Another great adventure yarn from my misspent youth!

I first read this book as an impressible boy and loved it. While sex is kept to a minimum and it is heterosexual - not my thing by any means - the main appeal of this story was the slavery element with which I closely identified. 

It's a grand, sweeping, historical story which captured my fertile imagination and introduced me to new aspects of slavery I knew very little about.

Essentially, it is a story about a young, English squire, Michael de Bernay set back in the time of the Crusades who is captured by the Saracens and sold as a galley slave to an Arab merchant trading from the Red Sea with South-East Asia. 

Through a series of misadventures, Michael ends up as a slave of The Khmer king in Kampuchea. After he is branded, he is forced to work alongside Cham slaves who are the natural enemies of the Khmer and labours on the construction of Angkor Wat. Whilst, I was familiar with and fantasised about Arab slavery and galley slaves in particular, the Khmer/Cham aspect of slavery was new to me and it whetted my appetite. It would be fair to say, this story resonated with me and very soon, in my erotic fantasies, I was a naked slave in a team hauling gigantic, stone, building blocks to the top of the enormous temple complex of Angkor Wat.

Peter Bourne wrote this novel in 1956 and named it "When God Slept". My copy is the original one with the old title and cover art. Later, it was re-issued as "The Golden Pagan" for some reason.

Bourne went on to write many more novels and some of them are about black slavery in the West Indies all of which I read most avidly.

Chris