I was going into the black mysterious darkness, peopled by ten thousand cruel foes.
(Davie Crawfurd penetrating the headquarters of the great black rebellion, Prester John page 99)

John Buchan (1875 to 1940) was absolutely determined to be a writer, and started being published while still at university in the 1890s. Prester John was Buchan’s sixth published novel but the first to reach a wide readership, establishing him as a writer of fast-paced adventures in exotic settings.

The historical Prester John

Between about the 12th and 17th centuries stories circulated throughout Europe of a legendary Christian patriarch and king ruling a fabulous kingdom somewhere in ‘the Orient’ named Prester John. At first Prester John’s kingdom was imagined to be in India, later its location moved to Central Asia. As European explorers, starting with the Portuguese in the 16th century, discovered Africa, Prester John’s mythical kingdom was relocated there, starting with the little-known coastal kingdom of Ethiopia, especially once it was understood that Ethiopia was a Christian enclave in what had been thought to be the Muslim world. Later still the mythical kingdom was said to be located somewhere in the African interior. By the time Buchan’s novel was published, most of Africa had been explored and nobody seriously believed in Prester John any more. He had become one among many children’s legends and stories.

Buchan knew about Africa. Soon after leaving university, he had spent two years in South Africa (1901 to 1903) as political private secretary to Lord Milner, High Commissioner for Southern Africa, who many people held responsible for the Boer War which was in its closing phases (it only ended in May 1902).

He puts this knowledge to good use in a story which deliberately harks back to the Africa adventure stories of Henry Rider Haggard, especially the ones about the hero Allan Quatermain, which were still being published when Prester John came out (Haggard novels continued to be published into the late 1920s). Presumably there’s a whole category of these kinds of fictions, given a name like ‘Imperialist Africa fictions’.

Prester John

Prologue with dancing black minister

The opening chapters of Prester John have a very consciously Scottish tone and vocabulary (see the vocabulary list at the end of this review). It opens in the village of Kirkcaple. The boy hero, David Crawfurd’s father is minister of Portincross. A black preacher comes to town and preaches about racial equality. The boy hero has a gang of mates, including Archie Leslie and Tam Dyke. One night they come across the black preacher on the beach, stripped down walking round a fire, lifting his hands to the moon, having drawn symbols in the sand. They creep up closer to get a better view but one of them makes a sound and the infuriated black man chases them up the gully of the stream which feeds down to the beach. David only escapes by throwing rocks in the pursuer’s face.

Next day they see him again, all respectable in his minister’s clothes, being driven in the free Church minister’s trap, gratified to see he has a swollen eye, and two strips of sticking-plaster on his cheek.

Seven years later

Years pass (on page 72 Arcoll states it is seven years since Davie saw Laputa dancing on the shore at Kirkcaple). David finishes his education in Edinburgh and goes on to the university. Then his father dies and his mother can’t live on the tiny pension he bequeaths. An uncle steps in on the basis that Davie and his mum move to Edinburgh. Days later this uncle says he’s had a word with a friend who runs one of the biggest businesses in South Africa – Mackenzie, Mure and Oldmeadows – and has secured him the job of assistant storekeeper at a place called Blaauwildebeestefontein. The general idea is that Davie will be encouraged to open up trade to the area north, becoming a successful entrepreneur or maybe getting involved with gold and diamonds. Better than sitting on a stool in an Edinburgh office.

The journey out

David makes friends with a couple of fellow Scots aboard the ship heading from Southampton to South Africa but gets the shock of his life when one day he sees the black man he hasn’t seen for years, since the incident on the sand, travelling first class. He discovers his name is the Reverend John Laputa. At one point David eavesdrops Laputa conferring with a bad-tempered, ugly-looking baddie named Henriques (‘that ugly yellow villain’).

The ship docks at several places in South Africa, at Cape Town where Henriques disembarks, then Durban where David meets up with his cousin, then with the local manager of the firm he’s going to be employed by, one Mr Colles. Colles briefs him on the place he’s going and why so many previous employees have quit: it’s in the middle of nowhere, there’s hardly any white men to socialise with, but also there’s some kind of religious centre nearby which natives for miles around go on pilgrimage to.

Lourenço Marques

David then takes a small cargo steamer to Lourenço Marques, the capital of Portuguese East Africa, and discovers that none other than his boyhood friend Tam is the second mate. They have a good yarn but are both amazed when, just before the ship sails, none other than the black minster, Mr Laputa, comes hustling up the gangplank. Tam is indignant when he is turned out of his cabin which is given to this VIP passenger.

When the ship docks at Lourenço Marques, Tam takes him to meet a Mr Aitken, ‘landing-agent for some big mining house on the Rand’ who was born and raised in Fife and turns out to have heard David’s father preach in his young days. Within the skeins of the British Empire was this subsidiary matrix of Scotsmen. Aitken gives him another layer of briefing about Blaauwildebeestefontein, namely 1) it’s the location of a wizard famous among the natives and 2) it’s a centre for diamond smuggling.

Blaauwildebeestefontein

After a journey by rail and then rickety ‘Cape cart’ across arid plains, through dusty gorges, David finally makes it to Blaauwildebeestefontein and he discovers it is a one-horse settlement, with just two solid buildings and twenty native huts. He discovers his boss-to-be, Mr Peter Japp, an old, balding, smelly man, passed out in a room reeking of alcohol on a shabby palette bed.

On the ship out from Britain David had met a small modest schoolteacher who, it turned out, was also heading for Blaauwildebeestefontein. Relations with Japp deteriorate, not least because of the appalling way he treats their girl servant Zeeta, one day whipping her till David seizes the whip (sambok) from his hand and promising to whip him (Japp) within an inch of his life if he does it again. At the same time Japp is strangely servile to the big booming black men who patronise the shop.

David buys a dog off a stony-broke prospector, ‘an enormous Boer hunting-dog, a mongrel in whose blood ran mastiff and bulldog and foxhound, and Heaven knows what beside. In colour it was a kind of brindled red, and the hair on its back grew against the lie of the rest of its coat.’ He takes some breaking in but eventually becomes David’s loyal companion. David names him Colin, and the dog proceeds to follow him everywhere and protect him.

Slowly, David comes to realise he is being spied on by natives hiding among bushes during the day and sometimes coming right up to his bedroom window at night.

Umvelos’

David’s manager, Colles, writes to revive an old idea, that he set up a commercial outpost at a place called Umvelos’. David travels half the way there with a convoy of Boers who he comes to admire as rugged honest country folk. Ample descriptions of the countryside, and of the Boers’ culture, tales of hunting, lore about the local tribes, with a sprinkling of Boer vocabulary. He admires the oldest of the party, a farmer called Coetzee, who’s a crack shot with a rifle.

As he penetrates into Africa, he finds people call him Davie.

The Rooirand

Arriving in his own cart at Umvelos’, Davie gets a mix of Dutchmen and natives to build a shop and house. While they do so he explores the mountainous ridge to the north, known as the Rooirand. An extended passage describing his arduous trek there and then dangerous climbing up cracks and chimneys and whatnot. The most significant event is he has made it back down off the cliffs when he becomes aware of someone moving through the jungle, creeps closer, and observes a black in a leopard skin marching towards the cliff face. But when David makes his way through the jungle to the same rockface he discovers the man has disappeared without a trace. Black magic! He half walks half runs away from the area, back along the road towards Umvelos’ where he rendezvous with one of the black workers from the new shop and homestead who was sent to meet him.

‘Mwanga

David arrives back early at Blaauwildebeestefontein and catches Japp discussing stolen diamonds with the most frequent black visitor to the shop, ‘Mwanga. So Japp is a fence for stolen diamonds! David tells Japp he must write a letter to Colles quitting, then leave and not be found within 20 miles or he’ll report him to the police.

Wardlaw’s premonitions

Davie moves in with Mr Wardlaw the schoolteacher who tells him about his paranoid premonition that the native blacks could rise up and massacre all the whites, as in the Indian Mutiny. There seem to be more blacks around than actually live there and the black kids have all stopped coming to his school. Davie calms him down, but moves his own bed out of direct sight of the window, keeps a loaded shotgun by the bed, and has his massive dog Colin sleep close by.

Days pass and the tension, the sense of being spied on and surrounded increases. Henriques pays a visit to Japp who takes him up to his bedroom but Davie is a building across the road and can’t see what they’re discussing, diamonds or the native insurrection Wardlaw is so worried about?

On a walk with Wardlaw they hear a shiver of drums rolling from north to south, are they war drums? A scribbled note arrives with the cryptic message ‘The Blesbok are changing ground’ (p.65). What does it mean? Davie gathers together all the firearms in the shop, plus some knives.

James Arcoll the spy

Late one cold afternoon (the town is on a berg or mountainside) a broken-down old black beggar appears. Davie kindly gives him some meal but then he invites himself inside, makes sure the door is secure, takes off his wig, washes his face and is transformed into Captain James Arcoll. He is, of course, a British Intelligence Officer (p.75) and, first, quizzes Davie about what he knows, then reveals the situation:

The idea is that Prester John was a real historical conqueror, founder of an empire in Ethiopia, as the generations passed, various successors claimed his title and the specificity of the historical figure blurred into legend. The key point is his power came to be associated with a particular fetish, probably a wooden carving. Chaka who built the great Zulu emperor had it but his successors couldn’t find it.

Ethiopianism

Arcoll has found that a black evangelist has been travelling up and down south Africa, preaching the word but going way beyond that and telling his audiences ‘Africa for the Africans’, claiming they can kick out the whites and establish a great empire again. Also known as Ethiopianism.

Laputa the reincarnation of Prester John

There’s a lot of detail (Arcoll has met Laputa disguised as a native in Africa but formally dressed like a white man in Britain, where he addressed Church gatherings and hobnobbed with MPs) but at his meetings with minor chiefs learns that Laputa considers himself the Umkulunkulu, the reincarnated spirit of Prester John, and he owns the Ndhlondhlo, the great snake necklet of Prester John.

Laputa has been making a fortune from the illegal diamond trade, working partly through Henriques, generating a fortune which he has spent arming the different tribes from the Zambezi to the Cape. Davie is stunned when Arcoll tells him the native rising is planned for the day after tomorrow! BUT Davie goes to bed happy and no longer scared. Arcoll has told him that, although Laputa has organised the tribes to rebel he, Arcoll, has also established a network of a) informers in those same tribes and b) alerted the authorities and settlers who are ready to rise up once the rebellion kicks off. So Davie is no longer frit because a) a leader has appeared who is going to take control, and b) far from being alone he’s discovered he’s a part of a huge co-ordinated army.

The plan

Arcoll knows that Laputa is scheduled to meet Henriques next day at Davie’s store, so the conspirators decide it will look perfectly natural if Davie turns up there but surreptitiously tries to gather as much intel as possible about the uprising.

To his horror, en route Davie encounters Laputa. Worth noting that Laputa, despite claiming to be the reincarnation of Prester John, has a far from classical African physiognomy, for Davie recognises ‘the curved nose, the deep flashing eyes, and the cruel lips of my enemy of the Kirkcaple shore.’

Davie the storekeeper

Somehow Laputa gains in stature and presence through the narrative. Davie now observes that he is a massive 6 foot 6 tall, and of ‘noble’ proportions. When Laputa says he’s heading for the store, Davie plays the fool and says he is the storekeeper. He gives Laputa a chair to sit on, shares dinner with him, even gives him a fine cigar, prattles on about how he believes the blacks are fine fellows, better than ‘the dirty whites’, how he hopes Africans will take Africa back for themselves etc, all designed to ingratiate himself with the man he knows is leader of the rebellion. In return Laputa politely warns him to leave this remote outpost and head back to ‘the Berg’, and not tomorrow, but tonight!

Davie spies

Later, Henriques arrives. He and Laputa confer in the outhouse and Davie sneaks through the cellar to eavesdrop. He’s nearly discovered but rushes back to the store and pretends to be dead drunk. Henriques wants to murder Davie in his supposed sleep, but Laputa stays his hand. Soon as they’ve left, Davie scribbles everything he’s heard about Laputa’s plans on a scrap of paper which he ties to the dog’s collar and tells it to run back to Blaauwildebeestefontein. Then Davie steals one of the horses and sets off north to the rendezvous point Laputa had mentioned.

The secret ceremony

Here he arrives and is greeted by black guards and led a merry tour into the face of the cliff, up narrow passages, emerging onto a ledge with a stone bridge across a chasm in which a fierce river flowed, then further in into the mountain till he emerges in a huge open space, one wall of which is a thundering waterfall.

We are, in other words, in the Land of Fantasy, a fantastical setting almost as dazzling as the Lost City in ‘She’. There are some 200 blacks gathered in a circle round an old blind black man with a circlet of gold on his forehead who is obviously ‘The Keeper of the Snake’ who Arcoll described as a key player in the ritual of anointing Laputa the rebel leader. Davie has been accepted because he claimed to be a messenger from Laputa, and he knew the password (‘Immanuel’) which he’s overheard Laputa sharing with Henriques.

Davie witnesses the impressive ritual of the reincarnation of Laputa with the spirit of Prester John, the daubing on the forehead of all present with the blood of a sacrificed goat, and the bestowal on Laputa of an ancient necklace of priceless rubies once worn by the Queen of Sheba, taken from an ivory box

During all this the narrative tells us that Davie is still only nineteen years old! (p.105)

To Davie’s amazement the priest and then Laputa invoke not pagan African gods but Christ and Christianity, a wild incantation, a long recital of glorious rulers from African history – ‘I was horribly impressed’. Once installed, Laputa delivers an awe-inspiring sermon listing all the infamies of the white man and calling on his black brothers to rise and overthrow them. Davie finds himself stirred and displaying fascist tendencies:

I longed for a leader who should master me and make my soul his own, as this man mastered his followers.

(He likes to be mastered. A lot later, when he meets up again and is close to passing out, Arcoll fixes him with his gaze: ‘Arcoll, still holding my hands, brought his face close to mine, so that his clear eyes mastered and constrained me,’ p.164.)

A key part of the vows Laputa makes is that for the next 24 hours nobody will commit any act of violence. As I read this I thought this was pretty much to ensure Davie’s safe escape or at least guarantee that he doesn’t get bumped off when he is discovered, as he surely soon must be.

Then the leaders of all the tribes take turns to kneel and swear allegiance to Laputa. Buchan gives a vivid sense of the varied appearance and appurtenances of the different tribesmen:

Such a collection of races has never been seen. There were tall Zulus and Swazis with ringkops and feather head-dresses. There were men from the north with heavy brass collars and anklets; men with quills in their ears, and earrings and nose-rings; shaven heads, and heads with wonderfully twisted hair; bodies naked or all but naked, and bodies adorned with skins and necklets. Some were light in colour, and some were black as coal; some had squat negro features, and some thin, high-boned Arab faces. But in all there was the air of mad enthusiasm.

Finally, it’s Davie’s turn to advance from the shadows to take the vow and, of course, first Henriques and then Laputa recognise him as the storekeeper, denounce him, he is seized by a hundred hands, beaten and passes out.

Tied to a horse

When he comes to Davie finds he is, of course, bound hand and foot and tied to the horse of none other than Mwanga, the domineering black who Japp fawned over and Davie chased out of the store. Now he has his revenge, gloating over Davie’s capture. The entire black army is marching south for a rendezvous with more forces at a place called Dupree’s Drift. Haggard and almost delirious from exhaustion and lack of food, nonetheless Davie estimates the black army at maybe 20,000 strong (!).

Finally there’s a break in the marching and a ‘savage’ looking native comes to check his bonds and give him some food but then whispers and turns out to be a messenger from Arcoll. Improbably enough his dog, Colin, got back to Blaauwildebeestefontein, Arcoll found him and read the message i.e. that the black army was going to march south to Dupree’s Drift. The messenger tells Davie that Arcoll will start firing just before the army gets to the drift at which point the native will cut his bonds and Davie can scamper free.

Along comes Henriques who stands gloating over him but then leans down and whispers that, actually, he is loyal to the white man’s cause, that he never killed the Boers he claimed to have, and that he’s on Davie’s side. I thought this might be an interesting development but Davie lets fly a deluge of insults and accusations and Henriques spits in his face before ordering a nearby African to tighten Davie’s bonds.

Henriques, looking tall despite being described in the text as short and slight, gloating over our hero, Davie, looking surprisingly fresh-faced for someone the text describes as dirty and fainting with hunger. Illustration by Henry Clarence Pitz (1910)

The ambush at Dupree’s Drift

At sunset they reach Dupree’s Drift and the army are half-way across the ford, and the litter carrying the priest bearing the ivory box containing the ruby necklace are precisely half-way across, when firing breaks out from a bluff on the other side. It is Arcoll and the white men, as arranged. As promised the African leading Davie falls to cutting through his bonds. However, firing hits the litter bearers from somewhere much closer. Once Davie is free he realises it’s Henriques who has only one motive, to seize the priceless necklace. He is a crack shot and shoots several of the litter guards and then the old priest himself.

It is now almost dark and Davie trails Henriques into the shallow water, watches him take the ivory box from the dead priest’s hand, open it and extract the ruby necklace. He is just standing up with it when Davie cracks him one on the chin, knocking him out, grabs the necklace, stuffs it in his breeches’ pocket. But instead of running downstream and crossing somewhere safe to join Arcoll’s men on the bluff, in the heat of the moment, scared by the size of the black army and the fact Laputa was riding back across the drift towards him, Davie bolted back up the track they’d come along.

Davie’s flight

After the initial buzz of the battle and his punch have calmed down, he realises he has a march of something like 30 miles to the West to ‘the Berg’ or the foothills to the mountains, which he regards as ‘white man’s territory’, ‘white men and civilisation’. For some reason the cool hills he regards as ‘white’ and the hot plains as ‘black’.

An exciting account of Davie’s feverish scared trek across wild African country, involving crossing two rivers, in one of which he manages to lose the revolver he’d nicked from Henriques. The stars are bright in the big black sky.

It was very eerie moving, a tiny fragment of mortality, in that great wide silent wilderness, with the starry vault, like an impassive celestial audience, watching with many eyes.

Davie is caught

Dawn shows him he is not far from the first glen which will lead him up into the safety of the mountains but at that moment he is cut off by black scouts who have beaten him to it. He makes it into the glen and climbs a good way through its varied terrain including jungle, but comes out to see a number of black figures spread out ahead of him. He slips into a side glen, slips off the necklace and places it in a cleft in rocks which gives onto a still shallow pool. Then he returns to face the men who are from Machudi’s tribe and explain they’ve been ordered to capture and bring Davie to Laputa. They treat him well, giving him food and letting him sleep before they set off back east and south to the place Laputa had appointed for meeting place of the tribes, Inanda’s Kraal.

At Inanda’s Kraal

He is too weak to walk and has to be carried in a litter which Machudi’s men efficiently construct. Description of the long trek and final arrival at Inanda’s Krall. Here all is pandemonium because the 24 hours of peace the vow pledged the army to make has lapsed and now scores of natives crowd round Davie threatening him with their assegais or spears. He sees Laputa surrounded by lesser chiefs and strides boldly over towards him. Laputa weighs him up, says it was folly to try and escape and tells his men to take Davie to his kya or hut, but Davie makes an impassioned attack on Henriques as the real traitor. Henriques lurches forward and goes for his pistol to shoot Davie. In that second Colin leaps forward and pushes Henriques to the ground but the Portuguese gets his gun hand free and shoots Colin three times. End of faithful hound.

Davie leaps forward but is soundly beaten and pricked by some of the spears before a final blow knocks him senseless.

Davie bargains for his freedom

When he comes round it is in a darkened hut being spoken to softly by Laputa who describes in detail the sadistic tortured death he is about to meet. Davie responds that Laputa needs the necklace. Laputa loses his temper and says is Davie so stupid as to believe his power derives from a petty trinket. He has the ivory box and if he chooses not to open it nobody will be any the wiser.

“Imbecile, do you think my power is built on a trinket? When you are in your grave, I will be ruling a hundred millions from the proudest throne on earth.” (p.147)

Davie is inspired to offer him a deal. Give him his life and he will lead him to where he hid the necklace. Even if his men torture him he wouldn’t be able to describe where it is, because he doesn’t know the country well enough. Laputa hesitates then accepts the deal. He has Davie blindfolded and shackled to his horse which he then rides at a slow trot so that Davie can just about keep up, stumbling and nearly falling.

Shattered David Crawfurd tethered to the horse of Laputa as they go off in search of Prester John’s necklace. Note Laputa’s angular features, more like a native American than an African. Illustration by Henry Clarence Pitz (1910)

Journey back to the Berg

It’s a long trek. At one point Davie asks Laputa how, as a sincere Christian, he can unleash a bloodbath against the whites. Laputa replies briskly that a) Christ turfed the moneychangers out of the temple and said he came to bring a sword b) Christianity in the intervening centuries has had many bloody reformations c) the Africans are ‘his people’.

After a long trek with various incidents they arrive at the glen where Davie hid the necklace. He has to be untied to clamber up the rocks and waterfalls to the pool where he hid it. He finds it and hands it to Laputa who transforms into ‘savage’ mode, demanding that Davie bow down to it.

At the sight of the great Snake he gave a cry of rapture. Tearing it from me, he held it at arm’s length, his face lit with a passionate joy. He kissed it, he raised it to the sky; nay, he was on his knees before it. Once more he was the savage transported in the presence of his fetish. He turned to me with burning eyes. “Down on your knees,” he cried, “and reverence the Ndhlondhlo. Down, you impious dog, and seek pardon for your sacrilege.” (p.157)

Davie escapes

Laputa’s anger distract him while Davie backs away up a ledge and works loose a big rock which he topples into the pool momentarily blinding Laputa with the splash. In that moment Davie is away up a ‘chimney’ in the cliff, staggers out onto the grassy top, leaps onto Laputa’s horse and, as the latter fires shots at him, gallops away, to safety!

I found the bridle, reached for the stirrups, and galloped straight for the sunset and for freedom. (p.159)

Pulp fiction (or what Buchan in the dedication to The Thirty-Nine Steps calls ‘shockers’) delivers simple, simple narrative pleasures.

Looking back

He rides through meadows as the sun sets, in a kind of transport of delight, delivered from the constant fear of death that has hung over him. Reminiscent of another boys’ adventure story, ‘Moonfleet’, which I’ve just read, the narrator is obviously writing some considerable time later, as a mature man looking back on the immature actions of his 19-year-old self.

Remember that I was little more than a lad, and that I had faced death so often of late that my mind was all adrift. (p.160)

Davie at Arcoll’s camp

But after the initial euphoria wears off he realises he has a duty to find Arcoll’s camp and warn him that Laputa is nearby and cut off from his army. An hour passes till his horse stumbles out of woods onto a path where a figure approaches. It is a white man who helps exhausted Davie out of the saddle then he hears the voice of Aitken, the Scot he met at Lourenco Marques. By luck (!) Arcoll’s camp is only 200 yards away and soon Davie is telling his story, but through a tide of weariness, barely able to remember. But he conveys the crucial fact that Laputa is without a horse, on foot and will have to cross the very road Davie has just reached i.e. if Arcoll can line the road with his men they can capture Laputa and prevent an Armageddon of bloodshed!

Davie passes out and so has the rest of the adventure told him later by Arcoll and Aitken. The trope of his narrative being set down much later is emphasised by mention of a two-volume history of the abortive rising which he is looking at as he writes i.e. it must be some years later.

The war against the rebels

Long story short, the various forces (Boer commandos, farmers, loyal blacks) deployed along the road force Laputa to try all kinds of angles to get south but in the end he is turned north, joining up at one point with Henriques, and the pair are forced all the way back to the cavern

Meanwhile Davie sleeps for 24 hours but has fever dreams in which he, spookily and supernaturally, sees Laputa meet up with Henriques, the pair swimming the river, arriving at the very store he had set up and spied on them at, then heading further north. In his exhausted feverish sate, Davie knows they are heading for the holy cave and feels it somehow his duty to find and confront them. He staggers out of the tent where he’s been sleeping, orders an astonished native to fetch him the same horse that he arrived on, and then he’s off for the final climactic 20 pages of the book.

Back at the secret cavern

He rides in a dream but nerveless, cold, sober, unafraid. He thinks he is riding to meet his God-given destiny and that he, Henriques and Laputa will somehow all died in the holy cavern. After riding all night he arrives at the cliff face where he had been brought four long days ago.

I marched up the path to the cave, very different from the timid being who had walked the same road three nights before. Then my terrors were all to come: now I had conquered terror and seen the other side of fear. I was centuries older. (p.175)

At the entrance to the path up to the cave Davie discovers Henriques’ body, His neck has been broken. But there is blood on his clothes and he finds his revolver nearby with two chambers empty. Henriques must have shot Laputa, hoping at the last to get his hands on the black man’s accumulated treasure, and wounded him, but Laputa still sprang at him and strangled him to death.

Vivid description of Davie retracing his steps through the various obstacles, the secret stone entrance, up the narrow steps, across the perilous rock bridge etc, and finally into the cavern. Here he finds Laputa badly wounded and bleeding from his side, kneeling before the ashes of the fire which had burned so brightly during the ceremony.

Death of Laputa

It takes Laputa ten pages to die during which he a) shows David all the chests and coffers filled with gold and jewels which he has amassed b) throws into the abyss the stone bridge over the river, cutting off Davie’s escape and c) maunders on at length about how he would have created a legendary kingdom and ruled his people wisely and well. Now his race will go down as drudges and slaves. At which he ceremonially clasps John’s necklace round his neck and throws himself into the cascade of water which runs along one wall of the cavern and is gone. A grand, romantic ending.

Davie climbs to freedom

At first Davie is overcome with lassitude and indifference sitting staring at the cascade. Only slowly does the will to live return. Then there is an epic description of his heroic act of climbing up the rock face, onto a tiny spur of rock jutting out of the cascade and so by slow painful ascent eventually up out of the cleft in the rock and into the joy of sunlight and the joy of lying on fresh turf. Saved!

It is very noticeable the way Buchan associates the binary worlds of darkness and light, the subterranean cave and the sunlit plateau, with savagery and civilisation.

Here was a fresh, clean land, a land for homesteads and orchards and children. All of a sudden I realized that at last I had come out of savagery. The burden of the past days slipped from my shoulders. I felt young again, and cheerful and brave. Behind me was the black night, and the horrid secrets of darkness. Before me was my own country, for that loch and that bracken might have been on a Scotch moor. (p.189)

Going over to the external cliff face he looks down, far down to the foot of the cliff, and sees the body of Henriques and two whites beside it, his friends Aitken and Wardle. Saved.

Epilogue

The uprising continued but without Laputa’s leadership degenerated into guerrilla warfare, inevitable white victory followed by white reprisals and then the magnanimous gesture of an official amnesty for the chiefs involved. Davie is brought to Arcoll and tells him about his escape and about the treasure. Thus Arcoll learns that Laputa is dead and is silent a long time. As for the treasure, he says it should be Davie’s reward.

The final act comes as Davie is involved in debate about what to do about the rebel army now surrounded in Inkana’s Kraal. The white forces could shell them then attack, but Davie has a brainwave. Rather than a bloodbath Davie suggests they walk in under a flag of truce and offer the rebels a decent deal – and this is what they do.

They’re allowed in and Arcoll makes a speech to the chiefs about the white man’s justice but it doesn’t move them. In desperation he calls on Davie to talk and Davie delivers a moving account of his last encounter with Laputa and the death of their leader. He describes it with respect and the chiefs respect him for it. One by one they lay down their arms.

And so the entire army is disarmed section by section, a prolonged process lasting months. Davie then delivers a controversial passage about the white man’s burden:

Yet it was an experience for which I shall ever be grateful, for it turned me from a rash boy into a serious man. I knew then the meaning of the white man’s duty. He has to take all risks, recking nothing of his life or his fortunes, and well content to find his reward in the fulfilment of his task.

That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies.

Moreover, the work made me pitiful and kindly. I learned much of the untold grievances of the natives, and saw something of their strange, twisted reasoning. Before we had got Laputa’s army back to their kraals, with food enough to tide them over the spring sowing, Aitken and I had got sounder policy in our heads than you will find in the towns, where men sit in offices and see the world through a mist of papers. (p.198)

This passage combines the patronising patriarchalism of the colonial mentality with, towards the end, the endlessly repeated complaint from white men on the ground about their higher-ups not understanding the reality of colonial rule. This is a note sounded again and again by Kipling but also, 60 years later, attributed to the white colonial officials in Chinua Achebe’s Africa trilogy.

Finally, Arcoll supervises white soldiers blowing open the secret rock entrance to the steps up to the cavern, they throw planks across the chasm, and so liberate the boxes of treasure. The government intervenes and diamond companies lay claim to the stolen diamonds, but Davie had become a popular hero especially for the parlay with the chiefs which persuaded them to end the uprising without bloodshed and so he is awarded some of the gold and diamonds to the eventual tune of a quarter of a million pounds.

Davie goes home

He takes the train to Cape Town puzzled and perplexed by his sudden fortune, wondering what to do. He bumps into his old friend Tam who he treats to a luxury dinner. It’s a way of rehabilitating himself (and the reader) back from the realm of Adventure into the prosaic world of the everyday. We feel like we are being eased gently back into the real world.

The text finishes with the idea that two years later Aitken finds the pipe from which the biggest diamonds in Laputa’s treasure had been taken, sets up a lucrative mining business but spends a lot of the profits setting up a college for young Blacks, technical training, experimental farms, modern agriculture.

There are playing-fields and baths and reading-rooms and libraries just as in a school at home.

The white man’s burden. Well, this could either be described from a white perspective as philanthropy and development or, as in the novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, as deracination and cultural destruction.

In charge is Mr Wardle, the very schoolmaster Davie met on the voyage out and who at one time ran the dusty little classroom in Blaauwildebeestefontein. How far they have both come since then.

The many faces of John Laputa

I was hypnotised by the man. To see him going out was like seeing the fall of a great mountain.

Laputa is obviously the centre of the story and the narrative does a good job of developing a kind of cult around him. The seeds is sown on that fateful night on the Fife shore but once we’re in South Africa, and meet the savvy intelligence officer Arcoll, the latter massively expands Laputa’s cult image with his tales of meeting the black leader in various settings, concluding that he is:

‘The biggest thing that the Kaffirs have ever produced. I tell you, in my opinion he is a great genius. If he had been white he might have been a second Napoleon. He is a born leader of men, and as brave as a lion. There is no villainy he would not do if necessary, and yet I should hesitate to call him a blackguard. Ay, you may look surprised at me, you two pragmatical Scotsmen; but I have, so to speak, lived with the man for months, and there’s fineness and nobility in him. He would be a terrible enemy, but a just one. He has the heart of a poet and a king, and it is God’s curse that he has been born among the children of Ham. I hope to shoot him like a dog in a day or two, but I am glad to bear testimony to his greatness.’

And this is all before we meet Laputa again about half-way through the book and learn of his plan to reincarnate the power of Prester John and lead a black uprising. What’s interesting (maybe) is the way Buchan attributes to Laputa such a variety of facets or personalities. There is the Christian preacher. The suited mover and shaker in meetings of MPs. The educated scholar who can quote Latin. The inspiring leader and general. The awesome figure at the centre of a thrilling religious ceremony. And the ‘bloodthirsty savage’.

This multifacetedness is all made explicit in the last scene, as Laputa kneels dying:

He had ceased to be the Kaffir king, or the Christian minister, or indeed any one of his former parts. Death was stripping him to his elements, and the man Laputa stood out beyond and above the characters he had played, something strange, and great, and moving, and terrible. (p.178)

On the face of it this multifacetedness builds up his stature as a Prize Baddie. But from another, more pragmatic point of view, it allows Buchan to write about him in different ways – I mean it gives Buchan the opportunity of using different baddie tropes.

Or, if you want an interpretation which foregrounds Buchan’s racism I suppose it could be interpreted as Buchan implying that not far below the surface of even the most ‘civilised’ black person lurks the ‘bloodthirsty savage’.

To really assess where Buchan stands in this regard, I think you’d have to be familiar with pulp adventure tropes of the time. For example, mention of Napoleon made me think of Sherlock Holmes’s adversary, Professor Moriarty, regularly described as ‘the Napoleon of Crime’ and who is, like Holmes himself, a master of disguise. But I wonder if other pulp characters, such as Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, are described in a similar way. I wonder whether multifacetedness is in some deep way the hallmark of the stage or pulp villain?

More recently, and in a much more grown-up novel, Giles Foden’s terrifying book The Last King of Scotland contains a sustained portrait of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin which makes it clear that a lot of his success was down to his terrifying unpredictability, moving from genuine laughter and bonhomie to loud anger, from civilised plans for his country to personally overseeing torture and executions, in a completely arbitrary way which kept everyone, even his closest entourage and family, on permanent tenterhooks.

So maybe what at first glance seems like a fictional trope in fact reflects the real world where real (male) terror figures are partly so scary because of their many faces and the unpredictability with which they move between them.

(Actually, I’ve just read commentary on Buchan’s 1916 novel ‘The Power-House’ where critics are quoted as saying that the central obsession of all Buchan’s fiction was the thin dividing line between civilisation and barbarism, that the novel contains the most famous line in all his works, when the baddie tells the hero ‘You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass’ (the Power-House, chapter 3). So maybe it isn’t a sentiment targeted specifically at Blacks, but just the local expression of the deep fear he felt about all supposedly civilised men or societies: one blow hard enough and they crumble.)

(Incidentally, the fact that ‘Napoleon’ was the stock go-to name for great leaders is reinforced by the incident in Buchan’s comic novel John McNab, where a housekeeper is said to have handled a horde of over-inquisitive reporters ‘like Napoleon’ (World Classics edition page 148), and by the five references to Napoleon in his short novel, The Power-House.)

Race

The book is so drenched in the racial attitudes of its time that it’s hard to know where to start. Buchan’s narrator takes it for granted that white man’s rule is just and inevitable. As so often in this kind of colonial writing, the narrator is alive to the native’s grievances, the way their culture has been erased by the white man who has seized all the best land for himself etc – all this is explicitly stated in Laputa’s rabble-rousing speech – yet at the same time ignores it and depicts Laputa’s goal of rousing the Africans to overthrow white rule as ‘treason’, ‘treachery’ and betrayal.

When they are submissive passive objects of the white gaze, then the white master can indulge a kind of patronising aesthetic appreciation of black bodies – hence the narrator’s repeated admiration of Laputa’s stunning physical magnificence and charisma, and Arcoll’s admiration of him as a black Napoleon.

I forgot all else in my admiration of the man. In his minister’s clothes he had looked only a heavily built native, but now in his savage dress I saw how noble a figure he made. He must have been at least six feet and a half, but his chest was so deep and his shoulders so massive that one did not remark his height.

But as soon as these black bodies start to display agency i.e. a determination to reclaim their ancestral land (a cause which must have awakened some stirrings in a Scot like Buchan, whose own country had been absorbed by the English, whose own traditional warriors i.e. the Highland clans, had been disarmed and disempowered) then they suddenly become ‘savages’, routinely described as ‘bloodthirsty’, ‘maddened savages’, ‘the wave of black savagery seemed to close over my head’.

And once Davie is among the black army, the narrative lets rip with a whole series of racial stereotypes:

To be handled by a multitude of Kaffirs is like being shaken by some wild animal. Their skins are insensible to pain, and I have seen a Zulu stand on a piece of red-hot iron without noticing it till he was warned by the smell of burning hide…

You know how a native babbles and chatters over any work he has to do. It says much for Laputa’s iron hand that now everything was done in silence…

A Kaffir cannot wink, but he has a way of slanting his eyes which does as well, and as we moved on he would turn his head to me with this strange grimace. (p.119)

It was Laputa’s voice, thin and high-pitched, as the Kaffir cries when he wishes his words to carry a great distance.

A note on ‘Kaffir’

To paraphrase Wikipedia:

The term was used for any black person during the Apartheid and Post-Apartheid eras, closely associated with South African racism. It became a pejorative by the mid-20th century and is now considered extremely offensive hate speech. Punishing continuing use of the term was one of the concerns of the Promotion of Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act enacted by the South African parliament in 2000 and it is now euphemistically addressed as the K-word in South African English.

I’ve only just read this and discovered how offensive the word is. Obviously I am citing quotes which include it precisely to show the negative way it’s used by Buchan. But now I’m aware, I’ll make every effort not to use it in my own prose.

Bravery

Of course Buchan was not so consumed with the issue of race as we are nowadays. The issues were much simpler and untroubled for him. Instead, the novel contains a number of reflections on the nature of bravery and duty which were probably more salient for its Edwardian readers.

As to duty, the several occasions when Davie’s conscience overrides his animal wish for safety, compelling him to do the right thing for ‘his own people’, for the white race. I’m thinking of his realisation that instead of merely escaping on Laputa’s horse, he must actively seek out Arcoll in order to isolate Laputa north of the highway and thus cut of the general from his army, nipping the uprising in the bud. As to courage, he reflects on its nature half a dozen times, including right at the end when he and Arcoll walk into the rebel stronghold:

I believed that in this way most temerarious deeds are done; the doer has become insensible to danger, and his imagination is clouded with some engrossing purpose. (p.195)

Thoughts

Possibly other considerations distracted me (I read it at a time when I was very busy with work) but I found the book hard to get into. The word that initially came to mind was ‘forced’: Buchan’s narrator tells the reader he is embarking on an adventure rather than showing it. On the face of it, Davie is going to Africa to work in a shop, nothing very adventurous about that. OK, he recognises a black man he saw in outlandish circumstances in Scotland on the boat out but, again, there’s nothing desperately exciting about this.

For the first 80 pages or so, it felt like Buchan was telling us to be excited when I didn’t feel at all gripped. Even when Davie begins to suspect he’s being spied on, it doesn’t really make sense why Laputa’s people should spy on a teenage shop assistant. For quite a while the narrative tells us that it’s all a huge adventure before the adventure actually arrives. It doesn’t quite hang together.

The adventure only really kicks in when Arcoll wipes off his disguise as old black man, reveals the scope of the conspiracy – i.e. a mass uprising of Blacks across South Africa – and that it’s going to kick off tomorrow! From that point onwards the adventure really does kick in and I found it much more readable and gripping.

Different vocabularies

Obviously, most of the text is written in standard English but Buchan makes surprisingly extensive use of terms from other languages. At the start of the book, set in rural Fife, he deliberately deploys Scottish dialect words, including one in the very first sentence – ‘I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man’ – where the Scottish word ‘mind’ stands for the English word ‘remember’. Later on, once he’s arrived in Africa, the text becomes littered with words of Afrikaner or Boer i.e. Dutch origin (although Scots keeps glimmering through the text as well).

Scottish vocabulary

• to bide – stay or remain somewhere
• a brae – a steep bank or hillside
• a burn – a stream
• a burnfoot – place at the foot of a burn or stream
• a cockloft – a small upper loft under the ridge of a roof
• to collogue – talk confidentially or conspiratorially
• a fanner – a wind machine that blows away the husks during the process of threshing wheat
• to fling up (a game) – to give up
• to fossick – to rummage
• a glen – a narrow valley
• a glim – a candle or lantern
• to grue – to shiver or shudder especially with fear or cold
• hotching – swarming
• a linn – a waterfall or the pool below a waterfall
• ower – Scots for ‘over’
• podley – a young or small coalfish
• scrog – a stunted shrub, bush, or branch
• a shebeen – an unlicensed establishment or private house selling alcohol and typically regarded as slightly disreputable (also Irish and South African)
• a stell – a shelter for cattle or sheep built on moorland or hillsides
• thrawn – twisted, crooked
• whins – gorse bushes

Afrikaner vocabulary

• battue of dogs
• a baviaan – baboon
• a blesbok – a kind of antelope
• an indaba – a discussion or conference
• a kaross – a rug or blanket of sewn animal skins, formerly worn as a garment by African people, now used as a bed or floor covering
• a kopje – a small hill in a generally flat area
• a kloof – a steep-sided, wooded ravine or valley
• knobkerrie – a short stick with a knob at the top, traditionally used as a weapon by some indigenous peoples of South Africa
• a kraal – an enclosure, either around native huts, forming a village, or an enclosure for livestock
• a laager – an encampment formed by a circle of wagons and, by extension, an entrenched position or viewpoint defended against opponents
• a naachtmaal – the Communion Sabbath
• outspan – verb: to unharness (an animal) from a wagon. noun: a place for grazing or camping on a wagon journey
• a reim – a strip of oxhide, deprived of hair and made pliable, used for twisting into ropes
• a ring-kop – the circlet into which Zulu warriors weave their hair
• a rondavel – a traditional circular African dwelling with a conical thatched roof
• a schimmel – type of stallion
• a sjambok – long, stiff whip, originally made of rhinoceros hide
• Skellum! Skellum – rascal
• a spruit – a small watercourse, typically dry except during the rainy season
• a stope – a veranda in front of a house
• a vlei – a shallow pond or marsh of a seasonal or intermittent nature

Plus a number of Afrikaans names for plants and animals e.g. tambuki grass, eland, koodoo, rhebok, springbok, duikers, hartebeest, klipspringer, koorhan

African vocabulary

Part of the problem or challenge for the white colonials was that there were so many tribes and cultures and languages in Africa, which they rode roughshod over. I’m aware that words here come from different languages but I’m trying to keep these headings simple and also couldn’t always find which language a specific word comes from. I like the flavour of diverse and novel words but I’m not an expert in them.

• assegai – the slender javelin or spear of the Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa
• dacha – hemp or marijuana
• impi – an armed band of Zulus involved in urban or rural conflict
• induna – a tribal councillor or headman
• the Inkula – title applied only to the greatest chiefs
• isetembiso sami – very sacred thing
• a kya – Zulu for hut
• a tsessebe – a species of buck, famous for its speed

Rare English words

• to snowk – to smell something intensely by pushing your nose into it like a dog (Yorkshire)

European vocabulary

• en cabochon – (of a gem) polished but not faceted (French)
• machila – a kind of litter (Portuguese)

Conrad

The morning after he witnesses the great inauguration of Laputa, Davie reflects: ‘Last night I had looked into the heart of darkness, and the sight had terrified me.’ Joseph Conrad’s great novella Heart of Darkness had been published just ten years earlier (1899 to Prester John’s 1910). Presumably this a deliberate reference to it? The fact that writers as wildly diverse as John Buchan and Chinua Achebe felt compelled to quote or reference Conrad, is testament to the huge imaginative shadow cast by his famous novella.

The Thirty-Nine Steps

In a sense ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ takes up where ‘Prester John’ leaves off. ‘Prester John’ ends with the young hero returning to England having made his fortune in Africa (if not quite in the way his uncle imagined he would) and not sure what to do next. ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ opens with the hero, Richard Hannay, having just returned to England from Africa (from Buluwayo in modern-day Zimbabwe, to be precise) having made his fortune and discovering that … he is bored (‘I was the best bored man in the United Kingdom’, page 1) – boredom, in Buchan, invariably being the prelude to an exciting new adventure!

Credit

Prester John by John Buchan was published in 1910 by T. Nelson & Sons. References are to the 1987 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

• Prester John online
• BBC In Our Time episode about Prester John

John Buchan reviews

• John Buchan reviews