Short Fiction

all the ethnologists and geographers.

Often I wonder about it, myself, for there are so many things I can’t explain. Is there a part of the Pacific that extends beyond time and space⁠—an oceanic limbo into which, by some unknowable cataclysm, that island passed in a bygone period, even as Lemuria sank beneath the wave? And if so, by what abrogation of dimensional laws was I enabled to reach the island and depart from it? These things are beyond speculation. But often in my dream, I see again the incognizably distorted stars, and share the confusion and bafflement of a lost people, as they pore above their useless charts, and take the altitude of a deviated sun.

Endnotes

1. Andromeda is the term used to designate a section of the heavens as seen from the earth. All heavenly bodies within this section, no matter what their distance from the earth, are “in Andromeda.” ↩

2. A marine animal that gives off a phosphoresence. ↩

Colophon

Short Fiction
is compiled from short stories published between 1910 and 1930 by
Clark Ashton Smith.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Hendrik Kaiber
and is based on transcriptions produced in 2006 for
The Eldritch Dark
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
The Nightmare,
a painting completed in 1781 by
Henry Fuseli.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
January 18, 2026, 11:37 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/clark-ashton-smith/short-fiction.

The volunteer-driven Standard Ebooks project relies on readers like you to submit typos, corrections, and other improvements. Anyone can contribute at standardebooks.org.

Uncopyright

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