TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD, the sixteenth in a series of twenty-four tales about the ultimate noble savage, was almost certainly the second Tarzan novel I read, following a paperback of TARZAN OF THE APES. Yet I might have formed a lesser impression of the ape man had I read any other books past the halfway mark of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan oeuvre. Not a bad impression, for ERB at his most formulaic was always entertaining. But most ERB books aren't emotionally moving, and GOLD was. I haven't read all the books he authored, but I would not hesitate to consider GOLD ERB's best work after Tarzan's origin tale.
Before this novel, ERB had Tarzan get involved three times in stories where he had to sort out the differences between two warring cities inhabited by White colonists-- sometimes "lost cities" that reproduced some earlier era's culture, sometimes fantasy-domains with no relation to real-world history. GOLD includes two warring cities, but this time the ape-man spends the whole time in Cathne, the City of Gold, and never visits Athne, City of Ivory, aside from learning of the latter from an Athnean denizen, Valthor. After Tarzan rescues Valthor from bandits in the first few chapters, Valthor guides Tarzan to the locale of the two cities, but floodwaters separate the two. Tarzan then spends the rest of the novel interacting with the greatest of Burroughs' pagan queens.
Tarzan gets captured by Cathnean soldiers and hauled before Queen Nemone on suspicion of his being a spy. ERB then has the ape-man compare Nemone to the first pagan queen he ever met: La, Priestess of Opar, who first appeared in the second TARZAN book. This is more than Tarzan's wife Jane gets, as she's not even vaguely referenced in the entire novel. La is not much more than a reference point, for in all of that character's appearances, she doesn't have much more than beauty going for her, so that La always comes off as a roadshow version of Rider Haggard's lost-city queen She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.
Nemone, however, represents ERB's attempt to produce a psychology for a female ruler with nearly unbridled power and no moral compass. When everyone else in the courtroom kneels in Nemone's presence, Tarzan does not, thus piquing her interest in him. Still, she accepts her counselors' opinions that the stranger is a spy and sentences him to face death in an arena at the hands of Cathne's strongest man. When Tarzan inevitably trounces his opponent, the ape man becomes even more attractive to Nemone.
The pop-fiction woods are of course full of stalwart heroes who nobly refuse the attentions of corrupt female monarchs, but ERB is going for something subtler. Through Tarzan, the reader becomes interested in what factors make Nemone act cruelly even toward her own subjects-- for instance, levying death or disfigurement to any Cathnean woman whose beauty might rival Nemone's. To be sure, everyone in Cathne is barbaric. Poor and rich alike hunger for the bloodsports of the arena, and no one opposes ritual sacrifice, since long before Nemone's birth, the nobles train lions to hunt human prey. One might argue that their city might be better called "City of the Lions," as their mining of gold is not that important to the story, while Athne is the City of Ivory as a consequence of their totemistic worship of elephants. Indeed, in an early chapter, Valthor, though a "good guy," tells Tarzan that both cities regularly raid each other, and remarks, "There is a sport for men!"
At no point does Tarzan seek to broker peace between the warring cities, and though he does abet a romance between a young man and a young woman, that part of the narrative is very minor. Once Nemone becomes smitten with Tarzan, she gives him enough liberty that the ape man could escape Cathne with the greatest of ease. He's given an excuse to stay, that of protecting a local noble made responsible for keeping the ape man confined to the City of Gold. But the hero's real reason is that he admits to being fascinated by Nemone despite her cruelty and insecurity. Three times in the novel the stalwart savage comes close to yielding to Nemone's seductions, until at last he exhausts her patience. Tarzan almost meets his doom, hunted by Nemone's totemic lion Belthar, and the ape man is only saved by his own "beast-mastery," in that his pet lion Jad-Bal-Ja shows up and slays Belthar.
Most of Tarzan's villains are one-dimensional power-seekers and rapists. But ERB constructs a history for Nemone rich in racial and sexual mythology, for behind the loveliness of this African White Queen is a spectre of Blackness. Nemone's mother is a raddled old Black woman and former slave who somehow convinced all of Cathne that her child was the true heir of the previous king-- a king whom Nemone's mother and the counselor Tomos probably poisoned on their path to power. A confidante tells Tarzan that some Cathneans believe Tomos to be Nemone's true father, and adds, without much condemnation, that it's believed Tomos would like to marry his queenly offspring. But Tomos is distinctly secondary to the mother of Nemone, to whom ERB gives a name suggestive of negative femininity: "M'duze."
It's plain that, even if Tomos was not Nemone's real father, he and M'duze have raised her to be their puppet, indifferent to her happiness, and this has contributed to her massive insecurities despite her glamorous attainments. And yet ERB is so in love with his character that he allows her to speak truth on her political situation. When Tarzan argues that a true ruler should show her subjects mercy, Nemone cannily replies, "If I were gracious and merciful they would think me weak; then they would take advantage of me and eventually they would destroy me." Tomos and M'Duze, being inferior villains, merely meet bad ends. Nemone, being ERB's greatest villain, meets a memorable fate. Convinced that she has a mystical connection to her lion Belthar, she dies when he dies, and none of her subjects mourn her. Only Tarzan does so, with the conviction that in death she has found the happiness that eluded her in life.
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