"The Hills of the Dead" (Robert E. Howard)
Dr Hermes
Horror From the Mound", they were NOT sexy, seductive Goth idols that
negative-minded teenagers could admire. Howard's vampires were gruesome,
silent, single-minded and dangerous; they were walking corpses out to
steal the life from the living and this gives them a raw potency that
Kate Beckinsale's decadent UNDERWORLD cronies can't match.
In "The Hills of the Dead" (from WEIRD TALES, August 1930), it's clear
from early on that the sour Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane is going up
against an entire colony of the Undead. He's in Africa again, drawn back
by a powerful fatalistic lure in the Old Land that he can't explain
("... over leagues of the blue salt sea she has drawn me and with the
dawn I go to seek the heart of her."). Kane is cursed with wanderlust
and crusading ideals, never to settle down and enjoy a peaceful life.
(But considering all the pirates and monsters he destroys, his burden is
to our benefit.)
We start with Kane meeting his old chum N'Longa. This character is a
withered, dried-up ju-ju man, a witch doctor of great age and forbidden
knowledge. Although he usually likes to speak to Kane in a pidgen
dialect that makes him seem a bit backward, when he switches to his own
language, his speech is subtle and impressive. N'Longa can send his
"ghost" out of his own body to wander hundreds of miles in a single
breath, to speak with Kane in dreams, to possess the body of another
(temporarily driving out that person's own spirit). The witch doctor
seems sinister (and Kane has grave misgivings about consorting with one
of Satan's minions), but he does good work. (Still, a guy that wears a
necklace made of human finger bones.. you have to keep a wary eye on the
likes of him.)
Here is where N'Longa first presents Kane with the ju-ju staff. It's a
steel-hard wooden stave, tapering to a point at one end and with a cat's
hard carved on the hilt. The staff is one of a kind, ancient and proof
against evil magic or creatures. (In "The Footfalls Within", we learn
the story behind the staff.)
Roaming far and wide, Kane eventually leaves the jungle itself to come
upon some rocky hill territory. In his stoic fashion, he rescues a young
African woman named Zunna from a charging lion (one musket shot, that's
all it takes if your aim is guided by Providence.) He escorts her back
to her village but they have to spend the night in a cave, and as he
sits by the fire he has built, the Puritan receives two strange
visitors. These are tall, lanky natives whose skin has a greyish tone to
it, whose eyes seem to have a red glint and who regard him hungrily.
Yep, it's the Undead and Kane has a few tense moments wrestling with the
monsters until he discovers that the ju-ju staff is the best weapon he
could have. ("His face set in grim lines as he raised it; then he drove
it through the black breast. And before his eyes, the giant body
crumbled, dissolving to dust as he watched horror-struck..."
Even Solomon Kane is a bit taken aback at all this, and Zunna doesn't
help ease his state of mind. She explains that there are hundreds of
these Things swarming in the nearby hills. They don't drink blood but
suck up the actual life force itself. These creatures are hundreds of
years old, the remnants of a great race which once ruled the area from a
great stone city. Now the city is falling into ruin, its silent
inhabitants these walking dead who stalk out at night to prey on nearby
tribes.
Frankly, this seems like a bit much for even Kane to tackle
singlehanded. He lies down with the ju-ju staff on his chest and meets
N'Longa in the dreamtime. Then the voodoo master has Kane send the girl
to bring back her lover, a good-looking man from her village. As Kane
looks on aghast, N'Longa takes over the dude's healthy young body and
goes with him on the mission to wipe out the city of the vampires. And
it won't be easy...
Howard puts his usual zest and enthusiasm into this story. It's packed
with creative details, vivid images and sudden violence. The uneasy
friendship between a God-fearing Puritan and an African witch doctor is
intriguing, as Kane comes to trust and like N'Longa despite all his
misgivings. As the voodoo man points out, if he were evil, wouldn't he
just keep the youth's strapping healthy body instead of voluntarily
surrendering it? N'Longa is one of Howard's more ambiguous and subtle
creations and teaming him up with the fanatic Kane has all sort of
possibilities. Kane has innate conflict between his violent adventures
and his stern religious code, and N'Longa seems to be an ominous
magician but he turns out to be a force for good. I would have liked to
see another story or two featuring these two men working together.
There's one new detail Howard adds to vampire lore, and it seems so
obvious and right that I wonder why no writers thought of it before.
Vultures regard the Undead as prey and go after them as the carrion they
are. ("No fool vulture!" explains N'Longa. "He know death when he see
it! He pounce on one fellow dead man and tear and eat if he be lying or
walking!") I haven't read many vampire stories since Anne Rice
glamorized them, but I wonder if other writers have picked up on this
idea that vultures are the natural enemies of vampires.
Howard developed Solomon Kane in daydreams as a teenager, and he wrote
the stories early in his brief career. LIke Francis X. Gordon (El
Borak), Kane is more of a traditional adventure figure than Howard's
later barbarians would be. This gives the Kane stories a slightly more
noble tone; after he shifted to Conan and Turlogh O'Brien and that crew,
Howard's stories didn't have heroes and villains so much as they had
gangs of cut-throats circling each other, with the reader cheering for
the least vicious. This is undoubtedly the sort riff-raff "soldiers of
fortune" you would find fighting over treasure and loot in real life,
but to be honest, I still like to read about a little nobility and
idealism in characters. (So I'm old-fashioned.)
_ berge @hotmail.com.invalid Eric D. Berge
wrote:
>I haven't read many vampire stories since Anne Rice
>glamorized them, but I wonder if other writers have picked up on this
>idea that vultures are the natural enemies of vampires
I would think that Hyenas would be an even bigger problem in Africa.
Ted Nolan <tednolan>
Dr Hermes <drhe...@webtv.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>Howard puts his usual zest and enthusiasm into this story. It's packed
>with creative details, vivid images and sudden violence. The uneasy
>friendship between a God-fearing Puritan and an African witch doctor is
>intriguing, as Kane comes to trust and like N'Longa despite all his
>misgivings. As the voodoo man points out, if he were evil, wouldn't he
>just keep the youth's strapping healthy body instead of voluntarily
>surrendering it? N'Longa is one of Howard's more ambiguous and subtle
>creations and teaming him up with the fanatic Kane has all sort of
>possibilities. Kane has innate conflict between his violent adventures
>and his stern religious code, and N'Longa seems to be an ominous
>magician but he turns out to be a force for good. I would have liked to
>see another story or two featuring these two men working together.
>
As I recall, this is the second story featuring both. In the first, N'Longa
comes off much worse, and Howard seems to have rethought him a bit
before this story to give him a certain dignity & gravitas.
Ted
Dr Hermes
Group: rec.arts.sf.written Date: Fri, Mar 10, 2006, 5:15am (EST+5) From:
t...@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan <tednolan>):
As I recall, this is the second story featuring both. In the first,
N'Longa comes off much worse, and Howard seems to have rethought him a
bit before this story to give him a certain dignity & gravitas.
....Quite right. In "Red Shadows", Kane is pursuing a pirate chief in
Africa and N'longa introduces himself with an offer to help the white
stranger. The fetish man is doing this because Kane can help rid him of
a hated rival.
In "The Hills of the Dead," N'Longa is shown as much wiser and more
altruistic. He gives Kane the valuable mystic staff (which once belonged
to KIng Solomon hjimself and is said to date back to the sorceror-kings
of Atlantis) so that the Puritan can use it to combat the supernatural
creatures he will face. N'Longa also sends his spirit to possess the
young African man so he can accompany Kane to wipe out the vampire
colony. So Howard shows N'Longa in the wise mentor role. ("To Kane it
seemed almost as if he looked into the far-seeing and mystic eyes of a
prophet of old.")
The broken pidgin makes the African wizard sound simple, but when he
drops it and speaks in the river dialect Kane understands, he suddenly
is much more solemn. ("My brother, shall I span all these years in a
moment and make you understand with a word, what has taken me so long to
learn?")
I don't want to try to read too much into Howard's African themes; he
wrote a lot of material which is bluntly offfensive. But characters like
N'Longa and Saul Stark show there is more to him than first meets the
eye.
willre...@yahoo.com
If the vampires are vulnerable to purely natural creatures and if they
are operating in the area where spotted hyenas would be a problem,
lions would be an even greater problem. Nobody's kill is safe from
lions and it takes several hyenas to be as dangerous as one lion. Of
course, vampires are strong and they are capable of climbing trees, if
not flying; I don't remember if Howard's vampires could fly. Getting
your kill into a tree will keep lions or hyenas from being a problem,
if you go up high enough.
Will in New Haven
Ted Nolan <tednolan>
I don't think they could fly, but the next(?) Kane story had him facing
Harpies, who could. Some pretty grim images in that one! And, for whatever
reason, Howard decided that his Harpies would be non-magical, so the
shaman's spirit-stick was no help there..
Ted
Dr Hermes
There's a review of the final Solomon Kane story, "Wings In the Night"
here:
http://community-2.webtv.net/drhermes/kane/
Things get so atrocious in that story that even Kane goes literally
stark raving mad, cursing God and Man and blaspheming at the skies. The
menace that time is a race of winged manlike creatures and Howard's
explanation of their origin is strangely evocative. These are the actual
Harpies, driven out of the Mediterranean by the hero Jason (remembered
in African legend as N'Yasunna). Kane shudders as he considers that all
the monsters and beasts of classical mythology might have been real and
some may still survive deep in Africa (the "Dark Continent" indeed).
It's a concept that could easily provide material for an epic novel.
Dorothy J Heydt
Omixochitl <omixoch...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>Speaking of vultures, that reminds me of a description of a Maxwell Ernst
>painting I read once. It was a picture of vultures, but a loving mother
>vulture taking care of cute fuzzy vulture chicks in some sentimental pose.
>Anybody know the title of the painting?
No, but it reminds me of the catchphrase my daughter sometimes
quotes: "Shut up and eat your carrion! There are corbies
starving in Scotland!"
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Howard Brazee
Heydt) wrote:
>No, but it reminds me of the catchphrase my daughter sometimes
>quotes: "Shut up and eat your carrion! There are corbies
>starving in Scotland!"
I wish airlines had better food. I'm not a fan of having to have my
own carrion luggage.
David Cowie
> In article <Xns97836065...@204.153.244.170>, Omixochitl
> <omixoch...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>Speaking of vultures, that reminds me of a description of a Maxwell
>>Ernst painting I read once. It was a picture of vultures, but a loving
>>mother vulture taking care of cute fuzzy vulture chicks in some
>>sentimental pose. Anybody know the title of the painting?
>
> No, but it reminds me of the catchphrase my daughter sometimes quotes:
> "Shut up and eat your carrion! There are corbies starving in Scotland!"
I don't know about the painting either, but Dorothy's reply reminded me of
a T-shirt I saw on sale in the 1970s: two vultures sitting on a branch.
One of them is saying "Patience my ass. I'm gonna kill something!"
--
David Cowie
Containment Failure + 20350:37
myrme...@yahoo.com
> I don't know about the painting either, but Dorothy's reply reminded me of
> a T-shirt I saw on sale in the 1970s: two vultures sitting on a branch.
> One of them is saying "Patience my ass. I'm gonna kill something!"
When I was in high school (mid 1980s), our civics teacher invited a
Vietnam veteran of his acquaintance to talk to the class. The man
brought a jacket that his platoon had commissioned from a Saigon
tailor. On the back was a vulture on a branch. I recall the motto as
"Patience my ass, let's go kill someone," but it could have been the
same as the one you saw.
I wonder if the jacket was based on the T-shirt, or if they were both
based on something else?
Nick
Dorothy J Heydt
Impossible to say. The cartoon (with variations) and the caption
(with variations) have been re-drawn and photocopied endless
times. The essence of folklore (said Alan Dundes when I took his
class years ago) is multiple occurrence and variation.
Paul Andinach
news:29553-441...@storefull-3211.bay.webtv.net:
> There's one new detail Howard adds to vampire lore, and it seems
> so obvious and right that I wonder why no writers thought of it
> before. Vultures regard the Undead as prey and go after them as
> the carrion they are.
I don't know, though. The main reason vultures go after carrion, as I
understand it, is that carrion can't fight back; this doesn't apply to
the undead.
Paul
--
The Pink Pedanther
"I'm talking with my mouth."