We read this between December 24 and January 25, so a bit more than a year ago now!

Fast edits

I think I had to do the most updating on the fly of all the books we’ve read so far. Thankfully we read this before I started getting Brodie to read paragraphs himself.

Some of the things I changed were

• Eaten by savages / savage tribes
• The natives
• The black man / the black boy (at least not over and over again)
• Ignorant
• Mafumu’s hero worship of Jack
• The girls treatment compared with the boys

While I’m sure many people used some of these words at the time, I don’t think there’s anything to gain by reading them in a story like this, not where they are treated as normal and acceptable.

I’ve written about my problems with using natives before, here, and again used phrases like the locals or local people.

While it’s accurate that Mafumu and his uncle are black, using the word almost every single time they are mentioned feels uncomfortable and unnecessary so it was easy to just say the boy or the man. I sometimes used Mafumu in place of the black boy if my brain was quick enough to make the substitution.

Jack’s behaviour in trying to protect Mafumu was admirable and I think anyone would be grateful in that situation but the level of hero worship also felt uncomfortable what with talk of slaves and wonderful white boy – a king of boys. Here I just tried to tone down the hero worship a little.

I think there were only two times that the girls were treated much differently to the boys which makes a nice change

One was the girls being carried across the stepping stones in the river while the boys were allowed to cross by themselves. I said the girls were helped across instead. Still not quite equal, but an improvement!

The second was near the end I said somebody should be on guard instead of just the Captain, Jack or Mike. That then included the girls as well as Mafumu and Mrs Arnold, as surely anyone could take a turn at staying awake and watching for the mountain folk approaching the temple?

 Voice work

Reading in my head I can pronounce things however I want. Saying them out loud with an audience (even just an audience of one) I suddenly start to wonder if I’ve got it right.

How do you pronounce Pilescu? Does it begin with Pil as in Pill? Or Pile? Do you pronounce the eh sound in the middle? Is the end have a q/cue sound or is it coo?

Personally I say Pill-ess-cue and as it’s a made up name I suppose I can’t be wrong?

Pilescu and Ranni (at least that’s easy to say!) as Baronians still have their vaguely German-sounding accents. I didn’t really attempt any sort of accent for Mafumu or his Uncle, their broken English gave them a distinct enough voice already.

Brodie’s questions and comments

• An aeroplane? Now they can go and look for their parents! Is that what this book is going to be about? Them going to rescue their parents?
• Yes! They’re going to go!
• Whaat? How could he go look for himself? (In response to I don’t want to wake up in the morning and find that we have disappeared too. I should just hate to go and look for myself!)
• Crocodiles! (I think he was slightly disappointed that they don’t meet one even though there’s an illustration of one.)

• So they’re going to have to go to the Secret Mountain and find the secret way in – that’s going to be the adventure! Or maybe they can land their plane on the top like they did in that other book! (I think I actually disagreed with him on that and said only helicopters can land on mountain tops… I had obviously forgotten the ending!)

• Lots of laughing at Mafumu’s funny way of using the words he had learned
• Open sesame! (He said this quite a few times after that when opening things but has since forgotten about it. I had to try to explain who Ali Baba and the 40 thieves were and how they were relevant, but were not going to be in the book themselves.)
• I know. The mountain people live in a cave! (He described the cave which was the fern cave from The Valley of Adventure.)
• He was worried the big rock would fall on Ranni if he pushed it the wrong way.

• Jack and Mafumu are going to have to rescue them!!
• How does the lift work??
• It’s the aeroplane they’re coming to the rescue
• He was sad to leave Mafumu behind – but not as sad as he was about the puffins in The Sea of Adventure.