What happens when you take classic Conan, strip out all that juicy weirdness and sorcery, and double down on the daring-do by making it even more bloody and kinetic? The answers are in these stories featuring another Robert E. Howard character, El Borak.
Lesser known, yes, but in terms of pure escapism and satisfaction, this Texas gunfighter turned Middle Eastern troubleshooter plays second fiddle to no one. Del Ray’s 500-page collection of El Borak tales blazed past my eager eyes in a blur of viscera, censer fumes, and sandstorms.
The collection features seven stories Howard penned near the end of his short life featuring Francis Xavier Gordon, known to people in the hills in and around Afghanistan whom he either fights or befriends as “El Borak,” meaning “the Swift.” Four other desert-set stories of earlier vintage feature two other Howard protagonists, Kirby O’Donnell and Steve Clarney.
El Borak is a charismatic figure, even when blunt in speech:
“Follow me, and many of you will die. Aye, the jackals will feed full. You will go up to the paradise of the prophet and your brothers will forget your names. But to those that live, wealth like the rain of Allah will fall upon them.”
Thus El Borak motivates a band of cutthroats, whose leader he just carved up, to follow him into danger in “The Daughter Of Erlik Khan.”
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| A portrait of El Borak, as depicted by Timothy Bradstreet in the Del Ray book. Dark and compact of stature, El Borak learned strategy from family members who fought Geronimo. Image from https://timbradstreet.typepad.com/the_online_world_of_timot/2010/01/robert-e-howard-el-borak-and-other-desert-adventures.html |
As Steve Tompkins notes in his introduction to this volume, El Borak was a character Howard sketched out in his boyhood but put aside until “Erlik Khan” was published less than two years before Howard’s death.
“He was part of Howard’s creativity both early and late, and in between benefited from an evolution, a maturation, which did not play out in public, or in publications, but underwrote the Francis Xavier Gordon stories of 1934 and 1935,” Tompkins explains.
That is a good word to use for these stories, “maturation.” Even though the yarns themselves are fairly basic and rather formulaic when looked at from a distance, they are incredibly well constructed. I prefer Conan myself, but only because of the Hyborian era he inhabits. The El Borak stories lack the peaks of Conan’s best but are more consistent.
Which El Boraks stand out most? Others offer different favorites; here’s how I rank the seven in the Del-Ray collection:
“Three-Bladed Doom” – Simply one of the most amazing Robert E. Howard stories I have read is also the longest here; call it a novella as it weighs in at 42,000 words. Despite its heft, the story never sags.
El Borak is trying to negotiate peace between a chieftain and an emir when he finds himself caught up in a terroristic plot involving a cult of killers, the Hidden Ones. After surviving an ambush, El Borak infiltrates a secret city to uncover the Hidden Ones’s secrets, do battle with a giant gorilla, save a Sikh friend, and lead a band of disaffected Kurds to make an Alamo-like stand against waves of attackers…hoping for rescue.
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| The cover of a 1979 paperback that tries to cram as much of its story elements in as possible. Beware, some of the paperback editions include additional material added on by lesser scribes decades after Howard's death. Image from abebooks.com |
“Three-Bladed Doom” moves like a fever dream from set-piece to set-piece, filling each page with incident and suspense, yet spending time developing El Borak’s admirable nature and the amazing loyalty he commands:
The Kurds did not share their leader’s apprehensions. They had already wrought a glorious slaughter; they had a strong position; a leader they already worshipped as men used to worship kings; good rifles and plenty of ammunition. What more could a mountain warrior desire?
It culminates in an awesome three-way battle for control of the hidden city, and a gripping, sustained combat sequence that keeps topping itself as more combatants enter the fray. Think Gettysburg with caftans.
“The Daughter Of Erlik Khan” – Howard enthusiasts in 1934 must have been surprised to see the author’s name gracing the December issue of Top-Notch, a magazine of adventure stories which catered to boys. But Howard’s stamp is recognizable from the opening pages; El Borak is betrayed by a pair of treasure-mad Brits who murder a companion:
Gordon’s ideas of obligation, of debt and payment, were as direct and primitive as those of the barbarians among whom his lot had been cast for so many years. Ahmed had been his friend and had died in his service. Blood must pay for blood.
By the time we get to the end of the story, the revenge angle has been augmented by other interests. Howard doesn’t surround El Borak with a slew of enjoyably characterized allies the way he did in “Three-Bladed Doom,” but he gives each player in it a distinct quality, a recognizable humanity however twisted he or she may be.
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| El Borak leads his allies to a mountain hideaway, whether away from or toward ambush is not clear. "They submitted because they were a wolf pack, and he was the grimmest
wolf of them all," Howard explains. Painting by Ken Kelly from https://arthive.com/artists/12898~Ken_Kelly/works/319594~The_Daughter_Of_Erlik_Khan |
The action culminates in a temple where we meet one of El Borak’s old flames, now worshipped as a goddess and thoroughly bored of it. Can El Borak help her escape? Or will he keel over from exhaustion first? Part of the greatness of this tale is how much Howard makes hitting the limit of endurance a factor in the story. El Borak is forced to operate on days without food or sleep, his senses reducing all to a blur.
“Hawk of the Hills” – One nifty device Howard used in several stories comes up again here: the protagonist viewed from another’s point-of-view. Here the point-of-view is that of Willoughby, an officer of the British Raj who wants to negotiate peace between the double-dealing Afdal Khan and El Borak, who leads a tribe of Afghani rebels.
Willoughby muses upon this situation:
Most white men who went native were despised by the people among whom they cast their lot. But even Gordon’s enemies respected him, and it did not seem to be on account of his celebrated fighting ability alone.
While Willoughby works in opposition to El Borak’s express desire to wipe out Afdal Khan, the Brit remains likeable. Since you never worry about El Borak’s fate in these stories, having Willoughby offers added suspense as well as a differently-angled perspective to consider.
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| “Pick up your blade, Afdal Khan. There is no one here save the
Englishman, you, I and Allah – and Allah hates swine!” The scene is depicted above, on the cover of June 1935 issue of Top-Notch. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk_of_the_Hills_(short_story) |
In an afterword to this volume, “Gunfighters of the Wild East,” David A. Hardy notes Howard’s debt to western stories; this is reflected well here in El Borak’s adopting guerrilla tactics of the Yaqui Indians and his clever way of fooling Willoughby into recognizing the truth of the matter, using a variant of an old Tom Mix campfire ploy.
“Blood of the Gods” – Other El Borak tales work as stories of communities in conflict; the focus here is on individuals, specifically El Borak; his chief adversary Hawkston; and Al Wazir, mystic turned madman in his desert loneliness.
Most of the action centers around a siege these three men endure in an alliance forced by the arrival of Shalan ibn Mansour, who we are told hates El Borak “as an imam hates Shaitan the Damned” i. e. Satan.
While not as strong as the stories mentioned above it, with its bare-bones framework and some convenient plot twists, “Blood of the Gods” held my interest with passages like this:
He slipped the limp bags from his shoulder, cocked his rifle and went forward to kill or be killed – not for gold, nor the love of a woman, nor an ideal, nor a dream, but for as much water as could be carried in a goatskin bag.
“Son of the White Wolf” – The last known El Borak story, posthumously published in Thrilling Adventures in December 1936, this yarn clearly plants El Borak in the time of World War I, with Turkish forces sweeping across Arabia. It also references Lawrence of Arabia, a chief influence on Howard’s character and a background ally here.
The plot involves a renegade Turkish officer, Osman Pasha, who persuades his troops to forsake Allah and become pagan followers of an ancient cult pledged to the banner of a white wolf. Pasha declares:
“What Asia needs is not a new party, but a new race! There are thousands of fighting men between the Syrian coast and the Persian highlands, ready to be roused by a new word, a new prophet! The east is moving in her sleep. Ours is the duty to awaken her!”
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| "Along the dim road that split the immensity of the desert a single shape
moved. The shape grew out of the heat-hazes of the south and resolved itself
into a man on a camel." A description from "Son of the White Wolf" suggests this famous image from the 1962 movie Lawrence Of Arabia. Image from https://greg-neville.com/2012/09/28/composing-lawrence-of-arabia/ |
After Pasha’s force murder all the men and children of a peaceful village and carry off their women to impregnate by rape, El Borak is roused to ride off against them, first by infiltrating them, then by leading an Arab force against them. It is a grim, satisfying tale that keeps itself short to a fault while suggesting what terrors were to come in this crazy world of ours, both in the coming decade and in decades well beyond.
“Sons of the Hawk” – There are elements of greatness in all the stories mentioned above; from here on what you get are good simple action yarns. Here again we see El Borak through the eyes of another, one Stuart Brent, who travels to Kabul from America to deliver to El Borak this message from a dying friend: “The Black Tigers have a new prince; they call him Abd el Khafid, but his real name is Vladimir Jakrovitch.”
A fun story, although Howard needlessly complicates it by presenting El Borak for an extended period in an unconvincing disguise. The angle of evil Russians gives this a fresh, present-day tilt, though it is set in Czarist times (and El Borak’s friend Al Wazir in “Blood of the Gods” was Russian, too.) Don’t expect too much, and you will be entertained.
“Swords of the Hills” – While I liked this story least of the El Boraks, it still was a good read, better by far than a couple of Conans I can name. Here, El Borak finds himself in a village hidden in the hills of Afghanistan where blond descendants of Alexander the Great retain their cultural identity. When they are attacked by enemies of El Borak, he rallies them to defend their village.
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| "Swords of the Hills" was repurposed in 1977 for issue #80 of Marvel Comics's Conan the Barbarian, with Conan finding himself less welcome a guest than El Borak did. Image from https://view-comic.com/conan-the-barbarian-v1-080/ |
The most fantastic of the El Borak stories is not that convincing nor enveloping, but it held my interest in the paucity of pages it took up. A couple of Howard’s more annoying enthusiasms, for bodily strength and ethnic purity, crop up here rather overtly, and there are purple passages to work through (“His enemies raved like foiled wolves in their bewildered rage.”) But Howard gives El Borak a characteristic two-way challenge, fending off both an invasion and a displaced king, and the result is a pretty diverting mess that doesn’t have to make much sense.
The rest of this book gives you three Kirby O’Donnell stories, one of them, “Swords of Shahrazar,” being the direct sequel of another, “Gold from Tatary.” While neither those nor the other O’Donnell story, “The Trail of the Blood-Stained God,” stand out from the usual adventure fare with the same dynamism the El Borak stories do, they radiate the same alluring positivity for their Middle Eastern setting.
“The Fire of Asshurbanipal,” featuring Steve Clarney, was something else again, a story like “Son of the White Wolf” I only wish had been longer. It features Clarney and his Arabic companion, Yar Ali, seeking gold and finding threatened oblivion. There is warmth and humor in the exchanges between Clarney and Yar Ali, and in the way Howard tells their tale, that offers an enjoyable contrast to the other stories here.
Of
all the Del Ray Robert E. Howard books in my collection, this was the one I
dreaded most before beginning, both for its length and its markedly different
setting. Yet I found myself enjoying it most, perhaps because longer Howard is
better. The more he spun his yarns, the more I found myself pulled into them.
El Borak may not have the depth of Conan or Solomon Kane, but for company he’s
just as good.
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