J H Rosny's Ironcastle--an Atypical Lost World

 

I just finished re-reading J. H. Rosny's Ironcastle. Rosny is called often the ERB of France, and actually he co-wrote his novels, or some of them, with his brother. I have an old paperback edition, though supposedly a new edition is is soon to be printed that shows more of Roy Krenkel's great art on the cover. The interior illos are all by Krenkel as well, and Phillip Jose Farmer both translated and apparently edited it some, though I have little idea just how much change he may have made. Rosny also authored Quest for Fire and The Great Cat, both novels of cavemen during the Plesticene, and since I haven't read those, I don't know much of his writing save for this, which may in fact contain too much of Farmer's embellishments. 

  Not that that doesn't make a great read. One embellishment that seems almost certain is that Farmer throws in reference to Doc Savage and AC Doyle's Maple White Land. The lost world that Ironcastle and his friends discover in the dark heart of Africa contains no dinosaurs, and in general, no actual prehistoric beasts, save for maybe a huge cave-lion that may be a Plesticene relic. 

There are a species of proto humans called "stunted men" who kidnap the obligatory love interest Murial at one point. There is also one dinosaur relation, a possibly prehistoric crocodilian beast, that is both warm-blooded and furred, with a third eye in the middle of his forehead. The cluster of photo-receptive cells possessed by some lizards and amphibians has developed into an actual eye in this species. The same has happened with a large three-eyed toad, which is also covered in hair (warm-blooded as well?) 

Other creatures inhabiting the land include small birds with fantastic hued, jewel-like colors, preyed on by huge flies, lion-sized leopards with blue-spots, giant, erythistic lions the shade of a red fox, purple and pink hippos four-tusked elephants (gomphotherium, or something else?), among many others. It's a fantastic managerie Rosny gives us. There are also scaled, green-furred sentient beings with cylindric heads. Most of the vegetation is a weird blue or purple, and seems in some strange symbiotic relation with the region's incredible wildlife. 

All this is, as the blurb informs us, this section of Africa has been transformed by an intelligence from the stars. They eventually discover the remnants of a crashed spacecraft, the alien pilot intact, although this being seems to have been neither animal nor plant, but something in between, and the region's weird plant life has "grown" from the deceased alien, and turn, has transformed the native fauna into the fantastic forms that now inhabit the land. Unfortunately, it appears the root system is now dying, which will eventually spell the animal life that depend on it as well. The hidden world may not survive but for a few more months. or perhaps it will revert back into "normal" African species.

It's an engrossing story, and the whole concept of the alien plant that creates and sustains the lost world seems distinctly Farmer-esque. He may be the one who came up with the concept, though I'm unfamiliar with Rosny's other writing. The alien system sort of recalled the "crystal tree of time" in Farmer's Tarzan pastiche The Dark Heart of Time. 

And it kind of begs the question: if there is indeed overlap between ERB's world and this one, could or did Tarzan ever visit Ironcastle's lost realm? Maybe not that we know of. But there was a lost valley that Tarzan discovered back in DC's Tarzan 235, drawn by Kubert, "The Magic Herb." This world also looks like someplace transformed by something from outer space as well. Tarzan battles a creature that resembles one of the giant creodont predators of the Miocene, only with saber-teeth, and then the horned serpent-like beast. And then there are the lizard-like (warm-blooded?) inhabitants. Hmmmm...