Pages 11-12

Esau’s narrative is in the first person, which was not a feature of Howard’s major character-based serials, but was employed in the dark Agnes stories, so he was not a stranger to the form, but seemed to use it judiciously and apply it to his more unique efforts.

Esau’s transit is uneventful and instantaneous:

“…I found myself standing upright in the clear sunlight that flooded a broad plain. I could not doubt that I had indeed been transported to another world. The landscape was not so grotesque and fantastic as I might have supposed, but it was undisputedly alien to anything existing on the Earth.”

Esau finds himself naked but unharmed, having been briefed by Hildebrand that:

“Only vibrant, living matter could pass unchanged through the unthinkable gulfs which lie between the planets.”

Grateful that he came naked to a summery land rather than some wintry world, he took stock of his surroundings, which consisted of a vast grassland:

“My imagination peopled the distance with nightmare shapes.”

Esau now felt helpless and vulnerable in his puny nakedness:

“…my mighty frame and massive thews seemed frail and brittle as that of a child. How could I pit them against an unknown world? In this instant I would gladly have returned to Earth and the gallows that awaited me, rather than face the unknown terrors with which my imagination peopled my new-found world.”

And so the mightiest physical specimen on Earth rediscovers Man’s primal terror on an open plain not unlike that on which the first humans challenged the lion prides of Africa. Esau shuddered and yearned for the mean little world of men he had escaped. Howard’s crafting of such a primal character and then having him transported into an environment that has him questioning his viability at the primal level—that level which he had owned on Earth, as obsolete is it may have been—is rich with irony, an irony that would grow deeper when Esau meets what passes for a man on Almuric in the next paragraph.

This reader wonders if Howard was not having fun with his own dreams of living in a more rugged time and place, sensing that though he might have yearned for it, once found such a place might find the author—a man of civilization, after all—wanting.