Formerly published as ‘In That Dark Land’, revised

This fragment to an incomplete novella is another lost race tale after the fashion of The Moon of Skulls. Kane is living with yet another poor refugee tribe of blacks who have given him shelter in a stormy night, only to be attacked and slaughtered by big armored men with curly blue-black beards. These are the descendents of Assyrian refugees from ancient Nineveh. Kane tracks the men—who smashed him and left him for dead in his sleep—to their monolithic stone stronghold. He was unarmed, and “…in that dark land a man’s weapons were his life,” so he followed his robbers so that he might recover his weapons.

Kane is captured and kept as an oracle by the corrupt high priest and the cruel king. The Assyrians make good heavies, with the black slaves that feed Kane making sympathetic—if doomed—characters. The men were cruel, arrogant, oppressive and piercing-eyed. Even their city was cruel.

“…There was a massiveness about their architecture that was vaguely repellent—a somber heavy motif that seemed to suggest a sullen and slightly inhuman character of the builders.”

The last of the three chapters of this tale that would have gone for two more chapters, ends on an uplifting note, after the first two exceedingly dark chapters.

In terms of a racial tale, Howard again explores the wretched plight of common tribal Africans, depicting at least two of the men as heroic freedom-seekers and loyal companions. Although much of Howard’s work denied or minimized the agency of blacks in line with the then current thinking on “the white man’s burden” as expressed by Kipling, The Children of Assur veers away from this motif in a balanced manner. The racially conscious reader of Howard’s work should also recall that he stresses the lack of agency of the vast bulk of all human populations in his work. Only small, tribal, barbarian populations living in harsh environments are ever credited with a racially characteristic drive to have a hand in their own destiny, if a doomed one.