Tombi Sink (found on the Internet Archive)
December 9th 2024
A few days ago, I decided to go out of my way to leave the house and spend most of the day out and about. This was, in fact, my second Friday in a row having done so, after I ended up spending the entire day walking around, gettin' lunch, reading and popping into stores like, two weeks ago, after my first appointment for HRT (personally speaking, huge!!). But anyway: I ended up spending a few hours in a local combination cafe-bar-bookstore, alternating between schoolwork and reading; and one of the things that I read whilst I was there was a seemingly more-or-less forgotten piece of adventuresome pulp fiction from the year 1940, titled Tombi Sink
Well, the above image kind of gives away the best part of the story, but I figured, having an image at the top of a blog is always good. But, before I get into it: I read this story on the Internet Archive, in an upload of the August 1940 issue of Unknown, a pulp magazine published from 1939 to 1943 headed by... WOAH JOHN W. CAMPBELL??? THE "THE THING" GUY?? And that's not the only big name loosely in the vicinity of this short story! The same issue also features a novel (maybe more of a novella) by sword-and-sorcery author L. Sprague de Camp, probably most well known for writing a slew of continuations of the Conan stories after Robert E. Howard committed suicide (also, he was the guy who coined the abbreviation "E.T." to refer to extraterrestrial life). Unlike these two, the author of "Tombi Sink" is otherwise unknown; this story is the only work listed by "J. Vale Downie" on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and if its a pseudonym, I have no idea who for. Unknown was the fantasy counterpart to the much more famous Astounding Science Fiction, and despite having a cursory familiarity with that magazine, I had never before even heard of this one before stumbling upon this story, highlighted by a cryptozoology enthusiast due to the story's content.
"Tombi Sink" opens on a small group of white characters in the Congo, and from only that information and the date that the story was written, I think you can gather something pretty important about this story. It's incredibly racist pulp trash! The white characters are a crew of engineers, geologists, and adventurers out in the Congo basin digging a canal to connect a fictional river to a fictional lake for... some reason. The whites are just overseers and onlookers; all of the actual work of digging out the canal is done by black laborers, all unnamed, solely identified by whether they are Kru or Bantu. However, their canal plans are thrown off when it turns out that the lake, the titular Tombi Sink, is inhabited by a long-snouted dinosaur, a man-eating sauropod! And, of course, in typical racist pulp fantasy fashion, the local Bantu tribespeople worship the dinosaur as a god, and the white characters intervene only when the Africans are about to sacrifice a white woman (who goes unnamed as well) to the beast by paddling out into the lake with her tied up in their boat. It is so on the nose that it feels almost like a pastiche of the genre.
Where the story shines, however, is in the evocative descriptions of the looming dinosaur. I can't help but love the creature's roar, described thusly:
- It lurched toward the machine, stopped, erected itself and, with a whiplike movement of the long neck, impossibly sharp and convulsive, uttered a cry like the lugubrious howl of a hyena, magnified to infinity, or the "gobble" of an unimaginable wild turkey.
The machine it is lurching towards in that quote, by the way, is the colonizer's mechanized backhoe, which one of the main characters climbs up into and uses to fight the dinosaur! Never would have expected a monster vs. machine bout in something written in the 1940s! Should the use of a mechanized backhoe to fight a large reptile qualify this as a mecha or kaiju story? Of course, though, the racism (I can't rightfully just say "racist elements") rears up here as well, with the Kru laborers in the employ of the white characters apparently revering the backhoe as a god, referred to repeatedly as the "white man's jinn." The layer of modern industry vs. primeval savagery is all too obvious here, but I can't deny that construction equipment duking it out with a sauropod is pretty sick, and the illustration makes it stand out. I wouldn't recommend this story, but I felt compelled to share it anyway; if you're someone interested in adventure fiction, sword-and-sorcery, or the work of racist but very verbose horror writers like H.P. Lovecraft, you'll probably get something out of this story! But I'm not going to downplay how Downie portrays Africans, or whites in the Congo (an especially brutal colonial regime), just because I think dinosaur fights are cool.