The Hyborian Age | Page 2

reverted to
flint, but had advanced more rapidly in the matter of population and
war-science. They had none of the Atlanteans' artistic nature; they were
a ruder, more practical, more prolific race. They left no pictures painted
or carved on ivory, as did their enemies, but they left remarkably
efficient flint weapons in plenty.
These stone-age kingdoms clashed, and in a series of bloody wars, the
outnumbered Atlanteans were hurled back into a state of savagery, and
the evolution of the Picts was halted. Five hundred years after the
Cataclysm the barbaric kingdoms have vanished. It is now a nation of
savages--the Picts--carrying on continual warfare with tribes of
savages--the Atlanteans. The Picts had the advantage of numbers and
unity, whereas the Atlanteans had fallen into loosely knit clans. That
was the west of that day.
In the distant east, cut off from the rest of the world by the heaving up
of gigantic mountains and the forming of a chain of vast lakes, the
Lemurians are toiling as slaves of their ancient masters. The far south is
still veiled in mystery. Untouched by the Cataclysm, its destiny is still
pre-human. Of the civilized races of the Thurian Continent, a remnant
of one of the non-Valusian nations dwells among the low mountains of
the southeast--the Zhemri. Here and there about the world are scattered
clans of apish savages, entirely ignorant of the rise and fall of the great

civilizations. But in the far north another people are slowly coming into
existence.
At the time of the Cataclysm, a band of savages, whose development
was not much above that of the Neanderthal, fled to the north to escape
destruction. They found the snow-countries inhabited only by a species
of ferocious snow-apes--huge shaggy white animals, apparently native
to that climate. These they fought and drove beyond the Arctic circle,
to perish, as the savages thought. The latter, then, adapted themselves
to their hardy new environment and throve.
After the Pictish-Atlantean wars had destroyed the beginnings of what
might have been a new culture, another, lesser cataclysm further altered
the appearance of the original continent, left a great inland sea where
the chain of lakes had been, to further separate west from east, and the
attendant earthquakes, floods and volcanoes completed the ruin of the
barbarians which their tribal wars had begun.
A thousand years after the lesser cataclysm, the western world is seen
to be a wild country of jungles and lakes and torrential rivers. Among
the forest-covered hills of the northwest exist wandering bands of
ape-men, without human speech, or the knowledge of fire or the use of
implements. They are the descendants of the Atlanteans, sunk back into
the squalling chaos of jungle-bestiality from which ages ago their
ancestors so laboriously crawled. To the southwest dwell scattered
clans of degraded, cave-dwelling savages, whose speech is of the most
primitive form, yet who still retain the name of Picts, which has come
to mean merely a term designating men--themselves, to distinguish
them from the true beasts with which they contend for life and food. It
is their only link with their former stage. Neither the squalid Picts nor
the apish Atlanteans have any contact with other tribes or peoples.
Far to the east, the Lemurians, levelled almost to a bestial plane
themselves by the brutishness of their slavery, have risen and destroyed
their masters. They are savages stalking among the ruins of a strange
civilization. The survivors of that civilization, who have escaped the
fury of their slaves, have come westward. They fall upon that myterious
pre-human kingdom of the south and overthrow it, substituting their

own culture, modified by contact with the older one. The newer
kingdom is called Stygia, and remnants of the older nation seemed to
have survived, and even been worshipped, after the race as a whole had
been destroyed.
Here and there in the world small groups of savages are showing signs
of an upward trend; these are scattered and unclassified. But in the
north, the tribes are growing. These people are called Hyborians, or
Hybori; their god was Bori--some great chief, whom legend made even
more ancient as the king who led them into the north, in the days of the
great Cataclysm, which the tribes remember only in distorted folklore.
They have spread over the north, and are pushing southward in
leisurely treks. So far they have not come in contact with any other
races; their wars have been with one another. Fifteen hundred years in
the north country have made them a tall, tawny-haired, grey-eyed race,
vigorous and warlike, and already exhibiting a well-defined artistry and
poetism of nature. They still live mostly by the hunt, but the southern
tribes have been raising cattle for some centuries. There is one
exception in their so far