Checking In With Our Belgian Friend

The Adventures of Tintin: Cigars of the Pharaoh
Little, Brown
Hergé, writer and artist

It's been a while since we last checked in with Tintin. This fourth installment in The Adventures of Tintin series — originally serialized between 1932 and 1934 — is much closer in tone to the few later adventures I'd read when I was a kid. It also serves to introduce a few of the recurring characters besides Tintin and his dog, Snowy.

Previous installments in the series have begun with Tintin being assigned by his employers, Le Petit Vingtieme, to explore and report back to his readers about foreign lands — Russia, the Congo and America. Cigars of the Pharaoh, however, begins with Tintin and Snowy embarking on a holiday cruise around parts of the Middle East and Asia. In fact, there are only a few mentions of Tintin being a reporter in this volume. One of the more humorous mentions is when Tintin runs afoul of Sheik Patrash Pasha. Once the sheik learns Tintin's name, his demeanor toward the reporter softens because he is fond of reading about the young man's adventures. As proof, one of his servants holds up a copy of Destination Moon, an anachronistic reference to the 16th volume in the series. Of course, what I have is a much more recent printing of the book that has obviously been modified; I wonder, however, what the servant was holding when this adventure was originally serialized. Maybe not a book at all as I don't think any of the Tintin adventures had been collected into book form in the early '30s; perhaps the servant was originally depicted holding a copy of Le Petit Vingtieme.

Back to the story, on the very first evening aboard the cruise ship, Tintin and Snowy chance to meet a seemingly befuddled professor, Sophocles Sarcophagus, who is endeavoring to be the first explorer to find the lost tomb of the Pharaoh Kih-Oskh. Tintin agrees to help the professor only to have the association lead the young reporter from one trouble to the next.

One such peril is being framed as a drug smuggler while still aboard the cruise ship. This brings Tintin to the attention of the Thompsons, two bumbling detectives who are almost identical and who show up in almost all of the subsequent Tintin adventures. By the end of this story, Tintin is cleared of the drug charges, as well as several subsequent charges the Thompsons level against him during their haphazard investigation and pursuit of the young man. The Thompsons part with Tintin on good terms, but they are not yet the friends and allies they will become in future installments.

At another point in the story, Tintin and Snowy are adrift at sea, only to be rescued by a passing ship. Also aboard the vessel is one Oliveira da Figueira, a disheveled but apparently gifted salesman of useless trinkets. I haven't seen da Figueira in the other Tintin stories I have read previously, but according to Wikipedia, he is a frequent, recurring character in the series.

And finally, back at the beginning of this tale — just after Tintin meets Sarcophagus, in fact — he also meets a man named Rastapopoulos. Again, this was a character unfamiliar to me prior to reading Cigars of the Pharaoh, but he pops up repeatedly in this tale, and again according to Wikipedia, Rastapopoulos is another character who will be seen in later volumes of the series.

This is a fun adventure, and as I said before, it more closely resembles the three later tales I'd read in my youth than the three that preceded it in publication order. My one complaint with Cigars of the Pharaoh is that the narrative is a bit disjointed as Tintin moves from one setting to the next, and a number of plot threads seem to be left dangling, or if resolved, that resolution is brought about by pure chance.

The villains in this story are smuggling opium disguised as ordinary cigars. The clues that help Tintin piece that together come in the form of counterfeit cigar bands and a symbol found repeatedly in the strangest of places. For instance, the mysterious symbol is a circle with a wavy, vertical line drawn through it and two dots placed on either side of the line, one near the top but inside the circle and the other at the bottom, outside the circle. At first, Sarcophagus believes this symbol to be the royal cipher of Kih-Oskh because it appears on the map he is using to locate Kih-Oskh's final resting place, and later, once Tintin and Sarcophagus find the tomb, the symbol is displayed in various places there as well. It turns out, however, that the tomb is being used by the smugglers as a base of operations. The symbol marks secret entrances and communications for the villains. Strangely, Tintin also comes across the symbol on random tree trunks in the jungle after crash-landing his plane there in one portion of the story. No explanation is given for the symbols to be in the jungle except to push Tintin onward in his investigations.

One further note about the villain behind everything in this tale: Rastapopoulos is first seen being very rude and gruff to both Sarcophagus and Tintin. He comes across as being very pompous and self-important. Later, he is seen again when Tintin stumbles onto his movie set. Here we learn that he is a movie producer, and he is much more kind and friendly toward Tintin. One character later in the story, the poet Zloty, tries to reveal the name of the mastermind to Tintin before he is poisoned; Tintin does not understand Zloty's final words, and the mastermind's face is never revealed in the art, but it is heavily indicated by what Zloty says that Rastapopoulos is the mastermind behind the smuggling operation. It will be interesting to see if and when Rastapopoulos resurfaces in future volumes of the series, as the mastermind of the smuggling scheme — identity still unrevealed — appears to fall to his death pursuing Tintin in the climax of the story.

One final humorous note: Snowy, Tintin's dog, speaks in every story of the series I've read. I've commented in the past that it is unclear if Snowy's often snarky comments are just humorous asides to the readers or if they are intended as being heard by the other characters. After reading this fourth volume, I'm going to solidly say Snowy's comments are NOT heard by the other characters and are just for the readers' benefit. While sometimes Tintin almost seems to be replying directly to something Snowy says, Cigars of the Pharaoh makes it clear that isn't the case. But also with this volume, Snowy is no longer the only animal to make such comments; while in the jungle mentioned above, Tintn and Snowy run into a very talkative herd of elephants.