review of
Sax Rohmer's Tales of Secret Egypt
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 17, 2013

My old friend Blaster Al Ackerman, the great writer, cartoonist, mail artist, & trickster philosopher, died on March 17th, 2013. That got me to scanning most of what I have by him in my archive in preparation for a possible bk revolving around our correspondence from 1980 to 1986. THAT led to my making an animated slide-show movie called "This Will Explain" intended for premier at the upcoming memorial event in BalTimOre at Normal's called the "Blasterthon". Somewhere in there I wrote something called "The Truth Can Now Be Told" re Blaster that was published online thanks to Rupert Wondolowski at the Shattered Wig blog spot ( http://shatteredwig.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-truth-can-now-be-told-by.html ) & on HTMLGIANT blog spot ( http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/blaster-al-ackerman-19xx-2013/ ). As part of this, Rupert posted a scan of a large postcard illustration from my archive of "Sax Rohmer's Widow" the verso's collage message. This got me to thinking about Rohmer. Shortly thereafter, I found this 1920 edition on sale at Copacetic Comics so, w/ Blaster in mind, I got it.

On the title page, it says: "Author of "The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu," "The Return of Fu-Manchu," "The Hand of Fu-Manchu," "The Yellow Claw," Etc.". This didn't bode well for me insofar as it reeks of 'Yellow Peril' popaganda [pun intended]. As I very vaguely recall the character of Fu-Manchu from old movies, he's the archetypal diabolical criminal character - similar, perhaps, to Dr. Mabuse - an unusually tall Chinese man. Wd Tales of Secret Egypt be like Mickey Spillane w/ Egyptians instead of Communists as the villains? Thankfully, no - at least not exactly.

The bk's divided into 2 parts: "Tales of Abu Tabah" & "Other Tales". The 'protagonist' of "Tales of Abu Tabah" is Kernaby Pasha - the latter word being an honorific in Egypt at the time equivalent to the British "Lord" - presumably applied here to the Kernaby character not b/c he occupies any political position but b/c he's a wealthy Englishmen living in Egypt. Kernaby Pasha represents the firm of "Messrs. Moses, Murphy & Co., of Birmingham" & is a thoroughly greedy scoundrel. As such, he's an anti-hero - Abu Tabah, on the other hand, is gradually built up to be a person who's not only much more clever but also a person w/ much greater integrity. SO, even tho these are more stories of the "Orient", as w/ the Fu-Manchu stories, there seems to be no 'Yellow Peril' here. Given that Rohmer (aka Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward) was born in Birmingham, Kernaby's depiction as a thieving businessman seems more indicative of a 'British Peril'.

Literary precedents for Rohmer might be Edgar Allen Poe, Theophile Gautier, & Bram Stoker. On the wikipedia bio Arthur Conan Doyle & M. P. Shiel are listed.

The 1st tale begins thusly: "The duhr, or noonday call to prayer, had just sounded from the minarets of the mosques of kalaun and Es-Nasir, and I was idly noting the negligible effect of the adan upon the occupants of the neighboring shops" - this boded well for me b/c I detest religion & see it as a primary cause of the imbecility & brutality that plagues this planet - as such, I'm glad to read of people ignoring the imposition of Pavlovian dogmatic behavior.

In at least 2 places in this bk, Rohmer has characters claiming that Cairo is "as safe as in London and safer than in Paris" (p 5). I know little of Rohmer's life. Born in England, died in the US. No mention of his ever having been to Egypt. Perhaps he went there, perhaps he didn't, perhaps his depiction of Cairo is based entirely on reading bks about it or some such.

Given that the US (where I live) seems to be mostly in conflict w/ Arab cultures these days (9/11, invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq, etc) & given my extremely limited knowledge of these cultures, even Rohmer's fictionally skewed take on them is welcome - if only as a look at what a popular British writer of a century ago chose to focus on. There're such things as "the sacred burko of the Seyyideh Nefiseh" (p 13) The contemporary transliteration being "burka or burqa" meaning a veil or full body cloak worn by some Muslim women. Rohmer's depiction of the veil is consistently as an alluring feminine accoutrement, my perception of it is more as a suffocatingly repressive tool of the patriarchy.

Kernaby tries to exploit the confused whereabouts of this veil by plotting for his company to "dispose of three duplicates through various channels to wealthy collectors whose enthusiasms were greater than their morality." (p 16)

Rohmer has fun w/ Muslim insults but, alas, it seems that anti-Semitism is taken for granted as an Arab characteristic: ""He is a Jew, and a son of Jews, who eats without washing ! a devourer of pork, and an unclean insect," she cried." Ever on the alert for references to anarchy (usually casually misused by many writers in the same way that Rohmer appears to've casually misused depictions of Chinese people), I was a bit perplexed to read this: "there was nothing about the well-dressed after-dinner throng filling Shepheard's that night to have aroused misgiving in the mind of a cinema anarchist." (p 31)

Rohmer does seem to've 'done his homework' somewhat before writing this material. In 2 places he even uses hieroglyphs. E. A. Wallis Budge, the keeper of Egyptian & Assyrian Antiquities in The British Museum, wd've published his various version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead by the time Rohmer wrote this so I reckon Budge's work might've been a handy source for Rohmer. However, in an admittedly superficial thumbing-thru of my 1960 edition of that, I see no hieroglyph that looks like a seated Anubis in profile holding an Ankh. In Rohmer's tale, this hieroglyph is part of a warning to Kernaby Pasha from Abu Tabah. Perhaps a conventional interpretation of the hieroglyph wd be that Anubis, the jackal-headed god associated with mummification and the afterlife, is holding the key to life - perhaps the key to immortality. It's hard for me to tell here, being no expert on such things, whether Rohmer is actually displaying 'occult' knowledge or just bullshitting.

Rohmer did, obviously have access to some vocabulary that must've been somewhat esoteric in his time (& is STILL esoteric to me): "I recognized that I was about to be treated to an exhibition of darb el-mendel, Abu Tabah being evidently a sahhar, or adept in the art of er-roohanee." (p 52) This strikes me as potentially authentic - but how wd I 'know'?!

Rohmer also references the Iranian poet Hafez: "It was like some gorgeous illustration to a poem by Hafiz, only lacking the figure at the window." (p 98) But the author he may reference the most often isn't Persian or Arabic but British: "In his story Beyond the Pale, Rudyard Kipling has trounced the man who inquires too deeply into native life" (p 114); "It was in those days, then, that I learned as your Rudyard Kipling has also learned that "East is East"; it was in those days that I came face to face with that "mystery of Egypt" about which so much is written, and always will be written, but concerning which so few people, so very few people, know anything whatever." (p 170) "Every Anglo-Indian that I met seemed a figure from the pages of Kipling". (p 195)

Then again, maybe it's "Ibn Sina of Bokhara": ""the perfume was presented in a gold vase, together with the manner of its preparation, by the great wizard and physician Ibn Sina of Bokhara" (Avicenna)." (p 119) "He was said to possess the secrets of Geber and of Avicenna—the great Ibn Sina of Bokhara ; to possess the Philosophers' Stone and the Elixir Vitae." (p 228)

Just as Rohmer seems to have a scholarly bent when spelling 'Avicenna', so, too, does he say in a footnote that "Bedouins" is the "incorrect but familiar spelling". (p 170)

There's apparently some uncertainty of whether Rohmer had any connection to occult societies of his time. There is, tho, as is apparent in his writings, a certainty that he had an ongoing interest in such things:

"You may have heard of the Bedouin song, the 'Mizmune':

""Ya men melek ana deri waat sa jebb
Id el' ish hoos' a beb hatsa azat ta leb."

"You may have heard how when it is sung in a certain fashion, flowers drop from their stalks?" (p 190)

I'm wary of the word "oriental" & Rohmer seems to use it in a way that conflates Asian & Arabic cultures together into an 'exoticism' (in relation to the 'western' world, of course) that I find highly suspect: "I approached the native station master, with whom I was acquainted, and put to him a number of questions respecting his important functions—in which I was not even mildly interested. But to the Oriental mind a direct inquiry is an affront, almost an insult; and to have inquired bluntly the name of the deceased and the manner of his death would have been the best way to have learned nothing whatever about the matter." (p 40) Given that "orient" apparently means "east' & that the world is divided by some into "east" & "west", what I mainly find strange about this is the subjective relativity of it - ie: these terms are only relative to each other: the "West" is east of the "East" & the "East" is west of the "West" if that relativity is perceived from a different direction. After all, the globe is round - it's not like we're talking about the left & right of a bounded square or some such.

Kernaby, being always on the lookout to make as much money as possible to someone else's detriment, still has an ethical code that's somewhat amusing & possibly in keeping w/ a 'stuffy' Englishman: "I disapprove of your morals, Malaglou. My own code may be peculiar, but it does not embrace hashish dealing". (p 82) After a description of a costume party, Kernaby states "Doubtless it was all very amusing, but, personally, I stand by my commonplace dress-suit, having, perhaps, rather a ridiculous sense of dignity." (p 97) Later, he justifies some industrial espionage (""We would ask you," ran the communication, "to renew your inquiries into the particular composition of the perfume 'Breath of Allah'" - p 115) as "socialistic": "Yet I am at a loss to see where my perfidy lay ; for my outlook is sufficiently socialistic to cause me to regard with displeasure the conserving by an individual of something which, without loss to himself, might reasonably be shared by the community." (p 131)

In a later, non Abu Tabah tale, the subject of slavery in 20th century Cairo comes up:

""He has many slaves. His agent in Mecca procures for him the pick of the market."

""But there is no such thing as slavery in Egypt!"

""Do the slaves know that, effendim? he asked simply. "Those who have tongues are never seen outside the walls—unless they are guarded by those who have no tongue." - pp 246-247

Indeed. In how many places in this world does slavery still exist? & do the slaves themselves even get a chance to know that it's illegal?!

"That the queen under whom Egyptian art came to the apogee of perfection should thus have been treated by her successors ; that no perfect figure of the wise, famous, and beautiful Hatasu should have been spared to posterity ; that he very cartouche should have been ruthlessly removed from every inscription upon which it appeared" (p 267) is explained on Wikisource thusly: "All that we know is that she disappears from history in about her fortieth year, and that her brother and successor, the third Thothmes, actuated by a strong and settled animosity, caused her name to be erased, as far as possible, from all her monuments." - http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ancient_Egypt_(Rawlinson)/Queen_Hatasu_and_her_Mer...

The mere fact that reading the above-quoted passage in "In the Valley of the Sorceress" prompted me to do even this tiny bit of research makes Tales of Secret Egypt good reading for me. Alas, in my copy of the bk, pp 268-269, 272-273, 276-277, & 280-281 are blank - making the mystery even more mysterious (altho filling in the blanks wasn't very hard).

"I once read a work by Pierre de l'Ancre, dealing with the Black Sabbaths of the Middle Ages" (p 275) "Pierre de Rosteguy de Lancre or Pierre de l'Ancre, Lord of De Lancre (1553–1631), was the French judge of Bordeaux who conducted a massive witch-hunt in Labourd in 1609. In 1582 he was named judge in Bordeaux, and in 1608 King Henry IV of France commanded him to put an end to the practice of witchcraft in Labourd, in the French part of the Basque Country, where over four months he sentenced to death several dozen persons." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Lancre ) More research I wdn't've done w/o Rohmer's arousing my curiosity.

I even found the final tale, "Pomegranate Flower", worthy of Boccaccio's The Decameron or of the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Whether this latter is really a compliment or not might depend on whether one ignores that these tales run on for hundreds of pages w/ dreary fundamentalist war propaganda.

I'd like to read a bk like this written by an Arab writer about New York City or some such. It wd help me get a clearer perspective on the ways in wch Rohmer (& others) romanticize & distort cultures that he's not a part of in order to make entertaining & exoticizing fiction.

By the by, I don't know whether this is available as a hard-copy bk anymore but it IS available online here: http://archive.org/stream/talesofsecretegy00rohm/talesofsecretegy00rohm_djvu.txt ( )