This led to a great interest in trade, travel and cultural diffusion, the exchange of ideas between India and China as well as Arabia and in the sudden flowering of the Moslem civilization following the death of Mohammed. At no time in the world’s history were scholars so revered as during those seven hundred or so years that followed. A traveling scholar was, as is Kerbouchard in my story, welcomed wherever he went, invited to converse and heaped with gifts.
Much of what we have from ancient Greece would not now be available were it not for the people of the Arab world who translated the Greeks into Arabic. It was a vast melting pot into which ideas poured from India, China and Greece as well as the absorbed populations of Persia and Central Asia. Many Hebrew scholars were prominent and respected men in this era, an accepted part of the Arab world milieu.
Mathurin Kerbouchard becomes a part of all this. Brittany had not been entirely Christianized at the time and he was a pagan, approaching what he was to find with no preconceived ideas. It was a time of roving warriors as well as Scholars. The Norsemen had come down from the north, raiding up the Seine and finally settling down to become the Normans, then under William the Conqueror they moved into England and established themselves. Another Norman adventurer, Roger I, had conquered Sicily, establishing a kingdom there as much Moslem as it was Christian.
It was an exciting time for me, for each book is an adventure, a new frontier for myself as well as, I hope, for my readers.
I hope in this book and two books that will follow to introduce my readers to not only the world of the 12th century in Europe and the Near East but to India and China as well.
I love a good story, a story of adventure in an exotic background, of course, but adventure can exist not only in action, but also with ideas.
No book is as important for what it says as for what it makes you think.
Dad’s concerns about the book were unfounded. In May 1984, it debuted at number six on the New York Times Bestseller list. By June, The Walking Drum was number two, and it stayed on the list sixteen weeks, fourteen of them in the top ten. A year later, it was still a bestseller on the New York Times list, and had landed on the Los Angeles Times and Publishers Weekly paperback lists as well. It was an overnight success a quarter century in the making, and it ushered in the era of prosperity and acceptance that my father had been hoping for and building toward his entire life.
Dad soon began plans to write a sequel, along with the creation of the other non-Western novels that The Walking Drum had set the precedent for, Last of the Breed and The Haunted Mesa. The sequel would be called A Woman Worth Having, a title lifted from a treatment Louis wrote about the early archaeologist Austen Henry Layard (included in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1), and would follow the adventures of Kerbouchard, Sundari, Rachendra, and Khatib on their way to India. As you can see from the following journal entries Dad was having a great time with the preparations:
April 5, 1985
The Kerbouchard story will need choosing a route (the most interesting), the life of the times, travel, conditions, clothing, people, etc. Most of this will deal with an area and time already well known to me but I must check the details on the times that I may have forgotten. Right now I am planning that he shall visit the Merv Oasis, Bokhara, Tashkent, Samarkand and Khotan, then into Kashmir, Taxila, Kanauj, etc. As far as India is concerned I shall deal most with much of what is now Pakistan, the Five Rivers area, etc. I have much information on the period but much of the period following, too, which will be useful as change in customs in India has been very slow…Too few people in our country know anything of this area, and it is fascinating.
June 11, 1987
Maps just arrived for the sequel to DRUM. Not all but some have been arriving day to day and each delivery finds me inwardly as excited as a kid. I have always loved maps, and in school we were asked to draw some; mine were always the best. I spent hours going over maps wherever I could find them and planning routes I would someday follow; most of them I have followed although often inadvertently. These are maps of areas I have been over or have touched upon, and now I shall be able to travel over them as it was in the 12th century. Who needs a time machine? I have my own, and can travel where I will and in whatever age I wish to see. These maps are like old friends, and I can close my eyes and see the sand dunes, the ruined walls, the monasteries, the “roads” and one must be polite and call them so. Writing this book will be a great adventure.
[…]
Now I shall be laying out the routes to travel across Asia—first decision: does Kerbouchard go through Afghanistan or across Soviet Central Asia? Both routes offer exciting possibilities, and Bokhara and Samarkand in the 12th century were exciting cities. Bokhara did not suffer as Samarkand did, and much remained as it had been. Once the story begins and the choice of routes made I shall have no more to say about it. Kerbouchard and the times will take over and my story will handle itself. Well, I hope. What deserts he must cross I know, but not how or exactly when. His lady awaits him in India, or is trying to wait, and the Jaichund of Kanaug [more accurately, King Jaichand or Jayachandra] is planning the swyamvara [swayamvara] at which his daughter will choose her husband…I want this to be a great love story, too, a truly romantic novel but utterly realistic as to the times.
Because of his ability to “channel” stories directly from his unconscious, writing was a bit like labor-intensive entertainment for Louis—at least when it was going well. The process wasn’t quite like sitting back and reading someone else’s work, but he did take great enjoyment in doing it. Part of the magic of reading a Louis L’Amour novel is that the reader can sense Dad’s excitement in discovering what happens next and in experiencing different historical times and places. It often feels like the author and his audience are on an adventure together.
Finding historical maps was always a challenge, but in this case, twentieth-century maps were also hard to obtain. The Cold War was at its height, and no one could have guessed that within five or six years the whole thing would come to a sudden, almost shocking, end. At the time, Dad was not only researching A Woman Worth Having; he had also been hard at work on Last of the Breed. Both stories took place, in part, in locations that were seriously off-limits to Westerners. Because of this, the U.S. intelligence services had a vested interest in making it difficult for the Soviets and Chinese to figure out what Americans knew or didn’t know about the topography of Central Asia. While my father had connections at the Library of Congress who arranged for him to look at a number of semisecret maps, to his great frustration he soon became aware of a good many more that he was never allowed to see.
June 19, 1987
Some maps came; some are restricted. Why the Hell should they keep us from maps of Central Asia and Russia? If it were Russia, I’d understand them refusing to sell maps. There’s nothing secret about such maps and I can do without them but it seems ridiculous.
Oddly, many of these restricted maps were not as good as the nineteenth-century Russian and Central Asian maps that Dad had in his personal library!
There are half a dozen cryptic lists that roughly outline my father’s concepts for what the sequels to The Walking Drum might include. They were developed at different times in his career, and some contained a few leftover ideas from, or scenes later written into, The Walking Drum during one or another of his rewrites. I have sorted through them to pull together a description of what the two sequels, A Woman Worth Having and May There Be a Road, might have looked like.
Here we go:
On the trail of Sundari and Rachendra, Kerbouchard and Khatib join with a caravan headed into modern-day Afghanistan. At Herat they are turned aside by a local conflict and must detour north through the area of the Merv Oasis and on east to Samarkand. It was Dad’s idea that part of this journey to India might follow the route of Alexander the Great and that Kerbouchard wo
uld discover along the way that legends of the young Macedonian king were still well known. Merv was even named “Alexandria” for a brief period. More important, it was a significant stop on the Silk Route connecting Europe and Asia.
Between Samarkand and Tashkent, Kerbouchard and Khatib are separated, and Kerbouchard is captured by raiders and sold into slavery. A list of possible sequences includes one in which Kerbouchard “becomes involved with the harem of his master.” One can only imagine what that might have meant!
Kerbouchard escapes and makes his way toward Kashgar and from there to Khotan. Louis had long wanted to write of western China’s Taklamakan Desert, and this was an opportunity to do it in a fascinating time period; not long after the era of this novel both the water supply to the Khotan region and trade from China began to dry up. Once a thriving trade route, the southern Silk Road drifted into relative obscurity, a dry and windblown husk of its former glory.
Making his way across the desert, Kerbouchard would have the opportunity to live with nomads—a “hard bitter life in high plateau country”—and to learn about the mysteries of the desert: the “Ghouls and Ghosts” that prowl the wastes and the ancient empires that have claimed the area. At some point, lost and desperate, he “repeats books aloud to keep from going mad.”
Striking south from Khotan, Kerbouchard climbs to a pass in the Kunlun Mountains and then makes his way along the western edge of Tibet. He recovers from his exhausting journey at a lamasery, where he learns the rudiments of yoga and meditation and then drops down into Kasmir.
He is captured and enslaved again, possibly by Muhammad of Ghor, whose forces are pressing into India from the west. However, “his knowledge of Indian ritual wins his escape.” Dad left it open as to whether or not he would part on good terms with Sultan Muhammad, or whether some other benefactor with a mysterious agenda helped him occasionally in his subsequent adventures. This also might have been a group with some shadowy influence over the Sultan. Eventually, Kerbouchard is reunited with Khatib, who was able to stick to their original plan and has been praying that his friend will survive and arrive at a predetermined rendezvous point unharmed.
Together they travel, disguising themselves as lamas, beggars, merchants, and the companions of thieves. They meet scholars who have studied at such great centers of learning as Taxila and Nalanda. In Delhi, Kerbouchard is reunited with Sundari, but she is no longer so quick to respond to his attentions. “There is much amusing by-play, and many adventures, as she is awaiting her marriage to a prince and Kerbouchard can only see her by trickery and subterfuge.” Kerbouchard is discovered, must confront Sundari’s intended, and then must escape. Finally, there is no way to resolve the situation without doing something drastic, and so he falls in with Prithivi Raj.
Prithivi Raj was a legendary character in Indian history, a warrior king who conquered a number of neighboring kingdoms and about whom many exciting stories were told and many myths created. The most important of these in relation to A Woman Worth Having, is one where King Jaichand of Kannauj holds a ceremony to consecrate his supremacy over the other rulers in his area, and Prithivi chooses not to attend, an act that is considered something of a challenge. Meanwhile, Jaichand’s daughter, Samyogita, has fallen in love with the stories of Prithivi’s adventures and, possibly to test her father, declares that the only man she will accept as a husband is the renegade king.
Hearing of Samyogita’s pledge, and possibly seeing an opportunity to both take his rival down a notch and marry into Jaichand’s family—and thus protect himself from future retaliation—Prithivi instigates a minor military action and steals Samyogita away. He ended up getting more than he bargained for, however: Cleopatra-like, Samyogita eventually enthralled and domesticated her fierce king, to the point where he was defeated by the eastward expansion of Sultan Muhammad.
My father’s intention was to place his hero in the center of these semihistorical events. Kerbouchard would get to know Prithivi, possibly even before being reunited with Sundari. When King Jaichand plans a swayamvara, or husband-choosing ceremony, for Samyogita, Prithivi is very intentionally not invited; in fact, an effigy of him is prepared and positioned near the gates as an ironic insult.
These are parts of the long-known Prithivi and Samyogita legend. In the novel the event is set up as a dual ceremony and great tournament, at which Indian royalty compete for the hand of Princess Samyogita and Sundari chooses a husband—except that there is no choice: The prince she has been promised to is the only real contender for her hand, for his winning the tournament has been rigged.
Kerbouchard convinces Prithivi to sneak into the city and, either in the moments before the swayamvara is set to begin or after they find a way to win the tournament, they elope with their respective brides. Their escape is facilitated by a hundred crack troops selected from Prithivi Raj’s army.
Even after their escape, Sundari’s spurned prince continues to send thugs after her and Kerbouchard. They escape to the west, finally settling into the scenic Fortress of Chittor, where Kerbouchard lives as a scholar, possibly under the protection of the previously mentioned mysterious benefactor. Even though it is never ultimately clear who this man is or what he hopes to accomplish, it appears Kerbouchard might have gone on to play a role in attempting to mediate between Muhammad of Ghor and Prithivi just before Prithivi is defeated by the Sultan and finally executed.
For a few lists of haphazard notes, that’s a pretty good outline. Vastly less is known about the plans for May There Be a Road, no doubt because Louis himself was still figuring them out. Here are the two sets of semi-conflicting notes that are all we have:
Perhaps Sundari is dead…perhaps something else…Kerbouchard goes to China by ship, perhaps as an envoy. Is taken by pirates, rescued by his father. Through East Indies, trade, commerce, alchemy, China, perhaps Thailand, return by Silk Road.
[…]
Touch on the old caravan routes across Asia, the ancient, little known civilizations there, the meeting of the Greek, Hindu and Chinese cultures in Sinkiang, and he visits cities that were in ruins before Marco Polo. Finally, revered as a great scholar, he returns by the way of Indonesia to India.
That’s the extent of it.
From his earliest writings in the 1930s until the publication of The Walking Drum in 1986, my father always wanted to write about the Far East. As a boy during the long North Dakota winters he had dreamed of mysterious and faraway places that he found in the books and maps of Jamestown’s Alfred Dickey Free Library. Against all odds, he visited Japan, China, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, the Federated Malay States, Arabia, and Egypt as a young man in the 1920s.
When he was first asked to define himself as a writer, back in the days before World War Two brutally introduced Americans to the far-flung reaches of the globe, he could not claim that he had received a formal education or that he’d ever performed any sort of significant job. What he could say was that he was a man who had traveled to the kind of places that others only dreamed about—and that he’d done it without much more than the clothes on his back. The wider world was his possession, one of the few things he had other than a will to entertain.
It’s terribly ironic that somehow, through a quirk of publishing history and the taste of American audiences, a man so well-traveled would end up trapped all too long writing Westerns. A reader pays to live in the fictional reality of a story for however long it takes to read it; a few hours, days, or a week or two. An author has to live in that made-up world for months or years. Dad loved the time he spent living in the West of the nineteenth century, but it was far from the only place he wanted to spend his days. It was a wonderful moment when he finally regained the freedom of his youth, and earned the opportunity to share his imagination, and his memories, of those far-off places.
Beau L’Amour
October 2019
To Lou and Emily Wolfe
&
nbsp; Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour
NOVELS
Bendigo Shafter
Borden Chantry
Brionne
The Broken Gun
The Burning Hills
The Californios
Callaghen
Catlow
Chancy
The Cherokee Trail
Comstock Lode
Conagher
Crossfire Trail
Dark Canyon
Down the Long Hills
The Empty Land
Fair Blows the Wind
Fallon
The Ferguson Rifle
The First Fast Draw
Flint
Guns of the Timberlands
Hanging Woman Creek
The Haunted Mesa
Heller with a Gun
The High Graders
High Lonesome
Hondo
How the West Was Won
The Iron Marshal
The Key-Lock Man
Kid Rodelo
Kilkenny
Killoe
Kilrone
Kiowa Trail
Last of the Breed
Last Stand at Papago Wells
The Lonesome Gods
The Man Called Noon
The Man from Skibbereen
The Man from the Broken Hills
Matagorda
Milo Talon
The Mountain Valley War
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
Passin’ Through
The Proving Trail
The Quick and the Dead
Radigan
Reilly’s Luck
The Rider of Lost Creek
Rivers West
The Shadow Riders
Shalako
Showdown at Yellow Butte
The Walking Drum (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 47
