Talk:The Wolf Master

Information about this edition
Edition:	Extracted from Adventure magazine, 1926 Dec 8, pp. 2–81.
Source:	https://archive.org/details/AdventureV060N0519261208
Contributor(s):	ragpicker
Level of progress:
Notes:	Accompanying illustrations may be omitted
Proofreaders:	ragcleaner

The real history underlying the story

(From the Camp-fire section of the issue.)

SOMETHING from Harold Lamb concerning the real history underlying his complete novelette in this issue:

Berkeley, California.

The koshevoi of the wolves is an old Cossack legend and is undoubtedly based on some actual happening. Just what it was no one knows. The Cossacks, by the way, used to call the wolves “gray friends” and the picture of St. Ulass and the wolf may still be seen in their churches.

AS FOR the False Dmitri—he is one of the weirdest figures of history. His character is summed up very well by one historian, Ustrialof, in these words: “Since he was the head of many tsardoms that had submitted to the Russian scepter, not being satisfied with the title of tsar he took the name of emperor. ... But while he understood the necessities of the empire, he did not understand his own situation. He aroused against himself universal hatred, and the annals hint at unheard-of crimes and call him by the name of God-detested man.”

An adventurer, who made himself a great emperor, aided by no more than his own wit; a man of unknown origin, who revealed real ability to rule when he had stolen the throne, and might have made the best of monarchs, except for one thing. Himself.

As to what befell him in the Terem that night, it is one of the secrets of medieval Russia. And about the most reliable account of the events of that night is the journal of Captain Margeret, French soldier of fortune.

The events are related in the story as Margeret and Bertrand told them—the mystery of the three missing horses, the beard on the dead man that did not look as if it had been shaved before then, the letter to the boyare and all the rest. Basmanof and Tevakel Khan and Ilbars Sultan were living men, and the raid of the Turkomans on the Golden Horde took place about this time—though the name of the Turkoman chieftain is not known to me.

AS TO the legend of the Earth Girdle—it bobs up in Europe, Persia and Arabia. In Europe, at least as late as 1630, it is the “Cingulus Mundi,” and in the tale of Abou Ishak it is the mountain Câf. I have in my library a map published by Petit de la Croix about 1710 that shows a single mountain barrier stretching down mid-Asia and this barrier is named Câf.

Modern exploration has cleared up the geography of high Asia sufficiently to show that this “rampart” is in reality a system of many mountain ranges extending northeast from Afghanistan to Lake Baikal, rather than north and south.

But there are regions behind the Gobi still unexplored, and one chap, Thomas Atkinson, observed some curious ruins above Lake Zaizan Nor—the ruins that appear in the story as the city of the Golden Horde (which once ruled the country).

ATKINSON saw a granite plateau standing out of a mountain range, and observed on nearer approach that the mass was in reality a number of isolated rock bulks that had the appearance of the ruined edifices of a vast city.

At least one ruin in this place was man-made—and during an earlier age—an enclosure nearly half a mile in length, surrounded by a wall of large stone blocks with smaller fitted between. Some portions were six feet high and seven thick. Where the wall was no more than two feet, Atkinson jumped his horse over it, and his two Cossacks followed him, but nothing could induce the native Kirghiz to enter the ruin. They rode around and waited for him on the other side.

They explained that the mins—which had the appearance of fortifications, towers, and pyramids—were the abode of “Shaitan” and it was not healthy to graze herds near by after dusk.

The Kirghiz are descendants of the Golden Horde. There are many such basalt and limestone formations in the loess regions of Central Asia, and plenty of abandoned cities, the prey of encroaching sands, plague or invasion. And the ruins of nature are often similar to the ruins left by men.—Harold Lamb.