To the Land of the Living Read Online Free PDF Page B

simply variants on his own much older ones.
    There was substance to the Gilgamesh stories, of course, especially the parts about him and Enkidu; but the poet had salted the story with a lot of pretentious arty nonsense too, as poets always will, and in any case you got very tired of having everybody boil your long and complex life down into the same twelve chapters and the same little turns of phrase. It had gotten so that Gilgamesh found himself quoting the main Gilgamesh poem too, the one about his quest for eternal life-well, that one wasn’t too far from the essence of the truth, though they had mucked up a lot of the details with precious little “imaginative” touches – by way of making introduction for himself: “I am the man to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death.” Straight out of the poet’s mouth, those lines. Tiresome. Tiresome. Angrily he jabbed his dagger beneath the dead monster’s hide, and set about his task of flaying, while the two little men behind him went on muttering and mumbling to one another in astonishment.

Three
    There were strange emotions stirring in Robert Howard’s soul, and he did not care for them at all. He could forgive himself forbelieving for that one giddy moment that this Gilgamesh was his Conan. That was nothing more than the artistic temperament at work, sweeping him up in a bit of rash feverish enthusiasm. To come suddenly upon a great muscular giant of a man in a loincloth who was hacking away at some fiendish monster with a little bronze dagger, and to think that he must surely be the mighty Cimmerian – well, that was a pardonable enough thing. Here in the Afterworld you learned very quickly that you might run into anybody at all. You could find yourself playing at dice with Lord Byron or sharing a mug of mulled wine with Menelaus or arguing with Plato about the ideas of Nietzsche, who was standing right there making faces, and after a time you came to take most such things for granted, more or less.
    So why not think that this fellow was Conan? No matter that Conan’s eyes had been of a different color. That was a trifle. He looked like Conan in all the important ways. He was of Conan’s size and strength. And he was kingly in more than physique. He seemed to have Conan’s cool intelligence and complexity of soul, Conan’s regal courage and Conan’s indomitable spirit.
    The trouble was that Conan, the wondrous Cimmerian warrior from 19,000 B.C., had never existed except in Howard’s own imagination. And there were no fictional characters in the Afterworld. If you had not lived, truly lived, in that other world of the first flesh, it was impossible for you to live again here. You might meet Richard Wagner, but you weren’t likely to encounter Siegfried. Theseus was here somewhere, but not the Minotaur. William the Conqueror, yes; William Tell, no.
    That was all right, Howard told himself. His little fantasy of meeting Conan here in the Afterworld was nothing but a bit of mawkish narcissism: he was better off without it. Coming across the authentic Gilgamesh – ah, how much more interesting that was! A genuine Sumerian king – an actual titan out of history’s dawn, not some trumped-up figure fashioned from cardboard and hard-breathing wish-fulfilling dreams; a flesh-and-blood mortal who had lived a lusty life and had fought great battles and had walked eye to eye with the ancient gods and had struggled against the inevitability of death, and who in dying had taken on the immortality of mythicarchetype – ah, now there was someone worth getting to know! Whereas Howard had to admit that he would have no more to learn from a conversation with Conan than he could discover by interrogating his own image in the mirror. Or else a meeting with the “real” Conan, if it was in any way possible, would surely cast him into terrible confusions and contradictions of soul from which there would be no recovering. No, Howard