Ebony and Crystal/The Witch in the Graveyard

by Clark Ashton Smith

THE WITCH IN THE GRAVEYARD

Scene: A forsaken graveyard, by moonlight. Enter two witches.

FIRST WITCH:
Sit, sister, now that haggish Hecate
Appropriate and ghastly favour sheds,
And with wild light forwards our enterprise;
And watch the weighted eyelids of each grave
As never mother watched her babe, to mark,
At zenith of the necromantic moon
The stir of that disquiet, when the dead,
From suckling nightmares of the charnel dark
Or long insomnia on a mouldy couch,
Impelled like wan somnambulists, arise—
Constrained to emerge and walk, or seated each
On his own tombstone, shrouded council hold,
Or commerce with the sooty wings of Hell.
All omens of this influential hour
When all dark powers, thronging to the dark,
Promote enchantry with their wavèd wings,
And brim the wind with potency malign—
A dew of dread to aid our cauldron—these
Observe thou closely, while I seek afield
All requisite swart herbs of venefice,
And evil roots unto our usance ripe.
(The first witch departs, leaving the other among the
tombs, and returns after a time, in the course of her search.)

FIRST WITCH:
Sister, what seest or what hearest thou?

SECOND WITCH:
I see
The moonlight, and the slowly moving gleam
That westers hour by hour on tomb and stone;
And shrivelled lilies, tossed i' the winter's breath,
With their attenuate shadows, as might dance
Phantom with flaffing phantom; at my side,
The white and shuddering grasses of the grave.
With nettles, and the parching fumitory,
Whose leaves, root-trellised on the bones of death,
Will rasp and bristle to the lightest wind.
(The first witch moves on, and approaches again, after a long interval.)

FIRST WITCH:
Sister, what seest or what hearest thou?

SECOND WITCH:
I see
The mound-stretched gossamers, cradles to the dew;
Moon-wefted briers, and the cypress-trees
With shadow swathed, or cerements of the moon;
And corpse-lights borne from aisle to secret aisle
Within the footless forest.***
Now I hear
The lich-owl, shrieking lethal prophecy;
And whimpering winds, the children of the air,
Lost in the glades of mystery and gloom.
(The first witch disappears and passes again shortly.)

FIRST WITCH:
Sister, what seest or what hearest thou?

SECOND WITCH:
I see
The ghost-white owl, with huge sulphureous eyes,
That veers in prone, unwhispered flight, and hear
The small shriek of the moon-adventuring mole.
Gripped in mid-graveyard.*** And I see
Where some wild shadow shakes, though the pale wind
Of moonlight stirs far off*** and hear
Curst mandragores that gibber to the moon,
Though no man treads anigh.***
(After an interval)
Some predal hand doth halt the wandering air;
Now dies the throttled wind with rattling breath,
And round about a breathing Silence prowls.
(After another interval)
I hear the cheeping of the bat-lipped ghouls,
Aroused beneath the vaulted cypresses
Far-off; and lipless muttering of tombs,
With clash of bones bestirred in ancient charnels
Beneath their shroud of unclean light that crawls.***
Earth shudders, and rank odours 'gin to rise
From tombs a-crack; and shaken out all at once
From mid-air, and directly neath the moon,
Meseems what hanging wing divides the light,
Like a black film of gloom, or thickest shadow;
But on the tombs there is no shadow!

FIRST WITCH:
Enough! Twill be a prosperous night, methinks,
For commerce of the demons with the dead;
And for us, too, when every omen's good,
And fraught with promise of a potent brew.