Immediately inside the cover of this edition is the following excerpt, meaning the scene from the story that the publisher’s managing editor judged would be most likely to pique the interest of teenage boys and young men inclined to peruse racks of such paperbacks at new stands and shopping mall bookstores of the day.
Demon Rulers of a Savage Planet
The alien queen Yasmeena stretched her wings and said, “You call me cruel, Esau Cairn. But I am a goddess—what has either cruelty or mercy to do with me?”
“You are no less mortal than the peoples you enslave and torture,” I said. “And your rule cannot last forever.”
She smiled mockingly. “It has lasted since beyond the gray dawn of Time’s beginning. On the dark rock Yuthla my people have brooded through ages uncountable. We were always masters. As we rule the Guras, so we ruled the mysterious race which possessed the land before the Guras evolved from the ape: the race which reared their cities of marble whose ruins now affright the moon, and which perished in the night. We have watched races come and go, each in turn bending beneath the yoke or our godship.”
Then laughing, she flung the challenge at me: “Why should our rule not endure forever, Esau Cairn?”
This passage will be treated in its proper context in the story. The mythic dimensions implicit in this brief confrontation of will and word are Race, Gulfs and Cataclysm, the latter of which, is, in most of the cases it is evoked by Robert E. Howard, a genesis element from which the usually more immediate mythic dimensions, such as racial legacies and the gulfs that yawn between Man and the unknown powers that buffet him, spring like soul-drinking night flowers with roots sunk in Hell.
