To WILLIAM BEEBE After long and patient research I am still unable to give to the reader of these Chronicles the exact date of the times that they tell of. Were it merely a matter of history there could be no doubts about the period; but where magic is concerned, to however slight an extent,... Read More

From steaming lowlands down by the equator, where monstrous orchids blow, where beetles big as mice sit on the tent-ropes, and fireflies glide about by night like little moving stars, the travelers went three days through forests of cactus till they came to the open plains where the oryx are. And glad they were when... Read More

He said: “There were only twenty houses in Daleswood. A place you would scarcely have heard of. A village up top of the hills. “When the war came there was no more than thirty men there between sixteen and forty-five. They all went. “They all kept together; same battalion, same platoon. They was like that... Read More

Ebrington Barracks Aug. 16th 1916. I do not know where I may be when this preface is read. As I write it in August 1916, I am at Ebrington Barracks, Londonderry, recovering from a slight wound. But it does not greatly matter where I am; my dreams are here before you amongst the following pages;... Read More

Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by. And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made... Read More

Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here. In the morning of his two hundred and fiftieth year Shepperalk the centaur went to the golden coffer, wherein the treasure... Read More

I hope for this book that it may come into the hands of those that were kind to my others and that it may not disappoint them. —Lord Dunsany Toldees, Mondath, Arizim, these are the Inner Lands, the lands whose sentinels upon their borders do not behold the sea. Beyond them to the east there... Read More

With deep gratitude to those few, known to me or unknown, who have cared for either of my former books, "The Gods of Pegana," "Time and the Gods." Where the great plain of Tarphet runs up, as the sea in estuaries, among the Cyresian mountains, there stood long since the city of Merimna well-nigh among... Read More

These tales are of the things that befell gods and men in Yarnith, Averon, and Zarkandhu, and in the other countries of my dreams. Once when the gods were young and only Their swarthy servant Time was without age, the gods lay sleeping by a broad river upon earth. There in a valley that from... Read More

In the mists before THE BEGINNING, Fate and Chance cast lots to decide whose the Game should be; and he that won strode through the mists to MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI and said: "Now make gods for Me, for I have won the cast and the Game is to be Mine." Who it was that won the cast,... Read More