Chapter 6 begins with Esau Cairn covered in blood, his hair matted with the stuff, and determined to rescue the woman he had mistaken for any other, who he had discovered far too late was his female counterpart. He has pursued the flying black men to a haunted city of some undetermined, time-obscured race and immediately notices that the Yaga who he had used for a beast of aerial burden was darting away from the place in terror, a place to which he naturally went.

At this point the reader is clued into the fact that Esau is a dark hero, who carries something more terrible in his being than the villains. It is a constant underlying theme with Howard's heroic fiction—which is to say the vast majority of it—that the hero is an actor apart from the norm, from common society, and does not represent the norm, but intercedes on its behalf.

Kane is never shown worshipping in a church congregation hall.

Conan is never depicted shoulder-to-shoulder with a Cimmerian. Indeed he seems to be the only Cimmerian in the world.

Bran Mak Morn is the embodiment of self-sacrificing tribal agency, yet he is physically of a different type than his brutish people.

Cormac MacArt is the only Gael on Wulfere's longship.

Xavier Gordon is an American adventurer who works for the interests of tribes and empires not his own.

Kirby Buckner works on behalf of racist whites who do not hold his mild view of blacks, avenges these blacks who have suffered at the hand of one of their own, and in another tale looks after a new Englander lost in the Southern pine woods.

A Howard hero is not just alienated from that which he apposes, but that which he fights for.

The substance of this particular chapter is of such dark, horrific imagery that the presence of a powerful character lends it a dreamy quality, as if the protagonist is flying in a dream or breathing under water, his actions are so outsized, his rage larger than its terrible stage. Despite the superhuman strength and wild impulsiveness of Cairn he experiences animal fear and nausea.

I leave the reader with one passage from the hands of the story's chthonic creator deity:

"Looking about at the towers and fallen blocks and pillars, bathed in the weird moonlight [golden on Almuric, evoking an otherworldy eye and suggestive of dream], I was aware of a distinct aura of evil, of lurking menace. I felt the glare of hidden eyes...and came upon a trail of blood drops lying blackly in the moon, leading through a maze of drunken pillars...I stood bewildered and terrified, as the damned must stand in the clamorous halls of hell. I passed through the stages of icy terror, bewildered horror, desperation, berserk fury. With a maddened roar I plunged blindly at the sounds that seemed nearest, only to collide with a sold wall, while a thousand inhuman voices rose in hideous mirth."

I am not a Jungian. However, this entire chapter reads like a young man's nightmare, squatting blackly in the center of a story line that had been something of an adolescent romp—and Howard never got old. I am reminded of Dante's inferno, if Dante had dreamed, not as an intellectual, but as a man of action. Howard has essentially placed a Viking/caveman in a setting that would normally be populated by a cast of victims that would range from detached to simpering. The drunken pillars, in dream space, would represent an unjust society. As a writer of lesser things, I have taken such a nightmare and placed it at the center of a tale and written around it. Rereading this chapter, I wonder if Almuric was a tale born in the nightmare of a writer.

For reference, below is the link to a look at the opening canto of Dante's Inferno.