The Monsters of the Hyborian Age 2: Satha the Giant Snake

If you missed last time…

Satha the giant snake of the Hyborian Age is as iconic as the other frequent Howard baddie, the gorilla. Satha shows up in several stories, and eventually in the movie, Conan the Barbarian (1982) as a not-really convincing animatronic. We all had Frank Frazetta cover images in our heads and got awkward Arnie cutting off fake-snake’s head. Sigh.

The Scarlet Citadel

That image came from the second Conan story, “The Scarlet Citadel” (Weird Tales, January 1933). Conan has fallen into the hands of a mortal enemy, Tsotha-lanti, a wizard. He is imprisoned in the terrible dungeon of the Scarlet Citadel. He is chained in the dark where he gets visitors:

It was a snake that dwarfed all Conan’s previous ideas of snakes. Eighty feet it stretched from its pointed tail to its triangular head, which was bigger than that of a horse. In the dim light its scales glistened coldly, white as hoar-frost. Surely this reptile was one born and grown in darkness, yet its eyes were full of evil and sure sight It looped its titan coils in front of the captive, and the great head on the arching neck swayed a matter of inches from his face. Its forked tongue almost brushed his lips as it darted in and out, and its fetid odor made his senses reel with nausea. The great yellow eyes burned into his, and Conan gave back the glare of a trapped wolf. He fought frenziedly against the mad impulse to grasp the great arching neck in his tearing hands. Strong beyond the comprehension of civilized man, he had broken the neck of a python in a fiendish battle on the Stygian coast, in his corsair days. But this reptile was venomous; he saw the great fangs, a foot long, curved like scimitars. From them dripped a colorless liquid that he instinctively knew was death. He might conceivably crush that wedge-shaped skull with a desperate clenched fist, but he knew that at his first hint of movement, the monster would strike like lightning.

Conan survives that encounter, mostly by luck and then escapes. He would later cut Tsotha-lanti’s head from his shoulders, with the headless corpse chasing the eagle that has his head. It was that scene that Jayem Wilcox illustrated rather than Satha the giant snake.

The Valley of the Worm

We get another chance at it in “The Valley of the Worm” (Weird Tales, February 1934). Howard tells the story of the Aryans migrating across a haunted land. This takes place in a time after Kull’s Atlantis but before Conan’s Hyboria. He does this through the dreams of James Allison, a modern man in a device borrowed from Jack London. Niord and his people encounter the Picts. They teach him of Satha, the giant snake. Howard even mentions that in ages to come Satha will be worshiped in Stygia:

Let me speak of Satha. There is nothing like him on earth today, nor has there been for countless ages. Like the meat-eating dinosaur, like old sabretooth, he was too terrible to exist. Even then he was a survival of a grimmer age when life and its forms were cruder and more hideous. There were not many of his kind then, though they may have existed in great numbers in the reeking ooze of the vast jungle-tangled swamps still further south. He was larger than any python of modern ages, and his fangs dripped with poison a thousand times more deadly than that of a king cobra…

Niord wants to destroy an even worse enemy, the giant worm (we’ll look at him in a later piece) but he wants Satha’s poison for his arrowheads. Niord sets a deadfall trap and acts as the bait:

Then I went alone through that primordial twilight jungle until an overpowering fetid odour assailed my nostrils, and from the rank vegetation in front of me Satha reared up his hideous head, swaying lethally from side to side, while his forked tongue jetted in and out, and his great yellow terrible eyes burned icily on me with all the evil wisdom of the black elder world that was when man was not. I backed away, feeling no fear, only an icy sensation along my spine, and Satha came sinuously after me, his shining 80-foot barrel rippling over the rotting vegetation in mesmeric silence. His wedge-shaped head was bigger than the head of the hugest stallion, his trunk was thicker than a man’s body, and his scales shimmered with a thousand changing scintillations. I was to Satha as a mouse is to a king cobra, but I was fanged as no mouse ever was. Quick as I was, I knew I could not avoid the lightning stroke of that great triangular head; so I dared not let him come too close. Subtly I fled down the runway, and behind me the rush of the great supple body was like the sweep of wind through the grass.

Dark Valley Destiny

I don’t think Howard’s obsession with snakes isn’t that hard to figure. (He would have large constrictors in “Devil in Iron” (Weird Tales, August 1934) and “Beyond the Black River” (Weird Tales, May–June 1935) too. In “The Dream Snake” (Weird Tales, February 1928) a man is obsessed by a snake in his dreams and ends up crushed by it.) He was a Texan. He lived in rattlesnake country. As L. Sprague de Camp put it in Dark Valley Destiny (1983): “And as every Howard enthusiast knows, giant snakes regularly slither into his stories and coil their hideous bodies around the sore-tried hero.” De Camp attributes Satha the giant snake to Howard reading The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling with its character of Kaa. I completely get this, as the Kipling stories are quite exciting and not the cute Disney fare of the 1960s.

Jayem Wilcox may have passed on drawing Satha in 1933, but many artists have chosen to do so since. Frank Frazetta sold millions of Lancer paperbacks with his cover for Conan the Usurper (1967), while comic book artists Frank Brunner did in Savage Sword of Conan #30 (June 1978) and Tomás Giorello in Dark Horse’s King Conan: The Scarlet Citadel (February 2011). Gil Kane had beat both much earlier in Supernatural Thrillers #3 (April 1973) with “The Valley of the Worm”. Corben went another way with Bloodstar (September 1979).

Next time...The Tower Spider…