“As far as pure intellect went, they were superior to the hairy Guras. But they lacked altogether the decency, honesty, courage, and general manliness of the apemen. The Guras were quick to wrath, savage and brutal in their anger; but there was a studied cruelty about the Yagas which made the others seems like mere rough children. The Yagas were merciless at their calmest moments; roused to anger, their excesses were horrible to behold.”

The balance of Chapter 9 is dedicated to a description of the mesa-top stronghold of the winged black demons and the hellish life of their slaves. This short chapter seems to present Howard’s conception of the perfect hell, toiling as the playthings of soulless masters, and finally, eaten. The reader is served with Howard’s ideal Hell—a place of emasculation in which females have their wings clipped and the males are all slaves to a terribly winged queen—which forms the basis for his discussion with the demon queen in the next chapter.

Chapter 10 is built around a dialogue between Esau and the beautiful Yaga goddess, Yasmeena who offers to make him king, offers herself as a mate, in a more sinister manner than The Devi Yasmina offered the kingship of her nation to Conan in People of the Black Circle. Like Conan spurning the marriage proposal of an earthly monarch, Esau Cairn spurns the queen of a temporal hell. Howard’s message is clear: the authentic man chooses death before domestication.

What follows is an excerpt from the theological discussion between the he-man and the demon queen, which, like the marriage proposal, is later mined for inclusion in the Conan character’s back story and for one of the very best Conan yarns, Rogues in the House:

“Well, I may not be able to create life, but I can destroy life at will. I may not be a goddess, but you would find it difficult to convince these foolish wenches who serve me that I am not all-powerful. No, Iron-hand, the gods are only another name for Power. I am Power on this planet; so I am a goddess. What do your hairy friends, the Guras, worship?”

“They worship Thak; at least they acknowledge Thak as the creator and preserver. They have no regular ritual of worship, no temples, altars or priests. Thak is the Hairy One, the god in the form of man. He bellows in the tempest, and thunders in the hills with the voice of a lion. He loves brave men and hates weaklings, but he neither harms nor aids. When a male child is born, he blows into it courage and strength; when a warrior dies, he ascends to Thak’s abode, which is a land of celestial plains, rivers and mountains, swarming with game, and inhabited by the spirits of the departed warriors, who hunt fight and revel forever as they did in life.”

She laughed, “Stupid pigs. Death is oblivion. We Yagas worship only our bodies. And to our bodies we make rich sacrifice with the bodies of the foolish little people.”

And so Howard sketches his well-known barbarism versus civilization theme, pitting the primal superstition that buoyed the raw primitive in his age against the evolved materialism of the ultimately atheistic civilized society, which he presents according to the metaphor of a hornets’ nest—a hive mind, which many hard science-fiction writers have since depicted as either the ultimate interstellar foe of Humanity or its emptily teeming evolutionary destination.