‘Bronzed by the Sun’
‘He Has Slain the Sacred Son of Set’: Chapter 17 of Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon
Reading from pages 207-211 of the DelRey edition
The opening illustration is darkly telling with a procession of hooded figures, whose leader holds a skull on a pole before him, traversing the shadowed feet of massive buildings.
“…the commoners of Stygia were no more given to analysis than were the commoners of less exotic races.”
The above quote nicely sums up Howard’s oft hinted at belief that the common folk of most societies were mere meat for the poet’s mill, slave-minded fools barely conscious of reality let alone such unfathomable concepts as fate, destiny, patrimony and esoterica, aspects of life that their rulers and heroes translated into impulses and events they could at least tangibly experience in their groping blindness.
Conan is doomed, not by great enemies, but by the slavish environs he is cast into, the streets of a slave nation where the ruling priesthood [like modern urban politicians] let loose their bestial temple pets [like modern criminals hunting pedestrians with government sanction]. And, when Conan is attacked by a sacred temple beast and butchers the thing, the justice of corrupt civilization descends upon the justice of natural barbarism, and where enemy heroes might fail to drive the mighty barbarian from the place of battle, the simpering civics of the moral cesspool called civilization which sends him fleeing into a more palatable, cleaner venue for heroism, out of the sick streets and into the temple of death and doom where evil cleanly lurks.
The closing illustration is an example of the priestly funerary mask worn by the devotees of Set, the Jackal God of Egypt, become in Howard’s hands the coiled serpent of primal evil.
Diction of Note
Nighted, essentially Howard’s most unique diction
Cressets, primitive street lights