The environment under which Hergé wrote this book couldn't be much more different from its predecessor, 'The Seven Crystal Balls', ironically so given that they constitute a two part story.

He started 'The Seven Crystal Balls' during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, with his publisher, the newspaper 'Le Soir', under Nazi control. While Belgium was liberated ten months later, it's fair to say that Hergé's situation became even worse at that point, being called a collaborator, arrested and freed four times by four different authorities and forced to produce nothing for a couple of years. He started 'Prisoners of Sun' with his name cleared and a dedicated magazine for 'Tintin' guaranteeing plenty of continued work. No wonder it feels lighter.

There was a darkness riddled throughout 'The Seven Crystal Balls' that occasionally veered into horror movie iconography. 'Prisoners of the Sun', however, feels like a quintessential adventure story, even if our heroes, Tintin and Capt. Haddock, end up in the small town of Santa Clara. This one's in Peru rather than California, however, and, at least as far as we're aware, it isn't home to any damn vampires. They're in Peru to wait for the arrival of the 'Pachacamac', a cargo ship on which they believe their friend, Prof. Calculus is a prisoner. Even though Tintin finds a way to prove that, even with clever obstacles being thrown in his way, he can't rescue him so the chase spins onward.

It's been pretty clear throughout this series that Hergé, for all the racism of the era apparent in the first few adventures, especially 'Tintin in the Congo' and 'Tintin in America', he enjoys a clear opportunity to explore foreign lands in these stories. That's especially apparent here in a quest that takes our heroes higher and higher as it runs on. It begins quite literally at sea level with Tintin climbing the anchor chain of the 'Pachacamac' in the Cachao harbour, in which it's been quarantined due to a supposed couple of cases of yellow fever. However, it's ever upward from that point on to seek out the Temple of the Sun.

From Santa Clara, they buy tickets to Jauga, but the train only runs every other day, which gives the local Inca population plenty of time to sabotage their attempts. They soon find themselves in the last coach that's been set adrift to drop off a cliff on the highest railway in the world. It's a great start and a good deed in Jauga gets them a guide through the mountains, as well as a talisman that we know will surely provide an out at a particularly crucial point in the story still to come.

After the dangers of the mountains, it's the dangers of the jungle, then the dangers of further mountains. I tend to focus on Hergé's stories in my reviews, because these are quintessentially cliffhanging adventure yarns and it's his ability to throw Tintin and his colleagues into danger but then extract him from it that's often most notable. However, he also drew these stories, at least until the series got to the point where he had help, at which point he still drew much of it and guided his colleagues on the rest, and it's the art that often stands out here.

The jungle is fun for us, though not for Capt. Haddock. He's eaten by mosquitoes and pestered by monkeys; he sleeps on an ant nest and wakes up covered in ants that are being devoured by an anteater; he sits on an alligator, believing it to be a tree; and even gets run over by a tapir, which ought to be on everybody's bucket list. However, his true nemeses here are llamas, which spit in his face at every opportunity. That first happens early and it continues as a running joke, with a neat moment of revenge on the final page.

However, the mountains feel far more dangerous. As Hergé draws them, it's not just that these Andean mountains reach incredible heights, it's that they're also incredibly steep and we feel that acutely in his artwork. It didn't quite trigger an attack of vertigo for me but it absolutely made them seem even more deadly. When each attack comes, whether it's from an avalanche triggered by Capt. Haddock sneezing or a condor swooping down to seize Snowy off an exposed peak, it doesn't seem like there's ever anywhere to run. They're always exposed to all enemies and restricted from any clear escape. That in turn challenges Hergé's cliffhangers.

As you might expect, the Temple of the Sun is as remote as it gets and as high up as it gets and, while there are plenty of more traditional dangers coming thick and fast in the jungle, they're more dangerous in the mountains. It's here that the darkest scenes occur, though they're not a patch on the dark scenes in 'The Seven Crystal Balls'. After all, this is fundamentally about the Incan culture and the curse visited upon the expedition that stole the mummy of Raspar Capac. We can't escape darkness entirely, even if Hergé wasn't feeling it as much during the process of writing this one.

So our heroes shift seamlessly from mountain adventure into more archaeological adventure almost in the blink of an eye. They're faced with the need to cross a waterfall on a rope, but it snaps on Tintin and he ends up behind that waterfall. There's a hollow space there that leads into an entrance to the Temple of the Sun that perhaps even the Inca have forgotten about. It leads first into a tomb, in which Snowy grabs a bone and inadvertently makes sound because it turns out to be a dead man's flute. Eventually it leads to the temple and a death sentence.

I won't spoil the way out of that apparently inescapable fate, because it isn't the talisman, but I will drop some hints because it had already become a trope when this began serialisation in September 1946. It was famously used in literature as far back as 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' and 'King Solomon's Mines', but both Mark Twain and H. Rider Haggard likely adapted it from a real event that befell Christopher Columbus in Jamaica in 1504. Bottom line, it was already passé when Hergé wrote it in early 1948 but it seems all the more so now.

Other than that cliché, 'Prisoners of the Sun' feels both strong and natural. I don't believe that it quite matches 'The Seven Crystal Balls', but then 'Red Rackham's Treasure', the conclusion to the preceding two part adventure didn't quite match its setup 'The Secret of the Unicorn'. Both times, the solving of a mystery to set up an adventure trumps the adventure itself in a series of books fundamentally known for its adventures. Go figure.

Next month, something a little different, though. 'Land of Black Gold' was a standalone volume that Hergé had begun in 1939 after 'King Ottaker's Scepter' but which had been interrupted by the Nazi invasion of Belgium. He returned to complete it after 'Prisoners of the Sun'. After that comes the two part adventure I've been waiting for, in which our heroes visit the Moon. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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