Elemental Trouble
From the Valley of Voe our heroes climb another long staircase up to the land of the Gargoyles. Along the way they have a couple of odd encounters.
The first is when they pass a rift in the wall which looks out over another cavern, and a very strange place it is. The bottom is covered by a black sea dotted with gouts of flame, and the air above the flaming sea is filled with giant birds as big as the roc of Arabian Nights fame. In the clouds Dorothy sees some lovely Cloud Fairies.
The second random encounter is with a strange old man whose long hair and beard are all braided. He is, unsurprisingly, known as the Braided Man. He makes and sells rustles (for ladies' silk dresses) and flutters (for flags and banners). He claims to have come from the surface world, where he made holes for imitation Swiss cheese, and post holes for fences. To store his post holes, he hammered them into the ground in a long stack, creating a hole which led down to the underground world.
Unlike just about everyone else they have encountered so far, the Braided Man isn't trying to kill them, but for some reason Our Heroes don't hang around with him. The Wizard suggests he's a bit crazy. I think that's pretty unfair of the Wizard. He traveled underground in a balloon and has a pocket full of miniature talking piglets, and he's calling this guy nuts?
Beyond the Braided Man they reach the Land of the Gargoyles. Unlike proper cathedral gargoyles, these Gargoyles are made of wood, and are a pretty standard issue bunch of Baum's randomly hostile freaks. We never even find out why they're so hostile; they just are. I'm not even sure why Baum calls them Gargoyles, since they're so different from the standard depiction.
The Gargoyles shy away from noise, but once the Wizard has emptied his two revolvers (yes, the Wizard's packin' heat -- Secret Service issue, no doubt) the Gargoyles take the party prisoner and lock them in a house with no doors, only a hatch in the roof. They can do this because the Gargoyles fly everywhere, by means of hinged wooden wings.
I think this is why I assumed they were aboveground when I read this book as a child. This hardly sounds like an underground world at all. Everything they've encountered during their sojurn inside the Earth is aerial in nature. The Mangaboos can walk on air, the Voese are transparent as air, there's a cavern inhabited by birds and cloud fairies, the Braided Man makes things out of air, and the Gargoyles can fly.
I don't know if this was some kind of thematic choice by Baum, or whether he just had a whole bunch of ideas for weird wayside tribes and random hostile freaks which all happened to involve air and flight somehow. If so, it's odd he used them in this book.
Another odd thing is the complete absence of Nomes. The Nome King has been described as the Ruler of the underground world, and now Dorothy and the Wizard (and the rest) are trapped underground trying to get free. Baum could have made all this an attempt at revenge by the jolly old psychopathic Nome King, which fails because he didn't anticipate the arrival of the Wizard.
Even if the earthquake isn't the Nome King's fault (fault? earthquake? geddit?) it's kind of a shame Baum passed on the opportunity to have the heroes encounter some Nomes underground -- maybe even a rebel faction or some exiles. Instead we get Cloud Fairies. Very odd.
Rereading DATWIO as an adult who knows something about the Oz books, something else struck me about it: this book doesn't read as if it's written to be adapted to the stage. There are no armies of showgirls, no comic duos, and just about all the adventure setpieces would be impossible to stage. From that and the preceding points, I deduce that L. Frank Baum more or less threw this one together from bits and pieces, secure in the knowledge that he would satisfy his fans by bringing back the Wizard. Can't really say he was wrong, either.
Escaping the Gargoyles is pretty simple. Zeb sneaks out and steals several pairs of Gargoyle wings, which the creatures remove when they go to sleep. He and the Wizard attach the wings to Jim and the buggy, and the whole crew go flying off toward the next tunnel entrance on the far side of the Gargoyles' cavern. Naturally they are pursued, and reach the tunnel just in time.
To hold off the Gargoyles the Wizard removes the wings and douses them with lamp oil before setting them on fire. He also hopes aloud that the fire may spread and destroy the entire Gargoyle country. Given what he's been through, one can sympathize. With the blaze making the tunnel too hot, they proceed upward, and we'll catch up with them next time.
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