Golden Blood by Jack Williamson

Book Details

Golden Blood – Gold lured the “Secret Legion” into the world’s most treacherous desert. And gold they found – a powerful golden man, an exotic golden woman, a huge golden tiger and an eerie golden snake.

A tale of weird adventures in the hidden land beyond the cruel desert of the Rub’ Al Khali, and a golden folk that ride upon a golden-yellow tiger and worship a golden snake.

Golden Blood (1933)

1. The Secret Legion
2. The Yellow Blade
3. The Road of Skulls
4. The Tiger in the Sky
5. The Sign of the Snake

Part 2

6. The White Dromedary
7. Aysa of the Golden Land
8. “La Siwa Hu”
9. The City of the Sands
10. In the Crypts of Anz

Part 3

11. The Tiger’s Trail
12. “The Rock of Hell”
13. The Golden Land
14. The Menace in the Mirage
15. Mirrors of Peril
16. The Strange Eyes of the Snake

Part 4

17. The Slave of the Serpent
18. Frost of Gold
19. For the Mastery of the Serpent
20. The Sleeper in the Mist
21. At the Mercy of Malikar

Part 5

22. Vekyra’s Guest
23. The Golden Folk
24. Mirrors of Mirage
25. The Crown of Anz
26. Vekyra’s Vengeance

Part 6

27. The Camp in the Wadi
28. The Sentinel Serpent
29. Golden Blood
30. Gold and Iron
31. Kismet
32. The Ancient Aysa

John Stewart Williamson (1908–2006), who wrote as Jack Williamson, was often called the “Dean of Science Fiction”. As a young man, he discovered the magazine Amazing Stories, after answering an ad for one free issue. He began to write his own fiction and sold his first story to Amazing’s publisher Hugo Gernsback at age 20.

Golden Blood was published in six parts in Weird Tales in 1933.

Golden Blood has 9 illustrations.

Excerpt: Golden Blood

1. The Secret Legion

THE noonday Arabian sun is curiously like moonlight. The eye-searing brilliance of it, like the moon, blots out all color, in pitiless contrast of black and white. The senses withdraw from its drenching flame; and the Arab kaylulah or siesta is a time of supine surrender to supernal day.

Price Durand, sprawled beneath a sun-faded awning on the schooner’s heat-blistered deck, lay in that curious half-sleep in which one dreams, yet knows he dreams, and watches his visions like a play. And Price, the waking part of his mind, was astonished at his dream.

For he saw Anz, the lost city of the legend, where it stood hidden in the desert’s heart. Mighty walls girdled its proud towers, and away from their foot stretched the green palm groves of the great oasis. He saw the gates of Anz open in the dream, massive valves of bronze. A man rode out upon a gigantic white camel, a man in gleaming mail of gold, who carried a heavy ax of yellow metal.

The warrior rode out of the gate, and through the tall palms of the oasis, and into the tawny dunes of the sand-desert. He was reaching for something, and his fingers kept tight upon the helve of the great ax. And the white camel was afraid.

A fly came buzzing about Price’s Head, and he sat up, yawning. A damned queer dream, that! He had seen the old city as vividly as if it had actually been before his eyes. His subconscious mind must have been at work on the legend: there had been nothing in the story about a man in golden armor.

Well, it was too hot to worry about a dream, too hot to think at all. He mopped the perspiration from his face, and stared around him with eyes narrowed against the blinding glare.

The Arabian Sea blazed beneath the merciless sun, a plane of molten glass. The blazing sky was tinged with copper; dry, stinging heat drove down from it. A tawny line of sand marked the northern horizon, where the desolate shifting dunes of the Rub’ Al Khali met the incandescent sea. The schooner Iñez, as furtively sinister as her swart Macanese master, lay motionless upon the hot, steely ocean, a mile offshore, her drooping, dingy sails casting narrow and comfortless shadows upon greasy decks.

Price Durand, lounging beneath his tattered awning, was saturated with the haunting loneliness of hot sea and burning sand. The brooding, shadowy hostility of the unknown desert so near flowed about him like a tangible current, silent, sinister.

His emotions had become oddly divided, he was thinking, in the long days since the schooner had left the Red Sea, as if two forces in him were struggling for mastery.

Price Durand, the world-weary soldier of fortune, was afraid of this crudest and least known of the deserts of the world, but not, of course, to the extent of wishing to abandon the expedition; he was not the sort to quit because he was afraid. But he struggled against the tawny, brooding power of the desert, fiercely determined not to be mastered by its silent spell.

And the other, new-born part of him welcomed the haunting spirit of the desert, surrendered to it gladly. The very loneliness beckoned, the swart cruelty was a mute appeal. The same stern hostility of the land that frightened the old Price Durand was a fascinating allure for the new.

“See Fouad’s coming,” boomed Jacob Garth’s calm voice from the foredeck. “Kept the rendezvous to a day. We’ll be starting inland by Monday.”

Price looked up at Jacob Garth. A huge, gross, red-bearded man, with a deceptive appearance of softness that concealed his iron strength. His skin looked white and smooth; it seemed neither to burn nor tan beneath the sun that had cooked all the others to a chocolate brown.

HOLDING the binoculars with which he had been scanning the red line of the coast, Jacob Garth wheeled with ponderous ease. He evinced no excitement; his pale blue eyes were cold and emotionless. But his words woke the schooner from sun-drenched sleep.

Joao de Castro, the swarthy and slant-eyed Eurasian master, scum of degenerate Macao, burst out of his cabin, shrieked excited questions in Portuguese and broken Eaglish. De Castro was small, physically insignificant, holding authority over his crew by sheer force of cutthroat hellishness. Price had no great liking for any of his strangely assorted fellow adventurers; but Joao was the only one of them he actually hated. That hatred was natural, instinctive; it had risen from some deep well of his nature at first sight of the man; and Price knew the little Macanese returned it cordially.

Jacob Garth silenced the feverish questions of the master with a single booming word: “There!”

He handed his binoculars to the little man, pointed at the line of undulating sand across the shimmering, steely sea.

Price’s attention went back to Garth. After three months he knew no more of the man than on the day he had met him. Jacob Garth was a perpetual enigma, a puzzle Price had failed to solve. His broad, tallow-white face was a mask. His mind seemed as deliberate and imperturbable as his massive body. Price had never seen him display any shadow of emotion.

Presumably, Garth was an Englishman. English, at any rate, he spoke, unaccented and with the vocabulary of an educated man. Price imagined that he might be a member of the aristocracy, ruined by the war, and attempting this fantastic expedition to recoup his fortune. But the supposition was unconfirmed.

It was strange, and yet almost amusing, to watch Jacob Garth standing motionless and immutable as a Buddha, while the excitement his words had created ran like a flame over the ship.

The men sprang up from where they had been lounging on the deck, or came running up the companionway. to line the rail in a shouting, jostling throng, oblivious of the beating sun, staring at the horizon of sand.

Price surveyed the line, speculatively. A hard lot, this score of life-toughened adventurers who called themselves the “Secret Legion.” But a hard lot was just what this undertaking demanded; no place here for pampered tender feet.

Every man of the “Secret Legion” had served in the World War. That was essential, in view of the actual nature of the schooner’s cargo, which was manifested as “agricultural machinery.” None was younger than thirty, and few were more than forty. One, besides Price, was an American; he was Sam Sorrows, a lanky ex-farmer from Kansas. Nine were British, selected by Jacob Garth. The others represented half a dozen European countries. All were men well trained in the use of the implements in the cargo; and all were the sort to use them with desperate courage, in quest of the fabulous treasure Jacob Garth had promised.

With only their naked eyes, the men at the rail could see nothing. Reluctantly, Price got to his feet, crossed the hot deck to where Garth stood. Without a word, the big man took the binoculars from the captain’s trembling hands and handed them to Price.

“Look beyond the second line of dunes, Mr. Durand.”

Endless ranks of heaving red-sand crests marched across the lenses. Then Price saw the camels, a line of dark specks, creeping across the yellowish flank of a long dune, winding down toward the sea in interminable procession.

“Sure it’s your Arabs?” he asked.

“Of course,” boomed Garth. “This isn’t exactly a main street, you know. And I’ve had dealings with Fouad before. I promised him two hundred and fifty pounds gold a day, for forty mounted warriors and two hundred extra camels. Knew I could depend on him.”

But Price, having heard before of Fouad El Akmet and his renegade band of Bedouin harami or highwaymen, knew that the old sheikh could be depended upon for little save to slit as many throats as possible whenever profitable opportunity offered.”

Excerpt From: Jack Williamson. “Golden Blood.”