El Borak and Other Desert Adventures

by Robert E. Howard

  “Swords of the Hills” has an almost naive preoccupation with feats of strength. Gordon’s physical strength, endurance, and agility all play a role in defining him. In “Swords of the Hills,” his physical prowess is pushed to its limit. The reader has a sense that the hero is mortal, that his eventual victory is hard won and not a foregone conclusion.

  But “Swords of the Hills” goes beyond that. There is a subtle sense that the Greek ideal of the athletic body is at work. Gordon’s entree into Attalus comes from freeing a man trapped by a massive boulder, a dramatic use of strength to save a life. At one point Bardylis even admires Gordon’s physique, “devoid… of surplus flesh.” The very kingship of Attalus itself is determined by who can best the king in a no-holds-barred fight.

  Although Kline was unable to sell “Swords of the Hills,” Howard apparently retained an interest in it. In One Who Walked Alone, Novalyne Price Ellis recalled that Howard said he was he was studying Alexander the Great’s conquests and colonization of Central Asia. He told her that he intended to write a story about one such colony surviving intact until the present day. Either Price Ellis mis-remembered and Howard told her he had written such a tale, or perhaps he was writing a new one.

  In any case Howard was committed to writing El Borak stories. In December 1933 he sent Kline the typescript for “The Daughter of Erlik Khan.” This story would see publication in the December 1934 issue of Top Notch as a “novel.” Top Notch typically ran a novelette as its lead feature calling it a novel. Although Howard’s work had that distinction, it did not get the cover illustration.

  The story offers a nod to Talbot Mundy in the form of the heroine Yasmeena, echoing Mundy’s Yasmini, and also revisits the narrative elements of “The Man Who Would Be King,” but this time the motifs are even more rearranged. Instead of being loveable rogues like Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, Ormond and Pembroke are murderers, devoid of principle, unable to show loyalty even to each other. The Black Kirghiz are an isolated pagan tribe much like Kipling’s Kafiris. But the Black Kirghiz have no noble heritage from Greece’s glory. They are squalid devil worshipers, “bestial” and “ignorant of all but evil.” The Black Kirghiz recognize a talisman of authority just as the Kafirs do and allow the Englishmen to pass. But it is not the Masonic symbol of universal brotherhood, it is a token from Yasmeena. The Black Kirghiz have no interest in or much connection to the outside world. Where Dravot impersonates a god in order to assume power, Yasmeena finds that the role of divinity is thrust upon her. Moreover, there is no power in being a goddess in Yolgan. Rather she is a prisoner. Her sole desire is to escape and resume an ordinary life in India.

  Just as “The Daughter of Erlik Khan” inverts familiar motifs from Kipling, the classic Western motifs devised by Cooper are rearranged. The traditional narrative is about restoring a captive white woman to civilization and domesticity. But Yasmeena is not white, her father is a native of Yolgan and her mother is Indian. Although she is a prisoner of the Black Kirghiz, Yasmeena arrives voluntarily. Domesticity is what she fled, if that concept can extend to a psychopathic husband who intends to beat her to death with a slipper. El Borak offers escape, but nothing else. There is no cabin on the Afghan border with Mrs. Yasmeena Gordon raising young ’uns. Yasmeena says, “[Y]our soul is a whetted blade on which I feared I might cut myself.” El Borak is simply a violent means to an end.

  While Gordon may seem like a superman, his physical limits factor strongly. By the end of the story, Gordon is nearly drunk with fatigue. His face is like a grinning skull and his feet leave bloody smears on the rock. The feats of strength celebrated in “Swords of the Hills” have become a grim test of endurance.

  While Howard emphasized Gordon’s physical prowess, he also carefully crafted Gordon’s personality. Self-assurance and duty are Gordon’s hallmarks, a sharp antithesis to Kirby O’Donnell. When his friend Achmet is murdered deep in a remote region full of bloodthirsty savages, Gordon does not turn back for reinforcements, he does not indulge in histrionics, nor even pause to consider options. He simply builds a cairn for his friend and goes after the killers. “Blood must pay for blood. That was as certain in Gordon’s mind as hunger is certain in the mind of a gray timber wolf.” Diego Valdez has returned as an avenger.

  Gordon’s single-mindedness parallels his utter confidence. Just as he has no doubts about his purpose, Gordon never betrays doubts about himself. “[H]is bearing was no more self-conscious among a hundred cutthroats hovering on the edge of murder than it would have been among friends.” Gordon’s attitude alone allows him to dominate situations in which compromise would end in certain death. When attitude will not serve, El Borak backs up his words with deeds. He provokes a fight with a bandit chief with no other aim than taking over the outlaw band. He ruthlessly cuts down a bandit who attempts a mutiny. Gordon threatens torture and death against Yogok to secure the priest’s cooperation.

  Yet all the mayhem is directed ultimately toward the goal of helping a friend. Gordon’s initial motive is revenge, but he shifts his priority to rescuing Yasmeena when he realizes her predicament. He has no hesitation in using the Turkoman bandits to his own ends and enforcing his will with death. But once the bandits accept Gordon as their leader, he accepts responsibility to them. His duty to Yasmeena is balanced very delicately against his duty to bring the Turkomans out alive. Even Yogok will earn his freedom. The Diego Valdez aspect of Gordon is more than revenge and death.

  Gordon’s devotion to duty reinforces the distinctive characterization of the supporting cast. Their motivations and attitudes are not muted by romanticism or glossed over as incomprehensible. They stand in sharp relief to the almost dreamlike fantasy of savage tribes, impenetrable mountains, hidden treasure, and devil-worship. Yogok, the high priest of an ancient cult that worships a pre-human deity of pure evil, wants to get rid of Yasmeena and her influence without arousing the ire of her worshippers. Like so many other politicians, he wants to eat his cake and have it too. Howard details Yogok’s network of spies and assassins to good effect and has the arch-priest betray more-or-less every other character that crosses his path. Yogok is a memorably sleazy villain, anti-romantic in that he could easily be transplanted to a political thriller or a hard-boiled crime story.

  Yasmeena, the princess in need of rescue, may seem to come from a fairy tale, but Howard does not leave it at that. She has fled a murderously possessive husband, disgusted with the hypocrisy and conformity of bourgeois life. The alternative, Yogok’s primitive police state, is equally disillusioning. The result is a personal paralysis that only Gordon’s dynamic action can break through. Howard invests some well-thought out existential dilemmas in Yasmeena.

  The contrasts between Gordon, Yogok and Yasmeena are striking. Both Yogok and Yasmeena are self-absorbed, the one pursuing furious activity scrupling at nothing to protect his power, the other relying on someone else to save her from her own decision. El Borak is courageous, self-sacrificing, loyal to friends and followers and bent not on gain, but on justice. Above all, it is duty that motivates Gordon, even to the gang of bloodthirsty Turkoman bandits whose leadership he assumes. Gordon seems almost an abstraction, personifying the need to lift oneself out of the trap of self-pitying inaction, but not at the cost of falling into the trap of utter selfishness.

  It was almost a year before Howard produced his next El Borak tale, but it was his longest. “Three-Bladed Doom” is a 42,000 word novella. The themes are familiar ones, a dream of empire, a lost city and an ancient cult of devil-worshippers. Even allowing for a high degree of imagination on Howard’s part, he also employed some well-researched history.

  Howard refers to Othman’s outlaws as fedauis and batinis. Fedaui has its modern variant in the term fedayeen, used for Arab guerilla fighters in Palestine and Iraq. Batini on the other hand is a bit more obscure. It is a term used by Medieval Muslim heresiographers for those who claimed an esoteric knowledge of the Koran. The batinis accepted all religions as one; no believer was barred fro
m their brotherhood. Othman adopts this ecumenical view wholeheartedly and opens his fortress to any devil-worshipper or criminal in order to create his all-Asian Mafia of cultists and killers.

  A more spectacular motif derives from Marco Polo’s account of the Old Man of the Mountain. The Old Man was the legendary leader of the Assassins, who ruled his secret armies from a remote mountain fortress. The Old Man claimed authority based on his direct access to God. Recruits to the Assassins were drugged and taken to a secret pleasure garden where they awoke and enjoyed the pleasures of fine foods, wine, and beautiful women. The fedauis were told they were in Paradise itself enjoying the delights promised to loyal fighters for Islam. Then they were drugged again and returned to service. The Old Man sent his devoted fedauis on what were often suicide missions, reinforced in the belief that they would return to the Paradise they had seen if they died doing their duty.

  Three-Bladed Doom is a product of the 1930s, yet it seems to summon modern fears of terrorism and political violence. When Gordon finally meets Othman, the Assassin leader relates how he funded his organization using money from “minerals” (oil, perhaps?) in Persia. Later it is revealed that some European power, perhaps Czarist Russia, is supporting Othman. The image of an oil-rich Iranian funding terrorism, state-sponsored terror, religious radicalism, and suicide-assassins yearning for a paradise of beautiful virgins have strong resonance with the twenty-first century’s nightmare of global terrorism.

  Three-Bladed Doom is full of echoes from the early Gordon fragments and other Howard tales. Gordon’s past as a sailor in the South Seas (“A Power Among the Islands”) is mentioned. Othman’s city has an elaborate network of secret passages like the fortress in “Intrigue in Kurdistan.” Gordon senses himself to be a reincarnation of a Crusader, echoing Cormac FitzGeoffrey and other Howard heroes. Ancient Greece, so central to “Swords of the Hills,” influences Three-Bladed Doom. Like a modern Theseus, Gordon enters a labyrinth occupied not by a Minotaur, but a variant on the Yeti. Howard also revived two of Gordon’s companions from the early tales: Yar Ali Khan and Lal Singh. Any two names would have sufficed for these supporting characters, but Howard retained these names, pulling them out of unpublished, unfinished stories. Perhaps simply naming a character helped fix his personality and characteristics. But there is something in drawing on these hidden sources that strongly suggests the presence of a personal mythology.

  When Howard wrote Three-Bladed Doom, Czarist Russia was long-gone, but the Great Game motif lingered on. Like Kipling’s Kim, Gordon is called upon to thwart a Russian threat to British India. While Kim can rely on his status as an agent of the British Empire, Gordon’s strength is his utter lack of official support. That allows him to infiltrate the Assassin stronghold by pretending to be a wanted man. It is more than a mere plot device. Howard’s repertoire of characters are individualists to a man. But there is a refinement of that in Gordon. Kim’s two-sided life is united in service to the empire. Gordon is always at odds with those he helps most. He is part Gordon, the frontiersman who keeps the peace of the frontier, and part El Borak, an Afghan warrior who follows only his own dictates. In a passage explaining how El Borak manages to infiltrate the outlaw Assassins, Howard explains:

  He had no reverence for the authority which bedecks itself in pomp and arrogance and arbitrary worship of precedence, and he did have an abiding contempt for certain types of officials, whether civilian or military; so he was violently hated by the latter, and their opinion was sometimes accepted by the unthinking as an index of governmental opinion. But the men who actually rule India, moving unobtrusively behind the scenes, knew El Borak for what he really was, and though they did not always approve of his methods, they were his friends, and they had profited by his aid time and again.

  Howard never did find a publisher for “Three Bladed Doom,” despite cutting it down to 24,000 words and re-writing it at least twice. The short version cuts quickly to the climactic battle, and ends on an uncharacteristic note, with Gordon knocked unconscious and the denouement related secondhand. It is a very weak ending, strongly at odds with the dynamic personality that sets El Borak apart from Steve Clarney and Kirby O’Donnell.

  While “Three Bladed Doom” remained unpublished in Howard’s life, the Gordon short stories were making a mark. Top Notch ran two El Borak yarns, “Hawk of the Hills” and “Blood of the Gods,” in June and July of 1935 respectively. Both had the lead spots as the issues’ “novels,” with accompanying cover illustrations.

  “Hawk of the Hills” marks a turn from the “Lost Race” theme that predominated earlier. Its subject is a savage feud in the Afghan hills. With the more fantastic elements gone, “Hawk of the Hills” takes on a new grittiness. The El Borak stories had never been overly sentimental. “The Daughter of Erlik Khan” has homicidal ex-husbands and tribal women weeping over their slain menfolk. But in “Hawk” there are no heaps of treasure or lost cities to discover, only new shades of darkness in the human heart. It is as if Yasmeena’s disillusionment has become general. Men casually barter for the heads of their enemies. Betrayal and murder by ambush are the norm. Khoda Khan views the aftermath of battle thus:

  The heap at the foot of the stairs was no longer a merciful blur, for the moon outlined it in pitiless detail. Dead horses and dead men lay in a tangled gory mound with rifles and sword blades thrust out of the pile like weeds growing out of a scrap heap. There must have been at least a dozen horses, and almost as many men in that shambles.

  “A shame to waste good horses thus,” muttered Khoda Khan.

  “Hawk of the Hills” is more like a Western than any of the earlier El Borak stories. Yet the comparison cannot be pushed too far. “Hawk of the Hills” has none of the trappings of a cliché horse-opera. There is no sentimentality to the mayhem. The story exists at the battle-front, with only the burned ruins of villages to suggest a life outside of war. The belief in impartiality and compromise is shown to be a web of lies and self-deception. The Wild East is won by war to the last man. This is less the West of Zane Grey than that of Sam Peckinpah.

  Perhaps not “Western,” but “Texan” would be a better term for “Hawk of the Hills,” for the story echoes the savage feuds chronicled by Texas historians such as C. L. Sonnichsen and C. L. Douglas. The feuding Afghan clans are subject to manipulation by outside forces: the Russians, the Amir, and the British Empire. But the feudists are quite capable of resisting, and of doing some manipulating of their own. The crisis could be a feud in Reconstruction Texas, with rival ranching clans battling it out while outside politicians and business interests try to take advantage of the bloodletting. That the scenario in “Hawk of the Hills” is perfectly believable in Afghanistan or Texas perhaps indicates that the basic truths about power, greed, and hate become evident when handled by a great writer.

  A distinctive feature of “Hawk of the Hills” is that Howard uses Willoughby, the British diplomat, as his point-of-view character. There is a utilitarian function to multiple viewpoints: Howard can reveal or withhold information to create surprises or build tension. But the diplomat is more than a mere device. Willoughby’s presence turns the story into a skirmish in the battle between “civilization and barbarism” played out in Howard’s fiction and his voluminous correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft. One may wish to amend that phrase to “society vs. individualism.” In earlier tales Gordon confronts outsiders, men who are not integrated into Afghan life as Gordon is. But wolfish adventurers like Hunyadi, Ormond, or Pembroke hardly represent “civilized” values. Willoughby, on the other hand, regards society’s interests as higher than the individual’s. “You’re sacrificing the welfare of the many to avenge the blood of the few,” is Willoughby’s assessment of El Borak’s feud with Afdal Khan.

  For Gordon a necessary corollary to loyalty in life is revenge after death. It is a minor theme in “Daughter of Erlik Khan,” while in “Hawk of the Hills,” Gordon makes the philosophy of revenge explicit. To leave his friends’ murder un-avenged would b
e to “throw [them] aside like a worn out scabbard!” Thus Gordon justifies his loyalty to others, by arguing in favor of individualism.

  Willoughby provides a further viewpoint of El Borak’s physical abilities, explored in “Swords of the Hills” and “The Daughter of Erlik Khan.” Gordon’s natural surroundings are a nightmare world for Willoughby. They are not just exhausting, but also disorienting and terrifying. “Willoughby always remembered that flight over the mountains as a sort of nightmare in which he was hustled along by ragged goblins thorough black defiles…” Although “Hawk” lacks the sheer fantasy of “Erlik Khan” or “Swords of the Hills,” it retains a brooding, Gothic atmosphere.

  Moreover, the reader gets a chance to respect Willoughby’s mission of peace. As a peripheral character, the Englishman would simply be a hindrance for Gordon to push aside, but as the central character, Howard allows the reader to identify with Willoughby as a flawed but genuine seeker of peace. He agrees to climb down a dangerous cliff in order to end the feud, and readily meets with armed and dangerous men without any protection save his moral standing as a diplomat. He nearly bluffs a group of hostile tribal warriors into escorting him out of a dangerous region. For Willoughby, the risks are simply what he must undertake to end the feud. In Howard’s fiction the basic worth of a man is measured in physical and moral courage, and Willoughby is shown to have both.

  “Hawk of the Hills” also reveals a bit about how Howard used his research. In Beyond Khyber Pass there is a brief passage in which Thomas describes the economics of rifles on the Afghan border. British rifles were the best, but very difficult to obtain. Soviet rifles were known for good quality and moderate price. Locally made copies of foreign firearms were the cheapest, but also of questionable quality. While Howard does not dump all that information on the reader of “Hawk,” Gordon explains how Afdal Khan is using Russian rifles to aggrandize himself while the Russians are using Afdal Khan for the same purpose.