15 June 2010

Todays Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net

ROGUE FEED elves and theyre not telling.

Elven Oddities
JUN 14, 2010 12:18P.M.
ROGUE FEED
Now that Ive discussed how dwarves procreate, a few brief words on the
question of elven reproduction. Pulp Fantasy Library: The
So far as anyone knows, elves are immortal. They can be killed and Dweller in the Gulf
certain ailments may slay them, but they never die of old age. All elves, JUN 14, 2010 09:41A.M.
regardless of their chronological age and many elves claim to be over a
thousand years old look as if they were approximately in their late
teens or early 20s from a human perspective. Interestingly, elves, unlike
most other races, cannot be raised from the dead if slain.

Elves are few in number; most humans have never seen more than two
or three elves their entire lives and rarely do they ever see more than one
elf in the same place. However, there are communities of elves in isolated
parts of the world but humans rarely see them, let alone visit them.
Those few who have visited them note, among other things, that there
are no children to be found among the elves.

This lack of children has led to speculation about how new elves come to
be, if indeed they do at all. For their part, elves refuse to broach the
subject with ephemerals, implying only that it is an intensely personal
matter that they do not discuss with non-elves. One popular belief is that
elves are a dying race that will pass away forever when the last elf is
slain. Another even more popular belief is that elves steal human
children and raise them as their own. Others say that one can become an
elf by consuming their food, a notion made more plausible by the fact
that elves do not consume human foodstuffs if they can avoid it and
prefer not to eat in the presence of non-elves, regardless of the menu.
In general, elves are a detached, almost emotionless people, at least by
human standards. Though there are many tall tales of half-elves the
result of a star-crossed romance, usually between a human hero and a
beautiful elven maiden theres no evidence that such a thing is even
possible. For their part, elves take no interest whatsoever in humans (or
any other race) as objects of affection. Furthermore, though elves do
have two genders that, outwardly at least, resemble those of humans,
elves do not marry or form pair bonds or have any other kind of social
arrangements that suggest either the formation of families or indeed any
purpose to the physiological differences between the genders. Its almost
as if elves were male and female in imitation of humans, a theory that
seems unlikely given the antiquity of the race and the fact that they
originated on another world.
Thus, how and if elves reproduce remains a mystery to all but the
First published, in modified form, in the March 1933 of Hugo
Gernsbacks Wonder Stories, Clark Ashton Smiths The Dweller in the
Gulf is another short story set on Mars. Smith himself called it a sort of
running mate for The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis and its easy to see why.
Like his Martian tale published the previous year, The Dweller in the
Gulf concerns Earth men who, while exploring a subterranean locale,
disturb an ancient evil that leads to their doom. But whereas, The Vaults
of Yoh-Vombis is story of curiosity killing the cat, sot speak, The
Dweller in the Gulf is more a commentary on greed and over-
confidence, as its three protagonists are not scientists but treasure
seekers.
The trio of earth-men, hard-bitten adventurers who
disdained the services of Martian guides, had started five
days before from the outpost of Ahoom, into the uninhabited
region called the Chaur. Here, in the beds of great rivers that
had not flowed for cycles, it was rumored that the pale,
platinum-like gold of Mars could be found lying in heaps, like
so much salt. If fortune were propitious, their years of
somewhat unwilling exile on the red planet would soon be at
an end. They had been warned against the Chaur, and had

1
Todays Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net 15 June 2010

heard some queer tales in Ahoon regarding the reasons why
former prospectors had not returned. But danger, no matter
how dire or exotic, was merely a part of their daily routine.
With a chance of unlimited gold at the journeys end, they
would have gone down through Hinnom.
A sand storm (or hell-twister) called a zoorth by the native Aihais
forces the three men into a cave for shelter. While there, they here a
strange sound like a sharp rustling and rattling as of metal dragged over
rock; and also it was somehow like the smacking of myriad wet
enormous mouths. One of the men, Bellman dismisses concern that
these sounds might have been made one of the millipedal underground
monsters, half a mile long, that the Martians tell about as fairy-tales,
as the Chaur is devoid of life save perhaps rival gold-hunters from the
Earth. Plus, even if hes wrong, Weve got our revolvers.
Since the zoorth will rage for at least half an hour, the three men start to
explore the cave, hoping to find a few violet rubies or amber-yellow
sapphires, such as are sometimes discovered in these desert caverns.
They find no gems but they do find an immense chasm.
Bellman was leading the way. Suddenly his torch revealed the
verge of a precipice, where the olden channel ended sheerly
and the shelves and walls pitched away on each side into
incalculable space. Going to the very edge, he dipped his
pencil of light adown the abyss, disclosing only the vertical
cliff that fell at his feet into darkness with no apparent
bottom. The beam also failed to reach the further shore of the
gulf, which might have been leagues in extent.
limbs of the Martians but all of them were eyeless. In the
faces of some, there were faint, rudimentary slits where the
eyes should have been; in the faces of others, there were deep
and empty orbits that suggested the removal of the eyeballs.
Smith originally entitled this story The Eidolon of the Blind in
reference to its conclusion, after the eyeless Aihais take the three humans
deeper into the caverns to reveal the source of the strange noises they
had been hearing. When it appeared in Wonder Stories, it bore yet
another title, Dweller in Martian Depths, and much of its text was
changed without the knowledge or participation of CAS. It did not
appear under its current title until 1960, when many of the textual
changes were also reversed.
I personally prefer The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis to this story, mostly
because the former tale maintains a more consistent scientific feel to it.
That is, its unambiguously a work of science fiction and, somehow, that
makes its ending all the more horrific for me. The Dweller in the Gulf,
though not a fantasy as such, veers toward fantasy in my view, and that
somewhat weakens its horrors, which feel less stark as a consequence, if
that makes any sense. Regardless, The Dweller in the Gulf is creepy,
brooding tale and one of Smiths finest works. It also enjoys the
distinction of being short and to the point, losing none of its atmosphere
or punch as a consequence of its relative brevity. Indeed, it probably
works better precisely because it is so succinct.

Discovering that an ancient road had been hewn from the face of the
cliff, spiraling downward around the chasm, the three adventurers
proceed along our road to Hades. Eventually, the silence of the place is
broken by

the same peculiar long-drawn sound or combination of

sounds which they had heard in the outer cavern. It suggested
other images now: the rustling was a file-like scraping; the
soft, methodical myriad smacking was vaguely similar to the
noise made by some enormous creature that withdraws its
feet from a quagmire.

Their confidence shattered, the Earth men decide to retrace their steps
and return to the surface to wait out the storm. Unfortunately, they find
the way blocked by an array of whitish creatures, three abreast. Shining
their flashlights on them, they what stands before them.

The creatures, who stood perfectly motionless and silent, as if

awaiting the earth-men, were generically similar to the Aihais
or Martian natives. They seemed, however, to represent an
extremely degraded and aberrant type, and the fungus-like
pallor of their bodies denoted many ages of underground life.
They were smaller too, than full-grown Aihais, being, on the
average, about five feet tall. They possessed the enormous
open nostrils, the flaring ears, the barrel chests and lanky