“The Sapphire Siren” was an unusual tale from an author with an equally odd name, Nyctzin Dyalhis. The story appeared in Weird Tales, February 1934 under the title “The Sapphire Goddess”. The title was changed when it was reprinted in The Avon Fantasy Reader #17, November 1951. It has been called “The Sapphire Siren” since, like when it appeared in Lin Carter’s Weird Tales #2 (December 1980).
Nictzin Dyalhis
Dyalhis (1873-1942) wrote almost exclusively for Weird Tales (Ghost Stories and Adventure also got a few pieces). Reportedly, his inspiration came from his dreams, much in the same way Edward Lucas White wrote his ghost stories. This process produced less than a dozen stories so it is obvious Dyalhis was not a professional, making his living at the typewriter. In fact, “The Sapphire Siren” was written when he was 61. Most of Dyalhis’s reputation rests on another story, “When the Green Star Wanes” (Weird Tales, April 1925), a Science Fiction tale that readers of the magazine pointed to as a favorite for years.
Much of Dyalhis’s work has a Science Fictional flavor to it, whether he is writing about distant planets or cave men. “The Sapphire Siren” opens with a slight SF feel before becoming an Arabian Nights adventure. Some have called it Sword & Sorcery but the opening makes this hard to tell.
A Tale of a Strange World
The plot goes as follows: A man who is about to kill himself suddenly finds himself whisked off to another dimension by a man named Zarf. He claims to be the man’s royal guard. The earthman finds out that he was once King Karan, his memory wiped by a sorcerer named Djl Grm.
Adventure Awaits
The two men are attacked by Vulmin dwarves, which they kill with their swords. Zarf tells Karan of a rival sorcerer named Agnor Halit, who might remove the memory spell.
They spend the night in a hovel belonging to a strange hybrid named Koto. He is half Rodar, a race of giants living in the Red Wilderness, and an elemental. Karan knights him and makes his Lord of the Red Wilderness, and wins an ally for life. Karan wants to return to Earth to get firearms but Zarf can not send him back. Instead he builds bows and arrows, which are unknown there.
On a Quest For Memory
They set out to find Agnor Halit on ostrich-like riding birds. That night they sleep in the ghost-haunted desert. Koto keeps the ghosts at bay by burning resinous gum he finds. Zarf goes to sleep. Koto and Karan go to speak with Koto’s father, a dark cloud with sinister eyes. Koto’s father agrees to transport the trio over the Sea of the Dead, the Hills of Flint, and to the Mountains of Horror, which they must cross themselves. This he does with a sandstorm cloud that deposits them beside the ruins of an ancient and evil city.
There Karan meets the former queen, an evil vampire that wishes to lie with him. When he refuses her she fades away. Karan wakes to find his two friends under a sleep spell. Agnor Halit has come to meet them. He awakens the two so that they can confirm his identity. He promises to restore Karan’s memory if he will do one task for him, go to a whirlpool and dive down into a chamber and claim a shining blue statue that lies there.
The Sapphire Goddess
When they come to the geyser hole it is Koto who goes first, out of loyalty. Zarf follows and Karan has no choice but to follow. They find a chamber below that houses the statue, along with a multitude of round stones of varying color. These rise up and attack the men. Only when King Karan demands they stop as their rightful king, can he walk way with the prize.
Koto’s father and the other wizard, Djl Grm, are waiting for the three upon their return. Koto defies Djl Grm and wins both his king’s praise and his Koto’s father’s. Koto’s father warns the sorcerer off, saying he will go to war with him if he presses his claim on the statue.
That night the Princess of Hell comes back and tries to seduce Karan again. She raises her phantom city all about him. He refuses again and is tortured by a priest who knows all the pressure points. She torments him further by making him think he is kissing the beauty from the blue statue. It is actually a corpse.
The Quest Comes to an End
Karan is rescued by Agnor Halit, who destroyed the queen and her city ages ago. He punishes her by imprisoning her soul in a poisonous lizard. Agnor Halit is ready to complete their deal. He gets Karan to relinquish all claims to the statue then restores his memory. Karan now remembers that Halit had turned Karan’s queen, Mehul-Ira, into the statue. She wants her king but the wizard presses his claim. Koto deals with the sorcerer, first by denying that Karan relinquished his claims to his wife, just a statue, which she was no longer. To really finish him, he throws the poisonous lizard down his throat and kills him. Koto convinces his father to return them all to Koto’s hovel. The king and queen are reunited and spend the night alone.
One element we see here in “The Sapphire Siren”, and we will see again and again, is the person going to the strange world will actually be someone returning to that place. Our world of mundane reality is used as a kind of hiding place (usually fled royal heir) or prison ( a vanquished hero) to keep them away from other places. It makes for a fun daydream to imagine you aren’t a schlub living a boring life but actually Prince Ramigarthan of the Brilliantine Empire.
Portal Fantasy
Portal Fantasy is the name historians have given Fantasy tales that involve a person or persons going from our world into a realm of wonder. The most famous example are the Narnia novels of C. S. Lewis from the 1950s, beginning with The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950). In 1934, Portal Fantasy is unusual. The first ones were dream stories like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872) as well as novels like George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858). (MacDonald would inspire C. S. Lewis and his tales of Aslan.) These stories imply that the characters have only dreamed the visit to the otherworld. A more modern version would include H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath, which he finished in 1927 but wasn’t published until 1943. As the title implies, the journey takes place in sleep but like Phantastes, danger is still present.
Other classics include The Wizard of Oz (1901) by L. Frank Baum and Peter Pan (1901) by J. M. Barrie. In these two classics, the heroine is whisked away to a far land that lies adjacent to the world. These have more in common with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in that they go to a place that lies somewhere unknown to others but possibly near the real world. A. Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) type scenario is another version of this, when modern people visit a forgotten and secret land.
All-Story Masters
Heroic adventure tales in which the travelers know they are not dreaming (they are physically transported to another realm) begin with two authors in the Soft Weeklies: first, Edgar Rice Burroughs and his A Princess of Mars (All-Story, February-July 1912). Burroughs dabbled in wishy-washy occultism, having John Carter leave a body back in that Arizona cave, and possess a new one on the planet Mars. The mechanics are never really explained, nor do they matter. Alice has gone through her looking glass and found herself fighting a band of green tharks. Burroughs would have immediate imitators in J. U. Giesy and Charles B. Stilson.
The other was Fantasy master, A. Merritt, who began his career with “Through the Dragon Glass” (All-Story Weekly, November 24, 1917), a tale of a man who goes through a mirror to find a beautiful mate and a terrible monster. Later he would write a novel-length Portal Fantasy called The Ship of Ishtar (Argosy All-Story Weekly, November 8-December 13, 1924). Many of Burroughs’ and Merritt’s books use The Lost World model instead of a portal.
More Tales Through the Looking Glass
Which brings us back to “The Sapphire Siren”. Portal Fantasy stories in the pages of Weird Tales were unusual. Shortly, they will become easy to find but not yet. I’m not saying Dyalhis invented it, but he did create one small innovation: his dimensional crossing:
Like a movable panel a section of the wall opened, revealing a most peculiar corridor– a strange Being stood smiling at me! It did not speak, yet I caught the challenge: “Dare you?”
With a single movement I rose and stepped into the opening…
Oh, the agonizing, excruciating torture of that transition! Every nerve, tissue and fiber flamed and froze simultaneously. My brain seethed like a super-heated cauldron. My blood turned to corrosive, searing acid. Tears suffused my aching eyes. I choked, unable to utter the groans my sufferings constrained me to emit….
With this scene, Dyalhis drags a Science Fiction feel into a magical crossing. He keeps enough of a technological sensibility in his jump from ordinary Earth to the land of wonder that modern readers will buy the idea of stepping through a door into Fantasy.
Open the Doors
After “The Sapphire Siren” the flood gates open.:
♦In 1939, Robert E. Howard’s posthumous tale, Almuric appears in Weird Tales (May, June-July, August 1939), with Esau Cairn transported to a world of violence and action.
♦In the pages of Unknown, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt begin telling stories of Harold Shea for the purposes of humor, poking fun at mythology. “The Roaring Trumpet” (Unknown, May 1940) and “The Mathematics of Magic” (Unknown, August 1940) start a series that is still being added to today.
♦Edmond Hamilton would write in a Merritt mode in “A Yank in Valhalla” (Startling Stories, January 1941) and the Brian Cullen stories, “The Shining Land” (Weird Tales, May 1945) and “Lost Elysium” (Weird Tales, November 1945–January 1946).
♦Hannes Bok would also take inspiration from Merritt with The Sorcerer’s Ship (Unknown, December 1942).
♦Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury mimicked “The Sapphire Siren” in “Lorelei of the Red Mist” (Planet Stories, Summer 1946) with an Earthman pulled back into another world to find he was once a famous prince (named Conan!), now reviled by everyone. This story is Sword & Planet but feels like Fantasy. The same summer Henry Kuttner had “The Dark World” in Startling Stories, Summer 1946.
♦Andre Norton used the idea of crossing a dimensional door to start off Witch World (1963). Simon Tregarth, like Esau Cairn, takes his inspiration from Edgar Rice Burroughs. Once there, the author sheds the SF for Fantasy.
♦Perhaps the best use of the idea is Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles, that has an entire universe that is crossed by portals, with a central monarch who rules over all the worlds. Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse is a similar connective device.
Conclusion
Portal Fantasy today is a fairly common choice for writers. You can find it in comic books, movies and television. Popular versions include A Wrinkle in Time (1962) by Madeleine L’Engle, which blurs the lines between SF and Fantasy, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, which have been described as “anti-Narnia novels” and in YA novels such as Joy Chant‘s Red Moon and Black Mountain (1970). Children’s writers have never needed to explain or validate an idea that goes back to Dorothy and her visit to Oz. Writers for adults, like the Pulpsters who wrote for Weird Tales and Unknown, needed more scaffolding to sell the trick. Whether you use a magic spell, a techno-gizmo or a star simply pulls you across the heavens, it makes no difference. When you arrive, the adventure will begin.
