These earlier works of Mundry make for some of his best books, I think. Clearly he is influenced by his greater contemporaries, Haggard and Kipling. In an earlier set of stories brought to book form under the title, Told in the East, Mundy's guide seemed to be Kipling. But in The Ivory Trail, the influence of Haggard is paramount. And it's not just that Told in the East was, as with Kipling's tales, India centered in its stories, while Ivory Trail is set in Africa, the site of so many of Haggard's novels. The former book is also devoted to military deeds, military men, and questions of honor, duty, and a sidelong look every now and then at things amiss in the Empire. But with Ivory Trail's epic plot covering almost all East Africa, British, Portuguese, and German, and relating the adventures of explorers, hunters, and adventurers, the book has strong echoes of Haggard's Alan Quatermain.

The style, here, is realistic, however, with nothing resembling the later philosophically inclined adventure stories Mundy wrote or the even later novels outfitted in the subtleties of Mundy's notions about Theosophy. Too, Mundy creates one of his greatest villains, Schillingschen, the German professor and agent bent on fomenting rebellion among the inhabitants of British East Africa.

One more thing becomes clear in this early Mundy novel. With its climax taking place on Uganda's Mt. Eglon, it suddenly hit me that almost all of Mundy's work that I've read (and I've read a lot at this point) takes the action and/or the resolution of events to mountains or high ground. Even his forest/jungle stories with Ommony move to action climaxes on rocky outcroppings or elevated hills and nearby mountains. Not to mention all the tales of Ommony, Ramsden, Jimgrin, King, and Singh that take place in the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush, or the mountains of the North West Frontier. From a very early moment, it appears, Mundy understood that emotional drama and action was reinforced through the use of geographic atmosphere that was equally as dramatic and varied. ( )