“ Greeting and welcome, children of the Banana! Eyes-in-the-hands who is known to the people where the sun rises as the Eater-of-Men, hath come from afar, the messenger of a greater than he, the Lord of the World, the Earthquake, the World Trembler, who eats up what he pleases, whose eyes see all things, whose sword slays all things, whose breath is the rain, whose voice is the thunder, whose teeth are the lightning, whose frown is the earthquake, whose smile is the sun, whose ear is the moon, whose eyes are the stars, whose body is the world! ”
Charles Beadle
Biographical details
Charles Beadle (1881–1957), a British novelist and writer of pulp fiction, is renowned for his vivid adventure stories set in Africa and evocative depictions of Parisian bohemian life. Born at sea to a ship captain, he traveled across continents, served in the Boer War, and began his literary career with The City of Shadows: A Romance of Morocco (1911).
Establishing himself in New York, he became a regular contributor to pulp magazines like Adventure and Argosy, with Witch-Doctors (1922) marking his most acclaimed serial. Later settling in Paris, he captured the city’s artistic undercurrents in The Esquimau of Montparnasse (1928). His body of work, spanning distant lands and existential themes, bridges colonial adventure with reflective storytelling, reflecting a life shaped by travel, war, and cultural exchanges.
Quotes by Charles Beadle
Charles Beadle, The Tree of Life (Beadle) — Chapter 8 (1919)
“ With the hot kiss upon the dew-tipped crest of the giant tree the two white men hustled the last of the empty pods into the latrine behind the hut. Just as a bird raucously announced the capture of his prey to his nearby mate, Warren-Dukely, peering through the fence, saw the first of the six young girls who daily brought his food, for to a layman or woman of the age of puberty was it worse than death to come within the orbit of the sacred magician's sight, the husband of the Tree of Life, arbiter of fecundity in crops and women, mother of all, potent and terrible. ”
Charles Beadle, NQO (1917)
“ England became a land of chilly mists in which many of his kind had been doomed by a fever-ruined health to dawdle out their lives among an alien folk, tormented by vain dreams of the sudorific glory that was theirs. Native Bob lost all desire to see his own people; for his tongue was stiffened to English words, his eyes were haunted by vast spaces and his ears by the throb of drums in the shrill silence; that hypnotic throb which rouses unconscious resistance to the civilized inhibitions—a conflict expressed by the white man in, "Oh, damn those drums!" ”
