THE TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT

“The Tower of the Elephant” is the third short story that Robert E. Howard published starring Conan. While the first two- “The Phoenix on the Sword” and “The Scarlet Citadel-” feature a much older King Conan, this one has him at almost his youngest. If you ignore any Conan story that wasn’t written by or at least planned and begun by Howard (and obviously I'm not doing that), “Tower” is only the second story, following “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter,” which wasn’t even published until long after Howard’s death. In a way, that means that this was the very first tale in Conan’s chronology for several decades, at least until “Frost-Giant” was restored to its Conan-centric plot (rather than his “Gods of the North” rewrite) and published in 1953.

“The Tower of the Elephant   (Weird Tales, March 1933):    The earliest of the published chronicles, and one of Conan’s first adventures in the thief-city of Zamora.   He is still a youth, more daring than adroit at thievery, and has yet to earn a reputation among other followers of his profession.” - “A Probably Outline of Conan’s Career” by P. Schuyler Miller & John D. Clark

Originally published in the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales, “The Tower of the Elephant” was destined to become a classic of Conan stories. It’s the first of the “thief stories” which comprise “The Tower of the Elephant,” “The Hall of the Dead,” “The God in the Bowl,” and "Rogues in the House." Conan is a young man here, explicitly new to society and very confused about its particulars.

“The Cimmerian glared about, embarrassed at the roar of mocking laughter that greeted this remark. He saw no particular humor in it, and was too new to civilization to understand its discourtesies. Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

In fact, Conan’s characterization in “Tower” is is very in-line with the green Cimmerian we’ve seen so far: he’s frightened by the horrific sights he sees in the tower, just as he had been by the magic of the crypt, and he still chafes against the more “civilized” aspects of a city that he sees as unnecessary or too complex for himself to understand. As the story tells us explicitly, he finds his first profession of the Hyborian Age to be thievery because it plays more naturally to his skillset than anything that the big, morally-bereft cities have to offer.

The big, morally-bereft city of Zamora’s City of Thieves is an excellent setting, especially the Maul which opens the story. I know people take potshots at Howard’s frequently florid prose, but I’ve always really enjoyed it and considered it a hallmark of the genre. His descriptions of the seedy bars and evil business deals taking place within whisked me away immediately. The City of Thieves in which this story is set is actually pretty interesting, though. Like I alluded to very briefly in the end of my “The Thing in the Crypt” post, the thief-city is the subject of much confusion. There’s some debate as to whether the city of thieves described in this tale is named Arenjun or not. I’ve always thought that Arenjun, in Zamora, was the City of Thieves. As far as I’m aware, most everything that I’ve read treats them as the same city and usually names it (them?) as Arenjun, the City of Thieves. When I DM’d a Conan-themed D&D campaign with my friends a few years ago, the first module we played was based on “The Tower of the Elephant,” and I had them begin in what I called “Arenjun, the City of Thieves.” However, Dale Rippke (one of the foremost orderers of Conan tales) makes a pretty good argument for them being two separate cities on the opposite sides of Zamora entirely. It's still not exactly clear to me if the thief-city is unnamed, or if it shares its name with the country, as in it's the city of Zamora in Zamora (like New York, New York).

In Howard’s letter to P. Schuyler Miller about their “Probable Outline of Conan’s Career,” Howard only refers to it as “the thief-city of Zamora” when speaking of “The Tower of the Elephant.” I realized during this reading that Howard doesn’t ever specifically call it Arenjun in the text of “Tower,” so perhaps conflating Arenjun and the City of Thieves was entirely a mistake by L. Sprague de Camp. While I find this debate interesting, I don’t think it ultimately matters too much, especially since the very next story I’ve been reading (the Savage Sword adaption of the novel Conan and the Sorcerer) treats Arenjun and the City of Thieves as one and the same place.

[Hey, this is Dan writing a couple of weeks later. After reading up to "The Blood-Stained God," I think it makes the most sense that the City of Thieves and Zamora are indeed two different cities, on opposite sides of the country, as Rippke says. Go read that post if you're interested in why.]

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In “The Tower of the Elephant,” Conan’s scuffle with a rude bar patron absolutely rips as he kills the man in the darkness, unnoticed, after the accidental snuffing of a candle. He then goes to the temple district of the city to try to steal the gem known only as the Heart of the Elephant, meeting another thief- the more elderly, chubby Taurus of Nemedia, who is a very fun character- and infiltrates the tower past tigers, sheer walls, and unheard-of riches. Conan’s battle with a gigantic spider is especially exciting, probably because I hate spiders more than almost anything. But the real star of the show here is Yag-kosha: the millenia-old alien with the green body of a human and the gigantic head of an elephant. His reveal is such a good one that I almost wish I could wipe all art of him from the internet so that all first-time readers of the story could experience it in full for the first time. Yag-kosha is full of pathos in his characterization and he has a wild, enrapturing backstory unlike much else I’ve read in Hyborian lore.

​This story is one of the stone-cold-classics that Howard ever wrote and is honestly a great entry point for someone who had never read a Conan story before. It has essentially every escapist element that you want in a sword-and-sorcery adventure: exciting fights, acrobatics, hidden locations shrouded in mystery, ancient magic, memorable fantasy creatures… Matt Mercer is envious over here.

“The Tower of the Elephant” has made its way into numerous Conan adaptions, understandably. It’s had three comic adaptions alone and while I feel like I always talk about Savage Sword on here, the original Howard story was my first encounter with this one, though Roy Thomas’s version is great work, as always.

​Now that Conan has explored some of the northern territories, he’s descended from the mountains of Brythunia into Zamora, where we’ll stay for a few more entries. "The Hall of the Dead" is next.

I was in a band called Radroach back in the day, and we recorded a jam we called "Heart of the Elephant." I know our singer recorded it, but unfortunately it doesn't seem like he can find it. I'm devastated.

★★★★★