In search of lost friends – a story of barbarous adventure

As I promised a couple of months ago, I will occasionally share some of my older shorter stories. “The Gates of Shaizar” is an adventure story first published in 2010 in Pulp Empire, vol. 2, which is now out of print. It was republished in 2012 at the ezine Abandoned Towers, which has also now disappeared. I recently found two copies of Pulp Empire, vol. 2, on Amazon for $56 each, but you can read a story from that volume here, for free!

Oh, a few last words before the story: Shaizar is (or was) a real place, an ancient Syrian town that became a fortress in the medieval period before being abandoned after repeated devastation by earthquakes. The illustration for this post is taken from a photograph of the ruins which serves as a frontispiece to Philip K. Hitti's 1929 translation of a memoir of the medieval period.

Shaizar in ruins

***

THE GATES OF SHAIZAR

When the order to halt came, al-Mastoub reined in his bay before the guards at the eastern gate of Shaizar. Behind him, the queue of merchants with ox carts and camels, the woodcutters leading laden donkeys; the governor’s concubines in curtained palanquins; the flocks of bleating sheep and goats; the slaves, pilgrims, and riff-raff of the province backed up outside the iron-studded eastern gate of the city.

The gaze of the guards’ lieutenant traveled over al-Mastoub’s cast-off clothing, the tall warhorse, the sword, pulled although the lieutenant couldn’t know, from the Varangian Leofric’s stiffening hand. A good horse and weapons, but only a leather cap and quilted jerkin for armor. Al-Mastoub could see the lieutenant’s suspicions reflected on the man’s face.

“Sir,” al-Mastoub said, “I have a passport from the magistrate Haroun ibn Ibrahim of al-Shara.” He held the now-tattered safe conduct he’d forged before his chest, like a shield. And he prayed silently, as he had at every checkpoint, that the man wouldn’t know Haroun’s signature.

The lieutenant ran a hand over his beard. The document’s elaborate calligraphy, al-Mastoub knew, was almost indecipherable. He’d added every flourish possible to dissuade anyone he encountered from giving more than a cursory glance at his credentials. But as a corner of al-Mastoub’s mouth twitched, the lieutenant’s hand clamped on the passport.

“No one enters until I’ve examined this man’s papers. Thoroughly.”

The guards stationed themselves before the crowd shoving to enter the opened gate. The sun rose high over the town’s walls in the late summer sky. The crowd behind al-Mastoub grew more clamorous as the lieutenant read the passport, muttering each word aloud.

Al-Mastoub loosened the fidgeting bay’s reins. He fumbled for the pouch under his shirt that held his small horde of treasure -– the papers of his manumission, Leofric’s medusa-headed ring, the last handful of stolen dinars.

The lieutenant’s eye caught the movement. “You!  Keep your hands in sight.”

“It’s a hot day, sir. Perhaps you’d like something to slake your thirst?”

“In sight!”

Al-Mastoub shrugged. If the passport failed, at least he had the sword. He wished he had Haroun’s practical scimitar. Leofric’s sword was almost too long for him to wield one-handed. But he hadn’t dared steal another weapon. Roaming through Syria with a forged passport was enough to get him beheaded without having Haroun on his trail.

Itinerant jugglers, beggars, and pickpockets plied their trades among the crowd. Sellers of wine, fruit juice and sweetmeats counted themselves blessed.

“I’ve got eight for the head,” a singsong voice chanted just beyond the gates. “Do I hear any more?”

“Put me in for the head.” One of the guards pulled a copper dirham out of his sash.

“A small bet at short odds,” the bookmaker sneered. “You might do better to wager on nose and ears.”

“I’m for nose and ears,” another man shouted.

“Aren’t you going to give odds which gate he hangs at?” A man with eyebrows that met across his forehead pushed as close as the troopers would allow. Al-Mastoub cursed him under his breath.

“It would just be taking your money,” the bookmaker said. “Whatever part of him the lieutenant decides to hack off will hang here on the front gate for all to see.”

“I want to place a bet,” al-Mastoub said.

The bookmaker stared. “Show me your money.”

Again, al-Mastoub eased a hand under his shirt.

“In plain view!” the lieutenant said.

Al-Mastoub withdrew his hand.

“No money, no bet,” the bookmaker said.

“Silence!” The lieutenant looked up at last. “This mentions two companions,” he said.

“They were taken prisoner.” Al-Mastoub shifted his damp hands from the saddlebow. “I’m here to ransom them.”

The lieutenant flung the passport at him in disgust. “Then do so. And leave quickly.”

Al-Mastoub joined the travelers surging toward the marketplace. He scanned the merchandise.  At the point in the line where Jehan and Robert had been chained, there now stood only a gawky girl with big feet. There was no sign of either of the captured soldiers. No Jehan, no Robert.

The old slave trader, Abu al-Darda, hailed him, walking around al-Mastoub’s tall bay. “Ain’t you come up in the world since the last time we met? If I knew you was this good a horse thief, I’d have charged that judge more for you.”

“I had two friends in this caravan.  I’m able to redeem them now. Or if you remember where you sold them. . .” Al-Mastoub pulled a gold piece out of his pouch and flipped it.

Abu al-Darda moved closer. Al-Mastoub folded his fist around the coin.

Adventure classics – Haggard’s last hurrah: or is it?

Congo

by Michael Crichton

***

After inspiring decades of imitators of his “lost city, lost race” genre, the influence of H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 adventure, King Solomon’s Mines, seemed to have run its course. Or had it?

Nearly a century after the publication of Haggard’s work, along came Michael Crichton’s 1980 thriller, Congo. It and its namesake (although critically panned) movie version were followed a year later by the first of the Indian Jones series of movies. Two decades later, Anglo-Afghan journalist Tahir Shah’s nonfiction travel memoir, In Search of King Solomon’s Mines, followed, all gleefully treading the trail of a search for legendary lost treasures among exotic peoples and places. Where will it all end?

As readers of previous posts will recall (or if not, read the full story here). Haggard’s story began with a search for a lost brother and a legend told by African white hunter Allan Quartermain about the legendary mines that supplied the fabulous wealth of the biblical King Solomon. Although the Bible doesn’t mention diamonds among the treasures of Solomon, Haggard was inspired by the finds of South African diamond deposits discovered shortly before his own African sojourn in the 1870’s.

Following a centuries’ old map sketched by a dying Portuguese, Quartermain and his team set out to find the mines (and almost coincidentally, the lost brother of one of his crew). Among the group of explorers was one who, unknown to the rest, was a member of the lost warrior tribe guarding the treasure site.

It’s not to take any credit away from Crichton’s re-imagining of the story when I point out his version includes another white hunter (but one far less principled than Quartermain); the satellite pictures that are the maps of the current age; a missing member of an earlier expedition; and a reference in an old Portuguese book of exploration to the lost African diamond-trading city of Zinj.

And as it happens, the book’s illustrations bear a striking resemblance to the dreams of the most charming of Crichton’s innovations, the language-using young gorilla, Amy, inspired by the gorilla Koko, famous for her ability to understand and use a modified version of American Sign Language.

Unlike captive-born Koko, Amy was found as a youngster in the African Congo region, clinging to her dead mother, a trauma has begun to invade her dreams. Seeking more information about the nature of those dreams, Peter Elliott, the researcher in charge of her education, supplies her with paper and paint. Although she has never revisited the site of her infancy, she paints a jungle full of ruined buildings, the very buildings of ruined, fabled Zinj.

Elliott is about to try to reach Zinj on his own when he receives a call from the secretive exploration company Earth Resources Technology Services, Inc., (ERTS). An expedition to a source of high-grade diamonds in the Congo has been wiped out by what appear, however improbably, to be rogue gorillas and ERTS needs the help of a primate specialist familiar with the region. Elliott accepts ERTS’ offer to accompany their team, bringing Amy along as interpreter between humans and their close primate relatives, and the adventure begins.

In the more than 35 years that have passed since Congo's publication, the late 20^th century technology has lost some of its edge, but Crichton's suspense never fails. And there’s always Amy, probably the most fascinating character he ever penned.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins an April of mysterious adventures with The Laughing Policeman, by husband and wife writing team Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall.)

Adventure classics -- Caution: pterodactyl crossing

The Lost World

by Arthur Conan Doyle

#

My family loves dinosaurs. A grandson went to his first grade class’s “career day” program dressed as the paleontologist from “Dinosaur Train.” My daughter measured her foot against the prints in Texas’ Dinosaur Valley state park. And I remember my disappointment as a child when I realized finds of dinosaur eggs were fossils that would never hatch living baby dinos. So Arthur Conan Doyle’s foray into the world of dinosaurs, The Lost World, had to make my reading list.

Actually, my first introduction to the story was a cartoon version, only one among dozens of offshoots inspired by the prolific story. Including of course, Michael Crichton’s only sequel novel.

The debt modern writers owe goes deeper than a T. rex’s footprint. As the late Michael Crichton noted in his introduction to a new edition of the 1912 tale, it “set the standard and the formula for fantasy-adventure stories since that time. The tone and techniques that Conan Doyle first refined in The Lost World have become standard narrative procedures in popular entertainment of the present day.”

image: wikimedia commons

As he did in his pioneering works of detective fiction, the Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle establishes a larger than life expert, the brilliant, irascible and very eccentric scientist Professor George Challenger. Young journalist Edward Malone plays Watson to Challenger’s Holmes, interpreting the great man’s actions and ideas for the readers of Malone’s newspaper -- and of course, for us.

When the story opens, Challenger has returned to London from an expedition to South America with the outrageous claim of finding a remote plateau he believes harbors a lost colony of dinosaurs. With Challenger’s photographs and specimens lost in an accident, he has only a sketch in a notebook left to him by dying explorer to support his story. When scientific colleagues demand more proof, an independent expedition with Malone in tow sets out to replicate Challenger’s journey.

Unfortunately for modern readers, reconstruction of dinosaur anatomy and behavior was still in its infancy in the early twentieth century, as you can see from the illustration for this post, a page scan from Conan Doyle’s original edition. Tyrannosaurus rex had received his name around the turn of the century, but still had a reputation for being slow, cold-blooded, and dim-witted. And the viciously brainy velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame wouldn’t be discovered until the decade after Conan Doyle’s story.

“Conan Doyle needs a clever antagonist to sustain his narrative,“ Crichton wrote, “and with warm-blooded, intelligent dinosaurs still fifty years in the future (he) postulates a race of savage ape-men.” The expedition’s scientists, big-game hunter, and of course, reporter, are barely a match for the atavistic ape-men (“dryopithecus of Java or pithecanthropus” the expedition scientists speculate).

But keep reading for Conan Doyle’s climactic scene of a living pterodactyl set loose in a packed London lecture hall. It’s as outrageously entertaining as any movie show down between T. rex and raptors. Makes me wish that somehow that lonely pterodactyl found its way home.

Conan Doyle’s tale, its copyright extinct as a dinosaur, is available at
www.google.books.com/.

The text of Crichton’s introduction is available at www.crichton-official.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics looks at another monstrously influential adventure story, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.)