Sherlock Holmes at the Crucible of Life, page 1
part #2 of Holmes Behind the Veil Series
SHERLOCK HOLMES
AT THE
CRUCIBLE OF LIFE;
Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire
From a Memoir As Told By
Allan Quatermain
Author of “King Solomon’s Mines,” “She and Allan,” “Marie,” ETC.
1881 Manuscript Recorded, Edited, and Supplemented By
John H. Watson, M.D.
Author of “A Study in Scarlet,” “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” ETC.
Including as an Appendix
"Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World" By
Leo Vincey
Champion of “She” and “Ayesha: The Return of She”
Edited, Supplemented, and Annotated By
Thos. Kent Miller
Editor of “Sherlock Holmes on he Roof of the World,” ETC.
ROSEMILL
H O U S E
SHERLOCK HOLMES AT THE CRUCIBLE OF LIFE
(is a reorganized and expanded Kindle ebook version of
Allan Quatermain at the Crucible of Life (2010)
which is published by Wildside Press)
For the gifts of my wife and two sons,
This service, this hymn.
To my wife and sons.
Copyright © 1974-2012 by Thos. Kent Miller
Allan Quatermain at the Crucible of Life (2010)
was an expanded omnibus compilation of
two previous volumes by Thos. Kent Miller,
which originally appeared in somewhat different form as:
The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life (2005, Wildside Press) and
Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World (1987, 1990, Rosemill House, Borgo Press)
(also known as Sherlock Holmes in The Great Detective on the Roof of the World [2007, Wildside Press]).
Appendix A (Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World) published with the permission of the copyright owner of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the expressed written consent of the author and publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved.
ROSEMILL HOUSE
roofoftheworld@earthlink.net
First Rosemill House edition: August 2012
Coming soon in 2013
Sherlock Holmes at the Dawn of Time;
Or, The Adventure of the Star of Wonder
This novel is by definition a work of fiction. Furthermore, it is a pastiche of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain and She stories. Any references to historical events; to real people, living or dead; or to real locales are intended only to give the fiction a setting in historical reality.
Some names, characters, and incidents are the products of these and other deceased authors’ imaginations and are used here solely in the spirit of homage. Other names, characters, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
This book is structured like a child’s nesting toy—like a set of Chinese nesting boxes or Russian nesting dolls—insofar as the reader is invited to explore multiple layers within layers, of framing devices within framing devices, books within books, and narratives within narratives along with concomitant shifting points of view—beginning with the title page.
As the opinions expressed in this book are not necessarily those of the author, this tale has no further intention beyond providing food for thought . . . and perhaps an especially good time to boot!
A Note on Notes
This novel contains 50 notes, that is, endnotes, that are gathered at the back of the book. On occasion, you will find small superscript numerals attached to words or paragraphs that refer to these notes. These notes are intended to be read at your leisure. If you wish to check any particular note in real time, please jump to the Notes section from the Table of Contents.
A red light, a burning spark seen far away in the darkness, taken at the first moment of seeing for a signal . . . and then, as if in an incredible point of time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and all the sky and possessed the land.
—Arthur Machen in “The Great Return”
Travelers afoot in hot deserts should set their course toward shade!
—Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook
Remember, most loving and compassionate Virgin Mary, it has never been said or heard that anyone who turned to you for help was left unaided. Inspired with this conviction, I run to your protection and stand before you penitent of my wrong doings, for you are my mother and the mother of all. O Mother of the Word of God, neglect not my prayers, despise not my words of pleading, but in your mercy, please hear and answer me. Amen.
—The Memorare: A Prayer to Mary
Hurt and you will be hurt, love and you will be loved, cause someone to cry in suffering and you will be made to cry with your own suffering. This circle of doing followed by God’s response may be experienced immediately or may be held off for a future, or even a past, lifetime, according to the will of God for his own reasons.
—The Gospel of Gaspar
Dedication
To Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925)
My Dear Sir:
As you so often with sincerity dedicated your books to those you admired, I would like to offer this volume to you, though, as I place these words down, you have been gone from us for nearly a century.
Let me accomplish this by meandering a bit. During the early 1950s when I was a child, my father and older brother read Uncle Scrooge comic books (published for ten cents at the time by Dell Publishing Co., Inc.). I received them as hand-me-downs and was enchanted and enthralled by the adventures of Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his nephews, Donald Duck and Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Though it was obvious that my father and brother enjoyed these stories, at some point I realized that somehow these illustrated tales of lost cities and civilizations touched a special chord in me that transcended mere enjoyment. I knew this because my reaction to them was fundamentally different; my father and brother forgot about them and lost track of them, whereas I treasured every panel, turned the pages reverently as I read and reread the stories, and considered them my most precious possessions.
On the cover, prominently displayed above the title was the name of Walt Disney. What I did not know as a child was that during that era of comic book history the actual writers and artists who created the comic stories were anonymous. As an adult, I learned that Mr. Disney had little or nothing to do with Uncle Scrooge. Scrooge was the creation of a man named Carl Barks and the best Scrooge stories—the ones that haunted me, such as the Ducks’s stumbling upon the Seven Cities of Cibola, the lost continent of Atlantis, and Tralla La—were written and drawn by Barks.
Furthermore, I didn’t know—and didn’t learn until still more time had passed—that it was you, Sir Henry, who was the man behind Barks. He drew from you as surely as desert nomads draw from an oasis well. The magic he touched me with—as glorious as it was—was, in a way, recycled magic. You invented the magic—the subgenre of fantasy that has come to be known as the “lost race adventure.”
Let me quote from the passionate historian and editor of fantasy literature, the late Lin Carter. In the introduction to a reprint of one of your novels, he wrote that you were the right man with the right idea in the right place at the right time, that time being the end of the nineteenth century at the height of a succession of momentous historical and archaeological discoveries.
“For even more exciting,” Carter said, “than the discovery of lost cities of the past, dead and buried and forgotten for thousands of years, is the discovery of an ancient city tucked away in some far corner of the world—still inhabited!”
I cannot say why this subgenre you invented affects me so, but I suspect that somehow these matters are prearranged by a power far greater than ours, as perhaps you would agree. Be that as it may, because of the great joy I have experienced both from you directly in the form of your many “lost race” novels and indirectly through Mr. Barks (and not only Mr. Barks because it turns out that there are a multitude of others you have touched, among them writers named Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, Talbot Mundy, James Hilton, and, more recently, of course, Michael Crichton)1, I ask you to allow me to set your name upon these pages and subscribe myself,
Gratefully and ever sincerely yours,
Thos. Kent Miller
Contents
Dedication: To Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925)
SHERLOCK HOLMES AT THE CRUCIBLE OF LIFE
Editor’s Note to the Fourth Edition
Editor’s Note to the Third Edition
Editor’s Note to the Movie Tie-In (Second) Edition
Preface: “The Prodigious Phone Call” by Thos. Kent Miller
Foreword by John H. Watson, M.D.
Introduction by Allan Quatermain
I: ALLAN’S UNWANTED GUESTS
II: ALLAN’S HEADACHE GROWS
III: AND THEN THERE WERE TWELVE
IV: THE ABYSSINIAN ENTERPRISE (Being the First Digression)
V: THE TRUTH BE TOLD
VI: THE REFLECTION (Being the Second Digression)
VII: BAYUSHTIAK INTERVENES
VIII: THE PARCHMENT (Being the Third Digression)
IX: THE GATHERING OF HEAVEN’S DEAD
X: ATTACKED!
XI: ONCE UPON A TIME! (Being he Fourth and Last Digression)
XII: THE CHAPEL
XIII: THE CLEFT IN THE CLIFF
XIV: THE FOUNTAIN
XV: THE GIRL
XVI: ALLAN’S CHARGE
XVII: THE RETURN
Afterword
Appendix A: SHERLOCK HOLMES ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
Foreword by Thos. Kent Miller
Introduction by Leo Vincey
I: SIGERSON THE NORWEGIAN
II: THE FATE OF POOR PALJORI
III: THE DALAI LAMA BECKONS
IV: THE DALAI LAMA’S STORY
V: THE MONK OF LONG AGO
VI: AN UNDERTAKER AND A DOCTOR
VII: SIGERSON’S SOLUTIONS
THE GOSPEL OF ISSA
Conclusion
Addendum
Appendix B: THE GOSPELS OF ISSA, GASPAR, AND MARIAM (Combined)
Notes
Acknowledgments
About Thos. Kent Miller
Editor’s Note to the Fourth Edition
The publication of this fourth edition of Sherlock Holmes at the Crucible of Life coincides with the official joint announcement by the African states of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa that great swatches of their countries are being set aside for the establishment of a vast African continental preserve—The Great Rift Valley Paleoanthropologic Preserve. The preserve, in principle, follows the East African Rift System that cuts north and south through most of these countries. The park extends a bit further beyond the southernmost aspect of the rift valley into South Africa and is roughly 3,500 miles long, averaging about 75 miles wide, for a total of about 265,000 square miles.
Given that much of this area has been in extreme political turmoil for years, and that death, civil war, and even genocide have been the windows by which the world has assessed much of the area, this unprecedented alignment seems little less than a miracle. This near-impossible task was, in fact, accomplished through the supreme efforts of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the board of directors of the Peace Parks Foundation, and United Nations Secretary-General Nicholi Lorenzo and a significant percentage of the staffs of the U.N. Environment Programme, the Institute of Human Origins, the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, Esri, and the thousands of dedicated volunteers who believed in the unique value of this preserve.
The motivating principle behind the creation of the park is to preserve that unique spot on this planet where the human species arose. It has been shown over and again through a succession of historic paleoarchaeological finds (beginning in South Africa with Raymond Dart and Robert Broom early in the twentieth century through the redoubtable Leakey family in Tanzania and Kenya; Donald Johanson, Tim White, and Yohannes Haile-Selassie mainly in Ethiopia; and numerous other investigators) that beyond a reasonable doubt, primates stood tall on their legs and walked fully erect all over this area beginning between six and three million years ago. Despite the fact that researchers are constantly quibbling about the details, timeline, and branches of our family tree, there is complete consensus that these first walking primates came into existence in East Africa. Then, through the ages, they lived their lives, slowly changing in response to changes in their environment. The general outline of this evolution is Ardipithecus to Australopithecus to Homo hablis to Homo erectus/ergaster to Homo sapien, the latter two being those who left Africa to spread across Asia, then Europe, and finally the Americas to populate the world.
In a sense, we are all Africans, and now this fact has finally been acknowledged by the modern countries that include and surround the rift system.
But, of course, it is far beyond the realm of possibility or even of the wildest dreams to expect such a preserve to have a literal, physical fence around it with admission gates, souvenir shops, and the like. Something so vast as this preserve, which crosses so many political boundaries, even to the extent of absorbing entire countries—Rwanda, Burundi, and Malawi to be specific—must be something altogether different than what we are used to thinking of as a preserve.
There is no doubt that The Great Rift Valley Paleoanthropologic Preserve exists. But if there are no fences marking its outermost boundaries, what is the nature of its existence? This preserve exists:
• In the minds of the leaders and politicians of the fifteen governments who set it up at the urging of the agencies already mentioned, it exists as an entity within certain geographical points of longitude and latitude as measured by the Global Positioning System (GPS).
• In the eyes of the United Nations, it exists.
• In the minds of the people of the world, it exists.
• As a designated area on all new maps of Africa and of the world, it exists.
And to underscore its existence, each of the preserve nations is even now setting up preserve offices staffed with scientists of all sorts, preservationists, administrators, and an “army,” as it were, of preserve rangers, who, like similar personnel the world over, will educate and entertain visitors while also protecting their charge.
By now, I’m sure, some of the new readers of this book are wondering what this astonishing accomplishment has to do with Sherlock Holmes at the Crucible of Life.
I’ll satisfy that curiosity by briefly discussing the evolution, as it were, of this book and show how it has changed over its four editions.
In the beginning, by a circuitous route, the manuscript came into my possession (see my original “Preface”). Given the state of publishing these days, it was in itself a miracle that I was able to get first my agent, Gail Morgan Hickman, and then a publisher to even look at the book. Even so, once the publisher was persuaded to print Quatermain’s story, for purely commercial reasons she balked at printing the rather extensive front matter and ancillary material, much of which was my contribution. Thus, the book was released as a paperback original with a print run of 10,000, and all concerned assumed that it would sell enough copies to make a modest profit or break even and then fade from memory, the unsold copies of course being stripped and recycled. But by one of those flukes that can never be predicted, nationally syndicated radio talk show host (“shock jock”) Randy King by chance read the book and mentioned on his program that he had enjoyed it and found it thought-provoking. The net result was that the paperback publisher went back to press seventeen more times over the next two years.
The inevitable movie was released, of course . . . and then tanked. The film version (The Rose of Fire, starring Michael Caine, Gene Hackman, Sigourney Weaver, and introducing young Nigel Knox as “Will Scott,” and costing in the neighborhood of $75 million) had a disastrous opening weekend, acid reviews, and then quickly disappeared. It came and went so fast that most people weren’t even aware of its existence. Indeed, as of this writing, it still has not appeared on video or DVD.
But, naturally, the eventual fortunes of the film were not known while its advertising and promotion campaigns were being prepared. As the movie-tie-in edition of the book was being planned, I used my then not-so-insubstantial clout to suggest very strongly that the book be published as I had originally planned. As the publisher was quite distressed about this, I quietly reminded her of a particular clause in my contract, whereupon she sighed ever so deeply and made no further protest.
And then, in another twist of fate, the movie tie-in version of the book took on a life of its own.
Whereas the original paperback was accepted and thought of as a rather light true-life adventure story, the second edition (at first only a paperback, then reprinted in hardcover but with no further changes, as I had nothing more to add at the time) became a magnet for study. (In due course, a third edition appeared that contained some astonishing and important newly discovered data.) It seems the notion of a continental park was not new, that the groundwork had been prepared by many of those visionaries mentioned above, among others, and all that was wanting was a straw to cave in the camel’s back, so to speak . . . and this little memoir of Quatermain’s adventure proved to be just that. Educators, scholars, politicians, and heads of state, many of whom were affiliated with conservation groups around the world, found that Quatermain’s record of the events in 1872 included an aspect that underscored the reasoning and the arguments that they themselves had pursued to no avail for years. Slowly, others of influence gravitated to the book, discussed its implications, and eventually more and more world leaders were persuaded that certain points brought up in the book warranted serious study.
