Pharos, the Egyptian: The Classic Mummy Tale of Romance and Revenge
Guy Boothby
Dover Horror Classics
February 17, 2016
Reviewed by David Goudsward
Long before Anne Rice’s Ramses, Boris Karloff’s Imhotep, or Lon Chaney’s Kharis, there was Pharos. And Guy Boothby’s ancient Egyptian was more vindictive and homicidal than the rest of those linen-wrapped dust magnets combined.
In 1869 the Suez Canal opened, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Res Sea and conveniently bypassing the need to sail around Africa and proving an economic boon for England’s trade with India. The importance of this shortcut gave the British rationale to occupy Egypt to protect it after Egypt’s economy faltered. This unofficial imperialism struck an uneasy note in Victorian Britain, where an ongoing fascination with ancient Egypt had painted the land as a romantic vista of ruins marking a highly civilized ancient race. For highly civilized England to be seizing another civilized country was to cause some angst (conveniently forgetting that archaeologists had been gutting the ruins to ship mummies and artifacts back to England for decades by that point). This new-found sense of discomfort gave rise to a trend in tales of vengeance by supernatural, ancient Egyptians in Britain herself. Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), and several of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories all explore this dichotomy of ancient malevolence battling modern stalwart British men of science. The most notable of these was Guy Boothby’s narrative of an immortal Egyptian mesmerist and his revenge via mass extermination, Pharos the Egyptian.
Cyril Forrester is a young wealthy Englishman, a society gadabout and the son of a renowned archaeologist; a chance meeting with a sadistic old man named Pharos leads to additional encounters. The musical talents of Pharos’ young ward, a beautiful violinist named Valerie, takes London by storm. As Pharos and Valerie attend private soirees, our hero begins to suspect Pharos is searching for something. When he finds his own sarcophagus in the collection of Cyril’s late father, Pharos curses Cyril and steals it, fleeing England. Discovering he has feelings for Valerie, Cyril finds himself in mad pursuit of Pharos across the continent, trying to stop a nightmarish plot to destroy all of Europe, the ultimate curse of the living mummy.
Guy Boothby was a prolific Australian writer living in England, best known for a series of stories about a gentleman rogue Dr. Nikola. Boothby had dabbled in mummy lore previously after a visit to Egypt, but his earlier piece, “A Professor in Egyptology,” was a romance. In Pharos, Boothby borrows the supernatural foreign threat from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and in turn creates the prototype for Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu in all its xenophobic glory.
The new edition from Dover is a facsimile reprint of the 1899 novelization of Pharos the Egyptian. It is a crisp and clean reproduction, beautifully executed and includes a selection of the John H. Bacon illustrations that accompanied the original serialization in The Windsor Magazine, June-December 1898. This is the roots of horror at its finest – Boothby’s resurrected mummy was the first, creating the archetype for the resurrected mummy as the vehicle of revenge. By today’s standards of horror, it is fairly tame, but the books influence on the horror genre is indisputable and should be on the shelf of any horror fan who wishes to see the history of the creature before it descended into a series of clichéd tropes.
