El Borak and Other Desert Adventures

by Robert E. Howard

  Strangely enough, the same theme, explained in greater detail, appeared in Howard’s “Murderer’s Grog,” a “spicy” story that used British India as its setting. One wonders what the editor made of dialogue about arms trafficking in the middle of a risqué tale.

  “Blood of the Gods” appeared in the July 1935 issue of Top Notch. As with Yasmeena in “The Daughter of Erlik Khan,” Al Wazir must be saved from a stalled, self-absorbed life by Gordon’s dynamism. Disillusioned with palace life, Al Wazir renounced both wealth and power and went to live in the desert of the Ruba al Khali with nothing but a copy of the Bhagavat-Gita. After his rescue by Gordon, Al Wazir rejects solitary contemplation, vowing to serve his fellow man. It is almost trite except for Howard’s own troubled views on the worth of life. Howard once insisted that, “For life to be worth living a man… must have a great love or a great cause.” One may wonder how much of Howard, toiling alone with his books and stories, may be seen in Al Wazir.

  We have already seen that the motif of priceless rubies of great antiquity which bear a terrible curse is a recurrent one in Howard’s fiction, as in “The Blood of Belshazzar” and “The Fire of Asshurbanipal.” The lure of rubies certainly proves fatal to Hawkston and his gang. The rubies in “Blood of the Gods” fulfill their function indirectly as it were. They prove to have been lost before the action even begins. Once again the glorious goal proves to be illusory.

  Rubies of great antiquity feature in the adventures of both Josiah Harlan and Alexander Gardner. Harlan was presented with a ruby by Dost Mohammed, describing it as covered with some ancient script. Gardner recorded an even stranger incident. A certain fakir in the remote Shignan valley possessed an enormous ruby with Scythian script and the image of an altar such as the fire worshipers employed inscribed on it. The chief of a Kirghiz clan in the area requested it as a gift in order to appease Murad Ali Beg, the warlord of Kunduz. The fakir gave the Kirghiz chief the ruby, asking only for a greater food allowance that he might share with travelers. Despite the gift, Murad Ali Beg continued to raid the Kirghiz.

  The conjunction of a European wazir (the Arab term for a prime minister) and the Ruba al Khali has its own significance. It may be merest coincidence, but the Ruba al Khali was in fact explored by not one European prime minister serving an Arabian monarch, but two. St. John Philby was an Englishman who served ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi kingdom, as his prime minister. In 1931 Philby hoped to be the first Westerner to cross the Ruba al Khali. Much to Philby’s chagrin Bertram Thomas, the wazir to the Sultan of Oman, accomplished the feat just as Philby was setting out. Howard’s fictional Al Wazir, of course, derives his name from his duties in the administration of Oman.

  Along the way Thomas found remains of an ancient road that allegedly led to the lost city of Ubar, also called Iram of the Many Columns. Mentioned in the Koran and the Arabian Nights, Ubar was an actual location. Legends of its great wealth were fashioned into some of the earliest “Lost Race” stories over a thousand years before Howard sent El Borak among the Greeks of Afghanistan and the devil worshippers of Mt. Erlik Khan. Thomas’s report in turn inspired modern explorers to locate Ubar’s remains and solve the ancient riddle of Ubar’s disappearance.

  The next El Borak story, “Sons of the Hawk,” appeared in Complete Stories in August 1936, under the title “The Country of the Knife.” The “outlaw city” motif that was central to “Three-Bladed Doom” re-appears in the form of Rub el Harami. Howard shifts the point of view from Gordon to Stuart Brent. As in “Hawk of the Hills,” this allows him to show action or withhold information from the reader as needed.

  Gordon’s character gains a further dimension. Always split between American Gordon and Afghan El Borak, he gains a new side: Shirkuh. El Borak is a somewhat dour figure. He is not a treasure hunter, cheerfully plotting to seize vast wealth, or a schemer gambling for a golden throne. Gordon’s self-appointed tasks are to rescue a friend or to thwart some murderous plot. But as Shirkuh he is a swaggering Kurdish soldier-of-fortune. He is ready with a boast or a jest, albeit jests that often end in bloodshed. Just as Kipling’s Diego Valdez lamented his loss of freedom to office, it seems El Borak needed an escape from duty into a more swashbuckling role.

  Rub el Harami is also a character in its own way. So many hidden cities in adventure fiction lack depth, as if they existed only to provide a stream of villains for the hero to kill. Rub el Harami has more than just targets for El Borak’s blade: outlaws abound there, as we would expect in “The Abode of Thieves,” but the population also includes merchants, beggars and religious scholars. The notion of an entire community living off the proceeds of banditry and smuggling was not so far-fetched in Afghanistan of the 1930s, nor is it in the twenty-first century.

  The city of outlaws also proves to be a city of rigid law interpreted by a council of mullahs (an ulema, the basic legal institution where Islamic law prevails). In the guise of Shirkuh, Gordon competes against the villain in a slave auction for a prisoner of critical importance. The strict laws of Rub el Harami, enforced by an armed mob, somewhat limit the usual recourse of Howard’s characters, violence.

  Rafael Sabatini had used the same device in The Sea Hawk. Where Sabatini’s treatment of the auction scene is low-key (despite its critical importance to the plot), Howard turns it into an event of high drama leavened with a bit of humor. The headlong narrative swiftly lifts the limitations on violence.

  Another custom of Rub el Harami is that one buys passage into the outlaw city by slaying a warrior of the city in fair battle. This may be a nod to Talbot Mundy, in whose King of the Khyber Rifles the ticket to the Khinjan Caves, where all the outlaws of the Northwest Frontier dwell, is the head of an Englishman. While less satisfactory for the outlaws, bandits’ heads seem easier to obtain than Englishmen’s.

  “Sons of the Hawk” ends with a desperate battle in a narrow mountain pass between a murderous posse and Gordon’s small group of allies. Here is yet another parallel between Gordon and Alexander Gardner. After the defeat of his patron, Habibullah Khan, Gardner and a few loyal companions escaped into Kafiristan. While seeking the road to Takht-i-Sulaiman they were ambushed by a party of fifty Uzbek horsemen from Kunduz. Gardner and his men were very nearly caught in a trap but managed to retreat to a narrow pass. As sheets of rain fell, a vicious hand-to-hand melee raged. In close quarters and pouring rain matchlock guns were useless, or else Gardner and his men would have been shot down like rabbits. Finally, they cut free of the melee while the Kunduz warriors stopped to pillage the dead. Of the thirteen men with Gardner only seven survived.

  Howard wrote one other El Borak story, his last and most violent. “Son of the White Wolf” appeared in the December 1936 edition of Thrilling Adventures. Like so many other El Borak stories, “Son of the White Wolf” first focuses on the villain. Lieutenant Osman seeks to emulate warlords such as Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and his own namesake, Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire. Obsessed with Pan-Turkish ideology, Osman and his troops renounce Islam and declare their worship of the White Wolf, the ancient tribal totem of the Turks. Paganism and conquest are constant points of reference for Howard’s work; here they become pillars of pure evil. Osman says just enough to make his twisted mind clear and precipitously sets his blood-bath in motion. As British guns boom in the distance Osman and his neo-pagan warriors troop off to found an empire.

  The motif of rescuing a white captive, in the form of Olga von Bruckmann, from alien hands is again at work, but El Borak’s true motive is revenge, promised to one of the Arab villagers mortally wounded by Osman’s killers. “In some ways his nature closely resembled [the Arab’s]. He not only understood the cry for vengeance, but he sympathized with it.” Duty to others has once again reached its most minimal point, killing for revenge. Unlike Gordon’s Afridi friends in “Hawk of the Hills,” there is no future for the anonymous Arab dead, El Borak can only obliterate a bloody past.

  This is the only El Borak story to directly reference T. E.
Lawrence. He does not appear in “Son of the White Wolf,” but his role in the Arab revolt is mentioned. An incident related in Lawrence’s memoirs seems to parallel the massacre of the Arab village in Howard’s story. Retreating before British and Arab forces in 1918, Turkish troops entered the village of Tafas and slaughtered the inhabitants with gruesome and obscene mutilations. In horror, Lawrence told his Bedouin fighters, “The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead.” Lawrence’s warriors duly cut down the Turkish killers.

  The plot element of modern Turks returning to the paganism of their remote ancestors is a theme that fits well with Howard’s interest in the starkly primitive. In fact this story has its roots in a rumor circulating in Mecca in 1916, reported by Lowell Thomas in With Lawrence in Arabia. It was noised about that the radical nationalist Young Turks were advocating neo-paganism. Thomas wrote that the rumor helped stir up anti-Turkish feeling among the pious Arabs of the Hejaz prior to the revolt of Sharif Hussein. Even today the white wolf is an important symbol of far-right Turkish nationalism.

  The El Borak stories had always been violent, but “Son of the White Wolf” pushed it to new extremes. Osman does not just commit mass murder of innocent civilians, he plans the systematic rape of Arab women to breed a new warrior race. When his plan fails, he kills his women captives in cold blood. Killing of men is normal in Howard’s action stories, but “Son of the White Wolf” reaches a level matched only by the last Conan story, “Red Nails.” The factors involved on Howard’s part may be speculated at. A long-held disdain for sentimentality, a willingness to feed the pulps’ increased demand for violence, and a darker worldview as his personal life came under pressure, may all account for Howard’s production of such a brutal story. But viewed from the outside, “Son of the White Wolf” seems a natural fit for its time.

  Howard had expressed revulsion at atrocities perpetrated by the Turks back in the early 1920s with “Intrigue in Kurdistan.” However, Osman’s cruelties are not incited by the Turkish High Command. Indeed, they are carried out against villagers friendly to the Turks. This is not a take on the Armenian genocide, in the fashion of Talbot Mundy’s Eye of Zeitoon. Osman is a new sort of creature, as different from the pallid villains sneering from so many pulp fiction stories as a wolf from a stray dog. Compared to the rather vague schemes of Hunyadi and the tradition-hobbled plots of Abd el Khafid, Osman is a nightmare figure. The childish play-acting of “The Iron Terror” has been left on the other side of the ocean in an imaginary America.

  Howard’s voluminous correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft had taken something of a political tone by 1936. They had vigorously debated Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia, and Howard had made pointed references to the brutal treatment meted out by “civilized” conquerors to Irish, Belgians, and Africans. Despite Hitler’s and Mussolini’s pretensions to unite progress with ancestral glories, Howard had no sympathy with their brand of totalitarianism. Lieutenant Osman, the would-be conqueror, may be seen in the light of Howard’s debate with Lovecraft on the politics of conquest.

  Osman embodies both political and racial violence in ferocious synergy. His rallying cry is, “What Asia needs is not a new party, but a new race!” The birth of that new race is to be midwifed by the murder of the old one. The threat of a renewed and militant Asia taking vengeance on its oppressors is an old standby of the Yellow Peril genre. Osman is not merely some Fu Manchu pastiche, though. He espouses racial nationalism, worshipping it as a new religion. Osman is dedicated to rape, conquest, and genocide, a nightmare figure resonating with the horrors of Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Auschwitz. Osman is less Yellow Peril than Brownshirt Peril. The last El Borak story points eerily to a fast-approaching future that Howard did not live to see.

  The Gordon series is wild and restless; like its protagonist it refuses to settle into routine. The Gordon stories are as likely to be sheer fantasy about time-lost Greek colonies or mountains of gold amassed by devil-worshipping priests as they are to be about starkly realistic blood-feuds over guns and trade or the hyper-reality of fascist madmen perpetrating brutal crimes in the desert. Gordon is himself the central paradox, spinning off parallels and doppelgangers: Gordon the American and El Borak the renegade. Gordon is the ultimate individualist, beholden to no man, living by his own code, yet his constant motivation is loyalty to friends, to allies, even to India against the murderous ambitions of would-be conquerors. Gordon the man who risks his life for his friends, insisting that it is his personal duty, has a mirror image in O’Donnell, the greedy treasure hunter who throws away a fortune because it would cost the lives of too many others.

  The contrasts are hardwired into Gordon’s character, a fictional DNA that replicates itself. The germ begins in ten-year old Bob Howard’s imagination. Then it replicates itself, adapting new strategies to survive and multiply in the pulp jungle. The daydream becomes professional storytelling, personal mythology flourishes as commercial writing. That dream took nearly two decades to come to fruition. Now the strange, paradoxical character of El Borak has outlived the twentieth century itself.

  NOTES ON THE ORIGINAL HOWARD TEXTS

  The texts for this edition of El Borak and Other Desert Adventures were prepared by Rusty Burke, with the assistance of Rob Roehm, Paul Herman, Glenn Lord, Patrice Louinet, Dave Kurzman, and the Cross Plains (Texas) Public Library. The stories have been checked either against Howard’s original manuscripts and typescripts, copies of which were provided by Lord or the Cross Plains Public Library, or the first published appearance if a manuscript or typescript was unavailable. Every effort has been made to present the work of Robert E. Howard as faithfully as possible.

  Deviations from the original sources are detailed in these textual notes. In the following notes, page, line, and word numbers are given as follows: 3.9.7, indicating page 3, ninth line, seventh word. Story titles, chapter numbers and titles, and breaks before and after chapter headings, titles, and illustrations are not counted. The page/line/word number will be followed by the reading in the original source, or a statement indicating the type of change made. Punctuation changes may be indicated by giving the immediately preceding word followed by the original punctuation.

  We have standardized chapter numbering and titling: Howard’s own practices varied, as did those of the publications in which these stories appeared. We have not noted those changes here.

  Swords of the Hills

  Text taken from Howard’s typescript, provided by The Cross Plains Public Library, Cross Plains, Texas. 3.9.7: semicolon after “silence;” 3.11.3: futiley; 3.11.14: in; 4.26.12: a slash follows “Doubtless” and “ly” typed above; 5.15.14-15: they were; 5.38.3: steelly; 6.7.12: north west; 6.17.3: “came” repeated, no comma; 6.18.5: breath-takingly; 7.9.6: comma after “roaring;” 8.1.2: avalanch; 8.16.14: “Pushtu” underlined; 9.7.3: semicolon after “hair;” 9.20.2: “Turki” underlined; 9.27.8: with; 9.30.2: stunting; 9.39.6: on to; 10.6.2: distance; 10.12.9: “hand-holds” hyphenated at line break; 10.34.3: desperatedly; 11.9.1: “Frankistan” underlined; 12.1.1: langauges; 12.6.2: comma follows “Surely” rather than “you;” 13.3.8: thousands; 13.7.6: comma follows “town” rather than “and;” 13.39.8: colon after “softly;” 13.40.6: scanty; 14.5.4: serviley; 15.1.6: on to; 15.2.2: on to; 15.3.3: safe-guard; 15.12.8: semicolon after “valley;” 15.13.14: for ever; 15.16.12: following “before” is a hyphen typed above a three-point ellipsis, “the” is not capitalized; 16.28.6: semicolon after “directed;” 16.31.8: on; 16.34.1: following “out” is a hyphen, “with” not capitalized; 17.12.11: “he” not in typescript; 17.26.7: comma after “sparks;” 17.31.13: delapidated; 17.41.8: some one; 18.6.2: exclaimed; 20.4.6: following “you” is a hyphen rather than a period; 20.10.1: some one; 24.6.4: show-down; 25.25.9: “blades” not in typescript; 26.31.3: was; 26.40.8: lady

  The Daughter of Erlik Khan

  Text taken from Top-Notch, December 1934. 30.35.6: hangel; 31.7.4: comma after “south;” 32.10.10: some one; 32.34.13: thoughts; 43.1.1: “cut-thr
oats” hyphenated at line break; 52.13.6: some one; 52.24.10: about; 53.14.11: some one; 55.9.8: “kaffiyeh” not italicized; 59.28.3: she; 60.40.2: stranger; 61.12.4: to-morrow; 61.35.3: to-night; 65.36.1: to-night; 68.13.12: any one; 68.18.8: some one; 68.20.16: some one; 74.7.6: Yesmeena’s; 75.1.8: no comma after “Orkhan;” 77.23.10: causway

  Three-Bladed Doom

  Text taken from Howard’s typescript, provided by The Cross Plains Public Library, Cross Plains, Texas. There are two different versions of this story. The longer version, about 42,000 words, was written first. When it failed to sell, Howard rewrote it, cutting it down to about 24,000 words. The shorter version appears in the “Miscellanea” section. 89.21.1: slanted; 89.24.5: closted; 90.12.5: the; 92.30.7: agiley; 93.14.6: “the” not in typescript; 95.18.12: scretly; 97.7.11: semicolon after “Ghilzais;” 97.11.7: its; 98.5.5: stratgetic; 98.12.1: no comma after “suppose;” 98.19.5: no comma after ‘ravine’; 100.2.10: “the” not in typescript; 101.30.6: worship; 103.17.6: blood-drops; 103.20.10: whom; 104.11.6: criticising; 107.13.2: analzying; 108.5.11: analzyed; 109.33.5: taller; 110.3.2: taller; 110.6.3: “have” repeated; 111.32.6: colon after “heartily;” 114.2.3: palacial; 114.15.3: leans; 116.14.3: Sidna; 118.8.3: reverance; 118.13.4: unobtrusedly; 119.6.3: thing; 119.16.12: enemity; 120.8.11: mountains; 120.28.11: Lelesh; 121.36.11: referances; 122.34.3: “a” not in typescript; 123.2.11: immorial; 124.23.1: “one” not in typescript; 127.2.6: intricasies; 128.17.5: furtherest; 131.1.6: villian; 131.11.6: too; 135.2.3: futiley; 135.2.7: “them” not in typescript; 135.18.5: nitche; 137.2.9: you” he; 139.39.3: tha; 140.8.14: comma outside quotation mark; 142.30.4: “to” not in typescript; 145.12.12: “be” not in typescript; 148.4.1: steading; 148.28.14: in typescript, “have” added by hand other than Howard’s; 149.4.12: trandscends; 149.6.7: immobily; 149.41.4: tinging; 153.2.9: “fedauis” not underlined (i.e., not italicized); 153.26.13: no comma after “when;” 156.21.12: Some one; 157.36.10: holt; 159.28.5: see; 162.15.4: her’s; 163.34.7: Any way; 164.22.2: “the” not in typescript; 167.9.1: “Effendi” not underlined (i.e., not italicized); 168.15.9: freized; 172.7.13: beleagered; 178.9.1–3: “Aie! Ahai! Ohee!” not underlined (i.e., not italicized); 178.15.1: “Ohai” not underlined (i.e., not italicized); 178.17.11: “that” not capitalized