Part 1 (2/2)

As the inevitable result of ihty and intolerant They derided the ruder, unsophisticated Bossonians, and hard feeling greeen the the Bossonians and the latter resenting the attitude of their masters - who now boldly called themselves such, and treated the Bossonians like conquered subjects, taxing the them for their wars of territorial expansion - wars the profits of which the Bossonians shared little Scarcely enough uard the frontier, and hearing of Pictish outrages in their hon and marched to the western frontier, where they defeated the dark-skinned invaders in a great battle

This desertion, however, was the direct cause of Aquilonia's defeat by the desperate Neht down on the Bossonians the cruel wrath of the ihted as iiht to the borders of the reat conclave, and, in the guise of an expedition against the Picts, bands of savage Sheers The unarmed chiefs were massacred, the Shemites turned on their stunned hosts with torch and sword, and the armored i people Froed and the Aquilonian ar a ruined and devastated land behind them

And then the Pictish invasion burst in full power along those borders It was no mere raid, but the concerted rush of a whole nation, led by chiefs who had served in Aquilonian armies, and planned and directed by Gorm - an old man now, but with the fire of his fierce aes in their path, manned by sturdy archers, to hold back the rush until the iht up The remnants of the Bossonians were swept out of existence, and the blood-, before the legions, warring again with the Neara seized this opportunity to throw off the yoke, which exaiments of mercenaries and vassalsand burning as they went The Picts surged irresistibly eastward, and host after host was trampled beneath their feet Without their Bossonian archers the Aquilonians found themselves unable to cope with the terrible arrow-fire of the barbarians Froions were recalled to resist the onrush, while from the wilderness horde after horde swarmed forth, in apparently inexhaustible supply And in the midst of this chaos, the Ci the ruin They looted cities, devastated the country, and retired into the hills with their plunder, but the Picts occupied the land they had over-run And the Aquilonian eain the Hyrkanians rode froions from Zamora was their incitement Za established his capital in the largest city of the country This invasion was frodom of Turan, on the shores of the inland sea, but another, e Hyrkanian thrust caalloped around the northern extremity of the inland sea, traversed the icy deserts, entered the steppes, driving the aborigines before thedoms These newcomers were not at first allies with the Turanians, but skirmished with them as with the Hyborians; new drifts of eastern warriors bickered and fought, until all were united under a great chief, who ca from the very shores of the eastern ocean With no Aquilonian armies to oppose theated Brythunia, and devastated southern Hyperborea, and Corinthia They swept into the Ci the black-haired barbarians before the the hills, where cavalry was less effectual, the Cimmerians turned on them, and only a disorderly retreat, at the end of a whole day of bloody fighting, saved the Hyrkanian hosts from complete annihilation

While these events had been transpiring, the kingdoms of Shem had conquered their ancient master, Koth, and had been defeated in an atteia But scarcely had they coradation of Koth, when they were overrun by the Hyrkanians, and found theated by sterner masters than the Hyborians had ever been Meanwhile the Picts had made the out the inhabitants They had broken over the borders of Zingara, and thousands of Zingarans, fleeing the slaughter into Argos, threw the Hyrkanians, who settled theos was enveloped in the flahter of Pictish conquest, and the slayers swept into Ophir and clashed with the ard-riding Hyrkanians The latter, after their conquest of Sheian army at the Nilus and over-run the country as far south as the black kingdoht back thousands as captives, settling the the Shemites Possibly they would have co eainst their western conquests

Nemedia, unconquerable by Hyborians, reeled between the riders of the east and the swords down froed as mercenaries; they proved such able warriors that they not only beat off the Hyrkanians, but halted the eastward advance of the Picts

The world at that time presents some such picture: a vast Pictish empire, wild, rude and barbaric, stretches from the coasts of Vanaheiara It stretches east to include all Aquilonia except Gunder-land, the northern-dom in the hills, survived the fall of the empire, and still maintains its independence The Pictish eos, Ophir, the western part of Koth, and the western-most lands of Shem Opposed to this barbaric empire is the empire of the Hyrkanians, of which the northern boundaries are the ravaged lines of Hyperborea, and the southern, the deserts south of the lands of Shedom, Corinthia, most of Koth, and all the eastern lands of Shem are included in this empire The borders of Cimmeria are intact; neither Pict nor Hyrkanian has been able to subdue these warlike barbarians Nemedia, dominated by the yEsir mercenaries, resists all invasions In the north Nordhei races, but in the south, Koth has becoround where Picts and Hyrkanians war incessantly Sometidoain the plains and cities are in the hands of the western invaders In the far south, Stygia, shaken by the Hyrkanian invasion, is being encroached upon by the great black kingdoms And in the far north, the Nordic tribes are restless, warring continually with the Ci the Hyperborean frontiers

Gorm was slain by Hialmar, a chief of the Nemedian ALsir He was a very old man, nearly a hundred years old In the seventy-five years which had elapsed since he first heard the tale of e time in the life of a man, but a brief space in the tale of nations - he had welded an ee clans, he had overthrown a civilization He who had been born in a olden thrones, and gnawed joints of beef presented to hihters of kings Conquest and the acquiring of wealth altered not the Pict; out of the ruins of the crushed civilization no new culture arose phoenix-like The dark hands which shattered the artistic glories of the conquered never tried to copy the ruins of shattered palaces and clad his hard body in the silks of vanquished kings, the Pict remained the eternal barbarian, ferocious, elemental, interested only in the naked pri in his instincts which were all for war and plunder, and in which arts and the cultured progress of humanity had no place Not so with the JEsir who settled in Nemedia These soon adopted many of the ways of their civilized allies, modified powerfully, however, by their own intensely virile and alien culture

For a short age Pict and Hyrkanian snarled at each other over the ruins of the world they had conquered Then began the glacier ages, and the great Nordic drift Before the southwardkindred clans before thedorips with the Hyrkan-ians Nedom, ruled by the descendants of the ysirtides of Nordic invasion, the Cimmerians were on the ed across and codo their irresistible way through the Pictish hosts They defeated the Nordic-Nemedians and sacked some of their cities, but did not halt They continued eastward, overthrowing a Hyrkanian army on the borders of Brythunia

Behind them hordes of ALsir and Vanir swarmed into the lands, and the Pictish empire reeled beneath their strokes Nemedia was overthrown, and the half-civilized Nordics fled before their wilder kins the cities of Ne Nordics, who had adopted the nadom, and to whom the term Nemedian henceforth refers, came into the ancient land of Koth, expelled both Picts and Hyrkanians, and aided the people of Shem to throw off the Hyrkanian yoke All over the western world, the Picts and Hyrkanians were staggering before this younger, fiercer people A band of ALsir drove the eastern riders fro the name for themselves The Nordics who had conquered Hyperborea assailed their eastern eneely that the dark-skinned descendants of the Lemurians retreated into the steppes, pushed irresistibly back toward Vilayet

Meanwhile the Ci southeastward, destroyed the ancient Hyrkanian kingdom of Turan, and settled on the southwestern shores of the inland sea The power of the eastern conquerors was broken Before the attacks of the Nordheimr and the Cimmerians, they destroyed all their cities, butchered such captives as were not fit tothousands of slaves before the the northern edge of the sea, and vanishi+ng froain, thousands of years later, as Huns, Mongols, Tatars and Turks With thearans, ere settled together far to the east, forypsies

Meanwhile, also, a tribe of Vanir adventurers had passed along the Pictish coast southward, ravaged ancient Zingara, and coia, which, oppressed by a cruel aristocratic ruling class, was staggering under the thrusts of the black kingdoeneral revolt, overthrew the reigning class, and set theated the northern-doypt From these red-haired conquerors the earlier Pharaohs boasted descent

The western world was now dominated by Nordic barbarians The Picts still held Aquilonia and part of Zingara, and the western coast of the continent But east to Vilayet, and from the Arctic circle to the lands of She tribes of Nordheidoia and the lands of She tides of Picts, Hyrkanians, Cimmerians and Nordics had levelled them in ruins, and the once do scarcely a trace of their blood in the veins of their conquerors Only a few naes of the barbarians, to coend and fable, until the whole history of the Hyborian age was lost sight of in a cloud of ered the terara and Zamora; the Esir who doured in Irish history, and the Nordics who settled in Brythunia were known as Brythunians, Brythons or Britons

There was no such thing, at that time, as a consolidated Nordic e, and they fought savagely aht have been will not be known, because another terrific convulsion of the earth, carving out the lands as they are known to ain Great strips of the western coast sank; Vanaheilacier-haunted wastes for a hundred years - vanished beneath the waves The ocean flowed around the mountains of western Cimmeria to form the North Sea; these land, Scotland and Ireland, and the waves rolled over what had been the Pictish wilderness and the Bossonian ard into the peninsulas later known as Norway, Sweden and Denian continent was broken away froe foros, western Koth and the western lands of Shem, washed the blue ocean men later called the Mediterranean But where land sank elsewhere, a vast expanse west of Stygia rose out of the waves, for the whole western half of the continent of Africa

The buckling of the land thrust up great es in the central part of the northern continent Whole Nordic tribes were blotted out, and the rest retreated eastward The territory about the slowly drying inland sea was not affected, and there, on the western shores, the Nordic tribes began a pastoral existence, living inwith them In the west the remnants of the Picts, reduced by the cataclysan, with the incredible virility of their race, once e, they were overthrown by the ard drift of the Ci-up of the continent that only ends told of former empires

This drift comes within the reach of rowing population which thronged the steppes west of the inland sea - which still later, much reduced in size, was known as the Caspian - to such an extent that ration became an economic necessity The tribes moved southward, northward and ard, into those lands non as India, Asia Minor and central and western Europe

They came into these countries as Aryans But there were variations anized today, others which have long been forgotten The blond Achaians, Gauls and Britons, for instance, were descendants of pure-blooded JEsir The Neendry were the Nemedian JEsir The Danes were descendants of pure-blooded Vanir; the Goths - ancestors of the other Scandinavian and Gerlo-Saxons - were descendants of a mixed race whose elements contained Vanir, Esir and Cihland Scotch, descended from pure-blooded Cimmerian clans The Cymric tribes of Britain were a mixed Nordic-Cimmerian race which preceded the purely Nordic Britons into the isles, and thus gave rise to a legend of Gaelic priority The Ciht Rome were of the same blood, as well as the Gimmerai of the assyrians and Grecians, and Gomer of the Hebrews Other clans of the Ci inland sea, and a few centuries later mixed with Hyrkanian blood, returned ard as Scythians The original ancestors of the Gaels gave their name to modern Crimea

The ancient Sumerians had no connection with the western race They were a mixed people, of Hyrkanian and Shemitish bloods, ere not taken with the conquerors in their retreat Many tribes of Shem escaped that captivity, and from pure-blooded Shemites, or Shemites mixed with Hyborian or Nordic blood, were descended the Arabs, Israelites, and other straighter-featured Semites The Canaanites, or Alpine Semites, traced their descent from She them by their Hyrkanian masters; the Elamites were a typical race of this type The short, thick-limbed Etruscans, base of the Roian, Hyrkanian and Pictish strains, and originally lived in the ancient kingdo to the eastern shores of the continent, evolved into the tribes later known as Tatars, Huns, Mongols and Turks

The origins of other races of the modern world may be similarly traced; in almost every case, older far than they realize, their history stretches back into the e

THE TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT

Torches flared murkily on the revels in the Maul, where the thieves of the east held carnival by night In the Maul they could carouse and roar as they liked, for honest people shunned the quarter, and watchmen, well paid with stained coins, did not interfere with their sport Along the crooked, unpaved streets with their heaps of refuse and sloppy puddles, drunken roisterers staggered, roaring Steel glinted in the shadohere wolf preyed on wolf, and frohter of woht licked luridly from broken s and wide-thrown doors, and out of these doors, stale s-jacks and fists has, rushed like a blow in the face

In one of these dens merriathered in every stage of rags and tatters - furtive cut-purses, leering kidnappers, quick-fingered thieves, swaggering bravoes with their wenches, strident-voiced woues were the doers at their girdles and guile in their hearts But there olves of half a dozen outland nations there as well There was a giant Hyperborean renegade, taciturn, dangerous, with a broadsword strapped to his great gaunt frame - for men wore steel openly in the Maul There was a Shemitish counterfeiter, with his hook nose and curled blue-black beard There was a bold-eyed Brythunian wench, sitting on the knee of a tawny-haired Gunder mercenary soldier, a deserter froue whose bawdy jests were causing all the shouts of mirth was a professional kidnapper co to Zae of the an than he could ever attain

This man halted in his description of an intended victie tankard of frothing ale Then blowing the foam from his fat lips, he said, 'By Bel, God of all thieves, I'll show them how to steal wenches: I'll have her over the Za to receive her Three hundred pieces of silver, a count of Ophir pro Brythunian of the better class It took ar, to find one I kneould suit And is she a pretty baggage!'

He blew a sobry kiss in the air

'I know lords in Shem ould trade the secret of the Elephant Tower for her,' he said, returning to his ale

A touch on his tunic sleeveat the interruption He saw a tall, stronglybeside hiray wolf autters His cheap tunic could not conceal the hard, rangy lines of his powerful frame, the broad heavy shoulders, the massive chest, lean waist and heavy arms His skin was brown fro; a shock of tousled black hair crowned his broad forehead Fro a sword in a worn leather scabbard

The Kothian involuntarily drew back; for the man was not one of any civilized race he knew

'You spoke of the Elephant Tower,' said the stranger, speaking Zamorian with an alien accent 'I've heard much of this tohat is its secret?'

The fellow's attitude did not seee was bolstered up by the ale, and the evident approval of his audience He swelled with self-importance

'The secret of the Elephant Tower?' he exclaimed 'Why, any fool knows that Yara the priest dwells there with the great jewel ic'

The barbarian digested this for a space

'I have seen this tower,' he said 'It is set in a great garden above the level of the city, surrounded by high walls I have seen no guards The walls would be easy to cliem?'

The Kothian stared wide-mouthed at the other's simplicity, then burst into a roar of derisive mirth, in which the others joined

'Harken to this heathen!' he bellowed 'He would steal the jewel of Yara! - Harken, fellow,' he said, turning portentously to the other, 'I suppose you are some sort of a northern barbarian-'

'I am a Cimmerian,' the outlander answered, in no friendly tone The reply and the dom that lay far to the south, on the borders of Sheive ear and lea-jack at the discomfited youth 'Know that in Zamora, and more especially in this city, there are more bold thieves than anywhere else in the world, even Koth If eo You speak of cli cliain There are no guards in the gardens at night for a very good reason - that is, no huuards But in the watch-chamber, in the lower part of the tower, are arardens by night, you em is kept somewhere in the tower above'

'But if a ued the Cih the upper part of the tower and thus avoid the soldiers?'

Again the Kothian gaped at hily 'The barbarian is an eagle ould fly to the jeweled rim of the tohich is only a hundred and fifty feet above the earth, with rounded sides slicker than polished glass!'

The Ci laughter that greeted this remark He saw no particular humor in it, and was too new to civilization to understand its discourtesies Civilized es because they know they can be i He was bewildered and chagrined, and doubtless would have slunk away, abashed, but the Kothian chose to goad him further

'Come, come!' he shouted 'Tell these poor felloho have only been thieves since before you were spawned, tell theem!'

'There is always a way, if the desire be coupled with courage,' answered the Cimmerian shortly, nettled

The Kothian chose to take this as a personal slur His face grew purple with anger

'What!' he roared 'You dare tell us our business, and intiht!' And he pushed the Cimmerian violently

'Will you rated the barbarian, his quick rage leaping up; and he returned the push with an open-handed blow that knocked his torainst the rude-hewn table Ale splashed over the jack's lip, and the Kothian roared in fury, dragging at his sword