El Borak and Other Desert Adventures Read Free Page A

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