Formerly published as ‘Riddle of the Empty Huts,’ revised and expanded

The Man-Eaters of Zamboula is regarded as Howard’s most racist tale, in that it was published, was well-received, and depicted blacks in a villainous light. The story begins in the Sword-Maker’s Bazaar of the decadent, polyglot city of Zamboula, whose rulers lived behind locked doors and let the black slaves run about at night kidnapping and eating strangers, and the lower class, and where the mongrel City Guardsmen [police] glared at the white man who did not cower with pointed suspicion. In other words, Howard wrote a story set in Baltimore Maryland, in 2015, where the ruling elite reside in gated enclaves protected by their bully police while the rest of us, like Conan, are left to fend for ourselves.

Howard’s taste for beguiling dark-skinned beauties has not slacked and his jungle fever is on full display, “Conan pulled his eyes back from following a bold-eyed red-lipped Ghanara, whose short slit skirt bared her brown thigh at each insolent step…”

Yes, I, like Conan, saw her yesterday, only at the Noodle-Maker’s Bazaar.

In most of Howard’s stories, blacks are depicted in an even or sympathetic light. But in this novella, Howard sketches the blacks as bestial aggressors of the lowest human order:

“He grunted in disgust as he visualized brutish black shadows skulking up and down the nighted streets, seeking human prey…”

Howard also sketches an uninviting portrait of a mixed-race city, where menace is rendered in subtle hues:

“In this accursed city…The babble of the myriad tongues smote on the Cimmerian’s ears.”

“With a hillman’s stride he moved through the ever-shifting colors of the streets, where the ragged tunics of whining beggars brushed against the ermine-trimmed khalats of lordly merchants, and the pearl-sewn satin of rich courtesans. Giant black slaves slouched along, jostling blue-bearded wanderers from the Shemetish cities, ragged nomads from the surrounding deserts, traders and adventurers from all the lands of the east.”

“No lantern except the one hanging from the tavern gate.”

“Where great pale blossoms nodded in the starlight.”

In Howard’s hands Zamboula reeks of moral decay, bestial passion, and is trimmed in dark and lurid shadows, against which the stark savagery of the white northern barbarian cuts a line as clean as his sword edge is keen.

The plot of Shadows in Zamboula is one of Howard’s better efforts on this score. Despite the obvious danger of staying in the house where foreigners are known to disappear and their goods to be seen for sale in the marketplace, Conan rents a room. Not trusting to doors and bars that keep civilized men safe, he sleeps with naked sword by his side. When a murderer comes in the night Conan is driven by his bloodlust, passion for female flesh and his own cunning avarice into a low, lurid tale of high adventure, in which a half-naked man from a barren mountainous land pits his skills, wits and will against all the treachery and peril that the wickedest city in a wicked world has to throw at him. With more plot turns than normal, Howard writes Shadows in Zamboula at a brutal pace, with the glue holding the story together the juxtaposition of one man’s naked, elemental will against a gaudy societies vile vice and potent perversion.

To listen to a reading of one of Howard’s best, and most racially charged, adventure stories, try the link below.