As I Was Saying
Tintin and Captain Haddock (and Snowy) in the Incan Empire
Prisoners of the Sun by Hergé
Anyway, as I was saying, Tintin and the retired sea captain Haddock (and Snowy the dog) were caught up in a terrible, terrifying mystery.
At home, many men had been inexplicably subdued by some kind of supernatural force. The survivors of an expedition to South America, they were tormented periodically by seizures and were trapped, each of them, in a coma. Tintin and Haddock did their best to solve the mystery but were unable. And, to add to their miseries, their friend Professor Calculus then taken hostage. The professor was carried off aboard a great ship, a ship heading far away.
There was nothing for it. Haddock and Tintin (and Snowy) were off to South America to save him.
When they arrive, beating the ship on which Calculus was likely hidden, they feel continually under observation. Cruel looks follow them wherever they go. Efforts to find Calculus are brushed off or shot down. Even when the ship arrives to dock — the ship which has Calculus on it, we assume — a nasty trick is being played. The ship runs up flags to suggest that it has infectious disease abroad — particularly awful infectuous disease. A quarantine is ordered. No one can go aboard and no one may disembark. Tintin’s and Haddock’s (and Snowy’s) investigations are scuppered.
They can only assume the mariners have a devious plan of their own, which they are likely to carry out under the cover of a cordon sanitaire.
All hope is not lost. Tintin and Haddock have made some acquaintances locally. The local police are not helpful; but one small boy, a nativo, who is being humiliated in the marketplace by men who look a little Hispanic, is on the ground and being stepped on when Tintin chases off his attackers and gives him some help.
The boy is thankful and decides to work alongside Tintin and Haddock (and Snowy). He’ll be their guide and their companion in all that follows.
Tintin — boy reporter, boy wonder, boy of action — decides he won’t let whatever happens on the ship go down without being there himself. He decides to board the vessel in the dead of night, to see if he can find and secure Calculus, who is being held aboard. It’s a dark, desperate scene as Tintin swims through the inky harbour, sun way down, the night oppressive and bitter.
As Tintin climbs the great ship’s iron chain, walks through its passages and compartments, he imagines there won’t be sentries posted. But Tintin is wrong. His movements rouse the ship — men storm about. They hunt for him. Get closer every instant. Tintin is in great danger. But then all is suddenly over. Hunt suspended. The mariners decide that Tintin’s footsteps, the disturbance of bits and pieces — all that was the result of the ship’s cat.
And Tintin breathes a sigh or relief, and heads off to find his friend. This he manages, but Calculus is slumbering — sleeping very heavily. He’s drugged, or seems to be. Tintin tries to get him up, to wake him, but he is unsuccessful; and then the worst possible thing happens. Tintin is discovered.
Loud gunshots. Haddock and the nativo boy (and Snowy) hear them across the bay. Tintin flees, running as fast as he can and diving into the water. He escapes only by the barest whisper. Tintin swims away as hard as he can.
The criminals are soon almost upon him, swarming the shore with their numbers. They beach their small boats and bring a prone figure — we are to assume Calculus — and drag him ashore in the royal blue early light of the false dawn.
And now it’s a race; it’s a chase; it’s a hunt for Calculus, as the criminals surge along known trails into the heart of the country.
It dawns where they might be going. They may seek the rumoured temple of the sun of the Incan civilisation. Tintin and Haddock and Snowy wish to pursue them there, but the nativo boy says they must go rough and overland. They must climb high, craggy mountains, suffering through treacherous stony paths. They must struggle and wade through dense snow at the tops of high peaks. They must fight their way through rainforests, where the nativo is almost engulfed by a constrictor. They must fight off crocodiles and condors (the latter wanting to abduct, perhaps to eat, Snowy). All in pursuit of Calculus and on the trail of his kidnappers.
And Tintin and his party must traverse waterfalls underneath a rope, like a reverse Blondin. Risk being wracked to death on the rocks below, smashed to pieces under thousands of tonnes of swirling, evil water.
In the 1925 film The Lost World, it is this landscape that Professor Challenger and his party traverse. There stand high, perilous cliffs and thick foliage obscuring the party’s lines of sight. Those adventurers face violent enemies in nature, creatures which do not wish them well. The vegetation is thick and the rocks are immense and hard. The cliffs are all sheer and every drop over every edge is immense.
All Tintin and Haddock and the nativo (and Snowy) lack, by contrast, in their own adventures is the group of prehistoric creatures that Challenger and his group encountered and had to face.
Tintin and company go on looking for Calculus, looking for the Incan temple of the sun, where their guide is sure he has been taken.
What they find is so alien, so splendid, it’s almost beyond description. It’s almost beyond imagination what Tintin and Haddock and their party find.