Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (37 page)

The division between the days became ever more nebulous and confusing.

Consciousness and unconsciousness merged into a single blur, for when they slept, they dreamt of passing terrain, and when they were awake, they were so often somnambulistic that they might well have been dreaming.

From K'hok'ho into the land of Uyanzi, from village to village, through an ugly and desiccated jungle and over baked earth; then into the sandy desert of Mgunda Mk'hali, where lines of elephants marched in stately fashion, trunk to tail, past petrified trees filled with waiting vultures.

Mdaburu to Jiwe la Mkoa; Jiwe la Mkoa to Kirurumo; Kirurumo to Mgongo Thembo; Mgongo Thembo to Tura.

Days and days and days.

This long.

As they approached Tura, Burton said to Swinburne, “I keep seeing animal carcasses.”

“Funny,” the poet murmured. “I keep seeing a pint of frothy English ale. Do you recall The Tremors in Battersea? I liked that tavern. We should go back there someday.”

The two men were walking. So many of the freed slaves had left them now—gratefully returning to their home villages—that all the animals were required to help carry the supplies, and there were no more spare horses.

Burton looked down at his assistant. The roots of Swinburne's hair were bright scarlet. The rest of it was bleached an orangey straw colour all the way to its white tips. It fell in a thick mass to below his narrow, sloping shoulders. His skin had long ago gone from lobster red to a deep dark brown, which made his pale-green eyes more vivid than ever. He had a thin and straggly beard. His clothes were hanging off him in ribbons and he was painfully thin and marked all over by bites and scratches.

“I'm sorry, Algy. I should never have put you through all this.”

“Are you joking? I'm having the time of my life! By golly, in a poetical sense, this is where my roots are! Africa is
real.
It's
authentic!
It's
primal!
Africa is the very
essence
of poetry! I could happily live here forever! Besides—” he looked up at Burton, “—there is a matter of vengeance to be addressed.”

After a pause, Burton replied, “In that, you may not have to wait much longer. The dead animals I've been seeing—I think they were killed by a bloodthirsty hunter of our acquaintance.”

“Speke!”

“Yes.”

They came to Tura, the easternmost settlement of Unyamwezi, the Land of the Moon. Burton remembered the village as being nestled amid low rolling hills and cultivated lands; that it was attractive to the eye and a balm to wearied spirits after so many days of monotonous aridity. But when his expedition emerged from the mouth of a valley and looked upon it, they saw a scene of appalling destruction. Most of Tura's dwellings had been burned to the ground, and corpses and body parts were strewn everywhere. There were only fifty-four survivors—women and children—many wounded, all of them dehydrated and starving. Sister Raghavendra and Isabella Mayson—both recovering from their afflictions—treated them as best they could; but two died within an hour of the expedition's arrival, and during the course of the following night they lost eight more.

The camp was set up, and Burton gathered those women whose injuries were slightest. For a while they refused to speak and flinched away from him, but his generosity with food and drink, plus the presence of so many women in his party, especially Isabel Arundell, whom they took to almost straight away, eventually quelled their fears, and they explained that the village had been ravaged by “many white devils accompanied by demons who sat inside plants.” This terror had descended upon them without warning or mercy, had killed the men, and had made away with grain and cattle and other supplies.

The sun, Burton was informed, had risen two times since the attack.

He gathered his friends in the village's half-collapsed
bandani.

“Speke and the Prussians have not respected the customs of Africa at all,” he observed, “but this degree of savagery is new.”

“What prompted it?” Isabel Arundell asked. “John is a schemer but not a barbarian.”

“Count Zeppelin is behind this carnage, I'm sure,” Swinburne opined.

“Aye, lad,” Trounce muttered. “I agree. They went through this place like a plague of locusts. Looks to me as if they badly needed supplies and hadn't the patience or wherewithal to trade.”

“We're about a week away from Kazeh,” Burton said. “It's an Arabic town, a trading centre, and it marks the end of our eastward march. It's where we'll restock with food, hire new porters, and buy new animals, before heading north to the Ukerewe Lake and the Mountains of the Moon. Speke will be following the same route and no doubt intended to obtain fresh provisions there too, but perhaps he couldn't make it. I'd lay money on him having squandered all his supplies between Mzizima and here.”

“So Tura bore the brunt of his ineptitude,” Krishnamurthy growled.

Some of the Daughters of Al-Manat were patrolling the outskirts of the village. One of them now reported that a body of men were approaching from the west. They were carrying guns, in addition to the usual spears and bows.

Burton hurried over to where the women of Tura were sitting together and addressed them in their own language: “Men are coming, perhaps Wanyamwezi. If they've heard what has happened here, they will assume my people are responsible and they will attack us.”

One of the women stood and said, “I will go to meet them. I will tell them of the white devils who killed our men and I will say that you are not the same sort of devil and that even though you are white you have been good to us.”

“Thank you,” Burton replied, somewhat ruefully.

As he'd predicted, the new arrivals were Wanyamwezi. They stamped into Tura—two hundred or so in number—and levelled their weapons at the strangers. They were mostly very young men and boys, though there were a few oldsters, too. All were armed with matchlock rifles; all bore patterned scars on their faces and chests; all frowned at Burton and his associates; and all bared their teeth, showing that their bottom front two incisors had been removed.

From among them, a man stepped forward. He was tall, gaunt, and angular, but powerfully built, with long wiry pigtails hanging from his head. There were rings in his nose and ears and a profusion of copper bangles on his wrists and ankles.

“I am Mtyela Kasanda,” he said. “They call me Mirambo.”

It meant
corpses.

“I am Burton,” the king's agent responded. “They call me
Murungwana Sana
of Many Tongues.”

“Dost thou see mine eyes?” Mirambo asked.

“I do.”

“They have looked upon thee and they have judged.”

“And what did they find?”

Mirambo sneered. He checked that there was priming powder in the pan of his matchlock. He tested the sharpness of his spear with a fingertip. He examined his arrow points. He cast an eye over his warriors. “Mine eyes see that thou art
muzungo mbáyá
, and therefore bad.”

“My people are the enemy of those who destroyed this village. We found the women injured, and we helped them.”

“Did doing so darken thy skin?”

“No, it did not.”

“Then thou art still
muzungo mbáyá.”

“That is true, but, nevertheless, we remain the enemy of those who did this deed.” Burton held his hands open, palms upward. “We have come to help thee.”

“I will not be friends with any
muzungo mbáyá”

Burton sighed. “I have learned a proverb from thy people. It is this:
By the time the fool has learned the game, the players have dispersed.
”

Mirambo turned his head a little, chewed his lip, and regarded Burton from the corners of his eyes. He coughed and spat, then said, “I understand thy meaning. If I do not choose, I will have no say in the outcome.”

“That is probably correct.”

There was a sudden commotion among the gathered warriors and a small man pushed his way to the front of them. He was wearing a long white robe and a white skullcap, with a matchlock rifle slung over his shoulder and a machete affixed to his belt. At the sight of him, Burton felt a thrill of recognition.

“Wow! I know this scar-faced man, O Mirambo,” the newcomer announced. “I have travelled far and far with him. He is ugly and white, it is true, but he is not as those who passed before. He is fierce and loyal and good, though filled with crazy thoughts. I speak only the truth.”

The Wanyamwezi chief pondered this for a few moments, then said to the man: “Give me
pombe
, Sidi Bombay.”

The small man took a goatskin flask from one of his companions and handed it to the chief. Mirambo drank from it then passed it to Burton, who did the same.

“Now,” Mirambo said. “Tell me of our foe.”

The season of implacable heat arrived, and each morning they struck camp at 4 a.m., walked for seven hours, then stopped and did their best to shelter from it. It meant slow progress, but Burton knew Speke wouldn't be able to move any faster.

Their first three days from Tura saw them trekking over cultivated plains. The sky was so bright it hurt their eyes, despite that they wore
keffiyehs
wrapped around their faces.

The Daughters of Al-Manat, now supplemented by the vengeance-bent women of Tura and their children, rode and walked to the right of the porters.

Mirambo and his men marched on the other side of the column, keeping their distance, holding their matchlocks at the ready and their heads at an aloof angle. Sidi Bombay, though, walked along next to Burton's mule, for he knew the explorer of old, and they were firm friends.

A one-time slave who'd been taken to India then emancipated upon his owner's death, Bombay spoke English, Hindustani, and a great many African languages and dialects. He'd been Burton's guide during the explorer's first expedition to the Lake Regions in '57, and had then accompanied Speke on his subsequent trek in '60. Burton now learned that he'd also accompanied Henry Morton Stanley, last year.

As they pushed on across a seemingly unchanging landscape, Bombay cast light on some of the mysteries surrounding the latter two expeditions.

Burton already knew that, after discovering the location of the African Eye of Nāga in '57 but failing to recover the jewel, Speke had returned to Africa with a young Technologist named James Grant. They'd flown toward Kazeh in kites dragged behind giant swans, but, en route, had lost the birds to lions. He now learned that when they'd arrived at the town on foot, they'd hired Bombay to guide them north to the Ukerewe Lake, then west to the Mountains of the Moon.

“Mr. Speke, he led us into a narrow place of rocks. Wow! We were attacked by Chwezi warriors.”

“Impossible, Bombay!” Burton exclaimed. “The Chwezi people are spoken of all over East Africa and all agree that they are long extinct. Their legendary empire died out in the sixteenth century.”

“But perhaps no one has told them, for some have forgotten to die, and live in hidden places. They guard the Temple of the Eye.”

“A temple? Did you see it?”

“No, Mr. Burton. It is under the ground, and I chose not to go there, for I met my fourth wife in an ill-lit hut and I have never since forgotten that bad things happen in darkness. So I remained with the porters and we held back the Chwezi with our guns while Mr. Speke and Mr. Grant went on alone. Only Mr. Speke came back, and when he did—wow!—he was like a man taken by a witch, for he was very crazy, even for a white man, and we fled with him out of the mountains and all the way back to Zanzibar. On the way, he became a little like he was before, but he was not the same. I think what he saw under the ground must have been very bad.”

Stanley's expedition had also ended in disaster. The American newspaper reporter's team—five men from the Royal Geographical Society—had employed porters to carry rotorchairs from Zanzibar to Kazeh, then flew them north to locate the source of the Nile. They'd returned a few days later, on foot. Their flying machines had stopped working.

Bombay, who at that time was still living in Kazeh, was commissioned as a guide. He led Stanley to the Ukerewe, and the expedition started to circumnavigate it in a clockwise direction. But at the westernmost shore, Stanley became distracted by the sight of the far-off mountains and decided to explore them.

“I told him no, it is a bad place,” Bombay said, “but—wow!—he was like a lion that has the musk of a gazelle in its nostrils and can think of nothing else. I was frightened to go there again, so I ran away, and he and his people went without me. They have not been seen again. This proves that I am a very good guide.”

“How so?”

“Because I was right.”

The safari trudged on.

The cultivated lands had fallen behind them. Now there was nothing but shallow, dry, rippling hills that went on and on and on.

“The same!” Swinburne wailed, throwing his arms out to embrace the wide vista. “The same! The same! Won't it ever change? Are we not moving at all?”

During the nights, swarms of pismire ants crawled out of the ground and set upon the camp. They chewed through tent ropes, infested the food supplies, shredded clothes, and inflicted bites that felt like branding irons.