Part I:
Time and the Gods
The Coming of the Sea
A Legend of the Dawn
The Vengeance of Men
When the Gods Slept
The King That Was Not
The Cave of Kai
The Sorrow of Search
The Men of Yarnith
For the Honour of the Gods
Night and Morning
Usury
Mlideen
The Secret of the Gods
The South Wind
In the Land of Time
The Relenting of Sarnidac
The Jest of the Gods
The Dreams of the Prophet
Part II:
The Journey of the King
These tales are of the things that befell gods and
men in Yarnith,
Averon, and Zarkandhu, and in the other countries
of my dreams.
TIME AND THE GODS
Once when the gods were young and only Their swarthy
servant Time was without age, the gods lay sleeping
by a broad river upon earth. There in a valley
that from all the earth the gods had set apart for
Their repose the gods dreamed marble dreams.
And with domes and pinnacles the dreams arose and
stood up proudly between the river and the sky, all
shimmering white to the morning. In the city’s
midst the gleaming marble of a thousand steps climbed
to the citadel where arose four pinnacles beckoning
to heaven, and midmost between the pinnacles there
stood the dome, vast, as the gods had dreamed it.
All around, terrace by terrace, there went marble
lawns well guarded by onyx lions and carved with effigies
of all the gods striding amid the symbols of the worlds.
With a sound like tinkling bells, far off in a land
of shepherds hidden by some hill, the waters of many
fountains turned again home. Then the gods awoke
and there stood Sardathrion. Not to common men
have the gods given to walk Sardathrion’s streets,
and not to common eyes to see her fountains.
Only to those to whom in lonely passes in the night
the gods have spoken, leaning through the stars, to
those that have heard the voices of the gods above
the morning or seen Their faces bending above the
sea, only to those hath it been given to see Sardathrion,
to stand where her pinnacles gathered together in the
night fresh from the dreams of gods. For round
the valley a great desert lies through which no common
traveller may come, but those whom the gods have chosen
feel suddenly a great longing at heart, and crossing
the mountains that divide the desert from the world,
set out across it driven by the gods, till hidden
in the desert’s midst they find the valley at
last and look with eyes upon Sardathrion.
