（外文电子版资料）The.Hunters.from.Beyond.docVIP

The Hunters from Beyond Clark Ashton Smith I have seldom been able to resist the allurement of a bookstore, particularly one that is well supplied with rare and exotic items. Therefore I turned in at Tolemans to browse around for a few minutes. I had come to San Francisco for one of my brief, biannual visits, and had started early that idle forenoon to an appointment with Cyprian Sincaul, the sculptor, a second or third cousin of mine, whom I had not seen for several years. The studio was only a block from Tolemans, and there seemed to be no especial object in reaching it ahead of time. Cyprian had offered to show me his collection of recent sculptures; but, remembering the smooth mediocrity of his former work, amid which were a few banal efForts to achieve horror and grotesquerie, I did not anticipate anythihg more than an hour or two of dismal boredom. The little shop was empty of customers. Knowing my proclivities, the owner and his one assistant became tacitly non-attentive after a word of recognition, and left me to rummage at will among the curiously laden sheIves. Wedged in between other but less alluring titles, I found a deluxe edition of Goyas Proverbes. I began to turn the heavy pages, and was soon engrossed in the diabolic art of these nightmare-nurtured drawings. It has always been incomprehensible to me that I did not shriek aloud with mindless, overmastering terror, when I happened to look up from the volume, and saw the thing that was crouching in a corner of the book-shelves before me. I could not have been more hideously startled if some hellish conception of Goya had suddemly come to life and emerged from one of the pictures in the folio. What I saw was a forward-slouching, vermin-gray figure, wholly devoid of hair or down or bristles, but marked with faint, etiolated rings like those of a serpent that has lived in darkness. It possessed the head and brow of an anthropoid ape, a semi-canine mouth and jaw, and arms ending in twisted hands whose