Tarzan at the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The lake of the Horibs lies at a considerable distance from the eastern end of the mountains of the Thipdars, perhaps five hundred miles, and where there is no time and distances are measured by food and sleep it makes little difference whether places are separated by five miles or five hundred.

The time has come to read the thirteenth Tarzan book and the fourth Pellucidar book, Tarzan at the Earth's Core.  Today's subject first appeared as a seven-part serial in Blue Book, spanning September 1929 to March 1930.  I'm reading a 1970s Ballantine edition with a Neal Adams cover.  (I actually saw a print of Adams' cover illustration, signed by Adams himself, at an antique store a few years ago.)  You can see that Adams tried to reproduce the unique sky of Pellucidar in the background of painting--as every schoolboy knows, Pellucidar is the world on the inner surface of the Earth's crust, so there is no conventional horizon, you just see the surface geography of your inner world curving upwards, like if you were a tiny bug in a huge bowl (with another bowl placed upside down on top.)  The people of Pellucidar live in a perpetual noon, as the weird sun that hovers in the center of the hollow Earth never moves, and as such Pellucidarians have little or no sense of time, something Burroughs dwells on in these Pellucidar books, I guess part of the wish-fulfillment element of the Pellucidar series, an effort to appeal to the dread of 20th-century people of the schedules and deadlines and tick-tock clocks that allow our modern society to operate.  (Remember that loud stupid Harlan Ellison story everyone loves about how Harlan Ellison shouldn't have to follow deadlines and schedules?  I bet you do.)  

Anyway, Tarzan at the Earth's Core has been printed many times and has had many dramatic covers, and Adams' contribution can stand proudly among them next to those of Frank Frazetta and J. Allen St. John, each of which shows Tarzan fighting for his life against some monster.

You'll probably remember that, in Tanar of Pellucidar, James Gridley discovered a new radio wave and was able to tune in to messages sent by scientist Abner Perry from Pellucidar, messages that detailed how David Innes, founder of an empire in Pellucidar, had been captured by the piratical Korsars.  The premise of Tarzan at the Earth's Core is that Gridley recruits a bunch of Germans to build a superior dirigible with which to enter Pellucidar via an opening in the Earth's crust at the North Pole that Innes had discovered, and then recruits Lord Greystoke, your hero and mine, to lead the expedition.  A squad of Waziri, brave African fighting men who recognize Tarzan as their chief, accompany Tarzan.  For comic relief, accompanying the Germans as cook is an African-American soldier who settled in Deutschland after being captured during the Great War.  Burroughs renders this guy's dialogue phonetically ("'S funny...dey ain't no one stirrin'--mus' all of overslep' demsef") and we spend enough time with him early on that I thought he might play a role in the plot, but he does not; mainly Burroughs uses the cook's perplexity at how there is no time in Pellucidar to remind us readers of this salient fact about Pellucidar, something he persists in reminding us of again and again in a multitude of ways. 

Burroughs' style is smooth and comfortable, so after we get past Burroughs' explanation of what Pellucidar is in the two-page forward it is fun to read about how Tarzan and Gridley meet and about the construction of the dirigible and all that.  Once in Pellucidar, we get a long series of interesting and compelling scenes that mostly entail fighting prehistoric beasts or barbaric men, getting captured and escaping, or climbing mountains.  Tarzan at Earth's Core doesn't build up to a climax really, instead we have these various adventure episodes and cliff hangers in which people face death or captivity but retain life, limb and liberty, and then the plot is all wrapped up neatly thanks to coincidences.  You might say the novel is poorly structured, but the individual action and horror scenes are all fun so I enjoyed it regardless.

Immediately upon arrival, Tarzan goes off on his own and gets lost (with no stars and shadows that never change, it is hard to tell what direction you are facing) and immobilized in a trap and contemplates death as a saber-toothed tiger approaches him--Tarzan, we learn, is what an insufferable hipster might call "not religious but spiritual" and cherishes a hope that there is life after death.

Tarzan of the Apes was not a church man; yet like the majority of those who have always lived close to nature he was, in a sense, intensely religious.  His intimate knowledge of the stupendous forces of nature, of her wonders and her miracles had impressed him with the fact that their ultimate origin lay far beyond the conception of the finite mind of man, and thus incalculably remote from the farthest bounds of science.

When they realize Tarzan is lost, Gridley, a few Germans, and the Waziri, go out looking for him.  The search party blunders into an astounding danger--a big pack of saber-toothed cats are herding a huge crowd of deer, mastodons, giant sloths, "dinotheriums," etc., into a clearing to slaughter and devour them, and Gridley's party gets trapped among the doomed herbivores.  This massacre gives Burroughs a chance to share his own theory of why the dinosaurs and other prehistoric megafauna went extinct, and even a theory on the grim future of mankind; in its earlier chapters Tarzan at the Earth's Core feels like "real" science fiction, what with these sorts of speculations (however wacky) and with all the talk of how to build a superior airship.  But not the science fiction that romanticizes mankind's ability to solve problems and master the universe with science and technology; at the same time that Tarzan at the Earth's Core shows men advancing technologically and demonstrating selflessness and bravery, the novel still is full of that misanthropy we often see in these Tarzan stories, a lot of extravagant silliness about how man is less virtuous than animals:

...man, who is unquestionably the Creator's greatest blunder, combining as he does all the vices of preceding types from invertebrates to mammals, while possessing few of their virtues.

This is fun rhetoric to read, but come on, what "virtue" could we possibly say is possessed by a trilobite or an ammonite, by a skittering skink or slinking snake?  Like the idea that people in Pellucidar have no sense of time because there are no heavenly bodies and no night and day, the idea that animals--even bugs!--are better than people is an idea that makes the novel better by adding a layer of thought and feeling and alienness, but is utter balderdash.   

Tarzan is rescued from the cat who menaces him by a tribe of Sagoths, a savage people with approximately the intelligence of a human but the bodies of gorillas.  They speak the same ape language that Tarzan learned as a boy, so he is able to make friends with one of the biggest and strongest of them.  This prominent Sagoth is exiled from his tribe, and he and Tarzan set off together.  Soon they are joined by a normal Pellucidar human, a man of the mountain country of Zoram.  Like John Carter on Mars, Tarzan in Pellucidar plays the role of the civilizing imperialist who makes the natives less savage, more diplomatic and friendly, and gets the Zoramian and Sagoth, traditional enemies, to become comrades.  

Burroughs' novels generally include a princess and a man--an outsider--who ends up marrying her.  Zoram is famed as a land whose women are the greatest beauties in Pellucidar, and a third of the way into Tarzan at the Earth's Core we meet the expected princess, Jana, known as the Red Flower of Zoram.  We get a long description of her beautiful hair and and barbaric clothes, including her jewelry, made from the bones of a dimorphodon and other small creatures, and then a good chase scene as a chief of a lowland tribe, people whom the mountain tribes hold in severe contempt, and his lackeys try to capture her for the obvious purpose.  In the middle of the chase Jason Gridley appears.

Gridley survived the saber-tooth tiger feast, but was separated from his fellows, and when he got back to the zeppelin he took off in the airship's scout plane to look for his friends.  A pteranodon brings down his monoplane and he bails out, his parachute carrying him providentially right by the beleaguered Jana, who is not only about to be attacked from one side by lowlanders but from the other by hyenadons (when it rains in Pellucidar, it pours.)  Gridley with his Colt .45 revolver and Jana with her spear fight these creatures side by side, driving them off and falling in love, though Gridey doesn't quite grok his own feelings and Jana is reluctant to admit her own.

Adding a note of bitter realism to our male wish-fulfillment fantasy in which guys outfight saber-toothed tigers, pteranodons and cave bears, Gridley says the wrong thing and Jana starts saying she hates him and threatening to murder him and to commit suicide.  Jana performatively runs off and the quarelling couple are legitimately separated by a flood after one of Pellucidar's rare rain storms and Gridley must proceed alone, without a guide; in the process he loses his clothes and his rifle and must face the world as naked as its natives and armed with a spear and a bow he fashions himself.  One of the last things Jana said to him before she left him was that "Only a man may go where goes the Red Flower of Zoram," and by learning how to navigate the obstacles of a world of voracious monsters and treacherous cliffsides without clothes and without firearms, Gridley becomes that sort of man.

Tarzan and his two new buddies head for Zoram after finding the crashed plane and Gridley and Jana's footprints headed that way.  Tarzan is carried away by a pteranodon, and we get additional superior action sequences as he escapes the flying reptile's nest and then has to fight a giant cave bear on a narrow ledge.  The cave bear was attacking a prince of the Clovi people, people who, like the Zoram tribe they habitually raid to steal women, live in the mountains of the Thipdars, and saving the prince allows Tarzan to make friends among the Clovi.  While Lord Greystoke is there, a Clovi raiding party returns with a beautiful captive--none other than Jana, the Red Flower of Zoram, herself! 

Not everybody among the insular Clovi is crazy about Tarzan, and it looks like Lord Greystoke will be executed and Jana will commit suicide as she is forced to marry some local guy.  So the prince of the Clovi helps our heroes escape to a plain inhabited by triceratops and snake people known as the Horibs who ride pareiasaurs, reptiles which Burroughs depicts as being faster than a horse.  Tarzan watches as a squadron of snake people lancers hunt down a triceratops, and then he and Jana are captured by the mounted ophidians.

Meanwhile, Gridley makes friends among the Zoramians by killing a stegosaurus that was attacking Jana's brother.  (At least four times in Tarzan at the Earth's Core, Gridley or Lord Greystoke make friends with people by showing up at the very moment some monster is about to kill them.)  One of the crazier scenes of Tarzan at the Earth's Core is this one, in which the stegosaur glides by jumping off a ridge and lowering its characteristic plates to the horizontal so they serve as wings.  Jana's brother thinks Jana must have been captured by lowlanders, so, while we readers know she is has in fact been in the clutches of the Clovi mountain folk and then the snake people, we observe as Gridley and his new friend seek the Red Flower of Zoram in a village in a swamp.  This swamp is full of giant reptiles of all types, and Gridley is amazed to see a huge snake swallow a trachodon whole.  Further amazement follows as Gridley and friend are captured by Korsars and carried down a river towards the sea.  The pirates' boat is attacked again and again by giant reptiles, and then, finally, by Horibs, whose steeds are just as agile in the water as on the land.  Burroughs gives us a long and mind-blowing horror/battle scene with a surfeit of gruesome wounds and gallons of blood; once the pirate boat is taken by the snake people, Gridley has to watch as the reptile men eat the dead pirates.  Gridley and Jana's brother are carried off by the Horibs to be fattened up for a feast!

In the closing chapters of the novel, Burroughs wraps things up a little too quickly and a little too anticlimactically.  The snake men unwittingly bring Tarzan and Gridley back together, while chance reunites them with the Waziri and then the German airship.  With their modern rifles the Waziri make quick work of the Horibs, then the airship and its bombs awe the Korsars into handing over David Innes.  Somewhat oddly, we don't get a scene of Tarzan and/or Gridley meeting Innes and/or Abner Perry, shaking hands and thanking each other or something.  Despite the uncountable fights and chases they have all been in, the crew that entered Pellucidar on the airship has suffered only one casualty--one of the Germans is MIA.  Gridley decides to stay in Pellucidar to look for mein herr, and when she sees that Gridley is sticking around, Jana finally stops giving him the cold shoulder and the two openly express their love for each other.

(One of my gripes is that Burroughs didn't give the German for whom Gridley is going to search any personality that I can remember, or develop any kind of relationship between Gridley and this German.  Instead of expending time on the black cook, Burroughs probably should have given this German a personality.  Or, had the American cook, maybe through some goofy misstep, get lost in Pellucidar and have him be the man whom Gridley vows to find.)

Tarzan at the Earth's Core is made up of the same basic building blocks of so many of Burroughs' works, but the action scenes and horror scenes are better than average, or at least I enjoyed them more than usual.  The minor characters are not as good as some we have seen, but they aren't bad, and I have already said I enjoyed the stuff about the German dirigible and Burroughs' various evolutionary theories.  It is a little hard to judge, seeing as it has been a while since I read them, but I think I like this one better than the last three or four Burroughs novels I've read. So, thumbs up, I certainly recommend Tarzan at the Earth's Core.

It looks like the fifth Pellucidar novel appeared in 1937, preceded by the fourteenth through nineteenth Tarzan books, so it will be a while before we return to the Earth's Core.  I wonder if Gridley ever finds that German.