Lord of Darkness

Introduction

When I was a boy, more than sixty years ago, I encountered through some happy accident a magical, little-known novel by the English poet Walter de la Mare called The Three Mulla-Mulgars. It is a wonderful fantastical romance, published first in 1910, that tells of the adventures of three young Mulgars—the novel’s word for “monkeys”—of royal blood who, driven from their forest home by the enmity of Mulgars of less exalted birth, set out after their mother’s death on a vast and adventurous trip across the heart of Africa. Their goal is the Arakkaboa Mountains, where, so their mother often had told him, their dead father’s brother Assassimon reigns in splendor over a kingdom of animals.

“It will be a long and dreary journey, my sons,” their mother had warned them. “But the Prince Assassimon, Mulla-mulla of the Mulgars, is great and powerful, and has for hut a palace of ivory and Azmamogreel, with scarlet and Mamausul, slaves and peacocks, and beasts uncountable; and leagues of Ukka and Barbary-nuts; and bound- less fields of Ummuz, and orchards of fruit, and bowers of flowers and pleasure. And his, too, is the Rose of all the Mulgars.”

The Biblical cadence of de la Mare’s prose sang to me, even then, in my boyhood. I had no knowledge then of his models in the King James translation of the Bible (“The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet.... And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men....”) nor did I know yet of that other great source of his from which the exotic special words of his book had come, such words as M’keeso and Zevvera and Ollaconda, Dondo and Sharambba, Imbe Calandola, about which I will speak in a moment. But the powerful rhythms of de la Mare’s style and the strangeness of his three Mulgars’ journey through nightmare forests and formidable mountain passes exerted a powerful hold on me. I read The Three Mulla-Mulgars again and again when I was young, and I have read it every five or ten years ever since, and it has never lost its beauty and wonder for me.

There is only one human character in The Three Mulla-Mulgars, and he enters into the book only in its middle section, for three of its twenty-three chapters. He is the Oomgar—that is Mulgar-talk for “human”—Andrew Battle, who lives by himself in a hut in the forest, and who catches the youngest Mulgar, Nod, in a trap he has set up for snaring game. Battle proposes to keep Nod as a pet. He takes the skinny, preternaturally intelligent Nod to his hut, ties him to a pole, and gives him a little soup and a bite or two of meat, and in his loneliness begins talking to him, explaining that he is no cannibal, but a God-fearing English sailor who has been cast away in this remote and alien land, and who has spent “years and years in this here dismal Munza. Man-eaters and Ephelantoes, Portingals and blackamoors, chased and harrassed up and down....What wouldn’t I give for a sight of Plymouth now!”

To his amazement Battle finds Nod repeating some of his words:

“That,” said he, holding up a great piece of meat on his knife—”that’s meat.”

“Zmeat—ugh!” said Nod, with a shudder.

“And this here’s nuts,” said Battle.

“’Znuts!” repeated Nod, rubbing his stomach.

Battle rapped on his log. “Excellentissimo!” he said. “He’s a scholard born.”

And he goes on to say, “Andy Battle is an Englishman; hip, hooray! Andy Battle—

“Andy Baffle—”

“Is an—“

“Is an Englishman.”

“Izziningulissmum,” said Nod very slowly.

“Hip, hooray!” bawled Battle.

“Ippooray!” squealed Nod. And Battle rocked to and fro on his log with laughter.

Eventually Nod is found by his elder brothers, who urge him to escape and continue the journey toward Assassimon; and eventually Nod does, not without regret, telling Battle sadly that the time has come for him to leave. Battle gives him “out of his own pocket a silver groat with a hole in it, and a large piece of fine looking-glass, besides the necklet of clear blue Bamba-beads, and three rings of copper,” and wishes him well in his travels, and sends him on his way. And that is the last we see of Andrew Battle in this book, as the three royal monkeys make their way through one extraordinary adventure after another, and ultimately come to a land of sweet air and beautiful trees, where they at last are permitted to discover, “in a high, hairy cap, with a band of woven scarlet about his loins, and a basket of honeycombs over his shoulder, a Mulgar of a presence and a strangeness, who was without doubt of the Kingdom of Assassimon.”

Never did I think that Walter de la Mare’s “Andrew Battle” was anything other than a fictional character, briefly met, in this wondrous picaresque fantasy. But then, about 1962—some fifteen years after I first had read The Three Mulla-Mulgars—I began to do serious research into the great exploration narratives of the Elizabethan voyagers; and one of the old books I acquired was entitled The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell of Leigh, in Angola and the Adjoining Regions. At the sight of the name of Andrew Battell there leaped instantly into my mind the Oomgar “Andy Battle” of Walter de la Mare’s novel, which was still as vivid to me as Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan or any of the other fantasy-books of my childhood.

But could it be anything more than a coincidence, this similarity of names? I began at once to read The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell, having discovered that it had originally appeared in that great seventeenth-century compendium of voyagers’ tales, Purchas His Pilgrimes. The edition of the Battell book which I had, an annotated version of the original Purchas text, had been published in 1901 by the Hakluyt Society of London, that remarkable organization which for more than a hundred fifty years now has been bringing forth edited versions of the great exploration narratives. And I had not read more than a few pages when I began coming across words out of the special Mulla-Mulgars vocabulary that was so deeply emblazoned in my memory and my imagination—spelled differently, sometimes, but of the same sound. Here was the Ollicondie tree, and here was Mokisso, meaning a spirit, and here was the chieftain Imbe Calandola, and many more.

So I knew that Walter de la Mare must have come upon the narrative of Andrew Battell of Leigh long before me, some time between its republication by the Hakluyt Society in 1901 and the appearance of The Three Royal Mulgars (as it was originally called) nine years later, and had drawn upon Battell’s account of his African adventures for many of the details and much of the vocabulary of his own fantastic novel. But he had not chosen to devote the book to Battell’s own story, strange as it was, only to make him an incidental character in the shimmering work of imaginative beauty that he would write.

I jotted a note to myself, there in 1962: “Tell the story of Andrew Battell yourself.”

And what a story it was! Battell’s account, dictated in England in his old age, spanned only 61 pages in the Hakluyt Society book—the rest of the volume was given over to narratives of other Europeans who had been in Angola at about the same time—but, episodic and incomplete though it is, it amazed me with its richness and power. It is the first record of European travels in the interior of Black Africa. Battell, a seaman who came from the once—important port of Leigh in Essex, had sailed for Africa in May, 1589, had been captured by the Portuguese and used by them as a pilot on trading vessels traveling along the coast of Angola, had eventually escaped into the hinterlands, and had spent several years living among a cannibal tribe, the Jagas or Jaqqas, before eventually returning to the Portuguese settlements and, after an absence of twenty years, making his way back to England.

“Of Andrew Battell’s history,” said E.G. Ravenstein, the editor of the Hakluyt Society text, “we know nothing, except what may be gathered from his ‘Adventures’ and an occasional reference to him by his friend, neighbor, and editor, the Rev. Samuel Purchas.” Which set me to wondering: what could he have been like, this Englishman who spent two decades in the tropic heat of Angola, and dwelled for years amidst a flesh-eating tribe that must have seemed to him to be the next thing to devils? Would it be possible to re-invent such a man from the skimpy evidence at hand—to write his own memoir at full length, filling in all that this simple seaman had left unsaid, and much more that he would never have dreamed of saying?

The appeal to me was a three-fold one. On one level I would be paying homage to that book of Walter de la Mare that had been so essential in the shaping of my childish imagination. On another, I would be re-creating the lost world of British sixteenth-century maritime exploration and discovery, in which I had so passionate an interest. And, finally, I would be writing a kind of science fiction novel—for science fiction was the main pursuit of my life—in which I would be inventing not the future but the past, and bringing to life an alien civilization every bit as strange as those that had been imagined by the great science-fiction writers.

It was almost twenty years—a period nearly as long as that of Andrew Battell’s captivity in Africa—before I could realize my dream. Perhaps that is just as well, for I doubt that I had the literary resources, back there in 1962, to have sustained a book so large and ambitious as Lord of Darkness was to be. But the idea remained with me, year after year; and, year after year, I gathered collateral material for it, accounts of other travelers in the Congo and adjacent regions and all manner of anthropological and ethnographic lore. Finally, in 1981, I proposed the book to my American publisher at the time, Donald I. Fine of Arbor House.

I was, then in my mid-forties and at the peak of my powers as a writer. Science-fiction was what I was known for, though I had written some non-fiction books of what I called “romantic geography” as well, a book about the quest for El Dorado and another about the fabled kingdom of Prester John and others of that sort; now I in- tended to combine the two strands of my career with a major historical novel. To my surprise Don Fine was unenthusiastic. It was not that he found fault with the book I described to him; it was only, he said, that in the present state of American publishing, writers tended to become known for working in a single category of fiction—this one for science fiction, this one for horror stories, this one for political thrillers—and both readers and booksellers became confused and even hostile when a well-known writer did something that lay outside the category for which he was known. Beside, he said, there no longer was a readership in the United States for the serious historical novel, only for crudely written tales of tempestuous erotic adventure.

I was disappointed and dismayed—so dismayed that Don Fine, who understood the emotional makeup of writers very well, saw that I was determined to write Lord of Darkness no matter what, and would write it for someone else if he did not choose to publish it. So we arrived at a compromise: I would be allowed to do Lord of Dark-ness, yes, but also I would write for him a book called Valentine Pontifex, a sequel to my science-fiction novel Lord Valentine’s Castle, which was and remains my best-known and most commercially successful book. If he lost money on Lord of Darkness, well, he would earn it back on Valentine Pontifex.

So it was agreed, and so it happened. Early in 1982 I began at last writing Lord of Darkness. I based the book on Andrew Battell’s little 61-page narrative, and indeed I incorporated virtually every word of his account in my own manuscript of nearly 900 pages; but I vastly expanded and transformed Battell’s tale in the course of trying to recreate his personality and the intensity and quality of his strange experiences in Africa. I wrote the book virtually at fever heat, day after day for long hours, and by October of 1982 I was done: the longest novel I have ever written, and one of the most difficult to do, and for me perhaps the most rewarding as an artist. The style I chose to use was a modified Elizabethan prose, archaic but not incomprehensible to the modern reader. I took care to use no anachronistic words (or very few) that would have been unknown in Andrew Battell’s own time, and the rhythm and structure of every sentence was meant to be distinctly sixteenth-century in tone. It was as close as I could come, twentieth-century man that I am, to write the memoir of a sixteenth-century English mariner in his own words, though I know that the real Andrew Battell could never have written any book even remotely resembling the novel I created in his name.

In the end I was right to have written the book, which stands alone in my work, I think, in its power and scope; and Don Fine was right to have expressed misgivings about publishing it, for it did not do at all well in the American bookstores. Booksellers, recognizing the name of its author as that of a science fiction writer, put the book in the science fiction departments of their stores; and the science fiction readers, picking it up and looking through it, saw nothing in it about spaceships or time machines or other planets, and put it back on the shelf again. Meanwhile the readers of historical novels, never thinking to look for the book among the science fiction works, failed to find it at all. And so it passed quickly from sight in my own country, although it has won a steady and devoted readership in translated form elsewhere. At last it returns to print in English after having been unavailable for many years.

Thanks indirectly to Walter de la Mare’s remarkable novel of the three royal monkeys, Andrew Battell has been part of my life for many decades. And now, I hope, he will become part of yours.

—Robert Silverberg