Refraction 002: The Land of Terror

What is a Refraction in Bronze?

Doc Savage was a strange man, judged by the look-out-for-yourself-and-nobody-else code of a greedy civilization.

REFRACTIONS IN BRONZE #002: The Land of Terror

The glints that caught my mind’s eye….

TaleType: Lost World adventure, involving a greedy plot to employ a hitherto unknown element as an instrument of death and terror. And there are dinosaurs.

Savage Roll Call: Doc and all of the Amazing Five

Non femme du jour:

• There’s not one single (nor married!) woman in the whole yarn!

Notable Nogoodniks (and their just deserts):

• Kar: mysterious mastermind behind the Smoke of Eternity crimes, which are primarily bank robberies and gold heists; a master of deadly traps, and a merciless killer
• His doubly deadly end: Kar dies in the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which is in turn boiled in volcanic mud

• Squint: a ‘rodent-like’ killer of a thug, and Kar’s second in command
• Description: Squint and his unnamed partner in murder had ‘… bony, starved hands,’ and ‘… stringy necks. The rough, unwashed skin of those necks gave them a turtle aspect.’
• His violent end: squashed to death by a Doc-thrown table

The Nefarious Plot: to exploit the substance-dissolving ‘Smoke of Eternity,’ discovered on a petroleum prospecting expedition and only found in The Land of Terror, for personal gain

Infernal Devices:

• ‘The Smoke of Eternity,’ atomic structure dissolver which melts almost any material; it is dispersed through various means, including by air pistol
• Black smoke screen to cover the villain’s ship, amphibious plane landings, and a secret under-the-Hudson-River chamber

Kar is a master of setting deadly traps:

• A collapsing ceiling with one ton of timber in a cabin of Kar’s touristy ‘pirate ship’ lair
• Poison-daubed thorn bushes
• Creeper vine strung to trip a machine gun
• Jungle deadfall trap
• Poisoned watch-fob skinning scalpel

Doc’s devices: Doc has not yet developed very many of the gadgets that he employs in later adventures. This one has:

• A device that Long Tom uses to detect hidden telephone wires
• Doc’s continuously automatic ‘extremely small machine gun,’ here described as ‘deadly’
• Makeshift stilts to cross boiling streams in the Land of Terror

Savage Superlatives:

Strength and Agility:

• Jumping: ‘Doc Savage had simply jumped the fence. The height exceeded by more than two feet the world record for the high jump.’
• Strength: ‘Doc Savage grasped the first of the three handcuffs on Monk’s wrists. He brought the manacle close to his great chest and pulled. Monstrous muscles popped out on his arms and shoulders. The handcuff chain snapped apart.’
• Running speed: ‘A bronze giant of a man was overhauling the car.’

Acquired Skills:

• Woodcraft: ‘… his bronze form seemed literally to flow through the leaves and branches. Not a leaf fluttered; not a branch shook.’ It was a ‘… trick he had acquired from the very jungle itself.’
• Holding breath / Staying underwater: ‘He could readily stay under water twice as long as a South Sea pearl diver’
• Marksmanship: Shooting from the ground, Doc empties a policeman’s gun at the small Smoke of Eternity bomb plane, wounding the pilot
• Lock-picking: he picks a lock with the tongue of his belt buckle
• Sketch artist: Doc is an accomplished police-style sketch artist
• Surgery & medicine: ‘Doc, above all his other accomplishments, was a great doctor and surgeon. He had studied under the masters of medicine and surgery in the greatest clinics until he had learned all they could teach. Then, by his own intense efforts, he had extended his knowledge to a fabulous degree.’
• Hypnotism: ‘It was amazing, the things Doc could do with his eyes. He had studied with the great masters of hypnotism.’
• Human Fly: ‘Even a bat, master of clinging to smooth surfaces, would have had trouble with the wall. Grooves between the bricks furnished the only handholds. Doc’s steel-strong bronze fingers found the largest of these.’
• Arboreal locomotion: Doc & Monk’s ability to travel by swinging through trees is referenced.
• Piloting: ‘Doc flew. He was as accomplished at flying as at other things.’

Heightened Senses:

• Sense of Smell: ‘The unwashed odor of their bodies hung in the air. A set of ordinary nostrils would have failed to detect it, but here again, Doc Savage had powers exceeding those of more prosaic mortals.’
• Hearing: ‘His aural organs, imbued with a sensitiveness near superhuman, told him Squint had walked down a top-floor passage to the back.’
• Vision: ‘Doc strained the telescopic quality of his vision,’ another did-it-before-Superman feat!

Connections:

• With political leaders: ‘The leading political boss, the most influential man in the city government, owed his life to Doc’s magical skill at surgery,’ (Does Doc have a corrupt Tammany Hall connection?)
• With the NYCPD: ‘Doc rode the runningboard … for his very presence was a charm which magically gave him right of way through all traffic. New York City’s traffic policemen had been instructed by their chiefs to give every assistance to this remarkable man of bronze.’

Trilliant: TLoT gives us one of the more extensive descriptions of Doc’s trill:

• ‘…a weird sound permeated the surrounding air. It was a trilling, mellow, subdued sound, reminiscent of the song of some strange jungle bird, or the dulcet note of a wind filtering through a leafless forest. Having no tune, it was nevertheless melodious. Not awesome, it still had a quality to excite, to inspire.

This sound was part of Doc—a small, unconscious thing which accompanied his moments of utter concentration. It would come from his lips when a plan of action was being evolved, or in the midst of some struggle, or when some beleaguered friend of Doc’s, alone and attacked, had almost given up hope of life. And with the filtering through of that sound would come renewed hope.

The strange trilling had the weird essence of seeming to emanate from everywhere instead of from a particular spot. Even one looking directly at Doc’s lips would not realize from whence it arose.’

Background of Bronze: We are given an all-too-brief glimpse into the identity of one of the men who made Doc the man he is. Jerome Coffern was a mentor of Doc’s in the field of chemistry, and he could not have been more proud of his former student, boasting to colleagues:

• ‘Doc Savage studied under me many years ago. He quickly learned all I knew. Now his knowledge is vastly beyond mine.’
• Doc, in turn, was very fond of his former educator and current friend. As the story opens, Doc is waiting in his roadster at Coffern’s place of work in order to take him to dinner. And when Coffern is slain with the Smoke of Eternity, the only remnant of his body remaining undissolved was part of his right arm, on which was found ‘… the expensive watch Doc Savage had given Jerome Coffern as a token of gratitude.’

The Chuckling Savage: Doc Savage isn’t particularly known for his frequent smiles and laugh-out-loud joviality, which is what makes it so startling that in TLoT, he is actually said to chuckle – and not just once, but three times in the course of the tale.

One example: on having rescued Monk from almost certain drowning in a death trap under the Hudson River, Doc jokes: “Imagine finding you here!” Doc chuckled. “You pick the strangest places to visit!”

The Fab Five: All five are here.

• All Five: ‘They had first assembled during the Great War, these adventurers. The love of excitement held them together. Not a one of the five men but owed his very life to the unique brain and skill of Doc. With Doc Savage, scrapper above all others, adventurer supreme, they formed a combination which could accomplish marvels.’

• Monk: ‘… a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound human gorilla. He was one of the roughest and toughest and most likable and homely men ever to live.’
• ‘…had a penthouse chemical laboratory and living quarters downtown, near Wall Street.’
• Monk’s secretary? ‘…one of the prettiest in New York City.’
• Monk’s doorman and elevator operator ‘… each carried a pocket piece presented by Monk. These were silver half-dollars which Monk had folded in the middle with his huge, hairy, bare hands.’
• Proto-Superman: ‘Both Monk’s great hands gripped the revolver barrel. They exerted terrific force. Slowly, the barrel bent until it was like a hairpin.’
• Humor: To atoll dwellers’ stories of great flying devils that attack from Thunder Island (which later turn out to be pterodactyls), Monk comments that ‘They must drink caterpillar liquor! … Two drinks and the birds are after you!’

• Ham: ‘… a waspish, swift-moving, slender man … Ham’s dress was the ultra in sartorial perfection. Not that he was flashily clad, for he had too good taste for that…’
• Attorney Brooks ‘… carried a black, severe-looking cane with a gold band. This was in reality a sword cane, a blade of keenest Damascus steel sheathed within the black metal tube.’
• Thinking Monk is dead: ‘Monk was one of the finest men who ever lived. I actually loved Monk!’
• On Thunder Island, Ham stabs a deer-like creature with his sword for the gang to eat, then ‘… proceeded to boil a hunk of the primitive deer in the natural caldron. “I did that once in Yellowstone Park.”’

• Renny: is ‘…at least six feet four in height, and would weigh two fifty. The man resembled an elephant, with his sloping, gristle-heaped shoulders. He had a severe, puritanical face. His eyes were dark, somber and forbidding. His mouth was thin and grim and pinched together as though he disapproved of something…’
• His car is a ‘peewee limousine’ that ‘ran like a racer.’
• Renny doesn’t smoke.
• Renny gets the ride of his life on the head plate between the horns of a triceratops!

• Johnny: ‘… tall and gaunt, with a half-starved look. His shoulders were like a clothes hanger under his coat.’
• The year before, he had won a coveted international medal for his work in archæology.
• In a ‘restored’ passage in the Sanctum printing – but not in the pulp – Johnny makes the mistake of joshing Long Tom about making a mistake in an electrical journal, and gets a swift kick in the keister from the irascible electrical wizard for the gibe

• Long Tom: ‘… an undersized, slender man came in … he had a complexion that was none too healthy. His hair was pale, his eyes a faded blue. He looked like a physical weakling. He wasn’t, though.’
• LT had conducted electrical experiments with Steinmetz and Edison.

Dent’s First Trinomial: Lester Dent delighted in giving his villains and/or secondary characters peculiar names, and he took particular pleasure in using first, middle, and surnames, occasionally with just an initial for the first or middle name. The honor for the first Trinomial in a Doc Savage adventure goes to Oliver Wording Bittman, who had once saved the elder Savage’s life while on safari.

Vocabulary of Bronze:

• Limber board: one of the movable planks used to cover the bilge-water passages on each side of a keelson
• Phiz: slang for ‘face,’ shortened from ‘physiognomy’

Do You Remember? Doc’s surgical technique for removing criminals’ memory of their past lives was not yet in practice at the ‘certain institution’ in upstate New York:

• ‘Doc sent his prisoners to a certain institution for the mentally imperfect, in a mountain section of up-State New York. All criminals have a defective mental balance, otherwise they would not be lawbreakers. A famous psychologist would treat Kar’s men. It might take years. But when released, they would be completely cured of their criminal tendencies.’

The Savage Death toll: Doc and the boys continue with their version of extreme justice in this tale of vengeance: ‘Criminals…either learned a lesson that made them law-abiding men the rest of their lives – or they became dead criminals.’

Doc racks up at least fourteen or fifteen kills on his own, but the actual count is likely far higher; some of his mortal-uncoiling methods include:

• Death by broken neck (twice)
• Death by thrown pike to the brain
• Death by exsanguination from a sword-severed hand
• Death by crushing under a thrown table
• Death by defenestration
• Death by plain old shooting (two)
• Machine-gun fire (four or five mown down at a minimum)
• Not counted: chasing thugs into a pirate ship death trap (1) and into the jaws of a T-Rex (2)

Monk, Ham, and Long Tom: collectively shoot two thugs dead
Renny: shoots a baddie with a bomb on the atoll
Johnny: once again Professor Littlejohn has no kills recorded!

Prehistoric Roll Call! There is an impressive roster of dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals mentioned in the relatively few pages devoted to time spent on Thunder Island:

Dinosaurs:

• Pterodactyl
• Tyrannosaurus
• Triceratops
• Brontosaurus
• Stegosaur

Mammals and insects:

• Creodont (carnivorous mammal)
• Primitive type of deer (to eat)
• Dragonflies, bugs, beetles
• Lemon-colored, undersized hyena
• Bear-sized prehistoric beavers
• Large ground sloth
• Porcupine predecessor
• Armadillo-like beasts
• Miniature horses
• Chipmunk-like hole dwellers
• Lion-sized polecat

In a humorous scene where Doc is being stalked by a Tyrannosaurus, he kills one of the giant polecats, skins it, and drapes himself in its pelt. ‘The hopping monster, mistaking him for the malodorous animal, in the hide of which he was masquerading, backed off.’

End Quote:

‘His going was as silent as a breeze-swept puff of bronze smoke.’