Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (48 page)

They ran.

Herbert Spencer hobbled along, scraping his stump over the hard ground. A spear clunked into his hip and stuck there.

“Yow!” he cried. He yanked it out and threw it aside.

Another clanged off his head.

“Bloody hell! Bloody hell!”

He reached the sidewall, where it bulged outward, and collapsed into its shadow. He lay there, groaning.

“Herbert,” Swinburne called. “For the umpteenth time: it's all in your mind! You can't feel pain!”

“Ready for more dodging?” Burton called.

“Wait a moment!” Trounce shouted. A spear tip had scooped a furrow across his thigh and blood was flowing freely. He tore off one of his shirtsleeves and used it to bind the wound. “All set!”

Another mad dash, more spears—but far fewer this time—and they reached the space beneath a leaning slab without further injury.

“They must have stolen every spear from every village they pillaged,” Swinburne noted. “Either that or they have a portable pointy-stick factory with them.”

A wailing scream suddenly echoed and a body thumped into the gorge near to where they squatted. It was a white man, blond-haired and blue-eyed and dead. An arrow, striped red and black, was sticking out of his chest.

Shouts and screams sounded from above.

“They're being attacked!” Burton exclaimed.

“Who by?” Swinburne asked.

“Let's not dally to ponder that! Come on!”

They dashed out of their hiding place—the king's agent giving support to Trounce, and Swinburne to Spencer—and hurried along the cleft, leaving the embattled Prussians behind.

After they'd traversed perhaps two miles, the ground angled steeply upward. It was tough going.

Burton's stomach rumbled. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose.

He tried to remember what it felt like to sit in his old saddlebag armchair by the fire in his study.

“We're gettin' close, Boss,” Spencer announced. “I can feel the Eye's presence.”

The group struggled on through the fissure. By mid-afternoon, its walls had opened out and they emerged onto a low summit. The temperature plummeted, and suddenly they were shivering. The low mountains and hills they'd trekked through humped away to the rear; to either side, a long ridge zigzagged away to rising snow-covered peaks, which jaggedly heaped into the distance; and ahead, a long slope of crumpled strata plunged steeply downward and was split by a second shadowy crevasse.

Footing became precarious now; the ground was very uneven, with patches of loose slate-like rock that slipped from beneath their feet and rattled away down the incline.

They reached the fracture in the mountain's side and entered it. Darkness closed around them. Sheer rock faces soared up to the left and right, reaching such a height that the sky was reduced to nothing but a thin line of serrated blue.

They stopped for a moment while Burton rummaged in the pack for the oil lamp. Its glass was broken but it was functional. He struck a lucifer, put it to the wick, and moved on, illuminating the cracks and irregularities in their path.

“That's rummy!” Swinburne muttered. “No echoes!”

It was true: their footsteps and voices, the knocks and scrapes of displaced stones—every sound was sucked into an overwhelming silence.

The eerie atmosphere increased as the party moved ever deeper into the gloom.

“If Speke went on ahead while the Prussians tried to stick us with spears, then surely we must be hot on his heels by now,” Trounce whispered.

Burton clenched his jaw and fists.

After a while, they found themselves catching swift movements from the corners of their eyes—indistinct things flitting through the shadows—but when they looked, there was nothing to see.

The thread of sky was so far away that the darkness was almost complete. Burton raised his lamp. It illuminated men, naked but for loincloths and necklaces of human finger bones, standing dark and motionless against the cliffs to either side. Their faces were scored by networks of scars, making their skin resemble the segmented hide of reptiles; they were holding bows fitted with red-and-black-striped arrows, and their eyes were fixed on Herbert Spencer.

“How many?” Swinburne hissed.

“Hard to tell. A lot,” Burton replied. “Chwezi. It was obviously they who attacked the Prussians.”

“Look at the way they're all a-gogglin' at me,” Spencer said.

“I'm not surprised,” Swinburne responded. “With all those dents and scratches, you're quite a sight!”

“Thank you, lad. But it ain't that. I reckons they can feel the diamonds what's in me head.”

“They're closing in to the rear,” Trounce warned.

The others looked back and saw a number of the Chwezi slowly moving toward them.

“But they've left the way ahead open,” Swinburne observed. “Seems to me like they're here to escort us. Or do I mean herd us?”

“To the Eye?” Burton asked.

“It's in this direction, Boss,” Spencer confirmed. “The emanations are very strong now.”

“Then I suggest we allow ourselves to be guided.”

The king's agent continued on along the narrow path, and Swinburne, Trounce, and Spencer trailed after him. The Chwezi stood in eerie silence, not moving until the Britishers had passed, then falling in behind.

Untouched by the sun, the mountain air grew increasingly frigid, and the men's breath clouded in front of their faces. Snow, piled at the sides of the crevasse, reflected the light of Burton's lamp, stark white in the black shadows, and ice glittered on the walls.

“This fault line,” Swinburne said, “we climbed up through it on the other side of the mountain, and now we're descending through it on this. It's as if the whole peak has been split down its centre. What unimaginable energy must have caused that?”

“Not volcanic,” Burton mumbled, distractedly. “This is metamorphic rock. You can see from the angle of the strata how subterranean pressures have pushed it upward.” He frowned and looked up at the thin strip of blue sky high overhead. “You're right, though, Algy. There are very powerful geological forces at work here!”

Half a mile farther on, the chasm suddenly opened out to form a broad, bowl-shaped arena into which the sun shone, warming the air dramatically.

“Look!” Trounce said softly, and pointed ahead.

Across the space, the high wall was cut through as the great crack in the mountain's side continued, the mouth of it blocked by more of the silent Chwezi. Burton glanced about. He and his companions were surrounded.

“There's a cave,” Spencer announced. He pointed to the right, at a gap in the ranks of encircling warriors, where a shadow in the rock concealed a blacker patch of darkness.

“Bombay said the temple was underground and accessible through a cave. I suppose that's it,” Burton said. “And our escort obviously wants us to go down there.”

He moved warily to the opening and extended his lamp into it, illuminating a deep hollow at the back of which he saw a narrow opening.

“Come on,” he called, and ushered the others in with a wave of his hand. They filed past and he followed, stepping through the aperture in the rear wall while watching to see if the Chwezi were going to come in after them. They didn't.

He turned and saw a smooth rocky passage.

“Wait,” he instructed. His friends stopped and he squeezed past them until he was in point position.

They moved on, following the irregular tunnel. It descended, bending to the right and to the left.

There were no sounds of pursuit.

After a while, the detective became aware of something peculiar. He ordered a halt and blew out his lamp's flame. By degrees, a faint bluish luminescence became apparent.

“What's that?” came Swinburne's whisper.

“Some sort of phosphorescent fungus or lichen, by the looks of it. Let's proceed without the lamp. Our eyes will adjust.”

Gingerly, measuring every step as the passage inclined more steeply, they inched onward. As they did so, the glowing fungus became more prevalent until, a few yards farther on, it covered the walls entirely, lighting the way with a weird, otherworldly radiance.

The crooked corridor veered sharply to the left and plunged downward at a severe angle. They struggled to maintain their footing, slipping and stumbling until they were moving faster than they could help. Almost running, they plunged down and out onto the level floor of a fantastical chamber—a large domed grotto—so filled with ambient blue light that its every feature stood out in sharp focus.

They gasped, astonished at the spectacle.

Stalagmites, ranging from tiny to huge, rose from the floor, stretching toward stalactites of similar proportions, which hung from the high roof. Many of them had met and melded together to form massive asymmetrical pillars, giving the chamber the appearance of a gigantic organic cathedral.

Veins of glittering quartz were embedded in the walls, and serrated clumps of the crystal rose from the floor. On the far side of the chamber, a small fountain of clear water tinkled as it bubbled up from its underground source, spreading into a pool, roughly oval in shape and about twenty feet across at its widest point. Draining from it, a narrow stream had cut a channel through the stone floor to the centre of the cavern, where the kidney-shaped forty-foot-wide mouth of a sinkhole opened in the floor. The stream plunged into the darkness of this cavity, disappearing back into the depths of the Earth.

A number of tall wooden posts with roughly spherical masses stuck at their tops stood around the hole.

At the base of the walls, mushrooms—probably white but appearing pale blue in the light—stood clustered in groups; mushrooms of wildly exaggerated proportions, many of them more than twelve feet tall.

Trounce gasped: “Somebody pinch me!”

“Incredible!” Swinburne spluttered. “If an emissary of the fairy nation stepped forward and, on behalf of his monarch, welcomed us to his kingdom, I wouldn't be a bit surprised!”

They moved farther into the grotto and peered into the well. Trounce picked up a rock and dropped it in. They waited, expecting to hear a crack or splash echoing up from the darkness. Neither came.

“A bottomless pit,” the Scotland Yard man muttered.

The men stepped over to the pool. Burton knelt and lifted a handful of water to his lips.

“Wonderfully pure,” he said. “Thank heavens!”

They slaked their thirst.

“Boss,” Spencer said.

Burton looked at the philosopher and saw that he was pointing at the nearest of the upright poles. The king's agent examined it and let out a gasp of horror.

The lump at its top was a desiccated human head. Though wrinkled and shrunken, it was unmistakably that of a European.

There were seven poles and seven heads. Burton examined them all. He recognised one. It was Henry Morton Stanley.

“These others must be the five men who travelled with him,” he said. “Which leaves one extra.”

A harsh voice rang out:
“Ja, mein Freund!
It is the head of poor James Grant!”

They whirled around.

Count Zeppelin stepped into view from behind a thick stalagmite. He was a tall and portly man with a completely bald head and a big white walrus moustache. His hands were gripped tightly around the neck of a second individual. It was John Hanning Speke. The vicious-looking claws at the end of Zeppelin's fingers were pressing against, but not yet piercing, the skin of the Britisher's throat.

“Es ist sehr gut!”
said the count enthusiastically. “We have reached the end of our journey at last!”

“You bastard!” Swinburne hissed. “You've the blood of Tom Bendyshe and Shyamji Bhatti on your hands!”

“I do not know those people,” Zeppelin answered. “And I do not care.”

Burton whispered to Spencer: “Herbert, if you can make your revolver work, now is the time. On my command, draw it and shoot him.”

“Rightio, Boss.”

“And what is the death of one man,” Zeppelin was saying, “or two, or even a hundred, when we—how do you say it, Herr Burton?—
wenn wir mit der Welt spielen?”

“When we are gambling with the world. I would say the death of one man might make all the difference, Count Zeppelin. Hello, John. Your erstwhile ally seems to have you at a disadvantage.”

Bedraggled and skinny to the point of emaciation, with his beard grown almost to his waist, Speke's pale-blue right eye was wide with fear. The left was a glass lens—part of the brass clockwork apparatus that had been grafted to his head, replacing the left hemisphere of his brain. It was a prototype constructed by Charles Babbage, designed to process the electrical fields stored in two fragments of the Cambodian Eye of Nāga. Those diamonds had been stolen before the scientist could properly experiment with them, so he'd passed the device over to a cabal of Technologists and Rakes, and they'd fitted it to Speke in order to gain control of him. Later, Babbage had constructed a much more sophisticated version of the device, and that now sat in Herbert Spencer's head, along with all seven of the Cambodian stones.

“Dick!” Speke gasped. “It wasn't me! It wasn't me! I didn't do any of it!”

“I know, John. You've been the greatest victim of them all.”

“Please! We have to get out of here! They'll come for us!”

Zeppelin grinned. “He believes there are monsters in this place.”

“I see only one,” Swinburne snarled, stepping forward with his fists raised.

“Remain where you are,
kleiner Mann
,” Zeppelin growled.

Burton said, “Let's not waste any more time. Now, Herbert.”

The clockwork philosopher drew his revolver, aimed it at Zeppelin's head, and did nothing.

Burton sighed. He turned to William Trounce and asked, in an exasperated tone, “Have you noticed how he winds down at the most inconvenient of times?”

“I have!” the Yard man grumbled.

Count Zeppelin laughed nastily. “Your clockwork toy has become a statue.
Sehr gut!
Now, let us get to business. I want your little assistant to go around the rock behind me. He will find there a pack, and in it some lengths of rope. Have him fetch them, if you please.”

“Up yours, you murdering git!” Swinburne spat.