The Treasure Vaults Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Unconscious
April 10, 2011
The Treasure Vaults Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Unconscious
by
R.E. Prindle
Originally published in the Spring 2002
issue of the Burroughs Bulletin
Edgar Rice Burroughs
What makes an immortal writer? One thing and one thing only! Being able to captivate the mind of the reader. One may say that a magnificent use of grammar, vocabulary, syntax and such literary devices are important but only minimally. The greatest users of the language will be forgotten before their books have littered the remainder tables. Great ‘storytellers’ come and go with regularity. Every generation has its dozens. They are mere entertainment; amusing for a day and then forgotten.
An immortal writer may have faults, but with all his faults he is simply a writer who grips the reader’s imagination and won’t let go. Bulldogs. Such writers are in essence mythmakers. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes; D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers of Dumas. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If Walter Scott, the greatest of all novelists is slipping into oblivion it is because no matter how great a storyteller he may have been he has failed to create great mythological characters.
Tarzan himself would be no more than another Conan the Barbarian except that his adventures are placed in the mythical Africa which was dispelled by the advance of the twentieth century. Tarzan in Paris, Wisconsin or Baltimore in a suit of clothes is a mere laugh. In North Africa among the Berbers as a French ‘secret agent’ he begins to assume his true form, still there is something lacking there. Burroughs’ North Africa looks and feels too much like the real North Africa. When Tarzan arrives back in the jungle he assumes proportions that exceed one’s dreams.
The Greek myths are not historical reality; the fairy tales derived from the Greek myths take flight as mere fantasy. The difference between Perseus and Puss In Boots is immense. Yet Greek myths are a true representation of the human psyche while fairy tales are mere flights of fancy.
Edgar Rice Burroughs reverses the process and derives the creation of his life, Tarzan, from the fairy tales of H. Rider Haggard whose stories he turns into adventures of the greatest of the great mythical figures of the modern age.
The Tarzan series succeeds not from any literary skill of Burroughs, not because he replicates an authentic image of Africa, but because the mighty image of Tarzan exists in his mind as a living being in his imaginary Africa that bears more resemblance to Fenimore Cooper’s New England than any real Africa.
Nor was Burroughs an original author who drew his inspiration from vague sources. Burroughs very nearly copied out his stories from other men’s books. Who else would have named a character Lorna Downs after Lorna Doone. The fabulous world of Tarzan could never have come into existence if H. Rider Haggard had never written his three great African novels: King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain.
Every incident in Haggard’s novels are replicated in Burroughs’ novels. He even paraphrases the most memorable of Haggard’s phrases in the Tarzan series:
H. Rider Haggard
…he dreams of the sight
of Zulu impis
breaking on the foe
like surf upon the rocks
and his heart rises in rebellion
against the strict limits
of the civilized life.
Not only does Burroughs paraphrase the passage but the content of the quote informs the whole of the Tarzan series. The passage might be the motto of the Tarzan saga.
Haggard’s great trio of African adventures first appeared from 1885 to 1888 when Burroughs was from eleven to fourteen years old. Sensational successes in their day, one assumes that they would have come to the young adventurous boy’s attention quickly. I don’t know when Burroughs read them or how many times but I would think they had become part of his mental furniture sometime between the time he was fourteen or twenty.
There the fabulous exploits of Sir Henry Curtis, John Good and Allan Quatermain would have seethed and simmered away in his unconscious until they erupted from his imagination in 1912 as the incredible Great White Ape, Tarzan. Tar=White, zan=skin. Whiteskin. Tarzana=Whiteskin City.
Burroughs’ Tarzan is clearly derived in part from H. Rider Haggard.
There was a huge difference between the two writers. Haggard grew up in an England where he came into contact with the Esoteric tradition. His sojourn in Natal, South Africa intensified this streak of the occult. As Haggard was putting pen to paper Madame Blavatsky’s great ‘Isis Unveiled’ had already been in print for ten years. Bulyer Lytton’s esoteric novels were at the peak of their popularity.
Haggard was absorbed in esoterica so his stories partake a great deal of the supernatural. Burroughs on the other hand was born in the heart of pragmatic Chicago, USA in 1875 coming to young manhood in the Edisonian experimental scientific America that allowed little room for the supernatural. By 1900 the great Madame B had published both her masterworks but there is no indication that Burroughs read them.
Burroughs was from the Chicago someone styled ‘The Hog Butcher Of The World.’ It was said of the meat packing plants that they used every part of the pig but the squeal. The meat packers eventually created a product that looked like meat, sort of tasted like meat and possibly utilized the pig’s squeal for an attempt at zest. They called it Spam.
At the same time, Henry Ford was experimenting with this marvelous plant called the soy bean. By scientifically manipulating the oil chemically you can make door knobs or crab meat. Ford used the stuff to make the little revolving knobs for inside door handles. Others used the same stuff to create reasonable facsimiles of steak or crab meat. It’s not real steak or crab but it can be made to look sort of like the real thing and it has a flavor that would only fool anyone who has never had the real thing, but it is an approximation.
Thus by applying such scientific methods to H. Rider Haggard’s novels Burroughs converted Sir Henry Curtis into Tarzan. Then he took every impossible fantasy of Haggard to convert it into a scientifically plausible incident. You have only minimal necessity to suspend your sense of disbelief- once you accept his impossible premiss- in Burroughs while Haggard’s imaginative flight never bear up to examination.
In ‘Allan Quatermain’ the protagonists disappear into a cavern exposed only at low water to begin their journey through a huge tunnel that forms the course of an ‘underground river.’
Well, the entrance wouldbe visible at either low or high water. At high water the location of the entrance would identified by a fierce maelstrom down which the water would be drawn as though down a kitchen sink.
Once within the channel itself the roof was an improbable ten feet ove the trio’s head.
Burroughs would have found this explanation ludicrous and clearly scientifically impossible.
However when Haggard’s river delivers the intrepid adventurers safe and sound into the hidden valley the reader is entranced by the medieval civilization found there. This locale can also be found in Tarzan, Lord Of The Jungle.
When the adventure ended Good and Quatermain elected to return home while Sir Henry Curtis married the princess, sealed off the ground exit and elected to remain there until civilization should discover him. Compare that to the ending of Zane Grey’s Riders Of The Purple Sage.
Edward Borein- Six Riders On The Purple Sage
Gosh, what a story! Burroughs must have said to himself. I’d like to write something like that some day. One day he did. That was about 1926. In his story everything had to be scientifically plausible. Thus he has a remnant of Richard Coeur De Lion’s crusaders who had become separated from the main body living in a secluded African valley somewhere in Gallaland.
Haggard couldn’t explain how his White medieval society found his hidden valley among the Mountains of the Moon. Burroughs could explain his. Furthermore his crusaders had developed in a scientifically probable way. The entrance and exit, both similar to Haggard’s, are probable too. Burroughs has the entrance which is a tunnel, not dissimilar to Haggard’s tunnel, guarded by Black soldiers in medieval garb speaking medieval English which, the example of Chaucer not withstanding, was not too different from our own. Once in custody, the hero, Jim Blake, paraphrasing Il Duce says: Take me to your Director’ as he has mistakenly believed he was on a movie set.
Once within the valley the incidents follow Haggard’s story very closely. A battle takes place between two contending factions. The way out of this valley is identical to the way out of Haggards’ valley with the exception that rather than being obscure it is well know by the surrounding Gallas but as they are no match for the Valley’s inhabitants they avoid it.
In the end Blake, like Curtis, elects to remain with the Princess in a simpler but not necessarily kinder society.
Thus while Burroughs lifts the whole story from Haggard he manages to take the incredible and make it scientifically plausible. The place could have existed. You or I could go there if we only had a map and couple dozen Black porters.
So also the treasure vaults of Opar are a transliteration of the treasure chamber of Ophir in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. As John Talliaferro points out in his Tarzan Forever, La is based on Haggard’s She. Although this had passed over my head I was somewhat mystified by the name La. But as La is the French feminine article as in le, la, meaning he, she or it, the name La might even be translated as She. If La is She then the vaults of Opar are a combination of Ophir and the labyrinth of She.
There are also a couple other readily identifiable sources for Opar. One is H.G. Wells and the other is Sigmund Freud. As I always have the haunting presence of L. Frank Baum while reading Tarzan we may assume his presence too.
Many of the Tarzan books seem to be literary composographs. Burrughs wrote very fast turning out three or even four books in some years. This speed of writing doesn’t leave much time for real composition. It becomes almost necessary to borrow from other writers. Thus Burroughs offers a sort of literary Spam; If you examine it closely you can identify the parts but you have essentially a new product.
In the same way Burroughs combines his parts in such a way that you have a new original product.
The terrific Baumian feeling of Tarzan, Jane and Korak the Killer swinging down the jungle lanes on their way back from Pal-Ul-Don just really reminds me of Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scare Crow swinging down the Yellow Brick Road.
Once back home, Tarzan learns that his profligate loans to the British Empire, which the Empire has apparently no intention of paying back, have impoverished him. He realizes that he will have to make another run on the Bank of Opar.
He returns to Opar. Opar greatly resembles the land of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine. There are even Morlocks and Eloy. The men are all Morlocks and the women are all Eloy. This effect is achieved by unnatural selection or dysgenics on one hand and eugenics on the other. Over the ages since the sinking of Atlantis any normal men have been disposed of, only the degraded and misshapen kept. On the other hand the ugly women have been discarded while only beautiful women have been kept. One wonders at the genetic problems involved but it is so in Opar. Burroughs chucks in a little science while you’re not watching, showing what the effect will be if inferior specimens of humanity are allowed to live and propagate and the contrary results if eugenics are followed. A very popular idea is made palatable.
Thus we have this scene replicated from Wells’ Time Machine taking place in a land that time never knew.
So far we have Baum, Wells and Haggard represented. Now Burroughs throws in a little Freud. There is no doubt Burroughs read Freud up to at least 1922 as his notion on the theory of dreams in ‘Tales of Tarzan’ shows. By 1922 Freud was all the rage in America. One of Freud’s theories that challenged the psyche of the times was that of the Unconscious.
The nature of or even the existence of the Unconscious was highly controversial at the time with most people rejecting the notion. Interestingly ERB meets the challenge head on as he did with Freud’s theory of dreams. He seems to understand and accept the notion.
In King Solomon’s Mines the treasure vault of Ophir is concealed behind a fore chamber adorned with Haggard’s ghoulish trappings. The treasure room is hidden behind a counter-weighted door of which only the vile Kukuana priest knows the secret. He traps Good, Curtis and Quatermain in the chamber by lowering the door.
Apparently doomed the trio are delivered when Good notices that the air in the room hasn’t gone stale as it should. The men set about to discover the source of the fresh air which turns out to be a trap door in the floor. Descending, the men grope their way in total darkness through a maze of tunnels. They are forced to turn back when Good nearly falls into one of Haggard’s ever present underground rivers..
Forced to turn back they discover a ray of light they missed the first time. The light is coming from the end of the tunnel made by a small furry burrowing animal. The men force their way through the hole tumbling into the pit King Solomon’s men excavated for diamonds centuries before.
In Burroughs the deformed priests of Opar capture Tarzan and put him in a darkened room with no apparent egress other than the barred door. Tinkering around somewhat like Edison Tarzan discovers that ages ago long forgotten Oparians had sealed up a tunnel.
Cannily Tarzan removes the bricks one by one making an opening just large enough for him to pass through. He then replaces the bricks from inside the tunnel so the Oparians will by mystified by his disappearance.
The underground structure as we learn from various books is on two levels. On its upper level a long tunnel leads from the temple to a room containing the forgotten gold vaults of Opar. Halfway along there a, I don’t know, twenty foot wide gap over a pool of water. Tarzan is going to have to leap this gap to go on. It would be impossible to do this in a low tunnel. Consequently Burroughs has a large dome built over the gap with a small opening at the top which admits some few shards of light.
On the other side the tunnel continues on until one enters the gold vaults. Now, it would be impossible to return across the gap carrying a sixty pound ingot of gold which is what the ingots weigh.
Another literary source is here introduced. Burroughs was familiar with the Greek myths. Surely he had read Bulfinch as well as having studied Greek and Latin at Harvard Latin School in Chicago. The nether entrance/exit is so peculiar that if one weren’t already absorbed in the impossible African world of Tarzan it would certainly shake one’s sense of belief.
The nether exit leads steeply up a path to emerge from the top of a gigantic rock formation standing alone in a plain. Strangely neither the degraded Oparian males or the intelligent Oparian females have ever, over a period of at least six ages, investigated it. They’ve been there since the Flood.
The structure reminds me of the story of Metis and Zeus. In that story Zeus had swallowed the goddess Metis. She proved a bit much for the big fella’s digestion so in some kind of psychological manifestation of his indigestion Athene emerged fully formed from the Big Guy’s forehead. So Tarzan who has entered the body of Zeus from a different analogous part of Zeus’ anatomy emerges fully formed from the aperture in the rock.
Really funny if you think about it. Entrance through the nether end, leaping over the belly in the middle then emeging from the forehead. But then that is why one cherishes Burroughs. There is so much to discover in his Africa.
H.M. Stanley, African Explorer
Take the matter of the weight of the ingots. Why sixty pounds? Once can only guess of course but if you read H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa you will learn that the normal weight Stanley’s porters were to carry on their heads was sixty pounds. The men of Tippu Tib, an adversary of Stanley’s rebelled at the weight, demanding the loads be reduced to forty-five pounds or even twenty pounds.
Tarzan’s faithful Waziri, who would act as porters for no other than the Big Bwana, not only joyfully picked up a single sixty pound ingot but grabbed two, staggering across the lianas and creepers under the incredible burden of one hundred twenty pounds. ERB really knew how to top the next guy.
While we have In Darkest Africa in view, which Burroughs obviously read as Stanley mentions an upper Congo tribe called the Waziri, we might compare his version of the jungle with Burroughs’. One didn’t swing blithely barefoot down Stanley’s jungle trails. They were dangerous places full of both poisoned snakes and stakes. One might step on a horrid red ant nest, disturb wasps or have black ants drop on you.
In Tarzan’s Africa there are such things as lower, middle and upper terraces, one drops from a lower limb to the ground. Obviously Burroughs is not replicating the Africa of Stanley or Livingstone where the great trees are sheer for the first fifty or sixty feet in the air.
Burroughs obviously discarded the unpleasant realities of Africa for a replication of Fenimore Cooper’s New England forests of oaks and maples where there are low branches and no snakes, stakes or fire ants.
The diagram of the tunnels is not yet complete. We learn after an earthquake has the brought the treasure vault down on Tarzan’s head while closing the exit through Zeus’ forehead, Tarzan completely bereft of memory, suffering from amnesia as they used to do on the old radio Soaps, staggers back along the tunnel falling into the gap in the middle. Here he drops into the water which is level with the floor of the lower tunnel. This is real close to King Solomon’s Mines. Swimming to the further edge, once you’ve learned to swim you never forget, Tarzan climbs up to continue on where he comes to the spectacular jewel vaults of Opar. A near paraphrase of Haggard. Cases of giant stones fill this huge room. It may be true that De Beers has destroyed all roads to Opar in order to protect its monopoly. (That’s a yolk, son.)
From thence Tazan emits into a counsel room. Perhaps the darkness and obscurity of his exit from the tunnel prevented the incurious Oparians from discovering it.
What Burroughs has created here is a sort of map of Freud’s Unconscious as Burroughs understood it. I can’t tell exactly what Burroughs understood of Freud’s notion of the Unconscious but I interpret his understanding thusly: An idea for a great character enters the mind through a back door. Illuminated by a little candle the idea progresses through the canyons or corridors of the mind seeking resolution. Perhaps halfway through its genesis it meets an obtacle. If the idea can’t pass the obstacle it is aborted. If the obstacle can be passed the idea develops. But as the light was blown out by the leap perhaps the idea gestates deep in the unconscious no longer directed by the light of consciousness.
In Burroughs’ representation Tarzan, or the idea’s progress, was lit by a little candle until the light was extinguished by Tarzan’s leap across the gap. From then on Tarzan had to grope his way into the gold vaults which lie beneath the rock or mind of Zeus.
The idea of Tarzan having come to fruition bursts forth fully formed as with Athene and Zeus. The monetary value of the idea of Tarzan is represented by the gold lurking in the mind which is coverted to cash when the idea is expressed.
Perhaps Burroughs is here telling us how he conceived the idea of Tarzan. Back in 1890 or so when he read Rider Haggard the notion of Tarzan entered his mind through a chink in his psyche. Unable to develop the idea at the time the notion of Tarzan continued to gestate until in 1912 it burst from his mind like Athene from the forehead of Zeus.
There’s a joke in there somewhere and it’s a pretty nifty way of telling the cognoscenti how he developed the idea of Tarzan while incorporating the telling in the exposition of a Freudian theory.
Thus Burroughs has cobbled together a story from assorted literary parts. A little Fenimore Cooper, a little of L. Frank Baum, some H.G. Wells, a Greek myth, a lot of Haggard and a fairly serious discussion of Freud for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
By all rights such a compendium of other men’s stories and ideas ought to have been not only obvious but a failure. But like Spam, Burroughs was able to make easily seen parts unrecognizable while adding his own genius and brilliant creation into a fabulous myth which there is no need to check against reality. It is true because it fills a deep inner need.
If Tarzan wasn’t true he should have been. We love his idea as we love ourselves.
We are true. Tarzan is true. That truth exists in my mind and the mind of every reader. I will never find Tarzan’s Africa no matter where or how far I travel. No anthropologist will ever unearth the remains of Tarzan’s parents, Kerchak or Kala, but they still rest in God’s green earth. Tarzan cannot age. He can never die.
As I pass through the canyons of my mind I have found a little box canyon. In that box canyon I have discovered that I exist as Tarzan. I am Tarzan. I’m sure the reader has discovered that he too is Tarzan. Tarzan lives!
A Review: King Solomon’s Mines By H. Rider Haggard
November 13, 2009
A Contribution To The
ERBzine ERB Library Project
King Solomon’s Mines
by
H. Rider Haggard
Review by R.E. Prindle
Three volumes made Rider Haggard’s reputation then and maintain it today. Classics of the B genre. The first of these is the subject of this review, King Solomon’s Mines. The other two are She and Allan Quatermain. The novels were written between 1885 and 1888. These were very interesting years in the exploration of Africa. Speke had identified the source of the White Nile twenty some years earlier. Robert Livingstone had been found and sensationally recounted by the great Henry Morton Stanley.
Subsequently Stanley had navigated the course of the Nile from the plateau down to the sea, a stunning accomplishment. His rescue of the Emin Pasha in 1886 was on everyone’s lips. The white spaces on the maps were rapidly disappearing. In the midst of this excitement Rider Haggard’s great African trilogy made a propitious appearance. No better timeing could have been devised. And the novels were sensational, plausible too, at that time. Who knew what additional wonders Africa concealed. There was room in that gigantic continent for a lot of lost cities and civilizations. Haggard and his disciple, Edgar Rice Burroughs rapidly populated Africa with a host of them.
Haggard would continue to write exciting African tales until the day he died in 1925 after a lifetime of putting out two or three novels a year. They usually followed the same format, a long trip out taking up at least half the novel, the intense situation on arrival and a return home. The same format Edgar Rice Burroughs would use. The novels were packed with esoteric lore and authentic African details.
It is said that Haggard wrote the Mines on a bet after being told he couldn’t write the equal of Stevenson’s Treasure Island. He did do that but Mines is written tongue in cheek with a lot of jokes. Haggard makes this clear when Quatermain says that his two literary mainstays are the Bible and the Ingoldsby Legends. The Legends written in the 1830s and 1840s are a collection of humorous parodies of Folklore themes and poems by Richard Harris Barham writing anonymously as Thomas Ingoldsby of Tappingham Manor. The book was very popular with, it seems, all the the authors till the turn of the century at least. One finds it mentioned frequently. Taking the hint I read a copy. Thus, Haggard is protecting his rear in case of failure by saying his story is just a put on or joke.
King Solomon’s Mines is told in the first person by the old knockabout hunter, Allan Quatermain. He has a bumbling self-effacing manner not unlike Inspector Columbo of the TV series. You don’t think he can do it but he’s spot on every time.
As was common with this sort of adventure story the point is to make the reader think the story is true. Burroughs probably picked up his habit of framing from Haggard. Many of the details of Mines are true to Haggard’s own life while his study of the Zulus and other tribes accurately portray their customs. Haggard is very sympathetic to African customs and mentality actually seeming to envy them. He genuinely can see little difference between Black and White while adopting a fairly critical attitude towards Whites and a sympathetic one toward Blacks. Very modern. Indeed, in this novel the White heroes join a Zulu Impi or regiment and fight with the Zulus as White Zulus. Naturally they comport themselves heroically, Curtis excelling the Blacks at their own game.
As the novel begins Haggard sets up the story. The Englishmen, Curtis and Good, are out in search of a lost brother. The meeting with Quatermain on shipboard is fortuitous leading to his subsequent employment as their guide. Haggard describes a boat journey from Capetown to Durban that is obviously authentic; Haggard himself has taken the same trip. Thus unlike Burroughs’ imaginary Africa this is authentic, the Real Thing. On the journey Quatermain meets Sir henry Curtis and his friend John Good, who need a guide to take them in search of Curtis’ lost brother.
The search will take them to a hidden Zulu enclave behind a burning desert and a towering mountain range. The trip out is filled with interesting authentic details but no need to dwell on them here.
Crossing the burning sands not known to have been successfully navigated before, they are confronted by the towering twin peaks of Sheba’s Breasts topped with four thousand foot nipples. Who can’t see the humor there. Pretty racy for what are thought of as stodgy old Victorian times. Bear in mind the Ingoldsby Legends while reading the story as probably most of Haggard’s readers would have been familiar with them. They are of this sort of tongue in cheek humor. The ancient map they are following indicated the route to follow.
Behind the Breasts lies Kukuanaland. Undoubtledly Kuku should be read coo-coo. The Kukuanas are the Zulu tribe in possession of King Solomon’s Mines. Kukuanaland is somewhere near the ruins of Zimbabwe, although Haggard doesn’t allude directly to the site. I’m sure everyone has heard of the ruins of Zimbabwe. The old Zimbabwe I mean.
There has always been a dispute as to who built Zimbabwe. Africans claim it was built by Africans while the thought in Haggard’s time was that Zimbabwe was built by Phoenicians hence a few mentions of them. The notion was that these were the ruins through the Queen of Sheba of King Solomon, hence the title King Solomon’s Mines. Zimbabwe is either in or next to lands of the Shona people. The Shona arrived in the area from the North possibly from 300 to 800 AD. There is no record of stone work among the Shona before or after. The structures of Zimbabwe are of shale like stone merely piled on top of each other being very thick and very high. Instead of piled up stones it is customary to say the construction is without mortar as though that is a great skill. Without mortar = piled up stones, doesn’t it?
It seems unlikely the Shona would have built them while it is also a remote possibility that the Phoenicians did. It is true however that Greeks traded on these shores but they didn’t build them. A more probable builder is the Malagasy people. I don’t think the Malagasy arrival is commonly known yet, it wasn’t to me until a few years ago. The Malgasies made the long sea journey from Indonesia to arrive in Madagascar and East Africa sometime between 500 and 1000 AD. As they would have been invaders into a recently and sparsely settled territory any groups landing on the continent would have been automatically at war with the Shona thus needing a fort for protection. Being much more technologically advanced than the Africans they would likely be familiar with stonework.
As it is said that Zimbabwe was a mining and trading community, as the Malagasy were seafarers it is likely they would be the more obvious candidate otherwise one has to explain where the traders of what is described as an extensive trade come from as the the Africans couldn’t possibly have gone to the buyers or known what to trade. Interestingly the Malagasies introduced the banana and an improved yam to Africa thus they had to land on African shores.
Zimbabwe had only been discovered by Europeans a few years before Haggard arrived in Durban. Very likely he was eager to see the ruins and did as he does have at least three stories in which Zimbabwe figures. Here he combines Zimbabwe, King Solomon and the Phoenicians.
As the party approaches Kukuanaland they are faced by a huge mountain range towering perhaps 15,000 to 18,000 feet into the sky. Facing them are two huge mountains named Queen Sheba’s Breasts, the Grand Tetons of Africa.
Here I have to mention a blogger (feministbookworm.wordpress.com) who pointed out the female arrangement of Kukuanaland. This escaped me in my previous readings but is of some interest. Haggard in a cryptic way has written a fairly pornographic story, especially for Victorian times. I’m sure most people didn’t get it even though Haggard provides a fairly obvious map although turned upside down. This is along the coy lines of various pop songs such as ‘Baby, let me bang your box.’ After shouting out this line several times allowing the average guy to think a woman is being propositioned the singer reveals he’s actually referring to a piano- box in musician’s slang equals piano. Box = a woman’s pudenda in sexual slang.
If one looks at Haggard’s map Sheba’s Breast’s are to the South while there is a triangle of mountains to the North. The triangle of three mountains forms a female Delta or box. In the middle between the Breasts and Delta is the Kukuana capitol called Loo. Loo is British slang for toilet or ‘shitter’ so we some scatology going on here.
This gets better. I jump ahead to the ending. The Englishmen are promised diamonds from King Solomon’s Mines. The mines are located within the Delta or pudenda. British slang of times for the female pudenda was Treasure Box. Thus the Englishmen are going to descend through the vagina into the womb of the mines where the diamonds are stored in actual treasure boxes. Humor, remember. Bear in mind that in Burroughs diamonds are of the female, actually Anima, treasure. Same here. This is going to get better.
Apart from Mother Earth, represented by Sheba’s pudenda, there are only two women in the story which Haggard smirkingly points out: One is a Bantu beauty who becomes attached to Good, the other is an old hag named Gagool. The latter forms the model for Burroughs’ old Black crone in Gods of Mars and Nemone’s guardian in Tarzan And The City Of Gold.
Both accompany the three White men to King Solomon’s mines. At whatever age Burroughs first read this the impressions stuck. This stuff was current literature to him while Classics to us. One must imagine the excitement with which these novels were read. Readers of Opar Tarzan novels (Return, Jewels, Golden Lion and Invincible) will immediately recognize the setup although there are differences.
Always one to employ horror effects Haggard is at his best in this early novel. The group descended as it were through the vagina into the depths of the womb. Along the way are giant stalactites. (Penises?) Then they enter a chamber in which the dead kings of Kukuana are preserved. Rather than Egyptian mummification they are set beneath a drip being turned into stalactites or, in other words, big pricks. Seems to me like an obvious joke. A huge figure of death presides over the immortal enclave.
Proceeding further they come upon a door set in the wall blocking the way. The door is a huge slab several feet thick operated by a hidden mechanism that lifts the slab vertically into the ceiling. Gagool with a hidden movement releases the door which slowly and efficiently retracts into the ceiling. The party can now enter the treasure room or womb. The door stands for men’s sexual desire for the female. As with the hymen without equal desire on the part of the woman entrance is barred but with woman’s compliance the way opens easily.
Inside the room or womb are the treasure chests containing unlimited value in diamonds.
After taunting the men Gagool makes a break for the door having released the lever that closes it. She is held back by Foulata who worshipped Good. Stabbed by Gagool she falls to the ground but has successfully delayed Gagool. In attempting to roll under the descending slab the tardy witch is crushed flatter than a piece of paper. The men are now trapped in the womb but they have a candle for light. Quatermain stuffs his pockets with stones while filling a basket Foulata brought.
Here’s the classic B movie part: While waiting for death they notice that the air remains fresh. Good discovers a trap door in a corner. Opening this they descend as it were into the bowels of this elogated represention of a woman who might represent Mother Earth or the Great Mother thus forming a collective Anima for the three White men. Anticipating She a little. A bizarre Anima for Haggard also. OK, I’ve got a weird sense of humor. I’ve always known it but that doesn’t make it less funny. No longer having a light they are forced to feel their way through the tunnels. The tunnels eerily represent the intestines. Haggard is getting really scatological here as you know what emerges from intestines.
As they pick their way along Good falls into a stream that greatly resembles the urethra. Fortunately Quatermain has some matches. One is used to locate Good clinging to a rock in midstream, possibly meant as a kidney stone as a joke. Hauled ashore they backtrack and resume their way. Curtis spots a dim light toward which they move. The opening narrows down to the point that the men have to squeeze through tumbling out into the diamond shaft like so many turds. Haggard must have been gleeful at what he was getting away with.
Climbing out of the pit they discover they have returned to the entrance. Thus vagina and rectum are only a short distance apart. Anatomically correct as it were. Haggard had a fine sense of humor.
While adapting the topography for his own needs one can easily see how Burroughs replicates Haggards’ design in Opar. Burroughs designed a long straight corridor but broken by a fifteen foot or so gap. In Jewels of Opar Tarzan falls through the gap dropping into a pool of water or river much as in Mines. Proceeding further he enters he jewel room of Opar filling his pouch as he had neither pockets or basket.
Opar itself replicates the Treasure House of Kukuanaland. The gold vaults represent the head of the female figure or perhaps only one of Sheba’s breasts. Proceeding down the corridor, or Great Road of Kukuanaland one comes to the sacrificial chamber situated much as the city of Loo. Proceeding from the chamber one comes to the exit. This is described by Burroughs as a narrow crack or cleft in the wall to pass through which Tarzan had to turn his shoulders sideways. So, Opar and Kukuanaland are built according to the same scheme.
Obviously the memory popped into Burroughs’ mind in The Return Of Tarzan, developed in Jewels of Opar and Golden Lion and came to perfection in Tarzan The Invincible. It would seem clear that ERB understood the sexual structure of King Solomon’s Mines.
If we go back to the other end of Kukuanaland we have the two towering mountains known as Queen Sheba’s Breasts. In order to prevent anyone taking a low level route between the Breasts there is a perpendicular barrier running between the breasts rising several thousand feet. Odd geological formation. Rising 4000 feeet above the breasts themselves are the nipples. That should be enough to make anyone laugh.
A recurrent theme in the stories is a juxtaposition of ice with summer weather, often associated with a woman as here. Perhaps Haggard had a cold, cold mother.
While the party is both starving and thirsting they find neither game nor water until Umbopo discovers some melon patches providing food and water until they reach the snow line. Soon they come to the nipple rising sheer from the breast. At the base of the nipple is a cave. This cave may possibly have been appropriated as the entrance to Opar’s gold vaults in Burroughs. In the cave is the frozen body of Da Silvestre who made the map they have been following. The bushman servant freezes to death during the night so they set him over by Da Silvestre. There’s a joke here but I don’t get.
Continuing down Sheba’s left breast they reach below the snow line. The boys spot an antelope way off there, long shot, but Quatermain makes it, cleanly knocking out a vertebrae in the neck. While cleaning up in an adjacent stream and eating they are surprised by a band of Kukuana and taken.
Umbopo who signed on back in Durban always had this mysterious royal air about him and now we’re going to find out why. For those contemporaries who insist that no book should violate their enlightened prejudices whether the book be as old as Homer or not they may feel uncomfortable reading this book. By and large Haggard shares the attitudes toward race, gender and whatever of his times rather than Liberal notions of today. Can be painful for certain types.
Nevertheless Haggard has a deep admiration for the Zulu tribes and a kind of understanding one toward the lesser Bushman and Hottentots. The Zulus are uniformly tall and well built while Quatermain and Good are smaller and more comical in appearance. Only Sir Henry Curtis is of the same stature, slightly larger, as the Zulus. He seems to stand in for what is otherwise a race of inferior stature.
There is a great fifty foot wide road that runs from the barrier of Sheba’s Breasts to Sheba’s Delta. The road is over a hundred miles long with Loo in the center.
The city of Loo is modeled after the encampment of the Zulu chief, Chaka. The details Haggard describes are undoubtedly accurate. Chaka flourished 1830-40 while the last of his line, Cetywayo, ruled during Haggard’s tenure in Africa. His fictional king is called Twala. We now discover that Twala is Umbopo’s brother. The latter was rightful heir but Gagool who is represented as being hundreds of years old favored Twala expelling Umbopo and his mother which is why he was in Durban. His identity is assured because of an Uroboros that encircles his waist. This snake appears to be a birth mark rather than a tatoo.
After accepting a rifle from Curtis as a gift Twala sends three chain mail shirts of medieval manufacture which proves that Zimbabwe was formerly occupied by another race, I suppose.
We have a civil war brewing here as Umbopa asserts his rights. Before the war develops Twala holds a ceremony I find really interesting, the smelling out of witches. The regiments were assembled. In this case Gagool runs up and down the ranks smelling out the witches. Anyone she indicates is removed from the ranks and immediately killed. This was an actual Zulu custom. Haggard portrays them more than once in what is his pretty decent historyof the Zulus in the novels.
Interestingly under the African president of the United States we have the same situation occurring. Obama denounces those in opposition to him essentially as witches. While currently we are put under surveillance the time may shortly arrive when we are merely arrested and despatched. Thus the innate African soul reasserts itself hundreds of years out of Africa. Of course, Obama was born in Kenya but he didn’t live there.
After the smelling out the regiments align themselves according to their allegiance. The three White men suit up on the side of the pretender, Umbopo. In his admiration of the Impi battle plan Haggard has the Whites disdain to use firearms preferring to show Whites returned to primitive savagery. Of course he normalizes the British and Zulu societies so that any difference is perceived but not real.
If you want to how this attitude was digested by the British public rent a copy of the movie If c. 1965. A British public school story that viewed better the first time around for me but still of interest. I might rent it again, though.
It is at this point of the story that the ‘White giant’ Sir Henry Curtis took his place in the Zulu ranks to show White supremacy that is when the actual basis of Tarzan took place in Burroughs’ mind.
The three Whites are the only ones wearing chain mail so that they come through bruised but alive. Without the chain mail, of course, all three would have been killed many times over. Perhaps the chain mail is symbolic of the science of the Maxim.
My feeling is that Haggard was so enamored of primitive Zulu warfare as organized by Chaka that he thrilled himself by placing the three in their ranks. Haggard had his peculiarities. As I say, he seemed to reject science.
Umbopo’s troops triumph over greater odds while King Twala is captured. Sentenced to die he demands the right to hand to hand combat selecting Curtis as his adversary.
Thus a duel ensues providing two or three pages of excitement in which a very hard battle is fought. Curtis decapitates Twala proving I suppose that on their own turf, evenly matched, the White Man is the greater.
Morally, however, Haggard gives the nod to Umbopo and the Zulus. Umbopo apparently feels a bond has been vilolated between the trio and himself. He offers them wifes, land and honors if they choose to stay in Kukuanaland. They instead choose to gather diamonds from Sheba’s treasure box. Umbopo is disgusted that White men care about nothing but money. Haggard sheepishly agrees with Umbopo but the trio nevertheless collect their diamonds and scoot, setting themselves up splendidly in England where money matters. Regardless of Haggard’s moral it is clear that the Kukuanas have no use for money in their primitive society while being broke in London is a sort of hell.
One wonders whether when Umbopo sent Gagool with them he knew that he was sending them to their deaths. Their return was after all rather miraculous. Leaving Kukuanaland the three arrive safely and rich in England.
Postscript.
Burroughs read not only King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain but probably the whole corpus. What he read before 1911 was obviously the most influential on him through the twenties. So an an investigator, Haggard’s novels before 1911 are the one to familiarize oneself with first. The very late Treasure Of The Lake however did influence Tarzan Triumphant.
Sir Henry Curtis was a key element in the formation of the idea of Tarzan and a role model. I suspect that Treasure Island by Stevenson provided he means to get the Claytons to Africa. Evolution provided the background of Kala and Tarzan’s life with the apes.
Whether Good or Quatermain had any influence on the character of Paul D’Arnot or not I’m not sure. He may have evolved from Dupin of Poe’s Murders In The Rue Morgue forming a double for Tarzan not unlike the narrator and Dupin of Murders.
I have explained the probable relationship of Opar to Sheba’s treasure box. That seems pretty secure to me.
Haggard developed the story line of the preamble and journey to the scene of action, a flurry of action in the crisis and the return home. Burroughs seems to follow this format although he can introduce picaresque elements.
The landscape and terrain of Burroughs is quite similar to Haggard’s. Over the years as Haggard read Burroughs’ novels there are Burroughsian elements that creep into Haggard’s work. Treasure Of The Lake bears a number of similarities to Burroughs especially the elephant dum dum. That also owes a great deal to Kipling and Mowgli. A stunning scene in Haggard. I would really start with Treasure Of The lake and then begin with King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain.
La, of course, is derived from the next novel, She.
I, Dynamo 