RogerBW's Blog: The Sky Riders, T. C. Bridges

1919 boys' adventure. Martin Hamer's airship design is stolen (and covertly constructed), along with the niece of Mortimer Carne, the industrial magnate whom the inventor had hoped to get to build the thing. Clearly the thing to do is build another airship and track him down.

This is a book I read as a child, remembered with vague goodwill, and recently tracked down again. And it stands up rather better than I'd feared, apart from the Great Big Problem: first a group of Tuaregs, then later a cannibalistic tribe from Africa, are depicted as not only subhuman but intrinsically evil, to the point that bombing and machine-gunning them is really the only reasonable thing to do. (Also racist language of the day, of course; judging by other writers of the period it might have raised a few eyebrows even then.) Basically they are more part of the environment than anything more complex.

Mind you, so are the villain's henchmen, most of whom we never even get to meet. See, he's found an extinct volcano somewhere in the Sahara, with a lost-world-ish jungle in its crater, and an Assyrian temple part-submerged in the lake… and that's what Bridges wants to write about, along with two plucky lads getting into the villain's base to rescue the girl. All else is scenery and obstacle.

Indeed, the bulk of the narrative is essentially physical struggle: getting through the jungle, being captured by and escaping from the cannibals (in a surprising nod to realism it's admitted that the villain has imported them, to make the place even more hazardous), breaking into the temple lair, then escaping. Which includes the splendid line, one I've remembered over the years:

"There are beasts there that don't belong in the natural history books."

So far, so standard thud and blunder. But there are also airships involved, which make everything better; indeed, the climax is a duel in the air, and even involves a consideration of the advantages as well as the disadvantages of hydrogen versus helium as a lifting gas. All right, there's a magic fuel with "twice the power of petrol, much less weight, and stores in a far smaller space", but it's surprisingly unimportant to the plot.

"Do you know, I really believe that I have at last found the perfect lines for a dirigible. Remember, too, that her frame is not aluminium, but all steel, that she is far more rigid than anything of the kind ever yet produced, and that she, the full-sized ship which I shall build, will stand driving through any storm that blows. What is more, she can alight on hard ground more easily than any 'plane, and can be anchored out in the open with perfect safety."

Somehow.

Characters? Well, I suppose. Cyril Hamer is a fairly blank boy hero for the reader to project himself into, reasonably smart as well as a good shot; he's accompanied by comic-Irishman Tim M'Keown, who says things like

"The man hates ould Carne like cowld poison. It's my belafe he'd sooner cut the nose off his face than give up the girl."

but of course has an indomitable spirit. The Girl doesn't get to do much, though she can at least steer the boat during their escape. And the Fate Worse Than Death that she's threatened with is being turned over to the cannibals to be raised as one of them, which shows a surprising inventiveness if not much practicality.

Eh, make sure your past-filter goggles are firmly in place, and even then it's purest fluff, but there's still some fun to be had here and it would be a shame to lose what's good in avoiding the author's mindless fear of the Other. Freely available.

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