When the World Shook

When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard is an unusual if flawed piece of early science fiction, laced with philosophy, religion, colonial anthropology, romance and humor.

The journal Science Fiction Studies of DePauw University sums up the book as follows:

When The World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot. 1919. The most science-fictional of Haggard's novels, for along with such psychic phenomena as metempsychosis we have suspended animation with survivors from a technologically advanced civilization 250,000 years in the past, a chart comparing the star patterns of that time with those of today, and a monstrous machine — one capable of changing the tilt of the earth.

It is a post-Victorian novel, written during World War I, and the conflict impinges upon the narrative in various ways. When the World Shook was first published in serial form in the British Christian evangelical magazine The Quiver in 1918, at the end of the war, and was released as a novel the following year.

A thoughtful blogger was right on target when he recently observed:

When the World Shook is a beautiful and silly book. It has very clear flaws and is definitely not one of the best books ever written, but it may turn out to be one of my favorites. This thing is deeply flawed, but I fully intend to read it again and again throughout my life. The book is, at its core, the adventures of a troubled agnostic and his buddies the atheist and the believer, as they explore a mysterious island and meet the powerful man-god-king asleep in its bowels. They also argue philosophy and theology a lot. Oh and there’s World War I? Plus a touch of racism, but not as much as I expected! Basically, it’s your normal “boy widower who suffers anxiety about where we go when we die and what our place in the universe might be meets girl who is an ancient scientifimagical princess who has slept in the Earth for eons and might be a reincarnation of someone who lived during her sleep” story.

The author, Sir Henry Rider Haggard, wrote adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa – such as King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain (1887) and She (1887) – and was a pioneer of the “lost world” literary genre, of which When the World Shook is a late example.

Haggard was a close friend of Rudyard Kipling, and Sir Henry’s biographer Morton Cohen says Kipling provided the idea for When the World Shook. The website HiLoBrow says Kipling “helped with the plot.”

HiLoBrow has posted a modern serialization of the novel, with some minor abridgements.

Here is HiLoBrow’s plot summary plus some interesting blurbs, old and new:

When the World Shook concerns adventurers Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot, who discover two Atlanteans in a state of suspended animation on a remote island. One of the awakened sleepers, Lord Oro, is a superman — the last king of the Sons of Wisdom, who’d relied on hyper-advanced technology to subjugate the planet’s lesser peoples. The other is Oro’s sexy daughter, Yva… who falls in love with Arbuthnot. Using astral projection, Lord Oro visits London and the battlefields of the Western Front. Why? To determine whether or not he should once again employ an infernal chthonic machine to drown the worthless human race, as he’d done 250,000 years earlier!... 

“A really splendid romance, rich in color, fresh and gorgeous in its imaginative qualities and power, and needless to add, absorbingly interesting, is this wherein Rider Haggard tells us of what happened ‘When the World Shook.’” — The New York Times (1919) 

“Speaking quite soberly and without exaggeration, this story of ‘When the World Shook’ is an amazing novel. Amazing in its imaginative quality, its romance, the splendor of its descriptions, doubly amazing when one remembers that it is the successor to a long series of colorful tales of adventure in savage or extraordinary lands… We frankly admit that, in our opinion at least, Rider Haggard has never conceived and placed before our eyes any pictures more thrilling or more impressive that are contained in this latest book.” — New York Evening Post (1919) 

“Rider Haggard has again unbridled his splendid imagination. A thrilling, gigantic wonder tale.” — Pittsburgh Sun (1919) 

“If this is pulp fiction it’s high pulp: a Wagnerian opera of an adventure tale, a B-movie humanist apocalypse and chivalric romance. When the World Shook has it all — English gentlemen of leisure, a devastating shipwreck, a volcanic tropical island inhabited by cannibals, an ancient princess risen from the grave, and if that weren’t enough a friendly, ongoing debate between a godless materialist and a devout Christian. H. Rider Haggard’s rich universe is both profoundly camp and deeply idealistic.” — Lydia Millet (2012 blurb for HiLoBooks)

Another online version of the novel is available on an Australian website, freeread.com.au.

Queens of Mesopotamia – Part II: Nitocris

‘Darius Opens the Tomb of Nitocris’

By Eustache Le Sueur

In the previous post, we discussed the Assyrian queen Semiramis, as described in the Histories of Herodotus and other works. Now we will take a look at Nitocris, another queen who ruled Babylon five generations after Semiramis.

(Another, perhaps better-known, Nitocris was also mentioned by Herodotus as a ruler of Egypt. She was said to be the last pharaoh of the Sixth dynasty. Today, scholars question her very existence.)

The Assyrian-origin Nitocris, sometimes called Nitocris of Babylon, is said to be either the wife or daughter of Nebuchadnezzar II. This Nebuchadnezzar (a major figure in the Bible’s Book of Daniel) was the son of Nabopolassar, founder of the Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean Empire, which broke free from Nineveh-based Assyria by forming an alliance with the Medes of Persia. After the destruction of Nineveh, the Babylonians began to worry about the ambitions of their erstwhile Persian allies.

Nitocris is introduced by Herodotus as follows (in George Rawlinson’s translation):

The later of the two queens, whose name was Nitocris, a wiser princess than her predecessor, not only left behind her, as memorials of her occupancy of the throne, the works which I shall presently describe, but also, observing the great power and restless enterprise of the Medes, who had taken so large a number of cities, and among them Nineveh, and expecting to be attacked in her turn, made all possible exertions to increase the defences of her empire.

Herodotus says Nitocris ordered a number of grand civil works aimed at creating defensive positions north of Babylon and thereby deterring attacks by the Medes. Among other things, Babylonian excavations transformed the Euphrates, formerly a straight river course flowing into Babylon from the north, turning it into a winding river with a number of sharp bends. She also ordered a huge lake to be dug to the north of her capital.

As Herodotus put it: “All these works were on that side of Babylon where the passes lay, and the roads into Media were the straightest, and the aim of the queen in making them was to prevent the Medes from holding intercourse with the Babylonians, and so to keep them in ignorance of her affairs.”

She also took advantage of the massive construction projects to temporarily redirect the Euphrates into the new lake basin and build a stone bridge across the riverbed inside the city of Babylon, for the first time linking the two sides of the capital.

Says Herodotus: “When the river had filled the cutting, and the bridge was finished, the Euphrates was turned back again into its ancient bed; and thus the basin, transformed suddenly into a lake, was seen to answer the purpose for which it was made, and the inhabitants, by help of the basin, obtained the advantage of a bridge.”

The location of the bridge of Nitocris has been uncovered by archaeologists at the site of the city of Babylon.

The Achaemenid Persian King Cyrus used Nitocris’ public works against her in his conquest of Babylon. He diverted the Euphrates into her artificial lake, lowering the river’s level to allow his troops to enter the city under the defensive walls beneath which the river passed.

Nitocris also created what Herodotus called “a remarkable deception” to prevent anyone from seizing her burial treasure after her death. She built her tomb above one of the main gates of Babylon, rendering the entrance unusable, because of a widespread cultural prohibition against passing beneath a dead body:

She had her tomb constructed in the upper part of one of the principal gateways of the city, high above the heads of the passers by, with this inscription cut upon it:- "If there be one among my successors on the throne of Babylon who is in want of treasure, let him open my tomb, and take as much as he chooses -- not, however, unless he be truly in want, for it will not be for his good." This tomb continued untouched until [the Achaemenid Persian king] Darius came to the kingdom. To him it seemed a monstrous thing that he should be unable to use one of the gates of the town, and that a sum of money should be lying idle, and moreover inviting his grasp, and he not seize upon it. Now he could not use the gate, because, as he drove through, the dead body would have been over his head. Accordingly he opened the tomb; but instead of money, found only the dead body, and a writing which said- "Hadst thou not been insatiate of pelf, and careless how thou gottest it, thou wouldst not have broken open the sepulchres of the dead."

Herodotus does not specifically say what happened to Nitocris’ treasure, but his account suggests none was buried with her – that, of course, would have been the centerpiece of the deception.

Classicist Deborah Levine Gera, author of Warrior Women: The Anonymous Tractatus De Mulieribus, says Nitocris of Babylon appears to be more intelligent than Semiramis, particularly because of her public works projects and her awareness of Median expansionism. But she notes that some scholars suspect the two queens, if they actually existed, were in fact the same person. Plutarch, for example confuses the two, and has Darius plunder Semiramis’ tomb. Also some accounts attribute the bridge-building and artificial lake to Semiramis.

There are other theories about Nitocris’ identity, including:

(1) She was Nebuchadnezzar II, whose name Herodotus mistook for a feminine form. 

(2) She was Adad-Guppi, mother of Nabonidus, last of the Neo-Babylonian rulers. The influential Adad-Guppi, who helped engineer her son’s rise to the throne, was born in about 649 B.C., 150 years or five generations after the queen thought to be Semiramis. 

(3) Nitocris was a powerful Assyrian queen named Naqi’a, wife of Sennacherib (who ruled from 704-681 B.C.) and mother of Esarhaddon (who ruled from 680-669 B.C.). Many of the public works completed during Naqi’a’s lifetime resembled those of Nitocris.

To sum up, as Levine Gera puts it:

Nitocris is an elusive figure. All of the attempts to identify the Babylonian queen with an historical personage lead to difficulties of one kind or another and we cannot establish whether, in fact, she ever existed. Real or not, Nitocris is a complex, ambiguous personality whose successes and failures are inextricably linked.  She builds magnificent, monumental waterworks, but these are used by Cyrus to capture her city. She tricks Darius into opening her tomb only to bring about the violation of her own grave. Nitocris is said to be clever, but the queen is, in Herodotus’ tale, her own worst enemy: ultimately, her building feats and artful epitaph – the outstanding products of her intelligence – do her no good.

The mystery of Nitocris, like that of Semiramis, continues….