El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (93 page)

However, the differences between Howard and Mundy are conspicuous. Mundy’s tales of Asia are heavily influenced by his interest in Theosophy. Secret societies and science-fictional super-weapons are commonplace. Mundy novels emphasize the battle of wills more than physical combat. The antagonism between the hero and the villain is often worked out through a secondary character, ostensibly a minion of the villain. Princess Baltis in
Jimgrim
, Lady Saffren Walden in
The Ivory Trail
, and Dawa Tsering in
OM: The Secret of Ahbor Valley
come to mind. While Mundy’s heroes often have comparatively mundane motivations, such as finding a treasure, foiling a plot to rule Asia, or political intrigue, in many of his stories the heroes seek to conquer themselves and achieve spiritual advancement.

El Borak, like other Howard heroes, must survive physical confrontation to succeed. Action is the driving force of these tales. This is not to say Howard’s tales lack characterization, dialogue or atmosphere, but in an El Borak story the battle is won or lost in
battle
. Howard’s world of grim struggles for survival does not leave time for spiritual journeys.

Rafael Sabatini, well known for his swashbuckling adventure tales of pirates, may have been the source for Gordon’s nickname. Most commentators have simply taken it for granted that Howard got the nickname “El Borak” from the name of the winged steed (“al-Buraq” in more modern transcriptions, “the swift one” or “lightning”) that carried the prophet Mohammed from Jerusalem to Heaven. However, we may note Sabatini’s 1915 novel
The Sea Hawk
, a tale of piratical derring-do in which we find a Barbary corsair known as “Biskaine… el-Borak was he called from the lightning-like impetuousness in which he was wont to strike.” There is reason to think Howard may have been influenced by
The Sea Hawk
in other ways. The protagonist, Sir Oliver Tressilian, is an English privateer captain who joins the corsairs, which certainly fits the pattern of a West European fighting man living among Muslims.

Gordon’s origins as a Texas gunslinger link him to the Western genre, but the stylized trappings of the gunslinger myth explored by Zane Grey, Max Brand, and many others are conspicuous by their absence. Saloons, cowpokes, gamblers, cattle drives, and sheriffs do not readily translate to Afghanistan. But James Fenimore Cooper’s iconic take on the frontiersman does.

Rooted in colonial captivity narratives, the legend of the frontier scout is about border warfare, especially the rescue of captive white women from tribal
warriors who confront the advance of empire. The scout is the only man who can rescue captives from the Indians. But to do so, he must know Indian lore intimately, even to the point of identifying with the Indians. Cooper’s hero Natty Bumppo is raised by Indians and has a foot on both sides of the frontier. Among the Indians he is known as “Hawkeye” (one of many nicknames). The name is granted for his superior marksmanship, but also marks a special relationship with the Indians. Gordon may not have been raised by Bedouin, but he too has a special name. Gordon has one foot in the Western world he left behind, and he is ever ready to respond to its demands, albeit on his own terms. “El Borak” is the side of him that is assimilated into the tribal life of Afghanistan and Arabia. He is utterly at ease whether in a Bedouin camp or a city of outlaws in Turkestan. The captive/rescue motif is a recurring one in the El Borak stories.

Although many influences went into the making of the El Borak stories, they are a unique product of a highly original writer. H.P. Lovecraft remarked, “It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr. Howard’s stories stand out so sharply; but the real secret is that he himself is in everyone of them, whether they were ostensibly commercial or not.” Lovecraft’s words are more than simply a polite eulogy of a friend. Gordon is the core of a cycle of stories that grew over a twenty-year period. This cycle brings together the protagonist and supporting characters as well as alter egos of the protagonist. The El Borak cycle crosses disparate locales, boasts several leading characters, and even crosses genres. Yet despite that diversity, there is a remarkable consistency of themes and motifs over many stages of Howard’s professional career.

Gordon first appeared in print in the December 1934 issue of
Top Notch
, but he had been a long time in coming. Howard revealed a bit about the character’s origin to fan Alvin Earl Perry. The details were published in “A Short Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard” in the June 1935 edition of
Fantasy Magazine
. Perry quotes Howard: “The first character I ever created was Francis Xavier Gordon, El Borak, the hero of ‘The Daughter of Erlik Khan’ (
Top Notch
), etc. I don’t remember his genesis. He came to life in my mind when I was about ten years old.” Then, speaking of another character, Bran Mak Morn, Howard added, “Physically he bore a striking resemblance to El Borak.”

This comment about similarity between Bran Mak Morn and Gordon is significant. Howard was careful and consistent in describing his characters. Both Bran Mak Morn and Gordon are compact men, not physically large, but incredibly strong. Their hair and complexions are dark and their eyes are an icy, intense black. Of course there was a practical side to this. A dark complexioned, dark eyed man can disguise himself as an Arab or Afghan more
easily than a fair, blue-eyed fellow. But Howard used physical appearance to denote racial origin, not just in a broad sense, but with a very exact, almost tribal specificity. In “Hawk of the Hills,” Gordon describes himself as being of Highland Scotch and Black Irish descent. Those are the very groups identified in Howard’s day as modern descendants of the Picts. Much as Howard created a mythical global migration for the Picts, so Gordon acts out the racial memory of the Pictish
volkerwanderung
in the crossroads of conquest employed by the Bronze-Age Aryans, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and so many others.

It is characteristic of Howard that Gordon, Bran Mak Morn, and Solomon Kane were hold-overs from boyhood daydreams. A writer who can take the germ of an idea he had as a youngster and, after an eighteen-year span, craft it into polished work at the peak of his career proves the validity of Lovecraft’s eulogy.

Long before this polished work, however, Howard had attempted to commit Gordon to paper. Between 1922 and 1923 he began a number of Gordon stories, but none have come to us complete. One of these, “The Iron Terror,” provides an interesting look at both Howard as a writer and the character of Gordon. Gordon is plotting a revolt in Arabia as a first step to conquering his own empire. This touches on a theme that runs like a blood-soaked thread through the fabric of Howard’s tales: the usurper who wins a throne by dint of his indomitable will to power. That is part of the basic identity of Kull, and the Conan stories begin with the hero unsteady on his new throne. In “The Iron Terror” Gordon meets with an arms-dealer who compares Gordon to Genghis Khan. There is a brief exchange that might serve to describe many Howard heroes.

“I am no soldier,” says Gordon.

The arms dealer replies, “No, you are a conqueror.”

Howard’s conquerors are not men who direct others from behind a desk, nor are they uniformed servants of the state. They are utterly free, wild, and ferocious in their will to power. When Howard was writing “The Iron Terror” he was struggling to find his own road. Becoming a full-time writer in the face of his parents’ reservations required much determination. Howard was no one else’s soldier, he followed a lonely road to conquer the life he wanted.

At the same time Howard manages to question the worth of conquest and imperial glory. Although clearly fascinated by self-willed men who imposed their rule on the world, Howard regularly raised existential questions that suggest the futility of such a life.

“My road is my own,” Gordon replied.

“Aye, and you will travel it. Like all conquerors. They came, they saw, they conquered! Where are they now?

“Here is the dagger that was carried by Genghis Khan. But where is Genghis Khan? So all conquerors go!”

Just as much as Howard returned to the theme of the usurper, he returned to the ephemeral nature of glory.

The Gordon stories from this period are unfinished, but they form a framework of motifs that bear on the mature tales. One, published as “The Coming of El Borak,” concerns an English woman kidnapped by Afghan tribesmen. This fragment introduces a pair of supporting characters, the cheerful warrior Khoda Khan and the intense and brooding Yar Ali Khan. Gordon appears only at the end of the fragment. Both Khoda Khan and Yar Ali Khan appear in several other unfinished stories, as does Lal Singh, a Sikh warrior.

What is striking is that the story is told entirely in the first person by Khoda Khan. Howard liked to shift the point of view character and told several of the later El Borak stories using an alternate central character. However, he never again used an Afghan narrator to tell an El Borak story.

The motif of rescuing a white woman from the natives is a well-worn theme. In fact, about the time Howard was writing the early El Borak stories, a British
mem-sahib
was captured by rebellious tribesmen. In 1923, a gang led by Ajab Khan Afridi, a Pathan gun-runner who had a score to settle with the British, attacked the home of a British officer, Colonel Ellis. The raiders killed Col. Ellis’s wife and kidnapped his daughter. The story was reported in
The Dallas Morning News
, so Howard may well have read of it at the time. Admittedly, Miss Ellis was not rescued by a grim-faced American gunslinger. Instead the British employed a medical missionary, Mrs. Lillian Starr, and a local civil servant, Kuli Khan. Mrs. Starr wrote an account of her negotiations for Miss Ellis’ release in her 1923 memoir,
Tales of Tirah and Lesser Tibet
.

Another of the early stories, published as “Khoda Khan’s Tale,” introduces “El Borak” as Gordon’s
nom de guerre
. The name means “the swift,” and indicates his deadly speed with gun and sword and fast thinking under pressure. The name also gives depth to Gordon, giving a name to the Asian side of his character.

Howard gave the theme of empire building a twist in a piece published under the title “Intrigue in Kurdistan.” The setting is a Turkish castle with an elaborate network of secret passages, a motif that would recur in several El Borak stories. Gordon instigates a Kurdish revolt, ostensibly to forge an empire with himself as ruler. His true motive is revenge for Turkish atrocities against Armenians. The subject had been employed by Talbot Mundy in his 1920 novel,
The Eye of Zeitoon
, in which his heroes hold an Armenian fort in a desperate battle with Turkish troops. Characteristically, Howard’s protagonist is far more ruthless in his approach. Gordon’s revolt is intended to provoke
European intervention that would destroy Turkey as an independent country. Gordon is quite frank in his desire to see a mass slaughter of the Turks and Kurds. In his essay, “A Touch of Trivia,” Howard reflected on his personal reactions to historical events. His judgment on the Turks was harsh:

Say what you will, wholesale massacre is never justifiable — I mean the slaughter of helpless people. Except in the following case: when a nation has over and over again proved itself to be absolutely without mercy, as in the case of the Turks with the Armenians, it is in my mind no crime but a duty of the nations to extirpate them, to destroy all men capable of bearing [arms] and to scatter the helpless people far and wide, not in barren exile to die, but to be absorbed by other races.

The motif of building an empire on the slaughter of entire races would return in the last and most ferocious of the El Borak stories, “Son of the White Wolf.”

There are other fragments that show Howard was still experimenting with Gordon’s setting, character, and even his nickname. Some are efforts at “Lost Race” stories: tales of quests for lost treasure in unexplored regions. H. Rider Haggard’s romances have a strong influence here, and several are in fact set in Africa. Fantastic elements such as living dinosaurs and a cursed ruin appear in a couple of the fragments. In the fragment published as “A Power Among the Islands” Gordon appears as a sailor nicknamed “Wolf Gordon,” echoing Jack London’s Wolf Larsen from
The Sea Wolf
.

There are several fragments in which Gordon is paired with Steve Allison, a drifting Western outlaw who nonetheless has a double life as a New York sophisticate. Howard later developed Steve Allison as the “Sonora Kid,” a gunslinger in Western tales, mercifully dropping the New York connection.

In one of these Allison/Gordon fragments Gordon is referred to as “Diego Valdez,” and Allison responds by quoting two lines of Kipling’s poem, “The Song of Diego Valdez.” The narrator of Kipling’s poem tells how he found his ease in adventure on the high seas, but when he became “Diego Valdez, High Admiral of Spain,” the duties of his public persona deprived him of the wild and free life of an adventurer. The tension between duty to office and to others and the desire to seek adventure for its own sake is a motif in some of Howard’s best Conan stories, such as “Black Colossus” and “Hour of the Dragon.” Was this how he conceived of Gordon? When El Borak reappeared in the ’30s, he was no longer a treasure hunter or a man seeking a crown, but a very different character.

From 1923 until 1933, as Howard worked to establish himself as a
professional writer, El Borak lay dormant. But as the young author sought to expand into new markets as the Depression settled over the land, and his old standbys
Weird Tales
and
Fight Stories
struggled, the Desert Gunfighter made a comeback. Aiming at the adventure-story magazines, Howard experimented with the idea, in the process creating what might be thought of as an extended El Borak cycle, which includes not only the stories of Gordon, but those with other characters as well. Taken as a group, they help define what El Borak is and is not.

One tale that could fairly be considered part of this extended El Borak canon is “The Fire of Asshurbanipal.” According to Glenn Lord it was probably written in the early thirties and later re-written. The re-write was published in
Weird Tales
in December of 1936. The heroes are Steve Clarney, an American adventurer, and his companion, Yar Ali, a giant Afridi warrior. Yar Ali is a variation on Yar Ali Khan, Gordon’s bear-like Afridi friend. Steve Clarney, while not explicitly called a Texan, speaks in Texan dialect. Clarney and Yar Ali are searching for a giant ruby, known as “the Fire of Asshurbanipal,” deep in the interior of Arabia away from the Persian Gulf. The gem is said to be clutched in the hands of a mummified king on a throne in a desolate, haunted ruin.