Terror in the Desert

BY THE NORTH GATE (255 pp.)--Gwyn Griffin--Holt ($3.95).

The "gate" of the book's title is taken from a Chinese poem in which a lonely man in a watchtower looks out across a barbarous and a desolate land. But it is also the gate at which the sentinels of civilization have always stood guard and always died in the end. The scene of this modern tale of horror is Africa, where the Roman watch fell to the Vandals 1,500 years ago, and where today the British guard is falling to nationalism. Whatever its accuracy as an omen, By the North Gate is one of the year's most chilling novels. It is as free of sentimentality as a native spear, as relentless in its bitter logic as simple hate.

Political Magic. The fictional town of Belele lies in a huge chunk of northeast Africa. As Novelist Griffin tells it, Mussolini made the region an ornament of empire in the '30s; now the British are trying to get control through a mandate. To the white men who rule the area, native hatred is as much a fact of life as the brutal sun, the distant howls of hyenas. Belele has a fort, a few British officers, a power plant that is as unreliable as the loyalty of the natives. The Italians still remaining are despised by their British successors, who are themselves aware that service in such a post is proof of their personal failure. The natives live in age-old ignorance and squalor, the desert villages are outposts of pure savagery, and the rabble-rousing nationalists are free to work their political magic.

There is order in Belele and the surrounding desert because Major de Goltz creates it through simple brutality. His command is a native Mule Company of blacks, whom he keeps in line with regular floggings. In all the district his word is law, and since he is close to seven feet tall and can break a man's jaw with a swipe of his fist, he never gets any back talk. Others may want to leave Belele for a more civilized post, but not de Goltz. Half Dutch, half native, he knows that he has reached his peak, and glories in the power to flog, execute, ride herd on his three young white assistants, who fear him. When a new civil-affairs officer named Major Bluphocks arrives, the stage is set for a vicious contest of wills. He has never been up against a man like de Goltz, and in the intrigue that follows Bluphocks meets disaster, as does just about everyone else in the book.

Africa Lost. This is a bitter story, bitterly told. Author Griffin, who was an officer in the British colonial army in Africa in World War II, seems to know about administrative misfits and the cheap little ploys of petty, ambitious men in seats of power. Most of all, he can catch the hatred of mistreated natives in a brief scene, show on a single page the vast gulf of misunderstanding that separates insensitive whites and long-suffering blacks. His desert comes powerfully alive in brief, sharp descriptions, and without leaving his brutal, well-plotted story for a moment he makes his grim but debatable point with clarity: if Africa is lost to the West, it is because stupidity and brutality have been the means employed to keep it.

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