Episode Three: The Nome King!
The Army of Oz marches north, toward the entrance to the Nome King's dominions. Along the way there's a bit of a delay as Billina has to stop to lay an egg, which the Scarecrow stashes in his pocket when nobody else has a use for it. Pay attention to this egg.
Eventually they come to the outer defenses of the Nome empire: a mechanical giant endlessly pounding the narrow mountain path with a huge hammer. Intruders risk being flattened. Tiktok proudly identifies the giant as another piece of Smith & Tinker engineering.
The Scarecrow figures out how to get past it -- note that his excellent brains have become such a fixture of the Oz books that now everyone expects the Scarecrow to come up with a plan. The Scarecrow notices that there's a safe interval between hammer-blows as the giant raises his giant mallet for the next stroke.
The Cowardly Lion volunteers to go first, with Ozma on his back, and the Tiger follows with Dorothy. The Sawhorse brings the Scarecrow across, and Tiktok walks calmly under the hammer, timing his passage with mechanical precision. The Tin Woodman manages the same feat, but the Army of Oz are all too scared to try it. So the Lion and the Tiger have to ferry the twenty-four officers across, and the Sawhorse carries the lone private.
Beyond the giant Our Heroes encounter their first Nomes -- "rock fairies" who blend into the surface of the stone and scuttle along the cliff faces like big insects. I don't know why L. Frank Baum chose his unique spelling for their name; he may have been influenced by the town in Alaska, which would have been much in the news as a result of the whole Klondike gold rush a few years earlier.
Nomes/Gnomes can trace their pedigree back to the alchemist/physician/self-promoting con man Paracelsus, who apparently made up the word to refer to elemental spirits of earth (along with sylphs for air, undines for water, and salamanders for fire). Later on the term got adopted into fairy lore to describe little men living underground. And of course more recently in 1977 the Dutch team of Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen had a runaway best seller with their art book Gnomes, depicting them as miniature humanoids living an irritatingly harmonious existence.
Baum's Nomes are sort of halfway between fairies and Paracelsus's elementals. They look like they're made of rock, are immune to extremes of heat, and don't eat the same kind of food that surface-dwellers do. But they do dig tunnels, so they aren't swimming through solid rock like elementals.
John R. Neill did a great job illustrating the Nomes. They're lithe, bug-eyed and creepy, almost insectile. Not at all the typical lumpy rock-men or fat little hippies in pointed hats. He managed to make them comic and threatening at the same time.
And in charge of the whole shebang is the Nome King. Ozma first demands that he show himself, but he won't. She then entreats him to appear; no dice. Ozma won't plead with him. She's a Girl Ruler, after all. Dorothy has no such pretensions, and says "PLEASE, Mr. Nome King, come here and see us." The rocks open and Our Heroes descend into the underworld.
After all the buildup he's been given, at first appearance the Nome King is a huge relief. He's a fat little man with a busy beard, dressed in plain clothes with only a jeweled belt for decoration. His face is merry, and Dorothy thinks he looks just like Santa Claus.
Dorothy and Ozma sit down for a pleasant chat with their jolly host, and discover that being jolly isn't the same as being good. No, he's not going to release the Queen of Ev and her children. He bought them fair and square from King Evoldo and they belong to him. He even insists he's treating them well, because he transformed them into ornaments in his palace rather than put them to work.
Ozma tries to bargain for them, offering to replace the ornaments ten times over, but the Nome King politely refuses. Then she threatens him with the might of the Oz Expeditionary Force, and the Nome King nearly passes out from laughing. He shows off his army, which is bigger than that of any surface-dwelling ruler's. At the time, the world's biggest army was that of the Russian Empire, with a strength of about 500,000. Let's give the Nome King twice that.
How can he have such a big army? Actually, the question is how can he have such a small one. The Nome King is the ruler of the entire underground world -- in other words, the whole interior of the Earth. That's a volume of about 268 billion cubic miles. If we assume that the King's people have excavated only one one-millionth of that, he still rules an area of 134 million square miles (with a generous 10-foot ceiling height). That's more than twice the land area of the planet's surface! Even with a fairly sparse population density of only 100 per square mile, the Nome King has 13 billion subjects, or about twice the current population of the Earth. He could easily field an army of a hundred million Nomes.
Suddenly Ozma's twenty-four officers and lone private aren't so impressive.
But the Oz force have obviously read Machiavelli: any highly-centralized state like the Nome King's is very vulnerable to a "decapitation" attack against the ruler. The Cowardly Lion threatens to tear the King to pieces unless he agrees with Ozma's demands, but the King's magic keeps the Lion from approaching his throne. Impasse.
The Scarecrow suggests wheedling the Nome King into giving up his slaves, a suggestion the King himself endorses. So Ozma asks him what he wants in exchange for freeing the royal family of Ev.
The King proposes a little contest. Ozma can go into the rooms of the palace and try to find which ornaments are the transformed Queen and her children. To reverse the spell, all Ozma has to do is touch something she thinks is an Evian (Evite?) and say the word "Ev." If she's right, that captive is restored. Ozma gets eleven tries, and the King is such a good-natured fellow that he's willing to let all the other members of the Oz Expeditionary Force have a turn as well.
BUT: there's a catch. If anyone makes eleven guesses and can't even find one transformed Ev person, then they, too, become an ornament in the King's palace.
Ozma, who is still positively drunk with overconfidence, agrees to the Nome King's terms. The King opens the rock doors into the rest of his palace, and Ozma goes in. We'll find out what happens to her next time.
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