Pharaoh's cigars
.jpg)
The Pharaoh's Cigars ( French original title: Les Cigares du pharaon ) is the fourth Tintin album by the Belgian illustrator Hergé . It was published between December 8, 1932 and February 8, 1934 as a black and white version in Le Petit Vingtième under the original title Tintin en Orient . The colored album edition was published in 1955.
action
Tim and his dog Snowy take a Mediterranean - Cruise . There they meet a rather confused professor who supposedly knows the location of the tomb of Pharaoh Kih-Oskh in Egypt . He is convinced that he can reach the grave, although everyone who tried before him disappeared without a trace. After Tim met a billionaire named Rastapopoulos , cocaine was found in his cabin and Tim was arrested by Schulze and Schultze .
Tim manages to escape and he reaches Port Said . Together with the confused professor, he actually finds the grave he is looking for and both dig it up. The professor suddenly disappeared. Tim looks for him and finds the pharaoh's mark. When he pushes against it, a door opens and Tintin climb in to look for the professor. In it he discovers the mummies of all the professors who had discovered the grave before. At the end of the row of sarcophagi there are three empty ones: one for the professor, one for Tintin and one for Struppi. Shortly afterwards he discovers cigars with a strange signet. But Tim is anesthetized and loaded in a sarcophagus on board a ship. Because the coast guard shows up - and there should actually be drugs in the coffins - he is thrown overboard during the night. A small ship saves him from this predicament.
He later found smuggled weapons aboard this ship. The Schultzes appear again and of course accuse Tim of smuggling. He can escape again, but has to escape through the Arabian desert. When he finally comes across a town, war is being declared there because the sheikh has been attacked - by the clumsiness of the Schulzes. Tim is drafted into the army, where he finds more of the suspicious cigars, but is caught in alleged espionage and sentenced to death. He is shot at dawn.
During the night strangers open Tim's grave. He is doing well because the rifles were loaded with blank cartridges. The Schultzes turn out to be the rescuers, because they themselves had the order to arrest Tim. However, the army clings to Tim and Schultze's heels, whereupon Tim steals a plane . Meanwhile over the Indian jungle, he crashes because the fuel runs out. There, to his great astonishment, he meets the sign of the Pharaoh and the confused professor.
Tim goes to a white man's bush house, where all sorts of strange things happen in the evening. A ceremonial dagger disappears, there is talk of ghosts and a fakir sneaks around. During his further research, Tim learns that a gang of international drug smugglers are trying to get rid of him. When Tim wants to deliver the professor and an informant who has also gone mad at the hospital, he himself is locked up because of a forged letter of posting. Again he has to flee. This is followed by a wild hunt across the jungle, at the end of which he meets the Maharajah of Gaipajama.
Tim learns from the Maharajah that he will probably be the next victim because he has decided to take action against drug trafficking in his country like his father and brother. Both of them went crazy too. Tim knows they've been hit by a poison dart and sets a trap for the drug dealers. He ends up in a meeting where everyone is dressed and masked like Ku Klux Klan members so that they cannot recognize one another. Their robes are not white in the colored version, but purple and carry the symbol of Kih-Oskh on their breasts. Tim outsmarts the group and the Schultzes show up just in time to arrest the gangsters. Only the ominous fakir manages to escape. Together with an accomplice, he kidnaps the Maharaja's son and escapes. Tim follows them into the mountains, where the fakir is knocked down by a rock. The stranger, however, falls from a ledge into a ravine.
On his return, Tim is celebrated as a hero. He finally finds out what the cigars have to do with drug smuggling: Instead of tobacco, they contain opium . The problem still remains, however, of healing the people who have gone mad. The story therefore continues in The Blue Lotus .
background
With this work, the Hergé figures slowly come to maturity. This volume also introduces Tim's archenemy Rastopopoulos and the two Schul (t) zes (in the original Dupont and Dupond), which almost completes the “gallery” of the central figures in the series. Hergé probably borrowed the idea for the appearance of the two clumsy detectives from a cover of the weekly Le Miroir from March 2, 1919, in which two very similar detectives with melons lead a suspect away.
The original version of "The Pharaoh's Cigars" was published twelve years after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, which aroused great interest in Egyptology . The disappearance of the Egyptologists in history is an allusion to the supposed curse of the Pharaoh . Hergé's drawings of the interior of the Egyptian temple are decorated with hieroglyphics and frescoes that are in no way inferior to those from the excavation sites. The details of the drawings are also kept very realistic. A minaret about in Port Said was traced to a contemporary photography exactly the uniforms of the soldiers of the Arab League are the same as the time and the De Havilland Puss Moth DH.80 , with Tim must escape, is on images of the Saudi King Faisal I to recognize that Hergé presented.
Hergé also caricatures the British occupiers of India in his volume. The party to which Tim is invited is attended by various people who represent the archetypes of the English colonial rulers, from their appearance to their lifestyle to the furnishing of the bungalow.
Differences between the 1930s and 1950s versions
Like most Tintin volumes, this one has been revised and reissued several times. The color album edition that is popular today was published in 1955. You can also recognize it from the last drawing on page 15, when Sheikh Patrash Pasha Tim showed his admiration for his adventures. In the original, the servant shows the band Tim in America , while the album edition from 1955 shows the front page of Destination Moon , although that band is based on the pharaoh's cigars .
The differences between the old and new versions are as follows:
| scene | Old edition | New edition |
|---|---|---|
| Tim collides with a sailor at the beginning . | Out of anger, he gave it a black eye. | The two just collide. |
| Tim visits a city disguised as an Arab. | Tim's journey leads to Mecca . Tim disguises himself as only Muslims are allowed to enter the city. | The city has no name. |
| De Figueira appears. | De Figueira says that he left Europe because of the great global economic crisis . | He doesn't say anything about it. |
| The drug cartel is also involved in arms smuggling to Arabs. | Rastapopoulos tells Tim that high officials asked him to keep an eye out for gun smugglers. De Figueira and the gun-smuggling captain were once accomplices. | Only the gun-smuggling captain appears. |
| Tim discovers a trap door below the villa that leads to a snake pit and a pool with crocodiles. | Scene included | Scenes completely deleted |
| During his escape, the fakir sets booby traps. | Scene included | Scenes completely deleted |
| The fakir puts a cobra in Tim's room at night. Struppi can soothe the cobra with the help of a gramophone and at the same time wake up and warn Tim. | Scene included | Scenes completely deleted |
literature
- Hergé: Les Cigares du Pharaon . Casterman, Paris / Tournai 1955.
- Hergé: The pharaoh's cigars . Carlsen, 2008, ISBN 978-3-551-73833-2 .
- Michael Farr: In the footsteps of Tim & Struppi , Carlsen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 978-3-551-77110-0