The Land Of Hidden Men – Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1931 ★★½

Lost and Found in an Ancient Jungle Kingdom

Somewhere in my primordial past, decades before my birth, a man looked deep into some misty realm and espied the half-naked youth, bounding across a jungle just a half-step ahead of deadly peril, whom I would someday become, if only in my imagination.

That man was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who put pen to paper and crafted fantasies for a boyhood I had yet to reach.

Alas, I would seldom encounter Burroughs directly, on the printed page, but rather in comic books and on the television screen. Tarzan and John Carter, Warlord of Mars, were both staples of my youth; Burroughs himself, not so much.

Reading his books, I can see why. The John Carter ones were certainly entertaining enough. But there is a kind of stuffiness to Burroughs’ writing; a product of his time, perhaps, except it doesn’t seem to afflict other authors of the period like, say Hemingway or Robert E. Howard.

Also, there is a formula to Burroughs’ storycraft it doesn’t take long to twig onto: A man of modern Western civilization finds himself magically marooned in some exotic locale, and must blaze a trail for himself in order to survive, and eventually, rule the place where he has come to land. Some scholars see unfashionable notions of Manifest Destiny in Burroughs’ work; for me, it’s the predictability that grates.

But the formula, stripped of any ideological supercargo, is an effective one for developing fantasy-adventure fiction. It worked for Tarzan, it worked for John Carter, and here, it works for Gordon King, hero of The Land Of Hidden Men.

King is a young American doctor bored by the prospect of earning his shingle; he wants instead to use his ample wealth to support a life of adventure treating “strange maladies” in faraway parts of the world, in this case Cambodia. King wanders far into the jungle, leaving his anxious guide sitting at the jungle’s edge awaiting his return. Like Howard Jarvis in Airplane!, the guide will be waiting awhile. The jungle holds ghostly secrets which King will soon come to know.

As the guide tells it: “Within the dark shadows of the jungle the ruins of their cities still stand, and down the dark aisles of the forest pass the ancient kings and warriors and little sad-faced queens on ghostly elephants. Fleeing always from the horrible fate that overtook them in life, they pass for ever down the corridors of the jungle, and with them are the millions of the ghostly dead that once were their subjects. We may escape My Lord the Tiger and the wild elephants, but no man may look upon the ghosts of the dead Khmers and live.”

Originally published in the May, 1931 issue of Blue Book Magazine, and eventually appearing in book form alternately as The Land Of Hidden Men or Jungle Girl, the story is notable for being a stand-alone piece in Burroughs’ bibliography, rather than part of a series like Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, or the Pellucidar (Hollow Earth) books. In that way, it’s not unlike an earlier Burroughs novel I reviewed, The Cave Girl.

The Land Of Hidden Men is a better story than that, perhaps because it was written nearly 20 years later and Burroughs had learned a lot. Even when King is worked through his paces in familiar fashion, transfixing one too many of those “My Lord the Tiger” with trusty spear, Burroughs keeps the action flowing.

Exactly how King is sent back in time is one of those things Burroughs doesn’t explain. It seems that he takes shelter on his first night in the jungle in a strange, corbelled tower, from which he sleeps restlessly while crashing noises are heard outside. The next morning, he rises to a jungle where he finds it difficult to trace his path, perhaps because he is no longer standing in the same place in time, even if he is at the same place on earth.

Then King begins to see those ghostly figures his guide spoke of, dressed in cuirasses and riding in howdahs on great elephants. Soon he stops a tiger from killing a holy man, who it turns out is a figure of some importance in this new world King finds himself stuck in. For a long time, he fights the notion of being a time traveler. Eventually, he gives in.

“It is hard to know where dreams end and reality begins,” King observes.

As King works his way through the jungle, he hunts for food and unlocks something inside, “something primitive and bestial that always had been a part of him but that never before had had occasion to come to the surface.” He hones his skill with both bow and spear, having thrown the javelin back in college, and eventually finds himself rescuing a beautiful woman, Fou-tan, who becomes the focus of the rest of the story.

Fou-tan is Hidden Men’s most obvious trope, a maiden in need of rescue who offers King total love and devotion and is [SPOILER ALERT] eventually revealed to be the princess of one of the two city-states whose war becomes the fulcrum of the plot.

The story takes King from the jungle to the fabulous ancient city of Lodidhapura and its Leper King, Lodivarman, whose strange tastes extend to mushrooms he alone is permitted to eat, as well as Fou-tan, whom Lodivarman wishes to ravish in hopes she will catch his foul disease: “It was a woman who made me a leper. Let her sin be upon all women.”

The Preah Khan temple ruins at the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat was being explored and studied by French archaeologists at the time Burroughs wrote his story, set in a time when the city was still a lively center of Khmer civilization. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor.

Burroughs delivers this part of the story rather well, however well-trod his path often feels. When Gordon King is captured by Lodivarman’s soldiers, they demonstrate an amiable disposition that shows more than the usual humanity from your typical adventure-novel spear carriers.

A scene in Lodivarman’s palace, where King stands guard over a tedious royal dinner, offers some welcome humor as well as atmosphere: “As King watched he could not but compare this meal with formal dinners he had attended in New York and Washington, and he sympathized with the banqueters in the hall of Lodivarman, because he knew that they were suffering the same boredom that he had once endured, but with the advantage that they did not have to appear to be happy and gay.”

The story eventually becomes like many Burroughs adventures, that of a modern man who finds himself not only at home but in charge of those who once threatened his life. After dealing with Lodivarman, King takes on Lodidhapura’s rival city, Pnom Dhek, from where Fou-tan hails and to which she is summoned to serve as the bride of an evil prince. After much running around in underground corridors, and a thrilling battle King directs from atop an elephant, the stage is set for a final showdown.

“I am going to Pnom Dhek, and if I am not too late I shall save Fou-tan; and if I am, I shall make her a widow,” he says.

While set in Cambodia, it seems Burroughs transposed a lot of India to his jungle locale, with elephants, apsaras, roofs made of nipa palms, and much prayerful interjection in Siva’s holy name. East was East, I guess.

Not a great artist, Burroughs was a fine craftsman. There is evidence of this in Land Of Hidden Men, both in the way he weaves his adventure yarn and in how he sets up particular scenes, like Fou-tan explaining her duty to a disbelieving King: “Princesses are not born to happiness. Their exalted birth dedicates them to duty. They are more than human, and so human happiness often is denied them.”

There’s also this haunting bit of philosophical rumination, as King contemplates one of the jungle tigers he encounters: “It is remarkable that there should be so many more beautiful creatures in the world than man, which suggests a doubt of man’s boast that he is made in the image of God. There are those who believe that the image of God must transcend in its beauty the finite conceptions of man. If that be true and God chose to create any animal in His own likeness, man must have trailed at the far end of that celestial beauty contest.”