El Borak and Other Desert Adventures Read Free

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 Afghanand 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