I could see the holes in our port side, where every shot had hit; and they must have gone right through and made cracks on our starboard side below the waterline. They wouldn't have been more than cracks, or the Rakish Craft would have sunk, but she remained there, rocking on the water. One of the bullets must have gone right into her engines, for she didn't go forward any more. Then the strange ship turned round and sailed back the way she had come, and the Rakish Craft stopped rocking. I thought at first that she would keep afloat, and that the breeze, which was proudly flapping her black-and-yellow flag, would blow her ashore in about ten minutes. But she was making water all the time, and she couldn't last ten minutes. And we saw her go down with her skull-and-crossbones flying, yellow and black from her masthead, as a pirate's ship should.
There's not much more to tell, except one funny thing: the fat man launched his grey gunboat again and sent it right across the Round Pond. And she was flying the skull-and-crossbones too.
Explanatory Notes
INTRODUCTION
1
C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 30 January 1936, MS, John Hay Library, Brown University.
2
Oscar Wilde, preface to
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891).
3
Dunsany,
Patches of Sunlight
(London: William Heinemann, 1938), p. 30.
4
See Mark Amory,
Biography of Lord Dunsany
(London: Collins, 1972), p. 40.
5
Dunsany,
Patches of Sunlight,
p. 9.
6
Dunsany,
Patches of Sunlight,
pp. 20-21.
7
H. P. Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, 15 November 1936,
Selected Letters 1934-1937,
ed. August Derleth and James Turner (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1976), p. 354.
8
Dunsany,
While the Sirens Slept
(London: Jarrolds, 1944), p. 78.
9
Dunsany,
Lord Adrian
(1933), in
The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer and Other Fantasms,
ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Philadelphia: Owlswick Press, 1980), p. 336.
10
Dunsany,
The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders
(London: Jarrolds, 1950), p. 13.
11
W. B. Yeats, introduction to
Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany
(1912), in Yeats's
Prefaces and Introductions,
ed. William H. O'Donnell (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 140.
12
“Irish Academy,”
Manchester Guardian,
19 September 1932, p. 9.
13
Dunsany,
The Sirens Wake
(London: Jarrolds, 1945), p. 6.
14
Brooks Atkinson, “Three One-Acters by Abbe Workshop,”
New York Times,
25 May 1950, p. 36.
15
Dunsany, “Nowadays,” in
The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer,
p. 138.
The Gods of PegaÄna
was published in October 1905 by Elkin Mathews (London). Its critical and popular success led to the publication, in September 1906, of
Time and the Gods
by William Heinemann (London). That volume is a direct sequel to
The Gods of PegaÄna
in the sense that it develops the “PegÄna mythology,” although the tales are more thoroughly developed narratives than the quasi-biblical chapters of
The Gods of PegaÄna.
Only one story in
Time and the Gods
appeared previously in a periodical: “Time and the Gods,” first published as “The Lament of the Gods for Sardathrion” in the rare Irish magazine
Shanachie,
in its undated first issue (1906). The other stories included hereâ“A Legend of the Dawn,” “In the Land of Time,” and “The Relenting of Sarnidac”âwere first published in
Time and the Gods
. Dunsany virtually abandoned the “PegÄna mythology” in subsequent works, aside from brief allusions to some of his gods in “Idle Days on the Yann” and its two sequels. Thereafter, Dunsany invented mythical realms only for individual tales, such as “The Fall of Babbulkund” (
Irish Homestead,
Christmas 1907), included in his third volume,
The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories
(London: George Allen & Sons, 1908).
1
Dunsany refers to Polaris, or the Pole Star, the star around which all the other stars appear to revolve. Currently the Pole Star is Alpha Ursae Majoris; about 4,500 years ago the Pole Star was Alpha Draconis; 12,000 years from now it will be the star Vega in the constellation Lyra.
2
The sentiment is reminiscent of the celebrated passage in Book III of Lucretius's
De Rerum Natura,
in which he propounds the Epicurean notion that death signifies the utter extinction of all sensation and emotion. “ âUnhappy man,' they cry, âunhappily cheated by one treacherous day out of all the uncounted blessings of life!' But they do not go on to say: âAnd now no repining for those lost joys will oppress you any more.' ”
De Rerum Natura
3.898-901 (trans. R. E. Latham).
3
Archaic variant of
nevertheless.
4
For a very different etiology of the dawn, see “A Legend of the Dawn” (p. 53).
5
The conception is analogous to the
lares et penates
of the ancient Romansâthe “household gods” whose small images were placed on the hearth for the protection of the family, the clan, and by extension the entire community.
6
For a poignant tale of such “broken things,” see “Blagdaross” (p. 141).
7
Archaic variant of
drove.
8
Cf. the serpent's tempting of Eve to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5).
9
A commonplace of secularist thought. Cf. David Hume as cited by James Boswell: “I told him [Samuel Johnson] that David Hume said to me, that he was no more uneasy to think he should
not be
after this life, than that he
had not been
before he began to exist.” James Boswell,
Life of Johnson
(1791; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 426.
10
The Pleiades are a cluster of stars in the constellation Taurus. Orion is a constellation containing such bright stars as Betelgeuse and Rigel. The “morning star” is the name given to the planet Venus when it appears above the eastern horizon before sunrise.
11
For a much later story on this theme, see “Poseidon” (p. 358); also (by implication) “The Exiles' Club” (p. 242).
12
Dunsany is probably echoing the account in Xenophon's
Anabasis
of the march of the Ten Thousand (Greek mercenaries in the service of the Persian satrap Cyrus), who, after an arduous journey from Asia Minor to the Black Sea, cried: “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (“The sea! The sea!”)
13
Cf. Dunsany's lament on the increasing prevalence of machinery in modern life: “I know of the boons that machinery has conferred on man, all tyrants have boons to confer, but service to the dynasty of steam and steel is a hard service and gives little leisure to fancy to flit from field to field.” “Romance and the Modern Stage,”
National Review,
no. 341 (July 1911): 830.
14
For a much more sinister version of this scenario, see
The Gods of the Mountain
(1911), where seven beggars, impersonating the seven green jade “gods of the mountain,” accept the offerings made by the citizens, including a leg of lamb. As the beggars devour the food, one citizen states skeptically: “It is strange that gods should be thus anxious about the cooking of a leg of lamb.”
Five Plays
(London: Grant Richards, 1914), p. 22.
15
The name is perhaps meant to evoke Phlegethon, one of the five rivers of the Greek underworld.
II. TALES OF WONDER
The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories
and
A Dreamer's Tales
(London: George Allen & Sons, 1910) may well constitute the pinnacle of Dunsany's early short story work. It was at this time that his tales began appearing in the London
Saturday Review,
where they attracted a wide following. However, the four stories from that volume included hereâ“The Sword of Welleran,” “The Kith of the Elf-Folk,” “The Ghosts,” and “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”âwere previously unpublished. “The Kith of the Elf-Folk,” telling of a fairy who finds herself uncomfortable with the possession of a human soul, seems to have served as a nucleus for Dunsany's later novel
The Story of Mona Sheehy
(1939), in which a young Irish woman believes she is a child of the fairies (although the reader knows otherwise) and chafes at being forced to work in a factory and conduct her life in the manner of other human beings. “The Ghosts” may represent Dunsany's first tale of supernatural horror, and the first tale set entirely in the recognizably “real” world. “Sacnoth” has received the unusual tribute of serving as the basis for a fine song, “The Fortress Unvanquishable,” by the heavy metal band Destiny's End (available on their album
Breathe Deep the Dark,
1998).
A Dreamer's Tales
contains two of Dunsany's most poignant narratives, “Blagdaross” (
Saturday Review,
16 May 1908) and “Idle Days on the Yann.” The latter tale (not published periodically) was written in 1908, in anticipation of a trip down the Nile that Dunsany and his wife took in order to relieve a respiratory ailment his wife had developed. It later inspired two sequels, “A Shop in Go-by Street” (
Irish Review,
November 1912) and “The Avenger of Perdóndaris” (
Irish Review,
December 1912), both collected in
Tales of Three Hemispheres
(Boston: John W. Luce, 1919).
The stories in
The Book of Wonder
(London: William Heinemann, 1912) are generally parodies of Dunsany's own earlier manner, with the exception of “The Bride of the Man-Horse” (
Sketch,
1 February 1911), a splendid tale of heroic adventure.
1
Probably an echo of Kurdistan, the region in the Middle East comprising portions of eastern Turkey, northeastern Syria, and northern Iraq and Iran.
2
Abana and Pharpar are rivers in Syria mentioned jointly in the Bible: “Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?” (2 Kings 5:12).
3
Nineveh was one of the capitals of Assyria, located on the east bank of the Tigris River near the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. It flourished from at least the eighteenth century B.C.E. to 612 B.C.E., when it fell to a combined force of Medes and Babylonians.
4
The reference is to proposition 13 in Book 1 of Euclid's
Elements.
5
Mount Etna, the highest active volcano in Europe, is in eastern Sicily, eighteen miles north of Catania. Stromboli is a volcano on an island of that name north of Sicily.
6
Bucephalus was Alexander the Great's horse. It died in 326 B.C.E. while Alexander was in India. Saint George, the patron saint of England, probably flourished in the early fourth century C.E. He is reputed to have slain a dragon while astride a horse, although this legend dates no earlier than the twelfth century. Roland, the hero of the
Song of Roland
(a chanson de geste dating to the twelfth century), was reputedly Charlemagne's nephew and rode into battle against the Saracens on a horse. Rosinante is Don Quixote's horse.
7
Saladin (1138-1193) was sultan of Egypt and Syria. He defeated the Crusaders at Jerusalem in 1187. He was, however, unable to lift the siege of Acre in 1191, and the city fell to Christian forces commanded by Richard I, the Lion-Hearted (Coeur de Lion), king of England (1189-99). Richard was unsuccessful in attempts to recapture Jerusalem, and in 1192 he concluded a truce with Saladin.
Paynims
are pagans, heathens, or non-Christians in general.
8
Perhaps a reference to Dunsany's unsuccessful attempt in 1906 to become a Conservative member of Parliament for the district of West Wiltshire; in a heavily Liberal district he lost by only 1,450 votes.
9
“And the twelve gates [of Heaven] were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass” (Revelation 21:21).
10
Hanwell is a northwestern suburb of London where Hanwell Asylum, a mental hospital, was established in 1831. It is now called St. Bernard's Hospital.
11
Leviathan is a dragon or sea monster mentioned several times in the Old Testament (e.g., Job 41:1, Psalms 104:26).
Much of Dunsany's work, early and late, could be regarded as prose-poetic in its heavy use of metaphor, symbol, and rhythmic repetition, and its careful attention to cadence; but some works stand out as signal instances of prose poetry.
A Dreamer's Tales
contains two such specimens, “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow” (
Saturday Review,
2 May 1908) and “Carcassonne” (not published periodically). Dunsany's finest prose poems are found in
Fifty-one Tales
(London: Elkin Mathews, 1915), most of which appeared in the
Saturday Review
from 1909 to 1913. Among the stories in this volume are “The Raft-Builders” (
Saturday Review,
18 December 1909), “The Prayer of the Flowers” (
Saturday Review,
18 December 1909), “The Workman” (
Saturday Review,
26 March 1910), “Charon” (
Saturday Review,
20 August 1910), “Roses” (
Saturday Review,
31 December 1910), and “The City” (
Saturday Review,
30 August 1913), many of which not merely predict, but welcome, the eventual extinction of the human race.
1
Tyre is an ancient city on the Mediterranean Sea, located about forty-five miles southwest of Beirut, in what is now Lebanon. Established by the Phoenicians no later than the middle of the second millennium B.C.E., it developed into a powerful city-state. It was destroyed by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.E., but later reemerged as an important port in Graeco-Roman times before being razed by the Muslims in 1291 C.E. Persepolis, located near the modern city of Shiraz, Iran, was founded around 515 B.C.E. by the Persian king Darius the Great as the center of his imperial cult. It was sacked and burned by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.E.
2
In Greek myth, Charon is the ferryman who, for a fee, conveyed the spirits of the dead across the river Styx to their final resting place in the Underworld.
3
In Roman myth, Dis is the ruler of the Underworld, equivalent to the Greek Pluto.
4
Carcassonne is a city in southeastern France, lying on the Aude River. Founded by the Romans in the first century C.E. as Colonia Julia Carcaso, it was made into a fortress town by the Visigoths beginning in the fifth century. It features the finest surviving remains of medieval fortifications in Europe. It is still inhabited, with a population of about forty-five thousand. Dunsany's introductory note to the story suggests that he was perhaps unaware of Carcassonne's actual existence. The line of poetry Dunsany quotes is from Gustave Nadaud's poem “Carcassonne” (1879), as translated by M. E. W. Sherwood.
5
“Leal” is an archaic variant of
loyal.