"Ubbo-Sathla"

by Clark Ashton Smith
originally published Weird Tales, July 1933

Paul Tregardis, an anthropologist and amateur occultist, with a considerable grounding in The Necronomicon and The Book of Eibon, is killing some time in a musty little antiques shop when he comes across an odd crystal sphere. Unable to learn more about it ("The dealer gave an indescribable, simultaneous shrug of his shoulders and his eye-brows." - I do wish I could visualize that), and believing that it just might be a fabled crystal once in the possession of a Hyperborean sorcerer named Zon Mezzamalech, Tregardis gives in, buys the thing, takes it home, and stares into it (hey - they didn't have TV in `33).

He enters into a fugue state in which his consciousness becomes one with Zon Mezzamalech (what - you didn't expect that Tregardis was going to be correct in his surmise?  How many of these stories have you read?).  It seems Zon had sought some tablets inscribed by the eldest, lost gods of the universe, containing secrets powerful beyond imagining.  These tablets are hidden, guarded by the "idiotic demiurge" Ubbo-Sathla, and only the crystal can locate them.

Tregardis is unsettled by his visions and experiences from the crystal gazing, and vows not to do it again.  Ha!  Of course he goes right back to it.  He views/experiences past lives stretching back to Hyperborea, and beyond, even into pre-human times.  Finally, he comes face-to-face with ol' Ubbo hisself:

"Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. "

Now a formless, pre-human, pre-mammal, pre-dinosaur blob of glop, what once had been Zon Mezzamalech/Paul Tregardis crawls over the tablets, unable to read or do anything with them.  

Back in London, Tregardis is nowhere to be found....

Woo! What a tale.
Actually, for all my sarcasm, "Ubbo-Sathla" has always been something of a fave of mine.  A synopsis may make it sound very slight, and it has a lot in common with Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos", another fave.  But a synopsis doesn't give the purple poetic power of C.A. Smith it's due.  It had to be read to be appreciated.  Like all of Smith's best stuff, "Ubbo" casts an unearthly spell that's hard to dismiss.