Great Detective at the Crucible of Life , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Thomas Kent Miller

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131 pages

English

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Across Ethiopia and beyond, Sherlock Holmes encounters both the hideous and the divine, ripping asunder the fragile veil separating us from worlds unknown-all while in the company of the renowned Allan Quatermain. The last of Allan Quatermain's true African adventures to appear, The Treasure of the Lake, was published nearly a century ago in 1926. Those who lusted to vicariously accompany Quatermain on new perilous treks into the vast reaches of the "Dark Continent" (as they had done to King Solomon's Mines) had no choice but to remain disappointed. UNTIL NOW! Recently found amongst some obscure papers at Brown University, this new manuscript chronicles a complex and inspired quest headed by Quatermain deep into the earthquake- and volcano-ripped Danakil Desert of Ethiopia in 1872 accompanied by his devoted aide-de-camp Hans and a host of the nineteenth century's most prodigious luminaries, including astronomer Maria Mitchell, volcanologist Axel Lindenbrock, and Gunnery Sergeants Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan. Along the way, this ragtag troop is brutally attacked in the desert by its trophy-hunting denizens, and then they discover a 2,000-year-old lost city. Yet Holmes' and Quatermain's quest is not merely one of surviving in Ethiopia's beautiful yet tortuous landscapes; they must confront horror and overcome it. As the tale unfolds, readers will be swallowed by a maelstrom of concepts, relentlessly pulled headlong, descending into a scholarly labyrinth of interwoven writings. In point of fact, Quatermain encounters no less than the very essence of the meaning of life, which he then discounts as a wizard's trick!

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	12 février 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781787051614
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Holmes Behind the Veil, Book 2
The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life
or, the Adventure of the Rose of Fire
From a Memoir as Told By
Allan Quatermain
Author of “King Solomon’s Mines,” “Marie,” ETC.
1881 Manuscript Recorded, Edited, and Supplemented By
John H. Watson, M.D.
Author of “A Study in Scarlet,” “ The Hound of the Baskervilles ” ETC.
This Volume Edited, Supplemented, and Annotated By
Thomas Kent Miller
Editor of “Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World” ETC.

2018 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright ©1977, 1982, 1992, 2005, 2011, 2017
Thomas Kent Miller
The right of Thomas Kent Miller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
References to historical events; or to real people, living or dead; or to deceased authors’ literary characters; are used here to give the fiction a sense of historical reality. Other characters appearing in this work are fictitious; any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of MX Publishing.
Published in the UK by MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive,
London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.co.uk
Cover design by Brian Belanger

For Jayne, Douglas, and Ellie

A red light, a burning spark seen far away in the darkness, taken at the first moment of seeing for a signal ... and then, as if in an incredible point of time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and all the sky and possessed the land.
- Arthur Machen in The Great Return
Travelers afoot in hot deserts should set their course toward shade!
- Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook
Remember, most loving and compassionate Virgin Mary, it has never been said or heard that anyone who turned to you for help was left unaided. Inspired with this conviction, I run to your protection and stand before you penitent of my wrong doings, for you are my mother and the mother of all. O Mother of the Word of God, neglect not my prayers, despise not my words of pleading, but in your mercy, please hear and answer me. Amen.
- “The Memorare: A Prayer to Mary”
Hurt and you will be hurt, love and you will be loved, cause someone to cry in suffering and you will be made to cry with your own suffering. This circle of doing followed by God’s response may be experienced immediately or may be held off for a future. or even a past, lifetime, according to the will of God for his own reasons.
- “The Gospel of Gaspar”

Dedication
To Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925)
My Dear Sir:
As you so often with sincerity dedicated your books to those you admired, I would like to offer this volume to you, though, as I place these words down, you have been gone from us for nearly a century.
Let me accomplish this by meandering a bit. During the early 1950s when I was a child, my father and older brother read Uncle Scrooge comic books (published for ten cents at the time by Dell Publishing Co., Inc.). I received them as hand-me-downs and was enchanted and enthralled by the adventures of Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his nephews, Donald Duck and Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Though it was obvious that my father and brother enjoyed these stories, at some point I realized that somehow these illustrated tales of lost cities and civilizations touched a special chord in me that transcended mere enjoyment. I knew this because my reaction to them was fundamentally different; my father and brother forgot about them and lost track of them, whereas I treasured every panel, turned the pages reverently as I read and reread the stories, and considered them my most precious possessions.
On the cover, prominently displayed above the title was the name of Walt Disney. What I did not know as a child was that during that era of comic book history the actual writers and artists who created the comic stories were anonymous. As an adult, I learned that Mr. Disney had little or nothing to do with Uncle Scrooge. Scrooge was the creation of a man named Carl Barks and the best Scrooge stories - the ones that haunted me, such as the Ducks’s stumbling upon the Seven Cities of Cibola, the lost continent of Atlantis, and Tralla La - were written and drawn by Barks.
Furthermore, I didn’t know - and didn’t learn until still more time had passed - that it was you, Sir Henry, who was the man behind Barks. He drew from you as surely as desert nomads draw from an oasis well. The magic he touched me with - as glorious as it was - was, in a way, recycled magic. You invented the magic - the subgenre of fantasy that has come to be known as the “lost race adventure.”
Let me quote from the passionate historian and editor of fantasy literature, the late Lin Carter. In the introduction to a reprint of one of your novels, he wrote that you were the right man with the right idea in the right place at the right time, that time being the end of the nineteenth century at the height of a succession of momentous historical and archaeological discoveries.
“For even more exciting,” Carter said, “than the discovery of lost cities of the past, dead and buried and forgotten for thousands of years, is the discovery of an ancient city tucked away in some far corner of the world - still inhabited!”
I cannot say why this subgenre you invented affects me so, but I suspect that somehow these matters are prearranged by a power far greater than ours, as perhaps you would agree. Be that as it may, because of the great joy I have experienced both from you directly in the form of your many “lost race” novels and indirectly through Mr. Barks (and not only Mr. Barks because it turns out that there are a multitude of others you have touched, among them writers named Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, Talbot Mundy, John Taine, James Hilton, and, more recently, Ian Cameron, Lin Carter, and, of course, Michael Crichton [1] ), I ask you to allow me to set your name upon these pages and subscribe myself,
Gratefully and ever sincerely yours,
Thomas Kent Miller

1 Michael Crichton’s 1980 novel Congo is a clear pastiche of Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines , even to the extent that the last sentence in Congo reads thus: “The projected intersection point now marked a field of black quatermain lava with an average depth of eight hundred meters - nearly half a mile-over the Lost City of Zinj.” The name “Quatermain” is sufficiently close to the geological term “Quaternary” that some readers, to be sure, would have missed the homage.

Editor’s Note to the Fourth Edition
The publication of this fourth edition of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life coincides with the official joint announcement by the African states of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa that great swatches of their countries are being set aside for the establishment of a vast African continental preserve - The Great Rift Valley Paleoanthropologic Preserve. The preserve, in principle, follows the East African Rift System that cuts north and south through most of these countries. The park extends a bit further beyond the southernmost aspect of the rift valley into South Africa and is roughly 3,500 miles long, averaging about 75 miles wide, for a total of about 265,000 square miles.
Given that much of this area has been in extreme political turmoil for years, and that death, civil war, and even genocide have been the windows by which the world has assessed much of the area, this unprecedented alignment seems little less than a miracle. This near-impossible task was, in fact, accomplished through the supreme efforts of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the board of directors of the Peace Parks Foundation, and United Nations Secretary-General Nicholi Lorenzo and a significant percentage of the staffs of the U.N. Environment Programme, the Institute of Human Origins, the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the thousands of dedicated volunteers who believed in the unique value of this preserve.
The motivating principle behind the creation of the park is to preserve that unique spot on this planet where the human species arose. It has been shown over and again through a succession of historic paleoarchaeological finds (beginning in South Africa with Raymond Dart and Robert Broom early in the twentieth century through the redoubtable Leakey family in Tanzania and Kenya; Donald Johanson, Tim White, and Yohannes Haile-Selassie mainly in Ethiopia; and numerous other investigators) that beyond a reasonable doubt, primates stood tall on their legs and walked fully erect all over this area beginning between six and three million years ago. Despite the fact that researchers are constantly quibbling about the details, timeline, and branches of our family tree, there is complete consensus that these first walking primates came into existence in East Africa. Then, through the ages, they lived their lives, slowly cha