Lord of Darkness

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When I was a boy, more than sixty years ago, I encountered through some happy accident a magical, little-known novel by the English poet Walter de la Mare called The Three Mulla-Mulgars. It is a wonderful fantastical romance, published first in 1910, that tells of the adventures of three young Mulgars—the novel’s word for “monkeys”—of royal blood who, driven from their forest home by the enmity of Mulgars of less exalted birth, set out after their mother’s death on a vast and adventurous trip across the heart of Africa. Their goal is the Arakkaboa Mountains, where, so their mother often had told him, their dead father’s brother Assassimon reigns in splendor over a kingdom of animals.

“It will be a long and dreary journey, my sons,” their mother had warned them. “But the Prince Assassimon, Mulla-mulla of the Mulgars, is great and powerful, and has for hut a palace of ivory and Azmamogreel, with scarlet and Mamausul, slaves and peacocks, and beasts uncountable; and leagues of Ukka and Barbary-nuts; and bound- less fields of Ummuz, and orchards of fruit, and bowers of flowers and pleasure. And his, too, is the Rose of all the Mulgars.”

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