Snow Rubies: Baz Kill

Snow Rubies by Ganpat

As you might have noticed, thanks to the publishing company known as Armchair Fiction, I have lately been on something of a reading binge when it comes to lost-race fare. Just recently, I wrote here of three books in Armchair’s ongoing Lost World – Lost Race Classics series, which currently stands at a most impressive 58 titles. Those novels were James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), Will N. Harben’s The Land of the Changing Sun (1894), and Thompson Cross’ The Isle of Forgotten People (1925). And now, before I take a break from this always enjoyable genre, I’d like to tell you of my most recent reading experience in this wonderful series, namely Snow Rubies, by the author known as Ganpat.

Snow Rubies was originally released in the same year as that Thompson Cross novel just mentioned, 1925; a $2 hardcover from the publisher Houghton Mifflin, as well as another hardcover from the British publisher William Blackwood & Sons. Again like the Cross novel, Ganpat’s book would then go OOPs (out of prints) for no fewer than 99 years, till the fine folks at Armchair Fiction decided to resurrect it in 2024 as Book #46 in its Lost World – Lost Race Classics series, and featuring the same, highly faithful cover artwork as had graced the Houghton Mifflin edition. The book, as it turns out, was an inspired choice for inclusion in this series, as it is surely one of the most realistically depicted lost-world adventures to have ever appeared.

Before getting into the manifold fine qualities of this particular work, a quick word on the author himself. Ganpat was an Anglo-Indian soldier and writer who was born Martin Louis Alan Gompertz, in India, in 1886. “Ganpat,” as the story goes, was the closest pronunciation his Indian troops could make of his surname. Under that pseudonym, Gompertz would come out with a good 20 novels, at least eight of them being in the lost world/lost race genre that had been sensationally jump-started by H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines a year before the Anglo-Indian writer was born. Gompertz passed away in 1951, at the age of 65.

Now, as for the intriguingly titled Snow Rubies, which was released when its author was 39, it is narrated to us by a British soldier serving in India, Jim Everitt. Jim’s friend and a fellow English soldier, Frank Weston, we are told, had recently suggested a bold adventure for the two men to engage in during their upcoming extended leave. Several years earlier, it seems, while doing some ibex hunting in the desolate mountains of Baltistan, in northern Kashmir, at an altitude of some 13,000 feet, Weston had come across the body of a dead man in an isolated valley where practically no one ever ventured. The man had been wearing a necklace amulet containing a large red stone, which Weston had removed and taken back to civilization. The stone had been examined by Frank’s engineering/mining expert buddy Bob Saunders, who had declared it to be an uncut ruby of no small value. And so, Frank had proposed an expedition to that forgotten valley, to search for more of the gems. Thus, in a few months, Weston, Everitt and Saunders had indeed set out, accompanied by Frank’s remarkably spunky sister Valerie and his fox terrier Dog Bill … not to mention their guide Rassula and his nephew Karima; Jim, Frank and Bob’s servants of long service, respectively Fateh Khan, Taj Muhammad and Gobind; a mysteriously motivated Punjabi named Gulab Khan; and a slew of coolie carriers. Everitt and Weston had apparently entertained great skepticism regarding the possibility of finding any inhabitants in that lost valley, but had proceeded anyway. “The days of the forgotten peoples are past now,” Frank had opined. “We won’t find that.” As our narrator tells us, the notion “savored too much of the adventure romance in a world where everything was mapped and recorded…” But oh, what a surprise they all had in store!

After an idyllic interlude in the Dal Lake region of Kashmir, and a trek of many weeks to get to that lost valley, our heroes’ adventure had commenced in earnest. A deep ravine in the valley was successfully crossed after the arduous construction of a tree-trunk bridge, but not before Gulab Khan had revealed his secret: He was currently on a quest of vengeance, to find and kill his cousin, Baz Khan, who had set him up on a murder rap. Later, on the other side of that seemingly impassable ravine, our intrepid adventurers had discovered a lost community of cliff dwellers, and things had grown very serious indeed when Saunders, Gobind and one of the coolies had been kidnapped by those primitive folks. Several rescue missions had been attempted, and our men were abetted in their efforts by a young woman named Masalan, another kidnap victim from years before who now served as a priestess of sorts for the cave people. But then matters had gone from bad to much worse, when it was learned that the maniacal Baz Khan, searching for the precious stones himself, had succeeded, by dint of guns and sheer audacity, in becoming the absolute ruler of the primitive folk…

As I inferred earlier, Snow Rubies is presented in an absolutely authentic and highly credible manner, and it becomes apparent very early on that Ganpat, when it came to northern India, really knew his stuff. His intimate familiarity with the region and its peoples gives this lost-race affair a patina of undeniable verisimilitude; the same kind of seeming realism that Haggard, who had lived for a time in southern Africa, brought to his novels set in the so-called “Dark Continent.” Ganpat, in addition to being a novelist, also wrote several travelogue books on the Ladakh region of Kashmir, close to where much of Snow Rubies is set, and his descriptions of the terrain are both minutely detailed and beautifully rendered. Trust me, you’ll want to book a vacation to Dal Lake, and visit the nearby gardens of the Nishat Bagh, as a result of experiencing Ganpat’s prose pictures. The average reader (yeah, that’s me) will likely learn a lot about the area and its ways by the time he/she turns over the final page of Ganpat’s book. Don’t know what a nullah, shikari, marg, puttoo, shikara, chapli, gharri, babu or yakhdam is? Howzabout a bundobust, durbar, bhut, akara, chamar, paltan, havildar, jangi inam, tangi, bacho, pahlwan, tulwar, pag, kirpan or degshi? You will, by the time Ganpat’s story draws to its close. And besides being a convincing writer, Ganpat was also capable of some quite lovely passages. Take, for example, Everitt’s thoughts on the moon:

…She’s a friendly creature, the moon, and like the ideal woman, the dream princess, there always seems to be something new about her each time you see her, some new delight hitherto only partly glimpsed. And, like the dream princess that I suppose every man dreams of at least once in his life, she is the perfect companion, who comes with you wherever you go…

(Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, who was featured in no fewer than 14 of his novels, was also prone to musings such as this.) At the same time, Ganpat was also very capable of delivering some rather blunt and direct prose, such as when Everitt says of Baz Khan “I was very anxious to see him go over with a good honest bullet in his brain.” His novel also aspires to the realms of sophisticated literary fare with its frequent allusions to Omar Khayyam, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, and especially the book The Golden Journey to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker. Valerie and our narrator are, apparently, great poetry buffs, besides being fond of the outdoor life.

Any number of strikingly well-done sequences are here given to the reader. Among them: Gulab Khan’s fascinating back story; the perilous construction of that bridge over the ravine; the initial discovery of the savage cliff dwellers; the rescue of Saunders during his ceremonial sacrifice to an enormous red bear; the brutal fight between the primitives and our heroes at the bridge; the rescue of Gobind before another planned sacrifice; the ultimate confrontation between Gulab Khan and the villainous Baz Khan; Masalan’s tragic passing; and a calamitous earthquake that so drastically affects the hidden valley. No wonder Everitt is pleased to refer to his friends’ experiences there as an “appalling misadventure”! Surprisingly, the strong feelings between our narrator and Valerie, which are surely hinted at throughout, never seem to blossom into fruition, and even by the book’s end, it remains a distinct possibility that the two will ever remain in the loving “friend zone.” So those readers who are looking for some emotive romance and sappy lover’s dialogue in their adventure fare might be a tad disappointed in that regard.

For the rest of it, Snow Rubies offers us a group of likeable, stiff-upper-lip heroes and one rather impressively cool heroine. Their Indian comrades are also shown as being brave and resourceful, and it is nice to see the Englishmen willing to risk their own lives, and go through so many travails, to rescue Gobind and that nameless coolie. As was the case with The Isle of Forgotten People, one cannot help but wonder what kind of a remarkable film Snow Rubies might have been transformed into in the 1930s; say, by the same folks who had produced 1939’s Gunga Din, perhaps. And even for Hollywood producers today, Snow Rubies would seem to have “summer blockbuster” written all over it … if, of course, brought to the screen respectfully and properly.

I have very few complaints to make regarding Ganpat’s very fine work here. Yes, some slight work will be necessary on the reader’s part to attain a full appreciation – essentially, using a good atlas for the exotic locales, and your Google machine to help with all those abstruse Indian expressions – but really nothing major. And yes, the large cast of Indian characters is a tad difficult to keep straight in the book’s first half … until, that is, we get to know them and appreciate them as distinct and admirable individuals. (And incidentally, when one of those characters is in peril, we worry about him; when some of the Indians fall in action, we grieve.) But that’s about all. It is to be hoped that Armchair Fiction will be resurrecting some of Ganpat’s other lost world/lost race novels in the near future, those novels being Harilek (1923) and its sequel, Wrexham’s Romance (1935), Stella Nash (1924), The Voice of Dashin (1927), Mirror of Dreams (1928), The Speakers in Silence (1929) and Fairy Silver (1932). Snow Rubies is nothing deep, but remains a lost-race adventure par excellence, nevertheless, and has made me an instant fan of its author. As Ganpat wisely tells us via one of this book’s characters, regarding this type of romantic adventure: “Romance [is] always to be found if only one has the heart to seek … Romance is cheap at any price…” And it would seem that Ganpat was one of its most capable purveyors…