Hish, Lord of Silence - Sidney Sime Phone Case

Hish, Lord of Silence, leaves the forest at evening, and Sidney Sime catches him mid-step. Drawn in 1905 for Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegāna, the hooded figure tilts forward in bone ivory. Cloth covers his nose and lips against the cold. A slit is all the face he offers. Drapery running in hairline ink, thin strokes combed downward until the whole cloaked body reads as bark. Umber scrub flickers at his hem. Every fold is one pen and ink contour wavering down a frame that tapers to a footless stem.

Behind him the tree trunks rise as smoked columns, rubbed soft into a lampblack ground. Stippled foliage beads the upper reaches in pinprick clusters. Sepia grass bristles at the lower edge, the only texture loud enough to scratch. Dunsany made this god father to the bats and keeper of the cricket's thousand cries, a small home god who quiets the mouse before dreams arrive.

Elkin Mathews issued the London first edition with Sime's images in photogravure, and that velvet depth survives on the matte tough case. Edwardian fantasy illustration rarely sat this still. Carry a weird fiction pantheon in your palm, where a muffled deity keeps your phone under his own curfew. This Symbolist nocturnes slipped into the Golden Age of Illustration by the back stair. Vintage book illustration turning pocket armor. A monochrome god who asks nothing of the ringing world except less.