By David A. Adams
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(originally Published in the Burroughs Bulletin #29, Winter 1997)
You cannot be a Burroughs fan without coming across the works of David Adams. From Fan-Fic to literary articles, his insight into the Master of Adventure is well worth the effort to read.
Mr Adams was kind enough to track down an early papere he wrote on Pal-ul-Don and was generous enough to allow me to post this paper here.
I hope you enjoy it as much as did I.
In Tarzan the Terrible, Burroughs creates his first complete land for Tarzan of the Apes. Tarzan at last is given a range of action comparable to the previously invented rich Martian landscape.
"Like Mars, the moon, Caspak and Pellucidar, Pal-ul-don comes fully equipped. Burroughs provided fauna (domesticated Gryfs - - triceratops), language (a glossary of almost 150 terms is appended to the book), religion (mass human sacrifice, proscribed by Tarzan in his role of son-of-god), and excellent characters" (Lupoff 236).
There is an embarrassment of riches here, all of which fit into the story in a smooth, natural narrative style that does not impede the flow by paragraphs of tedious explanation alone. The details of Terrible are inserted within a tale of action with such grace and conviction that for many fans this novel stands at the peak of the series.
Despite the strength of Opar as a lost city and Tarzan's return there again and again, in Pal-ul-don Burroughs finally employed his creative ability to invent entire worlds in the Tarzan Series. The fact of the matter is, the action of the story is so integrated with the land that a detailed study of the individual cities contained within the land seems to diminish the whole in the sense that is not felt when dealing with Opar. However, the very nature of this essay makes such an investigation necessary.
"Only conflicting rumors hinted at the direction in which the fleeing girl and her pursuers had been headed.
Setting out nonetheless to attempt Jane's rescue, Tarzan finds his way into Pal-ul-don, the strangest of all the lands of the Africa which Burroughs described. Pal-ul-don is inhabited by the Waz-don, a race of tailed humans, completely covered with beautiful black fur, and by the Ho-don, similar white men with tails. In order to explain his own lack of a tail, Tarzan claims to be the son of their god, and because of his awesome feats of strength is given the name in the language of Pal-ul-don, of Tarzan-jad-guru, Tarzan-the Terrible (hence the title of the book)" (Lupoff 236).
In setting up his tale, Burroughs presents a black vs white structure in a half-joking manner.
"The Waz-don have no cities - - they live in the trees of the forests and the caves of the hills - - is it no so, black man?" he concluded, turning toward the hairy giant beside him.
"Yes," replied Om-at, "We Waz-don are free - - only the Ho-don imprison themselves in cities. I would not be a white man!"
Tarzan smiled. Even here was the racial distinction between white man and black man - - Ho-don and Waz-don" (Terrible 21).
The Ho-don live in A-lur (allure?) the City of Light, while the Waz-don live in a magnificent arrangement of caves set in a sheer, perpendicular cliffs of blindingly white limestone. To say that the Waz-don do not live in a city is only a matter of definition, for their dwellings in the gorges of The Valley of the Great God (Jad Pele ul Jad-ben-Otho) are indeed a city in all but a name.
The Was-don live in Kor-ul-ja, Gorge-of-Lions in numerous caves that can only be reached through the use of pegs as large around as a man's wrist. These pegs were used to climb a series of holes paralleling each other in zigzag rows upon the chalk cliff face. It is a dizzying, vertical maze, a labyrinth on a perpendicular white rock that turns an old myth and its dark cave symbolism inside out in a spectacular fashion.
The source of inspiration for the Waz-don must certainly have been the extraordinary ruins of the Anasazi at Mesa Verde in Colorado and its spectacular Cliff Palace pueblo, which first explored by archeologists in 1891. Here whole cities were built inside the entrances to huge caves that exist in the precipitous canyon walls.
In contrast to this, the city of the Ho-don, A-lur, is carved directly into the chalk like limestone from what had once been a group of low hills.
" . . . the exteriors (were) chiseled to such architectural forms as appealed to the eyes of the builders while at the same time following roughly the original outlines of the hills in an evident desire to economize both labor and space. The excavation of the apartments within had been similarly governed by necessity" (Terrible 101).
And since the Ho-don live on a horizontal plane, there is a wall around each building or group of buildings resulting from a single hillock. The narrow ledges and terraces that break the lines of the buildings might be traced back to their early-cliff-dwelling progenitors (101). So, the city is a flattened out version of the Waz-don caves, and with many similarities, another Opar.
In A-lur, the ubiquitous palace of the Burroughsian stories, is labyrinthian as usual, filled with geometric carvings and figures of animals, birds, and men in the more formal figures of the mural decorator's art. The throne room is under a large dome fifty feet from the floor, and almost filling the chamber is a great pyramid ascending in broad steps to the pinnacle where the king's throne sits in a golden splendor surrounded by shafts of light which pour in through tiny apertures of the dome.
This palace is certainly a reflection of Mayan architecture, which came to flower about A.D. 300 at Tikal with its Temple of the Great Jaguar, a stepped temple pyramid erected around interior courtyards, the residences for nobles and priests.
The temple at A-lur seems to have been influenced by the same Mayan or Aztec motifs as found in Opar since there are east and west (sun-oriented) oval shaped alters for the purpose of human sacrifice.
In the center of the palace grounds lies a secret, Forbidden Garden surrounded by a wall. It is an artificial profusion of streams and little pools of water, flanked by flowering bushes, constructed to reveal the contours of nature upon a miniature scale.
"The interior surface of the wall was fashioned to represent the white cliffs of Pal-ul-don, broken occasionally by small replicas of the verdure-filled gorges of the original" (Terrible 122).
Without a doubt, this is a magical place - - a model within a novelistic model. It fairly represents the Burroughsian fondness for doubles - - a little gem saying, “here is a strange reproduction of my strange creation. Let your mind walk around in this one if you can.”
Burroughs takes the time to give us his view of architecture and art at A-lur.
"The limestone of the country, close-grained and of marble whiteness yet worked with comparative ease with crude implements, had been wrought by cunning craftsmen into bowls and urns and vases of considerable grace and beauty. Into the carved designs of many of these virgin gold had been hammered, presenting the effect of a rich and magnificent cloisonné. A barbarian himself the art of barbarians had always appealed to the ape-man to whom they represented a natural expression of man's love of the beautiful to even a greater extent than the studied and artificial efforts of civilization. Here was the real art of old masters, the other the cheap imitation of the chromo" (Terrible 130).
Which is, of course, Burroughs’ own abiding theory of art.
In A-lur is also the symbolically suggestive Temple of the Gryf.
"It had a single barred entrance which was carved from the living rock in representation of the head of a gryf, whose wide-open mouth constituted the doorway. The head, hood, and front paws of the creature were depicted as though it lay crouching with its lower jaw on the ground between its outspread paws" (Terrible 167).
It seems to be a combination of Dante’s entrance to Hell and a sphinx.
In Pal-ul-don is also the city of Tu-lur, rivals of the Ho-dons, which is described as white domed and a smaller replica of A-lur. It lies across lake, Jad-bal-lul, which freely translated means the lake of gold. (Terrible 215).
Symbolic images are fugal in structure and intricately entwined. In Tarzan the Terrible, the symbolic images of the entire series increasingly overlap in a stretto, so that only a page by page analysis can ever untie them all. The novel is the climax of images begun in Apes, not just the abduction of Jane in Untamed, although one may begin there to untie the threads of the stretto.
The abducted Jane is in the monstrous belly of the beast, the Temple of the Gryfs. Tarzan escapes through an underground stream then loses her on the lake of gold, Jad-bal-lul, which is the watery image of his unfulfilled lion symbol - - Jad-bal-ja . The complexity of symbols is staggering.
The problem of untangling whole complex of symbols in Burroughs is like doing an analysis of the Goldberg Variations of J.S. Bach. The keys to the symbols are there for one who has the patience to use them to unlock the mysteries of a tremendous mythological series. And once the work is done, Edgar Rice Burroughs will emerge as a major myth maker of American literature. You might remember that Bach's Art of Fugue was lost for many years and its original pages were used to wrap sausages.
The End
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