El Borak and Other Desert Adventures Read Free Page B

dying in the pits beneath their palaces — 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