Almuric
By Robert E. Howard
The Transition was so swift and brief, that it seemed less than a tick of time lay between the moment I placed myself in Professor Hildebrand’s strange machine and the instant when I found myself standing upright in the clear sunlight that flooded a broad plain. I could not doubt that I had indeed been transported to another world.
The landscape was not so grotesque and fantastic as I might have supposed, but it was indisputably alien to anything existing on the Earth.
But before I gave much heed to my surroundings, I examined my person to learn if I had survived that awful flight without injury. I had. My various parts functioned with their accustomed vigor. But I was naked. Hildebrand had told me that inorganic substances could not survive the transmutation. Only vibrant, living matter could pass unchanged through the unthinkable gulfs that lie between the planets. I was grateful that I had not fallen into a land of ice and snow. The plain seemed filled with a lazy summerlike heat.
The warmth of the sun was pleasant on my bare limbs.
On every side stretched away a vast level plain, thickly grown with short green grass. In the distance, this grass attained a greater height, and through it, I caught the glint of water. Here and there throughout the plain, this phenomenon was repeated, and I traced the meandering course of several rivers, apparently of no great width.
Black dots moved through the grass near the rivers, but their nature I could not determine. However, it was quite evident that my lot had not been cast on an uninhabited planet, though I could not guess the nature of the inhabitants. My imagination peopled the distances with nightmare shapes.
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Robert E. Howard
Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an American writer who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He created the character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre.
Biography.
Howard was born and raised in Texas. He spent most of his life in the town of Cross Plains, with some time spent in nearby Brownwood. A bookish and intellectual child, he was also a fan of boxing and spent some time in his late teens bodybuilding, eventually taking up amateur boxing. From the age of nine, he dreamed of becoming a writer of adventure fiction but did not have real success until he was 23. Thereafter, until his death by suicide at age 30, Howard’s writings were published in a wide selection of magazines, journals, and newspapers, and he became proficient in several subgenres. His greatest success occurred after his death.
Although a Conan novel was nearly published in 1934, Howard’s stories were never collected during his lifetime. The main outlet for his stories was Weird Tales, where Howard created Conan the Barbarian. With Conan and his other heroes, Howard helped fashion the genre now known as sword and sorcery, spawning many imitators and giving him a large influence in the fantasy field. Howard remains a highly-read author, with his best works still reprinted, and is one of the best-selling fantasy writers of all time.
Howard’s suicide and the circumstances surrounding it have led to speculation about his mental health. His mother had been ill with tuberculosis her entire life, and upon learning she had entered a coma from which she was not expected to wake, he walked out to his car parked outside his kitchen window and shot himself in the head while sitting in the driver’s seat. He died eight hours later.
Robert E. Howard
