Dark Valley Destiny Read Online Free Page A

powerful arm. After decades of reading stories of puny bumblers who succeed through luck despite their manifold inadequacies, tales of epic heroes, like Conan, stir our blood and make us realize that each of us ' has but himself to rely on and and must learn to march breast-forward, ' free of self-doubt or cringing fear. ;
    Some readers have viewed Conan as nothing more than a walking killing machine, glorying in carnage, as insensitive to the people around him as he is to pain, a character without development. This is not so in our opinion; nor was it so to Robert Howard. Conan grew in stature— slowly, it is true—from a homeless thieving boy, unable to read or write and ignorant of the ways of the civilized world, into a king who ruled over the most splendid realm of the Hyborian Age, the kingdom of Aquilonia. Conan killed often and without remorse, but he seldom killed for wanton pleasure. He fought with murder in his heart and blood on his body; but he fought to protect himself or a follower or to take possession of some property he felt was his by right of conquest.
    Conan developed his own code of behavior and stuck to it. Like his creator, he had few friends, except those by whose side he fought. To those friends he was loyal. He trusted few men and fewer women, but with these few he was honest and open. He had, by implication only, some relative of whom he was fond living in the savage land of Cimmeria; for on several occasions he returned thither. With this exception he had no family ties until he had reached his years of maturity.
    Toward women his simple code of honor was strict, as was that of his creator. Save on one occasion in his youth, Conan never attempted to force a woman or violate her, despite the scanty clothing that she wore in both the story and the illustrations. 22 Of course, upon her invitation, he would willingly dally in her company, even though he risked his life to do so. Still, in the long run, his attachments were shallow. With the exception of Belit, the beautiful black-haired pirate maid whom he truly loved, and the young palace servant whom he promised to make his queen, each story finds him cheerfully taking a new love and cheerfully leaving her when the tale is told. Even when a woman betrays him, Conan stays his hand, growling about what he would do if she were a man. Once, however, his gallantry deserts him. On that occasion he tosses a murderous and faithless girl from a balcony into an open cesspool in the courtyard of an inn. 23
    Perhaps it is this combination of brute strength and compassion for those who seem to be the weaker sex that speaks to those male readers who dream of casting off the ways of civilization to trample the hostile world into submission beneath their booted feet. Such a course and such an outcome are only impossible dreams, as anyone would know if he, like Conan, had endured endless nights in rain or snow, gone barefoot and ill-clad through blazing sands, been forced to starve or eat raw muskrats, or defended himself with only a broken sword. But what splendid dreams they are!
    There are other reasons for the continuing success of the Conan stories. For one thing, Howard's passionate intensity carries the reader along on a galloping steed. Conan's gigantic angers and consuming hates recreate for us the tangled emotions that surged through Howard's own soul. His perception of the beauties of nature, from the broad sweep of the big skies of Texas to the tiny petals of a buttercup, enrich our own perceptions. His fiend-ridden vision of demons, ghosts, and writhing creatures from the nether world, which enfold each man or woman, seeking to destroy, is so impelling that even the most materialistic person shudders a little in the dark of night. And Howard's world of the imagination, in which he spent so much of his life in order to escape the prison of reality, stimulates our feebler imaginings so that we, for a little time, may flee from the humdrum world into the