Talk:Pharos the Egyptian (Windsor Magazine serial)

Information about this edition
Edition:	As serialized in The Windsor Magazine vol. 8, June–Nov 1898, pp. 31–47; 141–166; 243–259; 393–415; 513–539; 621–648
Source:	https://archive.org/details/windsormagazine19unkngoog & Project Gutenberg
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Notes:	Thanks to "Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net"
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Reviews

• The Athenaeum, 1899: The hero was the chief magician at Pharaoh's court in the time of Moses, and is occupied as the story opens in recovering his own mummy. As he is attended throughout by an English artist and Valerie de Voexqal, the finest violinist in Europe, and does practically what he likes by way of murder, mesmeric influence, and reading the future, it may be conceived that the results of the concatenation is a good deal of adventure.

• The Academy, 8 April 1899: This is a cosmopolitan tale of mystery and horror, the scenes of which in London, Prague, Hamburg, Port Said, Cairo, the Great Pyramid, and the ruins of the temple of Ammon-Ra. Mr. Boothby is one of the most skilled traffickers in sensation known to the magazines, and we should be inclined to say that Pharos the Egyptian is second only to the best of his efforts. There is not a chapter without its lurid incident, not a page which does not titillate the jaded curiosity. And the means employed are so simple, so childlike:

“You know it is not that,” she answered quickly and with a little stamp of her foot. “It is for your own sake I am imploring you to go. If you knew as much of this house as I do, you would not remain in it another minute.”

“My dear madam,” I said, “if you would only be more explicit I should be the better able to understand you.”

“I cannot be more explicit,” she answered; “such a thing is out of my power. But remember, if anything happens, I have warned you, and your fate will be upon your own head.”

“But——” I cried, half rising from my seat.

“Hush!” she answered. “There is not time for more. He is coming.”

A moment later Pharos entered the room.

Surely we have here a trick of narrative as old and as crude as the earliest and least artful newspaper serial (whatever that was). Yet Mr. Boothby employs it and similar dodges with a result which is truly surprising. He has indeed acquired and profited by the knowledge that in the manufacture of sensation one cannot use the obvious too freely. It is always the obvious which succeeds.

The central idea of the story—namely, that the old gods of Egypt revenge themselves by means of a great plague for the sacrilege which European nations, under the plea of “exploration,” have committed upon their sacred haunts—is a good one for Mr. Boothby's purposes. In the hands of Victor Hugo, even of Maurus Jókai, such a theme might have been made sublime; Mr. Boothby does better than that—he makes it effective. His chief characters are Pharos, a gentleman some three thousand years old; a beautiful Hungarian violinist, ward of Pharos; and an English artist named Cyril Forrester, whose father had been an “explorer.” The link between England of to-day and Egypt of the Pharaohs is, of course, a mummy. Given these data and an acquaintance with Mr. Boothby's methods, you should be able to imagine the rest. The work is clever, the work of one skilled at his own trade, carefully concocted (though the end seems a trifle rosier than is warranted by the introduction), and possessing a quite sufficiently plausible air of realism. One need scarcely say that its connexion with literature is a little slender.