El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (92 page)

Appendices

G
UNFIGHTERS OF THE
W
ILD
E
AST
by
David A. Hardy

Francis Xavier Gordon, known from Stamboul to the China Sea as “El Borak” — the Swift — was perhaps the first of Robert E. Howard’s characters to be created, before Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Kull, or Conan. Gordon was also one of the last of Howard’s characters to emerge as a fully developed pulp-hero, the center of a series of short stories and novelettes. The contrast of first and last is but one of the many paradoxes of El Borak. The Gordon stories unite East and West, fantasy and reality, greed and selflessness, and a personal mythology that nonetheless reflects and comments on real-life adventures and other writers’ works. Unlike most of Howard’s other series, the El Borak stories were not the product of a short, defined period in the writer’s career. They sprawl over a twenty-year span, drawing in motifs and elements from other works by Howard as well as generating variants on the central motif: the lone American wanderer who has cast his lot in the wildest reaches of Asia.

El Borak is a larger-than-life figure, yet there is a basic realism about his exploits. Part of that may be attributed to Howard’s ever-increasing mastery of his story-telling skills and sharper focus on what he wanted to do with the El Borak series. But part may be that, however improbable Francis X. Gordon may seem on paper, the exploits of real-life soldiers of fortune, travelers, and empire builders are at least as fantastic. Arguably, Howard inserted some true-life episodes and elements into the El Borak stories in order to lend them a greater verisimilitude.

General Charles “Chinese” Gordon is sometimes cited as the inspiration for Francis X. Gordon’s last name. “Chinese” Gordon earned his nickname leading the “Ever Victorious Army,” a Western-trained force of Chinese mercenaries, during the vicious T’ai-P’ing War of 1851–1867. The force was originally officered by some rather flamboyant Americans including a former Texas Ranger, Frederick Townsend Ward, and Henry Burgevine, who had served in the French army during the Crimean War. General Gordon later served as a field commander for the Khedive of Egypt alongside many American Civil War veterans as well as British, German, and Italian mercenary officers. General Gordon met his end in battle when the Sudanese dervishes overran his position at Khartoum. Howard used the Sudanese War as the setting for his tale “Guns of Khartum.” While they share a name, there is little of Charles Gordon in Francis Xavier Gordon. Compared to colleagues like Ward and Burgevine, Gordon was respectable. He was a devout Salvation Army sort of Christian and never visited Afghanistan. Tellingly, when
Howard used Khartoum as a setting his hero was not a commander, but a lowly foot-slogging American mercenary.

The exploits of T. E. Lawrence, known as “Lawrence of Arabia,” have led some to suppose he was the basis for El Borak. Lawrence’s very close identification with his Bedouin warriors was his most outstanding characteristic: among his peers he was unique in adopting the Bedouin life so fully. He employed disguise to scout enemy positions and fought in the thick of battle. Lawrence achieved a degree of celebrity thanks to a documentary and the book
With Lawrence in Arabia
by the American journalist Lowell Thomas. Lawrence’s own memoir,
Revolt in the Desert
, was written as something of a corrective to Thomas’s portrayal of him. Howard owned both books and found them of value when the time came to write the El Borak tales. But Lawrence is a peripheral influence on the El Borak tales. He was a scholarly Arabist who turned his hand to guerrilla warfare as an officer of the British army. El Borak is a swashbuckler, not a scholar, who operates independently of any governmental dictates.

In addition to Thomas’s book on Lawrence, Howard also owned
Beyond Khyber Pass
, an account of Thomas’s journey from Peshawar to Kabul by car in 1927. There is a distinct difference between Howard’s writing and that of Thomas. Howard’s tone is serious, even grim at times, and focused on conflict and derring-do, while Thomas is jaunty, despite the self-evident dangers of his surroundings. Many of the themes Thomas dwells on are common enough to the literature on Afghanistan and its neighbors, but a reader attuned to Howard’s style can find many interesting echoes in
Beyond Khyber Pass
.

The book is copiously illustrated with photographs by Henry Chase, Thomas’s veteran cameraman. One is a study of a Waziri tribesman, described as “wolf-like,” surely one of Howard’s favorite descriptives. At one point Thomas compares the Pathans to the Yaqui Indians of Sonora. It might seem like no more than a throwaway line — until one recalls that Gordon learned his tracking skills battling the Yaqui in Mexico. Details such as the sensational kidnapping of a British lady by Afridi bandits, the legend of Greek soldiers in remote Kafiristan, and the economics and politics of the rifle trade on the frontier all have echoes in the El Borak stories.

In
Beyond Khyber Pass
a reader can catch a glimpse of what so stirred Howard’s imagination. Bandits murder travelers on the same stretch of road Thomas’s party crosses. A British captain lays on a stirring demonstration of an Afridi raid as part of an exercise for his troops, and is killed the very next day in a real battle. Thomas and Chase are joined by David King, a dashing American veteran of the French Foreign Legion turned successful merchant in Calcutta. Their bodyguard is Niam Shah, a dapper, six-foot-tall Afridi, whose favorite phrase in English is “naughty boy shoot,” as in “Don’t go to Kabul,
naughty boy shoot you.” They travel to Kurram valley (home of Howard’s Afridi friends), meet feuding tribal warriors, and learn “a snake, a Shinwari and a scorpion have never a heart to tame.”

Witness Thomas’s depiction of the varied humanity passing in the streets of Peshawar:

From the uttermost confines of China to the walls of Jerusalem men come to Peshawar, bringing the commerce of a continent. Semites with corkscrew curls from Herat and Merv and merchants from Kashgar who have come down across the lonely Pamirs and the Malakand mingle with the men of the Zakka Khel. Here comes a group of gay lads from the uplands of Tirah, new to the city, bent on the delights of civilization and
charas
. In front of them saunter the more sophisticated youths of the plains, hand in hand, with roses behind their ears and their collyrium-painted eyes coquettishly glancing about and returning stare for stare. Beggars, thieves, dwarfs, human monstrosities with seal-like flippers where their arms ought to be, clowns, fakirs, rose-sellers, and purveyors of
charas
move on equal terms with handsome Roman-nosed Afridis, bobbed-haired bandits from Black Mountain, shaggy men from Yarkand, and scarlet-turbaned Rajput sepoys.

Lowell Thomas’s vivid word pictures, his picturesque companions and the all-too real dangers of the trip surely enchanted and inspired the pulp writer from Cross Plains.

Howard owned at least one other firsthand account of travel in Afghanistan, Emil Trinkler’s travelogue,
Through the Heart of Afghanistan
. Trinkler was a German geologist employed by a trading company based in Kabul. Trinkler does mention some things that appear as motifs in the El Borak stories, such as the kidnapping of a young British woman by a bandit chief, and notes the legend that the inhabitants of Nuristan (formerly Kafiristan) were descended from Alexander the Great’s soldiers. But they amount to mere notices, things heard in passing. Getting the cook to make a decent breakfast or finding an unusual rock specimen were what really mattered to Trinkler.
Through the Heart of Afghanistan
is a very far cry from the headlong adventures of Howard’s heroes.

While the exploits of Gordon, Lawrence, and Thomas were well known to Howard and the world, El Borak invites comparison with other, less well-known adventurers. There were in fact at least two historical American soldiers-of-fortune who, like Howard’s fictional Gordon, made their way into Afghanistan. Although the evidence for Howard’s knowledge of them is
speculative, Josiah Harlan and Alexander Gardner seem characters tailor-made for an El Borak story.

Josiah Harlan was a Quaker from Philadelphia who had served as a doctor for the East India Company’s army in the Burmese war of 1825. In 1827 Harlan, in disguise as a Muslim fakir, made a reconnaissance of Afghanistan on behalf of the deposed ruler Shah Shujah. He later served as a military governor for Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab. Harlan eventually quit Ranjit Singh’s service for the Sikh’s rival, Dost Mohammed, the ruler of Afghanistan (and Shah Shujah’s mortal enemy, too). In that capacity he commanded a force that crossed the Hindu Kush (with elephants, no less) and was made titular prince of Ghor by the Hazara tribesmen in that region. Harlan’s biographer, Ben Macintyre, regards Harlan’s elevation to royalty as the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s tale “The Man Who Would be King.” Harlan’s grant of the princedom is still extant in a Pennsylvania archive.

Harlan’s adventures, though, were almost tame compared to those of Alexander Haughton Campbell Gardner. Gardner was of Scots-Irish frontier stock, born in Wisconsin circa 1790 and reared in a town called Saint Xavier in colonial-era Texas. He entered Central Asia in 1823 and lived as a bandit, rebel chief and wanderer. In his travels he passed as an Arab and used the name Arb Shah (much as Howard’s heroes often have a
nom de guerre
). Gardner served as a commander under Habibullah Khan, a rebel Afghan prince. He survived any number of battles with bandits, Uzbek warriors, and the forces of Dost Mohammed. Once, while famished in the snow-clad Hindu Kush mountains, Gardner even fought a pack of wolves for a dead sheep. Eventually he left Afghanistan and served as a colonel of artillery under Ranjit Singh. He dropped his alias, and the Sikhs called him “Gordana.” If El Borak had a real-life stand-in, it was Gardner, who lived as an Afghan, traveled with tribal warriors, battled bandits and warlords, and explored little-known lands. That Gardner was raised in Texas at a place named Saint Xavier and was known by the name Gordana seems almost too much to be merely coincidence when compared to a fictional Texas gunfighter named Francis Xavier Gordon.

While Howard certainly read of Chinese Gordon and Lawrence of Arabia, did he know of these romantic adventurers, Harlan and Gardner? It is not impossible. Although he makes no mention of them, Howard was a voracious reader who did not always mention his sources. Gardner’s memoirs were published posthumously as
Soldier and Traveller
in 1898. Although Harlan had published a memoir in 1842, his manuscript,
Central Asia; personal narrative of Gen. Josiah Harlan 1823–1841
, was not published in the United States until 1939. Both men had been profiled in H.L.O. Garrett and C. Grey’s book
European Adventurers of Northern India
and Harlan rated an entry in the Dictionary of American Biography. If nothing else it shows that Gordon has a
certain realism: he is no more outlandish than the Quaker warlord or the Afghan outlaw from Wisconsin.

While many real-life adventurers blazed strange and bloody trails through the Wild East, El Borak is also part of a tradition of fictional adventurers. Howard avidly read the classics of the genre such as H. Rider Haggard, Jack London, Rafael Sabatini and Rudyard Kipling, as well as contemporary works by popular authors of the day such as George Allen England, Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. Howard’s peers and friends — E. Hoffmann Price, Otis Adelbert Kline, Clark Ashton Smith, Warren Hastings Miller, and others — dabbled in the field of Oriental Adventure. An appreciation of the influence of Howard’s favorite writers must also take into account just how much distance there was between Howard and his peers.

Howard singled out Rudyard Kipling and Talbot Mundy as among the best in writing adventure tales set in the Orient. His work was influenced by those writers, but could not in any sense be called derivative: the contrasts are striking and far-reaching.

Kipling did much to popularize and make respectable adventure tales set in the far corners of the British Empire, especially the Northwest Frontier between India and Afghanistan. But Kipling’s subject matter is the
sahib log
, the Englishman in India. His classic novel
Kim
is the story of a semi-wild street child, acculturated to native norms. In time Kim learns British ways, and as a secret agent of the Empire serves to bridge the gap between Briton and native in the Great Game of Anglo-Russian rivalry. Even Mowgli, the wolf-boy from
The Jungle Book
, more barbaric than Conan, ends up fully civilized, with a wife and child and a job as a policeman. The life of a civil servant would be incomprehensible to a Howard hero; a policeman’s lot would be anathema.

Howard’s heroes move in the opposite direction from Kim and Mowgli. They are much closer to Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan in
The Man Who Would Be King
. Kipling’s protagonists are Britons seeking their fortune on the fringes of empire; Howard’s are Americans who live among the warlike Bedouin or Pathans, Western Barbarians at home in the wilds of the East. More to the point, quite a few characters would be king in the El Borak tales. Kipling’s influence may be seen in other aspects of the El Borak cycle, but
The Man Who Would Be King
has a special resonance with Howard’s work.

Talbot Mundy was a major writer of adventure tales set on India’s Northwest frontier. He was a regular contributor to the better pulp magazines like
Adventure
and
Argosy
, and several of his stories were adapted for film. Howard made no secret of his admiration for Mundy’s writing, as evidenced by comments in letters to Tevis Clyde Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, as well as the selection of Mundy novels that he kept in his personal collection.

Certainly, one can find echoes of Mundy in the El Borak stories. Mundy’s
fictional heroes, James Schuyler Grim (known as Jimgrim) and Athelstan King, have some El Borak qualities. They are adventurers who must operate on their own. Their tramping grounds are the Afghan Frontier, the Middle East, and the Himalayas. Sometimes they even take the side of the natives against that of imperial authority.