El Borak and Other Desert Adventures Read online

  El Borak returned just as Howard was westering, moving into a “Texican” or Western phase of his fictioneering. In the Gordon stories, the East serves as a West that cannot be “won” or “tamed,” and the hero himself is that familiar figure described by Richard Slotkin in his Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in 20th Century America: “A man who straddles the border between savagery and civilization…them and us.” The possessor of hair “straight and black as an Indian’s” and features as “immobile as the deserts he haunted,” Gordon has long since acquired “the patience of the red Indian, which transcends even the patience of the East.” His booted tread is no noisier than the moccasins of the original Americans.

  “They say you are as stoical as the red Indians of your country,” Ivan Konaszevski, his Cossack near-nemesis, informs the Texan. In another story he hurls himself onto the vengeance trail, “no more foolhardy than his grandfather who single-handed trailed an Apache war-party for days through the Guadalupes, and returned to the settlement on the Pecos with scalps hanging from his belt.” But the grandson is as much an heir of the most famous Apache as of his own dogged grandpa: “Geronimo almost whipped an army with a handful of Apaches, and I was raised in his country. I’ve simply adopted his tactics,” he assures Geoffrey Willoughby in “Hawk of the Hills.” In another story, we watch as “manipulated with ragged cloak, balls of thick black smoke [roll] upward against the blue. It was the old Indian technique of Gordon’s native plains. “In what is almost our last glimpse of him, he is “running up the slope as the Apaches of his native southwest run.” Nothing else so legitimizes, nothing else so Americanizes an American hero (in the century-and-a-half since the surviving “real” Indians were for a time swept under the rug or onto reservations) as do Indian blood (witness David Morrell’s Rambo and Louis L’Amour’s Joseph Makatozi), Indian belongingness, or at least Indian skills.

  The things Gordon carries with him always and the things he leaves behind both do much to explain how the American creator of a forcefully American character was able to trespass so often on the Northwest Frontier and get away scot-free, or Scots-Irish-free. And although Howard never visited Arabia or Afghanistan, he rarely ceased from exploring the aridities and altitudes of his psyche and the waste places of his own soul. His Afghan and Arabian scenery is spectacular but rarely specific; background is only obtrusive insofar as it superbly equips Gordon to dominate each story’s foreground. The military historian John Keegan sketched the archetypal Afghan in his article “The Ordeal of Afghanistan” as “master of the high ground, [one who] knows every draw, false crest, goat track, hidden cave, overhang, and pinnacle.” The Gordon we meet has matched such mastery with the adaptability, absorptive capacity and attention to local detail that proved transferable from wild West to wilder East. In doing so he has effected a homecoming that perhaps exceeded his early hopes for his new surroundings; if home is where the heart is, then Francis Xavier Gordon is most at home when adventuring on the edge of precipices both literal and figurative.

  When Mundy wrote of “the heart’s desire for the cold and the snow and the cruelty — the dark nights and the shrieking storms and the savagery of the Land of the Knife,” he may well have pointed an editor to the title “Sons of the Hawk” appeared under. And in his 2003 essay “Hyborian Genesis Part II” (see The Bloody Crown of Conan), Patrice Louinet reminded us that the American’s Yasmeena (“The Daughter of Erlik Khan”), Yasmina (“The People of the Black Circle”), and Yasmeena (Almuric) differed from each other but were all daughters of Mundy’s Yasmini, who, in one of the enduring images from King of the Khyber Rifles, smiles down upon dangerous men “as sweetly as the stars shine on a battle-field.” The Englishman’s Ismail (“He looked like a bearded ghoul out for an airing”) is the progenitor of the Texan’s Yar Ali Khan the Afridi. Howard’s Shalizahr is “like a magic city of sorcerers, stolen from some fabled land and set down in this desert spot,” and is also rather like Mundy’s Khinjan Caves, “a very city of the spirits.”

  Yet sic transit gloria Mundy; Howard made room for himself on the turf the creator of Athelstan King and Jimgrim took over from Kipling by putting attitudinal distance between himself and the English author. Here it will be useful if we keep the title of Brian Taves’ 2006 Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure in mind, and then recall what was in effect Howard’s declaration of independence in a letter to Lovecraft: “For my part, the mystic phase of the East has always interested me less than the material side — panoramas of war, rapine and conquest.”

  We need not accuse Howard of mentor-mauling to note that Mundyesque philosophical or mystical states of grace are brusquely exposed as a state of disgrace in the Gordon stories; witness Yasmeena’s disillusionment in “The Daughter of Erlik Khan”: “I had dreamed of a calm retreat of mystics, inhabited by philosophers. I found a haunt of bestial devils, ignorant of all but evil.” Gordon himself expects to find “a hermit-philosopher, radiant with mellow wisdom” in “Blood of the Gods,” but encounters “a filthy, naked madman.” For all of Al Wazir’s study of The Bhagavad-Gita, for all of his delvings in “strange religions and philosophies, seeking the answer to the riddle of Existence,” events, violent events, elicit from him the admission “I can’t help mankind by dreaming out here in the desert.” Perhaps mankind is not to be helped at all, but individual men, women, and children can be saved or avenged as need be. Just as a good knife is a hearty incantation, a reliable pistol is a profound piece of philosophizing.

  But a skeptical approach to mysticism does not entail forgoing the fantastic. The heroic fantasist Charles R. Saunders, whose Imaro saga is one of the most exciting examples of someone honoring Howard’s legacy by applying powers of invention all his own, once published some thoughts on the earlier writer as Robert E. Howard: Adventure Unlimited. Is the adventure in any way limited in the El Borak stories because Afghanistan can’t be Conan’s Afghulistan? Is Francis Xavier Gordon’s Asia more cramped and constrained than, say, Solomon Kane’s Africa because the former is less supernatural? No. And conversely, some devotees of “pure” adventure will always wish to kick the fantastic out from under a writer like some gem-studded, exotically carved crutch, but if Howard’s fantasy is powerful in no small part because of its realism, his “realistic” adventure stories often reach for a fantastic vocabulary and imagery. On the brink of sleep Gordon wonders “what grim spectacles [the mountains] had witnessed since the beginning of Time, and what inhuman creatures had crept through them before Man was.” In another story “a brooding weirdness about these ancient and forgotten caverns [rouses] uncanny speculations in Gordon’s predominantly Celtic mind.” The speculations go so far as to include “a hypothetical rock-python of enormous size” and “the fabled djinn of the Empty Abodes.”

  The fantastic remains in residence in Howard’s time-slippage motif, as when Gordon can see himself as “a black-haired, black-eyed warrior from a far western isle, clad in the chain mail of a Crusader, striding through the intrigue-veiled mazes of an Assassin city.” Far older vistas open up, too; after all, we are dealing with the work of an author who often intuited a predecessor-or-underlier East, as he wrote to H. P. Lovecraft in June of 1931:

  …I feel a dim sense of a vast epoch lurking behind the East of the early ages — a sort of huge lurking night behind the dawn represented by Egypt and by Babylon — a dim sense of gigantic black cities from whose ruins the first Babylon rose, a last mirrored remnant of an age lost in the huge deep gulf of night.

  Always one to weigh rulers on the scale, find them wanting, and fling their kingdoms to the Medes and Persians, Howard reshaped Hubris and Nemesis in non-Greek, more forbiddingly sculpted guises. His ruination-reverie “Dreams of Nineveh” and the comeuppances in the poems “Belshazzar” and “The Blood of Belshazzar” seep into an unsparing verdict in “Three-Bladed Doom”: “So might the lords of Nineveh and Babylon and Susa have reveled, heedless of the captives screaming and writhing and dying in the pits beneath their palac
es — ignorant of the red destruction predestined at the maddened hands of those captives.”

  The supernatural version of “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (see The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard) was recently singled out by Lovecraft authority S. T. Joshi in The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos as “perhaps Howard’s most successful attempt to fuse his own swashbuckling action-adventure style with the Lovecraftian idiom.” But the story also succeeds in the absence of any creature feature, as in the version included in this book. Our old Howardian friends, human transience and temporal intransigence, are on hand for the climax of a long fascination on the writer’s part. That fascination with the sinister, subjugation-by-atrocity mystique of ancient Assyria, imprinted on the Western imagination, however unfairly, by the Old Testament and Lord Byron’s poem “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” is at work in the Solomon Kane fragment “The Children of Asshur,” the asshuri (blue-black-bearded, brutish Shemitish soldiery) of the Hyborian Age, and possibly the Nineveh-esque fate of the Acheronian capital of Python in The Hour of the Dragon. Outpost-turned-last-refuge for Assyrian refugees striving to outrun history, Kara-Shehr (as the Turks name it) is one of Howard’s most unforgettable settings, a “black city of the djinn, deep in the hazes of a haunted desert.” A character does well to suggest “the shadows of lost splendors” can be as phantasmally present as any ghost or afreet.

  For Howard the wings of an angel of oblivion beat blackly over the mud-brick Mesopotamian magnificence that was, but Alexander was another, more Western matter. When he wrote his “The Hills of Kandahar” he obviously knew who it was that haunts the very place name Kandahar, even if the poem’s vantage point is outside the former Alexandria in Arachosia, amid the mountains that outlasted the Macedonian and everyone else:

  They will be brooding when mankind is gone; The teeming tribes that scaled their barricades — Dim hordes that waxed at dusk and waned at dawn — Are but as snow that on their shoulders fades.

  Even during his lifetime Alexander had one foot in history and one foot in myth, so it was fitting that he was in effect there to greet Francis Xavier Gordon in the first El Borak story, “Swords of the Hills.” Howard was of course aware that Daniel Dravot’s rather rickety claim to the throne of Kafiristan in “The Man Who Would Be King” is based on his being “the son of Alexander by Queen Semiramis,” but another, pre-Macedonian alien-to-Afghanistan city actually preceded the Attalus of “Swords” in his imagination. A fragment published as “The Lion Gate” in the 2007 collection The Last of the Trunk concerns Minoans fleeing the fall of Knossos in the Bronze Age who put Xenophon’s later anabasis to shame: “Why should not those Ancients have won through to the high-flung reaches of the Himalayas and reared their city among the crags?” As killjoys, we can think of a few reasons why not, but the country’s Alexandrian legends date back long before Kipling; as is attested by the British adventurer and agent Alexander “Bokhara” or “Sikandar” Burnes, whose fate it was to fare less well than El Borak in the alleys of Kabul, in his Travels into Bokhara (1834):

  I heard from these people a variety of particulars regarding the reputed descendants of Alexander the Great, which are yet said to exist in this neighborhood, and the valley of the Oxus, as well as the countries near the head of the Indus. The subject had occupied much of my attention, and a tea merchant of our small caravan had amused me on the road from Khooloom, with the received lineage of these Macedonians.

  Alexander’s experiences have been much on the minds of those receptive to cautionary tales since 1979, and even more since 2001. Both Frank L. Holt’s nonfiction Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan (2005) and Stephen Pressfield’s hecatomb-in-novel-form The Afghan Campaign (2006) remind us that the Macedonian’s conceptual breakthrough in terms of counterinsurgency was marrying Roxana and hence into the local warlord-nobility, an option that Queen Victoria, Leonid Brezhnev, and the second President Bush were perhaps remiss in ruling out. And that in turn is a reminder that history has played a trick on the stories collected here, or possibly enriched them beyond even Howard’s hoards that function as “monstrous lodestone[s] drawing all the evil passions of men.” What we might call Khyberspace currently occupies more of the American imagination than at any time since movies like Lives of a Bengal Lancer and The Charge of the Light Brigade were released in 1935 and 1936 respectively.

  The Gordon and O’Donnell adventures probably haven’t been circulating overmuch among American or NATO troops in Afghanistan, unless yellowing paperbacks pounced upon in used bookstores or passed down from fathers and uncles made it into a kit-bag or three. Maybe that will now change, in which case we can predict a few double-takes when new readers learn that “The ameer [rules] the tribes after a fashion — with a dominance that [dare] not presume too far,” while the followers of Othman el Aziz seek “death rather than life,” or read about the “plague spot, sprawled in the high, bare hills, almost fabulous, beyond the reach of the ameer,” where the black Tigers scheme. Gordon even refers to “the terrorist methods” of the Shaykhs Al Jebal. Perhaps they will reflect that while El Borak, who doesn’t start vendettas, finishes them with blows that are crunchingly heavy, his “footprint” is light, lighter than a superpower’s could ever be.

  But here’s hoping any and all readers also relish these adventures as adventures, and as demonstrations of Howard’s galloping professionalism by the mid-thirties. “White men don’t forget — not when there’s loot in the offing,” he observes in one story; any White Man’s Burden mostly translates into white men burdened by the loot they seek to bear away. Ormond and Hawkston are both “beastly with cruel greed,” but the latter villain is forced to share what amounts to a foxhole with Gordon, and however fleeting their snarling, suspicion-ridden solidarity, it is a golden opportunity for Howard to contrast his hero with another adventurer. Or note how much more inhabited Rub el Harami, the Abode of Thieves in “Sons of the Hawk,” is than Yolgan in “The Daughter of Erlik Khan”: the earlier enclave seems like so much papier-mache and plywood in comparison. Or the quantum leap in POV characters from Stuart Brent, who looks to El Borak for rescue, to Geoffrey Willoughby, who looks to the Texan for compromise, a willingness to renounce to-the-hilt vengeance. As he keeps his eyes, his ears, and his mind open, Willoughby grows to rival Balthus in “Beyond the Black River” as a readerly stand-in, and his scenes with Gordon rank with the circumstantial alliance of Athelstane and Turlogh O’Brien in “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” as a seriocomic collision of Saxon and Celt arranged by a writer who bled Gael-green in his affinities.

  Gary Hoppenstand, a professor drawn to Howard’s work, has written, “Kirby O’Donnell constantly has to demonstrate his value as a hero by the strength of his hands and the grit of his teeth in the face of certain and terrible death, and only through his own mastery of the mechanics of death does he survive to the next story, to go through it all once more.” As Geoffrey Willoughby eyewitnesses, El Borak’s weapons-play is wizardly, but a note other than “the dry, strident, cruel cackling of the hills” is sounded in these stories. As the bodies pile up, so, sometimes, do the regrets. After one battle his eyes sweep “his phantom crew with a strange remorse,” and he says, “Sorry about it all.” In another story a pleasure garden-turned-abbatoir prompts the outcry “God!” from a man whose “soul [is] in revolt.” Few other Howard heroes would concern themselves with fetching water and binding wounds, or react to the butcher’s bill in “Son of the White Wolf” with the words, “A hundred better men than I have died today.”

  That story’s damning assessment of the detestable ex-lieutenant Osman is “He thinks first of his own desires, and only later of the safety of his men,” and the would-be empire-builder is a fresh frontier in villainy for the El Borak series. “Son of the White Wolf” as a whole is a new departure for a grim destination. Suddenly it is 1917, rather than some indeterminate prewar year, a time when, as Mundy’s Yasmini might put it, “The West has the West by the throat.” Cossacks and other
henchmen of the Czar making mischief in the hills now seem as quaint as a daguerrotype.

  Geopolitical realities have become molten and malleable; as Gordon, who has descended from his old eyrie to the flatlands and the multilateral suicide pact of world war, comments, “The world is being made over here, as well as in Europe.” Osman is thinking along similar lines, but he is acting as well as thinking. “Senta, Rinaldi. Senta. You and me, we’ve made a separate peace,” Hemingway’s Nick Adams, machine-gunned in the spine on the Italian Front, says to an even more wounded casualty in one of the most famous American reactions to World War One; in “Son of the White Wolf,” Osman makes a separate war, a revolt within, but against, the Arab Revolt.

  Now the Janus-faced iconography of “Three-Bladed Doom,” in which the palace guards of Shalizahr tote rhinoceros-hide shields and gold-chased scimitars that “[contrast] curiously with the modern rifles in their hands and the cartridge-belts [around] their lean waists,” intensifies as the summer thunder of British artillery competes for our attention with Osman’s banner with a strange device: “the head of a white wolf — the battle-standard of most ancient Turan.” Will the future be the past, an Osmaniacal, terribly simplified past purged of complexity and commiseration? In any event, “Son of the White Wolf” is our only foretaste of a possible future of the El Borak stories in which the shadows of the twentieth century might have lengthened and grown ever-chillier.

  T. E. Lawrence, an offstage colleague of Gordon’s in “White Wolf,” wrote in a letter, “I am still puzzled as to how far the individual counts: a lot, I fancy, if he pushes the right way.” We might suspect that with Gordon, as with Lawrence, the peace-making, promise-breaking years after 1917 will soon shove back, forcefully, but these stories remain adventures in which the individual continues to count a great deal. Richard Slotkin has argued that “heroes symbolize the possibility of successful action in the world,” and Gordon, whose “strenuous nature” negates the “inert philosophy” of fatalism, actively succeeds whether in Afghanistan or Arabia.