Swords of Mars, two-mouthed chameleon-cat-men, and kings' stories engraved on stones

Thomas B. Marsh has been in the sync stream, and it occurred to me that, since the h in Thomas is silent -- i.e., Thomas = Tomas -- we could also remove the h from Marsh, yielding Mars.

There is a character named Tomas Castro in Unsong, a Mexican bartender-turned-Leviathan-hunter, who apparently exists for the sole purpose of allowing the author to write, "'It's the Leviathan!' Tom said superficially." (Yes, authors do create whole characters -- fairly major ones sometimes -- for the sake of one perfect line of dialogue. Tim Powers is a confirmed case in point.)

In yesterday's post "Gilgamesh was an elven king," we have this quatrain, a slightly modified quote from Du Cane's Odyssey:

O Smith, declared th' earth-shaking god:

Should Mars the debt refuse,

Thou hast my word that I will pay

To thee thy lawful dues.

Ripped from its Homeric context, this suggested to me the reading that "Smith" -- implicitly Joseph, the assassinated Prophet -- will be avenged, if not by bloodshed (Mars), then by natural disaster (th' earth-shaking god).

The earth-shaking god is Poseidon. According to Robert Graves in The White Goddess, while the Roman Neptune was a god of fish, the Greek Poseidon was more properly a god of warm-blooded sea-beasts such as the Leviathan. This ties in with the Tomas character mentioned above, which in turn suggests that Mars in the second line may have something to do with Marsh -- which seems plausible, given Thomas B. Marsh's association with Joseph Smith.

Mars made me think of the 1935 Edgar Rice Burroughs novel Swords of Mars, which for some reason was in our family bookcase all through my childhood -- only that one, nothing else by Burroughs. I read it a few times as a very young child but always found it hard to follow. I couldn't keep the characters' monosyllabic names straight and kept getting Gar Nal mixed up with Ur Jan and Jat Or. If you asked me to summarize the plot now, I would be at a loss. What I do remember very clearly is the cover, which seems possibly relevant given the "flying boats" that have been in the sync stream of late:

The Internet informs me that this cover art, by Gino D'Achille, is from the 1973 edition, so I guess my parents had bought it before I was even born.

I took a look at the Wikipedia article on Swords of Mars to see if there was anything relevant. The "Plot introduction" section begins thus:

Swords of Mars begins as a cloak and dagger thriller and ends as an interplanetary odyssey.

Since I was led to Swords of Mars by a quote from the actual Odyssey, that seemed like a promising start. But what really got my attention was this:

To win freedom from their jeweled prison, the antagonists must join forces with each other, aided by another captive, the one-eyed and two-mouthed chameleon-like "cat-man" Umka.

I have absolutely no memory of any of these plot points, but these are some sync bull's-eyes. The Odyssey quote that started this has to do with Ares (Mars) being released from golden chains, conceptually similar to a "jeweled prison." The really startling coincidence, though, is the chameleon-like man with two mouths. In Shadowlands, the Colin Wilson Spider World novel I am currently reading, there is a race of creatures called "chameleon men," and they have two mouths each -- one in the usual place, and the other in the center of the forehead. At one point, they are compared to cats:

The chameleon men seemed to be finding the going far less difficult, gliding over the irregularities with a kind of natural grace that he had observed in cats.

So Swords of Mars has a two-mouthed chameleon-like cat-man, while Shadowlands has two-mouthed cat-like chameleon men. (Half man, half chameleon, and half cat -- I'm cereal.) The number of books in the world to feature creatures of such a description must be vanishingly small.

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Another thing I discussed in "Gilgamesh was an elven king" was the theme of ancient kings -- Gilgamesh of Uruk and the Jaredite king Coriantumr -- engraving their story on a stone, in characters which no one else can read. Today I read the following in Shadowlands:

The track they were following must at some time have been a road, for they passed large stones that were partly buried in the turf, and a few of these had some kind of writing carved on them, although Niall was unable to decipher it, or even make out the configuration of the letters.

I thought this was a fairly minor sync: There are large stones with indecipherable writing carved on them, but the context suggests that they are likely mile markers or something like that, certainly not the record of an ancient king.

Wrong. As Niall glances at one of these stones, he sees "a figure like a little old man sitting on the top of it. When he turned his head to stare, the figure was no longer there." Several pages later, we learn the identity of this ghostly old man:

[He] had been a brutal warrior king who had slain many enemies and dismembered others while they were still alive. This area of the moor had once been the site of a great battle, where the king had died of his wounds after putting his enemies to flight. Now he would have also gladly left, but memory of the cruelty he had inflicted bound him to this place.

Niall could have learned the king's life story merely by staying there and absorbing what had been written in the stones.

So the stones are engraved with the life story of an ancient king, a brutal warrior like Coriantumr -- and a king who is in some sense still there, just as the people of Mulek discovered Coriantumr himself together with the stone that told his story.