THE DEEP ONES: "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" by Clark Ashton Smith

Discussion begins February 26th.

First published the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/208
http://tinyurl.com/ptklela

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?62555

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The End of the Story: Volume One of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith
The Tsathoggua Cycle
A Rendezvous in Averoigne
The Spawn of Cthulhu

MISCELLANY

http://www.blackgate.com/the-fantasy-cycles-of-clark-ashton-smith-part-ii-the-bo...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/15/AR2007021501543....
http://www.yog-sothoth.com/wiki/index.php/Hyperborea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzPZwxVDnKI
http://tinyurl.com/k3xmpdp

The End of the Story: Volume One of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith for me. Wm. Pugmire recently mentioned that Hippocampus Press will likely be publishing the letters of CAS and HPL sometime this year. Looking forward to that!

The End of the Story: Volume One of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith for me as well.

I love the fact that Otis Adelbert Kline gets a special banner and Kirk Mashburn gets his story special notice, even though both people are basically unknowns today. At least Howard and Smith got the top of the other author list.

The End of the Story: Volume One of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith - me too.

I would not mind reading another tale featuring the one-handed thief Satampra Zeiros, but I think this is the only one. Satampra joins an impressive lineup of thieves in weird fiction, ranging from Conan in the early days to Gray Mouser and Nifft the Lean. Speaking of Conan, the toad god Tsahoggua brings to mind a similar batrachian entity in REH fiction. Or am I imagining it? Could have simply been a Roy Thomas creation...

CAS almost always enhances my vocabulary. This time it's "quinquangular". From now on, it's the Quinquagulon in DC for me!

One wonders why CAS thought "pentagonal" didn't do.

I particularly like the mock-epic tone Satampra adopts. He might be an unlucky thief, but dammit he's a heroic unlucky thief!

>7 AndreasJ:

There is also some subtle humor to be found in the "Farewell Tirouv Ompallios" sequence at the end.

This story seems to bring up comparisons with Dunsany. When Satampra Zeiros and Tirouv Omapallios come up the "ancient road, long disused and well-nigh overgrown", they seem to pass "from all human ken". The vegetation becomes denser and lusher and even attains a lethal aspect and the only animals are large vipers, strange moths and bats, and there seem to be"other and invisible presences". This reminds me of characters passing "far beyond the fields we know" in such Dunsanian works as The King of Elfland's Daughter and any number of short tales.

Might the "elastic monster" of the temple of Tsathoggua be considered Commoriom's genius loci?

I took it to be simply the supernatural guardian of Tsathoggua's temple. This reading may be influenced by HPL and later writers implying a whole race of "formless spawn" following the toad-god.

Speaking of humour, Satampra and Tirouv marvelling at the avarice of the idol-makers not to provide any gems or precious metals for them to steal is quite nice.

> 8

The story is Dunsanian as all get out. HPL certainly thought so, as declared to CAS in the correspondence quoted in Price's intro: "You have achieved in its fullest glamour the exact Dunsanian touch which I find it almost impossible to duplicate, & I am sure that even the incomparable Nuth would have been glad to own Satampra Zeiros as his master."

The rhythm and images of the story, as well as its arch irony, are indeed nigh-perfect Dunsanian pastiche, but the diction oversteps into a territory that is all Smith's own. I goggled at the overwrought phrase "gave evidence of anthropophagic inclinations"!

> 7

Curiously, pentagons don't tesselate (in a Euclidean plane), and the floor Smith describes may be impossible. I'm open to geometric suggestions as to how to pull it off!

10 > Regular pentagons don't tesselate. You can have a floor with pentagonal (or quinquangular) tiles - like this, frex - if you don't insist on them being being regular (ie. all angles and sides equal).

> 11

Ah! Too right.

> 6

I think that would be the DC Quinquangle (cf. triangle, quadrangle).

>12 paradoxosalpha:

I think that would be the DC Quinquangle (cf. triangle, quadrangle).

Technically, you must be right. However, "To the Quinquangle, soldier!" sounds a bit less meaty. In order to provide the least amount of confusion to the generals, it must be the Quinquagulon!
:-D

I liked the mock, droll tone and long words and one pause in a tale that sounds a lot more like an oral recollection than something written offhand.

And the plot reminds one of the old joke about two hikers in bear country: you don't have to run faster than a bear, just faster than your fellow hiker.

On his first reading of this, Farnsworth Wright rejected -- though he liked the Dunsanian flavor.

One of my favorite Smith stories.

>8 gwendetenebre: The thief who encounters a supernatural menace does seem a common plot device. I wonder if Dunsany is at the beginning of that tradition. Even Lovecraft did it with "The Terrible Old Man".

> 8, 14

I think the tradition goes back at least as far as the 1001 Nights, probably even back to Classical times ("Milesian tales").

> 15
apart from that last comment, I don't think I have very much to add to the conversation. I haven't read enough Dunsany to work out how much of the atmosphere of this story owes to him, and how much derives from CAS's background as a Decadent writer.

Commoriom sounds like one of those great lost cities that bear further exploration:

And still it stands, a luster of marble, a magnificence of granite, all a-throng with spires and cupolas and obelisks that the mighty trees of the jungle have not yet overtowered, in a fertile inland valley of Hyperborea. And men say that in its unbroken vaults there lies entire and undespoiled as of yore the rich treasure of olden monarchs; that the high-built tombs retain the gems and electrum that were buried with their mummies; that the fanes have still their golden altar-vessels and furnishings, the idols their precious stones in ear and mouth and nostril and navel.

And who knows what else? I see that a pre-abandonment Commoriom is featured in Smith's "The Testament of Athammaus", which I'll probably nominate for a Spring 2014 DEEP ONES discussion. Lin Carter also wrote a 1971 essay called "Notes on the Commoriom Myth-Cycle" which can be found in Hyperborea.

>17 gwendetenebre:
Is that perhaps the source of Gygax's inclusion of electrum in his RPG world building? I've often wondered.

I've enjoyed this thread quite a bit, without having read the story in question.

> 18

I sort of doubt it. Gygax's electrum seems to be "electrum magicum," an alloy of precious metals. Whereas the Commoriom tombs have electrum with gems, so I suspect it of being amber.

Now that's interesting, I'd somehow glommed onto the alloy idea, without knowing why. I thought somewhere (maybe Leiber?) it was specified as an alloy of two specific metals, but don't recall which. What's the etymology of electrum magicum?

Real-world electrum was/is a naturally-occurring alloy of gold and silver, used in the first coinage (from ancient Lydia).

My dictionary also gives two further meanings: amber (obsolete by the 19th Century); and an alloy of copper, nickel, and zinc (19th Century).