous spirals for mile on mile
of utter and irredeemable desolation, and the light grew dimmer above me
as ledge on ledge and battlement on battlement of that strange red stone
upreared themselves between my wings and the heavens. Here, when I rounded
a sudden turn of the precipice, in the profoundest depth where the rays
of the sun fell only for a brief while at noon, and the rocks were purple
with everlasting shadow, I found a pool of dark-green water - the last
remnant of the former ocean, ebbing still amid steep, insuperable walls.
And from this pool there cried a voice, in accents that were subtly sweet
as mortal wine of the mandragora, and faint as the murmuring of shells.
And the voice said:
"Pause and remain, I pray, and tell me who thou art, who comest thus
to the accursed solitude wherein I die."
Then, pausing on the brink of the pool, I peered into its gulf of
shadow, and saw the pallid glimmering of a female form that upreared itself
from the waters. And the form was that of a siren, with hair the color
of ocean-kelp, and berylline eyes, and a dolphine shaped tail. And I said
to her:
"I am the demon Charnadis. But who art thou, who lingerest thus in
this ultimate pit of abomination, in the depth of a dying world?"
She answered: "I am a siren, and my name is Lyspial. Of the seas
wherein I saw and sported at leisure many centuries ago, and whose gallant
mariners I drew to to an enchanted death on the shores of my disastrous
isle, there remains only this fallen pool. Alas! For the pool dwindles
daily, and when it is wholly gone I too must perish."
She began to weep, and her briny tears fell down and were added to
the briny waters.
Fain would I have comforted her, and I said:
"Weep not, for I will lift thee upon my wings and bear thee to some
newer world, where the sky-blue waters of abounding seas are shattered
to intricate webs of wannest foam, on low shores that are green and aureate
with pristine spring. There, perchance for eons, thou shalt have thine
abode, and galleys with painted oars and great barges purpureal-sailed
shall be drawn upon thy rocks in the red light of sunsets domed with storm,
and shall mingle the crash of their figured prows with the sweet sorcery
of thy mortal singing."
But still she wept, and would not be comforted, crying:
"Thou art kind, but this would avail me not, for I was born of the
waters of this world, and with its waters I must die. Alas! my lovely seas,
that ran in unbroken sapphire from shores of perrenial blossoms to shores
of everlasting snow! Alas! the sea-winds, with their mingled perfumes of
brine and weed, and scents of ocean flowers and flowers of the land, and
far-blown exotic balsams! Alas! the quinquiremes of cycle-ended wars,
and the heavy-laden argosies with sails and cordage of byssus, that plied
between barbaric isles with their cargoes of topaz or garnet-coloured wines
and jade and ivory idols, in the antique summers that now are less than
legend! Alas! the dead captains, the beautiful dead sailors that were borne
by the ebbing tide to my couches of amber seaweed, in my caverns underneath
a cedared promontory! Alas! the kisses that I laid on their cold and hueless
lips, on their sealed marmorean eyelids!"
And sorrow and pity seized me at her words, for I knew that she spoke
the lamentable truth, that her doom was in the lessening of the bitter
waters. So, after many proffered condolences, no less vague than vain,
I bade her a melancholy farewelland flew heavily away between the spiral
cliffs where I had come, and clomb the somber skies till the world Sadastor
was only a darkling mote far down in space. But the tragic shadow of the
siren's fate, and her sorrow, lay grievously upon me for hours, and only
in the kisses of a beautiful fierce vampire, in a far-off and young and
exuberant world, was I able to forget it. And I tell the now the tale thereof,
that haply thou mayest be consoled by the contemplation of a plight that
was infinitely more dolorous and irremediable than thine own.
