The Last Hieroglyph

"The Last Hieroglyph " is a short story by American author Clark Ashton Smith as part of his Zothique cycle, and first published in the April 1935 issue of Weird Tales.

"The Last Hieroglyph"
Title page of "The Last Hieroglyph" as it appeared in Weird Tales, April 1935.
AuthorClark Ashton Smith
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SeriesZothique
Genre(s)Fantasy
Published inWeird Tales
Publication typePulp magazine
PublisherPopular Fiction Publishing Co.
Media typePrint
Publication dateApril 1935

Plot

Nushain the astrologer in Xylac charts a new horoscope which he copies down in a book. The horoscope foretells of a journey involving three guides to the house of Vergama, a god. A mummy appears in his written horoscope. Soon he is visited by a mummy who leads Nushain from his abode to the underworld. Nushain is accompanied by his black servant Mouzda and his dog Ansarath. Initially, he is overwhelmed by the underworld and flees back the way he came but ends up getting lost. The mummy finds him and leads Nushain to the shore of an unknown ocean. There they are visited by a merman and an uncrewed ship. The ship follows the merman as it sends them over a boiling ocean. The ship brings them to a wall of fire. A salamander beckons them to follow it through the wall and they do so. The salamander sends them to a staircase that ends with a house of great height. They find that it is the home of the god Vergama. Vergama shows them they are all characters in her book as she points to the three guides that led them here: the mummy, the merman, and the salamander. Turning a page, a great wind sweeps up the three as they find that they too are merely characters in Vergama's book.

Reception

In the 1981 book Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, Will Murray called it an "ironic tale."[1] In the 1977 book The Weird Tales Story, Robert Weinberg called it "one of his typical entertaining fantasies of Zothique."[2]

See also

References
  1. Smith, Curtis (1981). Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press. p. 506. ISBN 0-312-82420-3.
  2. Weinberg, Robert (1999). The Weird Tales Story. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press. p. 39. ISBN 1587151014.
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