Pharos the Egyptian was written by Guy Boothby and first appeared as the serial “Pharos the Egyptian” (Windsor Magazine, Jun-Nov 1898). The Australian Boothby (1867-1905) was a mediocre but quite successful author of genre fiction. Although Boothby’s A Bid for Fortune is better known, his Pharos the Egyptian is the superior novel and the best of Boothby’s longer work.

Pharos is an old Egyptian man whose appearance causes revulsion to those who see him. The narrator's first reaction, on being looked at by Pharos, is "a great shudder, accompanied by an indescribable feeling of nausea, passed over me...the other's gaze was rivetted [sic] on me so firmly, indeed, that it required but small imagination to believe it eating into my brain."¹

Pharos is actually Ptahmes, the Egyptian wizard who was commanded by the Pharaoh to duel with Moses. Because Ptahmes failed to protect the Pharaoh's first-born from the tenth plague, the Pharaoh ordered Ptahmes' death, and Ptahmes was forced to flee into the mountains. Ptahmes died in hiding, but because he had sworn falsely by the gods (he “assured the Pharaoh, on the honour of the gods, that what the Israelite had predicted could never come to pass”²) he was cursed with perpetual life. Ptahmes’ body was mummified and hidden, but his spirit was forced to take on a new form, that of Pharos. Pharos was then forced to wander the Earth for thousands of years, always seeking his mummy, which was the only means by which he could try to regain favor in the eyes of the gods.

Pharos eventually finds the mummy in England, and he takes it, the narrator, Cyril Forrester, and a beautiful clairvoyant woman back to Egypt, where after various and sundry ceremonies Pharos is given a second chance by the gods. Pharos uses this second chance to avenge himself and his country on Europe, in the form of a plague that uses Cyril as a vector: “I tell thee assuredly that the plague which is now destroying Europe was decreed by the gods of Egypt against such nations as have committed the sin of sacrilege.”³ The plague kills tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in Europe, but this is not what the gods were interested in, and they damn Pharos a second time. In a fit of despair Pharos rips his own throat open. Cyril and the clairvoyant, both guilt-ridden for having been Pharos' pawns and both feeling responsible for so many deaths, flee to England and try to forget.

Pharos the Egyptian is well-told, suspenseful, and contains surprises that the readers will not anticipate. The novel has other aspects of interest to the modern reader. Pharos, though sinister, a religious fanatic, and willing to slay tens of thousands of innocents, is not entirely unsympathetic. The plot makes clear that he is trying to follow the dictates of his gods, gods who are in fact real and have spoken directly to him. Pharos is also a patriot, taking action against those he sees (not without reason) as having done Egypt wrong and humiliated and despoiled it.

Most interestingly to the modern reader aware of the Elgin Marbles controversy, Pharos and Cyril debate the propriety of Pharos’ theft of his own mummy. Cyril’s father was the man who took the mummy from the tomb in which he found it and brought it to England, and the Cyril feels somewhat proprietary toward the mummy:

“But allow me to remark that it is not your property, Monsieur Pharos,” I replied; “and even taking into consideration the circumstances you relate, you must see yourself that you have no right to act as you propose doing.”

“And pray by what right did your father rifle the dead man's tomb?” said Pharos quietly. “And since you are such a stickler for what is equitable, perhaps you will show me his justification for carrying away the body from the country in which it had been laid to rest, and conveying it to England to be stared at in the light of a curiosity.”⁴

The fair-minded reader will give that exchange to Pharos on points. Pharos, in fact,

makes clear how a colonized nation might well be justified in turning on an imperial force like England when that colonizing power sufficiently provokes the subject nation by unconscionable treatment of its (in this case, Egypt‘s) dead. Such, in fact, is the basis of Pharos‘s case against Britain, for, according to Pharos, Britain has been responsible for sacrilegious treatment of the graves of those entombed in ancient Egypt and have therefore incurred the wrath of the ancient land‘s gods. In response, those same gods send Pharos to punish the responsible nations for their desecration of those graves. Viewed in this light, the reprisal, though one might question its severity, seems perfectly reasonable. When, in addition to the punishment for acts previously committed, one considers the reprehensible character of many of the native Briton, one can hardly blame Pharos or his party for their acts of retribution.⁵

In its historical context, Pharos the Egyptian is an outstanding example of the Egyptian-themed Gothic, horror, and occult fiction which bloomed at the end of the century. The immediate cause of the surge in Egyptian-themed horror fiction was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the unofficial British of Egypt in 1882. “From 1869 when the canal opened, gaining further momentum after the 1882 occupation, numerous tales positing the irruption of vengeful, supernatural, ancient Egyptian forces in civilised, rational, modern England began to appear.”⁶ While there had been “a number of tales starting to posit the negative consequences of tomb exploration in the late 1860s,”⁷ including Louisa May Alcott’s “Lost in a Pyramid,” the number of cursed-Egypt horror stories skyrocketed between 1880 and 1914, with perhaps more than a hundred being published. They were the result of Britain’s unease at becoming involved with Egypt:

the curse trope, with its sense of inexorable doom, essentially underpins all of these tales from the violent revenges to the ill-fated romances, giving the genre a unifying structure, and relating it to broader imperial anxieties about decline and fall. When the criticality of the Suez Canal to the British imperial project is applied to this analysis, it sheds further light on the late-nineteenth-century narrative fascination with intrusive ancient Egyptians, suggesting that the spectrum of representations can be interpreted as complementary responses to the potential consequences of Britain possessing the canal—great promise and grave peril. While political threats that could sever the imperial lifeline found expression in curse form, the allure of Egypt’s ancient treasure, colonial resources, and strategic position circulated as the desirable object of the mummy romance. Thus the vengeful supernatural invader suggests the imperial nightmare of barbarians at the gates, while the eroticised female mummy holds out the tantalising prospect of secure empire.⁸

Murray Buford Montague, “Science, the Occult, and the Conservative Project of Late Victorian and Edwardian British Mummy Fiction.” PhD diss., Ball State University, 2011.

¹ Guy Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian (London: Ward, Lock, 1899), 27.

² Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, 199.

³ Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, 356.

⁴ Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian, 105.

⁵ Montague, “Science, the Occult, and the Conservative Project of Late Victorian and Edwardian British Mummy Fiction,” 43-44.

⁶ Alise Bulfin, “The Fiction of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia: The Curse of the Suez Canal,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 54, no. 4 (Oct., 2011): 412.

⁷ Bulfin, “Gothic Egypt,” 418.

⁸ Bulfin, “Gothic Egypt,” 421.