The Lake of Life by Edmond Hamilton

"Ages on ages have we of Dordona faithfully obeyed the commandments given us long ago by the Guardians below.  Never have we permitted one blasphemer to descend to the lake.  To allow you to do so would be supreme sacrilege.  I reject your proposal.  I would rather die!"

Via the magic of the internet archive, world's greatest website, we at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading 1937 issues of one of the most important and influential of speculative fiction magazines, Weird Tales.  In our last episode we read from the September ish poems by towering icons of the weird H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, additional verse by acclaimed science fiction writer Henry Kuttner, and fiction by top fantasy and horror scribe Clark Ashton Smith and prolific writer and editor of both mainstream and fantastic literature August Derleth.  Today we are exploring a three-part serial that began in that same September '37 number of WT, The Lake of Life by Edmond Hamilton, science fiction pioneer, author of a huge pile of space operas and horror tales, and husband of screenwriter and master of the mystery novel and the planetary romance, Leigh Brackett.  

The work of Edgar Rice Burroughs was a major influence on many SF writers, not just the drudges who churned out adventure stories to make their livings, but also the Grandmaster level SF writers whom SF critics and historians are always writing about, like Robert A. Heinlein and Michael Moorcock, both of whose bodies of work include homages to and/or pastiches of Burroughs.  Hamilton and Brackett are among those who found inspiration in the oeuvre of the immortal ERB, and we've already read some of Hamilton's Burroughs-formula work in which an adventurer guy takes an unlikely trip to another world and there hooks up with a princess and gets mixed up in the local wars, joining the side of the princess and playing a pivotal role in making sure her faction comes out on top, and today we read another one.  As in his 1935 Weird Tales cover story "The Six Sleepers" and his 1939 Weird Tales novelette "The Comrades of Time," Hamilton tries to liven up the narrative by providing the hero with a squad of companions, each of whom has a sort of stereotyped comic relief personality reflective of his origin.  Among these secondary characters in The Lake of Life are a gangster who fights with a tommy gun which he calls a "typewriter" and a Texas cowboy whose dialogue is peppered with Spanish words.    

I love Burroughs and I like this kind of thing and The Lake of Life is a decent example of its subgenre that has only a few annoying bits and some cool scenes (I like the journey through the African jungle and the fight with the black warriors as well as the descent into the bowels of the Earth on hundreds of slimy moss-covered steps) so I can mildly recommend it to fans of this sort of material.  If you need your SF to directly address the relationship of the individual to the state or the role of technology in society or to challenge Western sexual mores or 20th-century conceptions of gender roles then this story is perhaps not for you, though like some of Burroughs' own work it does address the issue of religious skepticism, and there is plenty of stuff in here for you identity politics types to chew on, as the white adventurers shoot down and blow up scores of African tribesmen and the princess is a sword-swinging military leader.  

The Lake of Life was reprinted in book form in 1978 by Robert Weisberg as the eighth of his Lost Fantasies series; apparently this publication was just a facsimile of the appropriate pages of the September, October and November 1937 issues of Weird Tales. 

If you are looking for a summary of the plot of The Lake of Life and some comments on the way the story is structured and some representative samples of Hamilton's text and techniques, read on. 

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The Lake of Life is divvied up into 15 chapters, five chapters per issue of Weird Tales.  In Chapter 1 we meet our main cast, six desperate dudes on a schooner headed to the French Congo.  Their leader is Clark Stannard.  Captain of the schooner is disgraced sailor Ephraim Quell, who lost his legal right to captain ships when he was master of a passenger ship that burned with great loss of life.  Then we've got Texas cowboy Link Wilson, who shot down two men in a "border saloon."  Hulking Mike Shin (Hamilton compares him to a gorilla) is a former prize fighter who threw a fight.  Lieutenant John Morrow was disgracefully discharged from the Army for assaulting a superior officer in a dispute over a woman.  Desperate dude number six is Blacky Cain, a murderous gangster.  These questionable characters have been assembled by one Asa Brand to pursue a perilous mission--journeying hundreds of miles up an African river into the territory of the savage Kiridu people, reputed to be the site of the Lake of Life!

Chapter 1 not only introduces our heroes (?) but covers the wreck of their schooner on a sand bar in the mouth of the Bembu river as they flees a French gunboat that is attempting to enforce the laws forbidding anybody from entering this part of the French Congo and stirring up the volatile natives.

In Chapter 2 we learn about the background of Stannard, a penniless adventurer who has a laid up brother and needs cash to pay for bro's operation, and of Brand, a skinny and sickly old millionaire whose business operations reach into every corner of the nation (Hamilton compares his body to that of a vulture and his finances to the many-tentacled octopus.)  Brand has learned that the tribes of the Kiridu region believe that deep in their territory, beyond the Mountains of Death, lies a lake of shining waters that confer immortality to all who drink of them, and this elderly moneybags, who is at death's door, recruited the six desperadoes to find this Lake, financing the expedition and promising a huge reward to any who survive a successful effort to bring back to him a dose of its miraculous water.

Chapter 3 starts with a description of the drums the adventurers hear on the seventh and eighth days of their grueling (they have to paddle--no motor boats for these guys!) trip up the Bembu.

Black heart of Africa, throbbing in hate and menace!  Its malign whisper was a sinister promise.  Boom!  Boom!  Boom!  

The becomes no more than a swamp, and the six pith-helmeted questors have to schlep the final leg of their journey to the mountains.  The Kiridu people regard the Mountains of Death as sacred and inviolable, and an army of warriors, their black skin painted white with the likenesses of skeletons, burst out of the dense jungle to attack the expedition, but their spears are no match for the invaders' rifles, grenades and tommy gun.

The Mountains of Death live up to their name, proving absolutely unscalable--all who touch them are instantly killed by some mysterious, perhaps electric, force.  In Chapter 4 our heroes find a raging river that passes through a chasm into the valley beyond the mountains and navigate it on a hastily built raft.  In Chapter 5 they spot a city of red domes and towers, but before they can reach it they are attacked by a small squadron of white cavalrymen clad in black mail.  These horsemen's swords are no match for the Americans' pistols, and they are routed, leaving behind their leader--a beautiful blue-eyed brunette princess!  A much larger unit of cavalry shows up; these pale faces are clad in red armor, and they take our cast into the red city.  Both the Red and Black factions of valley dwellers speak a language much like Arabic, so world traveler Stannard can communicate with them.

In Chapters 6 and 7, Stannard, in the red walled town, learns from the Reds and from the princess of the Blacks, Princess Lurain, all about local politics and religion and the Lake of Life.  Long ago, when it was still possible to climb the mountains, some migrating white people discovered this valley, as well as a subterranean lake said to offer immortality to those who drink from it.  But some nonhuman beings were guarding the lake, and forbid any to partake of its waters, and rendered the mountains impassable in order to keep any more outsiders from arriving in the valley.  Lurain's ancestors built a temple and a black city over the entrance to the cavern of the Lake, and in obedience to the strange Guardians, barred all entry to the cavern of the Lake.  Over the centuries people began to doubt the existence of the Guardians, but less so that of the life-giving Lake.  A civil war erupted between those conservatives who maintained the old religion and continued to forbid any entrance into the cavern, and those who wanted to go see if they really could win immortality.  The religious skeptics were defeated and departed, founding their own, red, city.  In the generations since the civil war, defectors from the black city have swelled the population of the red city, and the king of the Reds has been plotting an assault on the city of the now-outnumbered superstitious Blacks so he can try his hand at gaining immortality at the subterranean Lake.

The Red king, making liberal use of wine and his sexy sister, tries to get Stannard and the Americans to ally with him and participate in the attack on the city of the Blacks.  But Stannard soon learns that the king plans to stab him and his comrades in the back as soon as the Black city falls, so Stannard instead allies with Lurain and the Blacks.  Initially, Lurain doesn't want to meet his terms--that he be allowed to take some water from the Lake--but she figures the alien Guardians will just kill him if he goes down to the Lake anyway, so agrees.  The princess and the outsiders escape the Red city in Chapter 8 and by Chapter 9 are at Lurain's crumbling old depopulated Black city.  Lurain's pious countrymen of course refuse to give the outsiders permission to go down to the Lake, but Lurain keeps her word and in Chapter 10 guides Stannard through a secret passage to the top of the slippery staircase which no man or woman has descended for many centuries.

American and princess descend the stairs and reach the glowing Lake in Chapter 11.  No alien Guardians are in evidence, just a statue of one, an ogre-sized biped with flippers instead of hands (Hamilton compares it to a seal.)

In Chapter 12 Stannard has the opportunity to drink from the Lake of Life and achieve immortality, but the statue of the Guardian is so cunningly carved, its inhuman features so evocative of weariness and despair, that it conveys the horrible truth about immortality--that to live forever is a horror.

Night is good after day, and death is good after life.  Who would live in an endless day, without ever attaining the rest of night?

Lurain's father the Black king and his soldiers capture Stannard and the princess and are about to put them to death for blasphemy and sacrilege when the Red army arrives.  In a surprise storm, the Reds take the town, overwhelming the defenders, killing the entire population, man, woman and child, and seizing the temple.  Only Stannard and princess Lurain survive, the other Americans sacrificing themselves in the fighting to preserve them.  At the end of Chapter 13 the Red king and his soldiers drink from the Lake and become immortal and vow to conquer the Earth--the Lake's waters confer not only immortality, but invulnerability.

In Chapter 14 we have our somewhat disappointing Raiders of the Lost Ark-style deus ex machina climax.  (I prefer stories to be resolved in a way that reflects the characters' choices or personalities, not some outside force, so to my mind the real climax of the story is Stannard's spiritual crisis in which he must choose whether or not to seize immortality.)  The seal-like Guardians emerge from the Lake, and explain they ruled the Earth before the rise of Man, and the Lake is the product of a meteor strike way back when.  They attained immortality from the water infused by the meteor's life-giving radiation, but regretted it because living forever becomes boring and exhausting.

The Guardians denounce the Reds, allow Stannard and Lurain to escape, and then trigger an earthquake which buries the Lake and everyone in the valley, killing the women and children back in the Red city and burying alive, forever, the Red soldiers and themselves.

Chapter 14 is an "epilog" in which we learn that Lurain, the only survivor of her people, and Stannard make it back to civilization.  When Stannard's expedition was reported lost Brand bequeathed a million bucks to Stannard's family and then died of a broken heart.  Hamilton leaves us with the idea that the five reckless and violent men Stannard led into the jungle, to their deaths, had redeemed themselves by saving our male and female leads.  Stannard and Lurain, who of course have fallen in love, can live happily ever after.

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Look for more Weird Tales--and Weird Tales adjacent--material in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.