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Vecchio 08-06-2011, 08.08.41
David Brown
 
Messaggi: n/a
Predefinito David N. ***** of Mesa, Arizona: Making the most of google/gmail'srefusal to enforce copyright law!

Since google is still allowing the individual(s) I refer to as the
"Mad Spammer" to post a maliciously altered copy of my examiner.com
bio in the process of falsely accusing me of fictitious crimes, I'm
going to use this as a chance to "republish" the only thing ever
pulled from my Amazon store over copyright issues (because they didn't
think "the original owner may have ceased to exist" was good enough):

PEOPLE OF THE BLACK COAST
BY ROBERT E. HOWARD

This comes of idle pleasure seeking and—now what prompted that
thought? Some Puritanical atavism lurking in my crumbling brain, I
suppose. Certainly, in my past life I never gave much heed to such
teachings. At any rate, let me scribble down here my hideous history,
before the red hour breaks and death shouts across the beaches.

There were two of us, at the start. Myself, of course, and Gloria, who
was to have been my bride. Gloria had an airplane, and she loved to
fly the thing—that was the beginning of the whole horror. I tried to
dissuade her that day—I swear I did!—but she insisted, and we took off
from Manila with Guam as our destination. Why? The whim of a reckless
girl who feared nothing and always burned with the zest for some new
adventure—some untried sport.

Of our coming to the Black Coast there is little to tell. One of those
rare fogs rose; we soared above it and lost our way among thick
billowing clouds. We struggled along, how far out of our course God
alone knows, and finally fell into the sea just as we sighted land
through the lifting fog.

We swam ashore from the sinking craft, unhurt, and found ourselves in
a strange and forbidding land. Broad beaches sloped up from the lazy
waves to end at the foot of vast cliffs. These cliffs seemed to be of
solid rock and were-are—hundreds of feet high. The material was basalt
or something similar. As we descended in the failing aircraft, I had
had time for a quick glance shore*ward, and it had seemed to me that
beyond these cliffs, rose other, higher cliffs, as if in tiers,
rampart above rampart. But of course, standing directly beneath the
first , we could not tell. As far as we looked in either direction, we
could see the narrow strip of beach running along at the foot of the
black cliffs, in silent monotony.

"Now that we're here," said Gloria, somewhat shaken by our recent
experience, "what are we to do? Where are we?"
"There isn't any telling," I answered. "The Pacific is full of
unexplored islands. We're probably on one. I only hope that we haven't
a gang of cannibals for neighbors."
I wished then that I had not mentioned cannibals, but Gloria did not
seem frightened—at that.
"I'm not afraid of natives," she said uneasily. "I don't think there
are any here."
I smiled to myself, reflecting how women's opinions merely reflected
their wishes. But there was something deeper, as I soon learned in a
hideous manner, and I believe now in feminine intuition. Their brain
fibers are more delicate than ours—more readily disturbed and reached
by psychic influences. But I had no time to theorize.

"Let's stroll along the beach and see if we can find some way of
getting up these cliffs and back on the island."
"But the island is all cliffs, isn't it?" she asked.
Somehow I was startled. "Why do you say that?"
"I don't know," she answered rather confusedly. "That was the
impression I had, that this island is just a series of high cliffs,
like stairs, one on top of the other, all bare black rock."
"If that's the case," said I, "we're out of luck, for we can't live on
seaweed and crabs—"
"Oh!" Her exclamation was sharp and sudden.

I caught her in my arms, rather roughly in my alarm, I fear."Gloria!
What is it?"
"I don't know." Her eyes stared at me rather bewil*deredly, as if she
were emerging from some sort of night*mare.
"Did you see or hear anything?"
"No." She seemed to be averse to leaving my shelter*ing arms. "It was
something you said—no, that wasn't it. I don't know. People have
daydreams. This must have been a nightmare."

God help me; I laughed in my masculine complacency and said:
"You girls are a ***** lot in some ways. Let's go up the beach a way—"
"No!" she exclaimed emphatically.
"Then let's go down the beach—"
"No, no!"

I lost patience.
"Gloria, what's come over you? We can't stay here all day. We've got
to find a way to go up those cliffs and find what's on the other side.
Don't be so foolish; it isn't like you"

"Don't scold me," she returned with a meekness strange to her.
"Something seems to keep chasing at the outer edge of my mind,
something that I can't translate—do you believe in transmission of
thought waves?"
I stared at her. I'd never heard her talk in this manner before.

"Do you think somebody's trying to signal you by sending thought
waves?"
"No, they're not thoughts," she murmured absently. "Not as I know
thoughts, at least."
Then, like a person suddenly coming out of a trance, she said:
"You go on and look for a place to go up the cliffs, while I wait
here."
"Gloria, I don't like the idea. You come along—or else I'll wait until
you feel like going."

"I don't think I'll ever feel that way," she answered forlornly. "You
don't need to go out of sight; one can see a long way here. Did you
ever see such black cliffs; this is a black coast, sure enough? Did
you ever read Tevis Clyde Smith's poem—`The long black coasts of death
—' some*thing? I can't remember exactly."
I felt a vague uneasiness at hearing her talk in this manner, but
sought to dismiss the feeling with a shrug of my shoulders.

"I'll find a trail up," I said, "and maybe get something for our meal--
clams or a crab—"
She shuddered violently.
"Don't mention crabs. I've hated them all my life, but I didn't
realize it until you spoke. They eat dead things, don't they? I know
the Devil looks just like a monstrous crab."

"All right," said I, to humor her. "Stay right here; I won't be gone
long. "
"Kiss me before you go," she said with a wistfulness that caught at my
heart, I knew not why. I drew her tenderly into my arms, joying in the
feel of her slim young body so vibrant with life and loveliness. She
closed her eyes as I kissed her, and I noted how strangely white she
seemed.

"Don't go out of sight," she said as I released her. A number of rough
boulders dotted the beach, fallen, no doubt, from the overhanging
cliff face, and on one of these she sat down.

With some misgivings, I turned to go. I went along the beach close to
the great black wall which rose into the blue like a monster against
the sky, and at last came to a number of unusually large boulders.
Before going among these I glanced back and saw Gloria sitting where I
had left her. I know my eyes softened as I looked on that slim brave
little figure—for the last time.

I wandered in among the boulders and lost sight of the beach behind
me. I often wonder why I so thoughtlessly ignored her last plea. A
man's brain fabric is coarser than a woman's, not so susceptible to
outer influences. Yet I wonder if even then, pressure was being
brought to bear upon me
At any rate, I wandered along, gazing up at the tower*ing black mass
until it seemed to have a sort of mesmeric effect upon me. One who has
never seen these cliffs cannot possibly form any true conception of
them, nor can I breathe into my description the invisible aura of
maligni*ty which seemed to emanate from them. I say, they rose so high
above me that their edges seemed to *** through the sky—that I felt
like an ant crawling beneath a Babylonian wall—that their monstrous
serrated faces seemed like the breasts of dusty gods of unthinkable age
—this I can say, this much I can impart to you. But if any man ever
reads this, let him not think that I have given true portrait of the
Black Coast. The reality of the thing lay, not in sight and sense nor
even in the thoughts which they induced; but in the things you know
without thinking—the feelings and the stirrings of consciousness, the
faint clawings at the outer edge of the mind which are not thoughts at
all.

But these things I discovered later. At the moment, I walked along
like a man in a daze, almost mesmerized by the stark monotony of the
black ramparts above me. At times I shook myself, blinked and looked
out to sea to get rid of this mazy feeling, but even the sea seemed
shad*owed by the great walls. The further I went, the more threatening
they seemed. My reason told me that they could not fall, but the
instinct at the back of my brain whispered that they would suddenly
hurtle down and crush me.

Then suddenly I found some fragments of driftwood which had washed
ashore. I could have shouted my ela*tion. The mere sight of them
proved that man at least existed and that there was a world far
removed from these dark and sullen cliffs, which seemed to fill the
whole universe. I found a long fragment of iron attached to a piece of
the wood and tore it off, if the necessity arose, it would make a very
serviceable iron bludgeon. Rather heavy for the ordinary man, it is
true, but in size and strength, I am no ordinary man.

At this moment, too, I decided I had gone far enough. Gloria was long
out of sight and I retraced my steps hurriedly. As I went I noted a
few tracks in the sand and reflected with amusement that if a spider
crab, something larger than a horse, had crossed the beach here, it
would make just such a track. Then I came in sight of the place where
I had left Gloria and gazed along a bare and silent beach.

I had heard no scream, no cry. Utter silence had reigned as it reigned
now, when I stood beside the boulder where she had sat and looked in
the sand of the beach. Something small and slim and white lay there,
and I dropped to my knees beside it. It was a woman's hand, severed at
the wrist, and as I saw upon the second finger the engagement ring I
had placed there myself, my heart withered in my breast and the sky
became a black ocean which drowned the sun.

How long I crouched over that pitiful fragment like a wounded beast, I
do not know. Time ceased to be for me, and from its dying minutes was
born Eternity. What are days, hours, years, to a shattered heart, to
whose empty hurt each instant is an Everlasting Forever? But when I
rose and reeled down to the sea edge, holding that little hand close
to my hollow bosom, the sun had set and the moon had set and the hard
white stars looked scornfully at me across the immensity of space.

There I pressed my lips again and again to that pitiful cold flesh and
laid the slim little hand on the flowing tide which carried it out to
the clean, deep sea, as I trust, merciful God, the white flame of her
soul found rest in the Everlasting Sea. And the sad and ancient waves
that know all the sorrows of men seemed to weep for me, for I could
not weep. But since, many have shed tears, oh God, and the tears were
of blood!

I staggered along the mocking whiteness of the beach like a drunken
man or a lunatic. And from the time that I rose from the sighing tide
to the time that I dropped exhausted and became unconscious seems
centuries on countless centuries, during which I raved and screamed
and staggered along huge black ramparts which frowned down on me in
cold inhuman disdain—which brooded above the squeaking ant at their
feet.

The sun was up when I awoke, and I found I was not alone. I sat up. On
every hand I was ringed in by a strange and horrible throng. If you
can imagine spider crabs larger than a horse—yet they were not true
spider crabs, outside the difference in the size. Leaving that
difference out, I should say that there was as much variation in these
monsters and the true spider crab as there is between a highly
developed European and an African bushman. These were more highly
developed, if you understand me.

They sat up and looked at me. I remained motionless, uncertain just
what to expect—and a cold fear began to steal over me. This was not
caused by any especial fear of the brutes killing me, for I felt
somehow that they would do that, and did not shrink from the thought.
But their eyes bored in on me and turned my blood to ice. For in them
I recognized an intelligence infinitely higher than mine, yet terribly
different. This is hard to conceive, harder to explain. But as I
looked into those frightful eyes, I knew that keen, powerful brains
lurked behind them, brains which worked in a higher sphere, a
different dimension than mine.

There was neither friendliness nor favor in those eyes, no sympathy or
understanding—not even fear or hate. It is a terrible thing for a
human being to be looked at in that manner. Even the eyes of a human
enemy who is going to kill us have understanding in them, and a
certain accep*tance of kindred. But these fiends gazed upon me in
something of the manner in which cold-hearted scientists might look at
a worm about to be stuck on a specimen hoard. They did not—they could
not—understand me. My thoughts, sorrows, joys, ambitions, they never
could fathom, any more than I could fathom theirs. We were of
different species! And no wars of human kind can ever equal in cruelty
the constant warfare that is waged be*tween living things of diverging
order. Is it possible that all life came from one stem? I cannot now
believe it.

There was intelligence and power in the cold eyes which were fixed on
me, but not intelligence as I knew it. They had progressed much
further than mankind in their ways, but they progressed along
different lines. Further than this, I cannot say. Their minds and
reasoning facul*ties are closed doors to me and most of their actions
seem absolutely meaningless; yet I know that these actions are guided
by definite, though inhuman, thoughts, which in turn are the results
of a higher stage of development than the human race may ever reach in
their way.

But as I sat there and these thoughts were borne in on me—as I felt
the terrific force of their inhuman intellect crashing against my
brain and will power, I leaped up, cold with fear; a wild unreasoning
fear which wild beasts must feel when first confronted by men. I knew
that these things were of a higher order than myself, and I feared to
even threaten them, yet with all my soul I hated them.
The average man feels no compunction in his dealings with the insects
underfoot. He does not feel, as he does in his dealings with his
brother man, that the Higher Powers will call upon him for an
accounting—of the worms on which he treads, nor the fowls he eats. Nor
does a lion devour a lion, yet feasts nobly on buffalo or man. I tell
you, Nature is most cruel when she sets the species against each
other.
These thinking-crabs, then, looking upon me as God only knows what
sort of prey or specimen, were intending me God only knows what sort
of evil, when I broke the chain of terror which held me. The largest
one, whom I faced, was now eying me with a sort of grim disapproval, a
sort of anger, as if he haughtily resented my threatening actions—as a
scientist might resent the writhing of a worm beneath the dissecting
knife. At that, fury blazed in me and the flames were fanned by my
fear. With one leap I reached the largest crab and with one desperate
smash I crushed and killed him. Then bounding over his writhing form,
I fled.
But I did not flee far. The thought came to me as I ran that these
were they whom I sought for vengeance. Gloria—no wonder she started
when I spoke the accursed name of "crab" and conceived the Devil to be
in the form of a crab, when even then those fiends must have been
stealing about us, tingling her sensitive thoughts with the psychic
waves that flowed from their horrid brains. I turned, then, and came
back a few steps, my bludgeon lifted. But the throng had bunched
together, as cattle do upon the approach of a lion. Their claws were
raised menacingly, and their cruel thought emanations struck me so
like a power of physical force that I staggered backward and was
unable to proceed against it. I knew then that in their way they
feared me, for they backed slowly away toward the cliffs, ever
fronting me.
My history is long, but I must shortly draw it to a close. Since that
hour I have waged a fierce and merciless warfare against a race I knew
to be higher in culture and intellect than I. Scientists, they are,
and in some horrid experiment of theirs, Gloria must have perished. I
cannot say.
This I have learned. Their city is high up among those lofty tiers of
cliffs which I cannot see because of the overhanging crags of the
first tier. I suppose the whole island is like that, a mere base of
basaltic rock, rising to a high flung pinnacle, no doubt, this
pinnacle being the last
PEOPLE OF THE BLACK COAST 109
tier of innumerable tiers of rocky walls. The monsters descend by a
secret way which I have only just discov*ered. They have hunted me,
and I have hunted them.
I have found this, also: the one point in common be*tween these beasts
and the human is that the higher the race develops mentally, the less
acute become the physi*cal faculties. I, who am as much lower than
they mentally as a gorilla is lower than a human professor, am as
deadly in single combat with them as a gorilla would be with an
unarmed professor. I am quicker, stronger, of keener senses. I possess
coordinations which they do not. In a word, there is a strange
reversion here—I am the wild beast and they are the civilized and
developed beings. I ask no mercy and I give none. What are my wishes
and desires to them? I would never have molested them, any more than
an eagle molests men, had they not taken my mate. But to satisfy some
selfish hunger or to evolve some useless scientific theory, they took
her life and ruined mine.
And now I have been, and shall be, the wild beast with a vengeance. A
wolf may wipe out a herd, a man-eating lion has destroyed a whole
village of men, and I am a wolf, a lion, to the people—if I may call
them that--of the Black Coast. I have lived on such clams as I have
found, for I have never been able to bring myself to eat of crab
flesh. And I have hunted my foes, along the beaches, by sunlight and
by starlight, among the boulders, and high up in the cliffs as far as
I could climb. It has not been easy, and I must shortly admit defeat.
They have fought me with psychic weapons against which I have no
defense, and the constant crashing of their wills against mine has
weakened me terribly, mentally and physically. I have lain in wait for
single enemies and have even attacked and destroyed several, but the
strain has been terrific.
Their power is mainly mental, and far, far exceeds human mesmerism. At
first it was easy to plunge through the enveloping thought-waves of
one crab-man and kill him, but they have found weak places in my
brain. This I do not understand, but I know that of late I have gone
through Hell with each battle. Their thought-tides have seemed to flow
into my skull in waves of molten metal, freezing, burning, withering
my brain and my soul. I lie hidden and when one crab-man approaches, I
leap and I must kill quickly, as a lion must kill a man with a rifle
before the victim can aim and fire.
Nor have I always escaped physically unscathed, for only yesterday the
desperate stroke of a dying crab-man's claws tore off my left arm at
the elbow. This would have killed me at one time, but now I shall live
long enough to consumate my vengeance. Up there, in the higher tiers,
up among the clouds where the crab city of horror broods, I must carry
doom. I am a dying man—the wounds of my enemies' strange weapons have
shown me my Fate, but my left arm is bound so that I shall not bleed
to death, my crumbling brain will hold together long enough, and I
still have my right hand and my iron bludgeon. I have noted that at
dawn the crab-people keep closer to their high cliffs, and such as I
have found at that time are very easy to kill. Why, I do not know, but
my lower reason tells me that these Masters are at a low ebb of
vitality at dawn, for some reason.

I am writing this by the light of a low-hanging moon. Soon dawn will
come, and in the darkness before dawn, I shall go up the secret trail
I have found which leads to the clouds—and above. I shall find the
demon city and as the east begins to redden, I shall begin the
slaughter. Oh, it will be a great battle! I will crush and crash and
kill, and my foes will lie in a great shattered heap, and at last 1,
too, shall die. Good enough. I shall be content. I have scattered
death like a lion. I have littered the beaches with their corpses.
Before I die I shall slay many more.
Gloria, the moon swings low. Dawn will be here soon. I do not know if
you look in approval, from shadowland, on my red work of vengeance,
but it has to some extent brought ease to my frozen soul. After all,
these creatures and I are of different species, and it is Nature's
cruel custom that the diverging orders may never live in peace with
each other. They took my mate; I take their lives.

David N. *****
Mesa, Arizona
[url]http://www.evilpossum.weebly.com[/url]
[url]http://www.examiner.com/special-education-in-mesa/david-*****[/url]
[url]http://www.amazon.com/David-N.-*****/e/B00506KU7W/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel[/url]...
[url]http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/evilpossum[/url]
[url]http://www.fanfiction.net/u/1703090/David_N_*****[/url]


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