Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (53 page)

“You had better be off, gentlemen,” K'k'thyima said. “Our work here is done, at least for the next fifty-five years.”

He opened Burton's shirt pocket and slipped the seven pieces of the African Eye into it. “You need to unscrew my speaking apparatus to expose the babbage. Remove the seven Cambodian stones and take them with you back to London. Leave my winding key on the altar, please. The babbage will have one function left to perform, which it'll fulfil in 1918, as you have seen.”

“Damn you to hell,” Burton whispered.

“On the contrary, I have chosen to transcend. Goodbye, Sir Richard Francis Burton.”

K'k'thyima became silent.

For a few moments, the king's agent sat and did nothing, while Speke watched and fidgeted nervously; then the explorer stood and detached the clockwork man's speaking device. He pulled seven black diamonds out of the exposed babbage and put them into his pocket.

The brass device walked to the other side of the altar, saluted, and stopped moving.

Burton picked up his rifle and said to Speke: “Help me carry William outside. I want to bury him in the open.

It was night when they emerged into the cliff-ringed arena, both weary to the bone after manoeuvring Trounce's corpse through the narrow subterranean passages. To Burton, the bowl-shaped space felt strangely empty. He peered around it, remembered where he'd seen flowers growing on a mound, and, with Speke's help, laid Trounce to rest there, piling rocks onto him by the starlight.

Chwezi warriors stepped out of the shadows. Silently, they escorted the two men through the gorges on either side of the mountain, leading them each by the arm in utter darkness.

When they reached the spot where Sidi Bombay had fallen, Burton found his friend's corpse undisturbed, and a second burial mound was built before they continued on.

The king's agent, asleep on his feet, lost all awareness of the environment and his own actions until, suddenly, they emerged from the Mountains of the Moon and found the Wanyambo sitting around a small crackling fire. The warriors stared in superstitious dread at the Chwezi and backed away. The mountain tribe broke its silence. Words of reassurance were spoken. An oath was sworn. Obedience was demanded. Agreement was reached. The groups banded together—thirty men in all—and continued on eastward toward the Ukerewe Lake.

It was mid-morning by the time they reached the first village. Its inhabitants, fearing the Chwezi, immediately offered shelter and sustenance. Burton, not knowing what he was doing, crawled into a beehive hut and slept.

When he awoke, he was being borne along on a litter with Speke walking at his side. The lieutenant looked down and said, “You've been in a fever for three days. How are you feeling?”

“Weak. Thirsty. Hungry. Where's my rifle?”

“One of the Africans is carrying it.”

“Get it. Don't take it from me again.”

Another day. Another village. They stopped. They ate and drank.

Later, the king's agent sat with Speke in the settlement's
bandani
and watched the sun oozing into the horizon.

“Where are we, John?”

“I'm not certain. About a day's march from the northwestern shore of the lake, I hope. I didn't know what to do. Without this damned thing to help me—” he tapped the babbage embedded in the left side of his skull, “—I find it almost impossible to make decisions, so I'm following what it had originally intended me to do upon gaining the diamond, which is to circumnavigate the water to its northernmost point, then march northward. I think the Chwezi understood my intentions, though I've only been able to communicate through sign language.”

Burton checked his pockets. The fourteen stones were still there.

“It seems as good a plan as any,” he said. “As long as the Chwezi remain with us, the locals will supply what we need and we'll avoid demands for
hongo.”

Speke nodded and glanced at the other man. There was a disturbing lifelessness to Burton's voice, as if a large part of him had simply switched off.

The next afternoon, after mindlessly slogging over hill after hill, they caught sight of the great lake, stretching all the way to the horizon.

In a voice still devoid of emotion, Burton said, “I apologise, John. Had I seen this with my own eyes during our initial expedition, I would never have doubted your claims.”

“It was my fault you didn't see it,” Speke answered. “I became obsessed with the idea that my name alone should be forever associated with the solving of the Nile problem.”

“The diamond influenced your judgement as soon as we were within range of it.”

“Perhaps. Do you think we'll make it home?”

Burton looked down at himself. His tick-infested 1918 army fatigues were torn and rotting. His boots were cracked.

“I have reason to believe we will.”

“And what then?”

Burton shook his head and shrugged.

Just before sunrise, they set out again. For a short time, Burton walked, then his legs gave way and he collapsed onto the litter. He drifted in and out of consciousness. Fever raged through him like a forest fire.

Sometimes he opened his eyes and there was blue sky; other times, the Milky Way. On one occasion, he rolled his head to the right and saw a mirror-smooth expanse of water covered by thousands of pelicans.

For a long time, he saw nothing.

A hand shook his shoulder.

“Isabel,” he muttered.

“Dick! Wake up! Wake up!”

He opened his eyes and looked upon John Speke's lined, heavily bearded features, and his own reflected in the other's black, brass-ringed left-eye lens. He pushed himself up and found that a little strength had returned to him.

“What is it?”

“Listen!”

Burton looked around. They were on a slope. It concealed the landscape ahead and to the right, but on the left jungled hills rolled away before climbing to faraway mountains.

In front, from beyond the crest of the incline, mist was clouding into the sky.

A constant roar filled his ears.

“That sounds like—”

“Falling water!” Speke enthused. “Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

The lieutenant took Burton's arm and helped him to his feet. With a gesture to the Chwezi and Wanyambo warriors, he indicated that they should stay put.

The two Britishers walked slowly toward the summit, Burton leaning heavily on his companion. The sun burned their faces. Mosquitoes darted around them. The air was heavy and humid.

They reached the top.

Below them, the earth was cut by a wide and deep rift into which, from the edge of the Ukerewe, a great mass of water hurtled. Thundering beneath billowing vapour, it crashed and splashed and frothed over rounded rocks, and cascaded through the arch of a permanent rainbow. Fish leaped from it, flashing in the sunlight, and birds darted in and out of the rolling cloud.

There could be no doubt.

It was the source of the River Nile.

Burton thought:
Here it begins. Here it ends. Not the source, but just another part of a circle.

They stood silently for a long while, deafened by the sound of the falling water, then Speke roused himself, leaned close to Burton, put his mouth to the explorer's ear, and shouted: “We've done it, Dick! We've discovered it at last!” He clutched his companion's elbow. “And we did it together!”

Burton tore himself away and Speke took a step back, shocked by the ferocious expression on the other man's face.

“You can have it! I want nothing more to do with it! It's yours, Speke! The whole damned thing is yours!”

Over the next few days, they followed the river north, struggled across an extensive quagmire, pushed through thickets of water hyacinth, and found themselves on the shore of a second lake, smaller and much shallower than the Ukerewe. It was completely covered with water lilies and smelled of rotting vegetation.

“What shall we name it?” Speke asked.

“Why name it at all?” Burton growled. “It is what it is. A bloody lake.”

The lieutenant shook his head despairingly and walked away. He couldn't understand the other's mood at all. Burton had hardly spoken since their discovery of the falls. He wasn't even bothering to acquire the Chwezi language, which was entirely out of character, for in Speke's experience Burton was driven by a mania to conquer every foreign tongue he encountered.

The Wanyambo warriors, now far from home and unwilling to go any farther, left them.

Over the next three days, the Chwezi guided the two Britishers around the southern shores of the lake to where, at its western tip, the river flowed out of it.

They followed the waterway. The land was boggy and swarming with snakes. Foul-smelling gasses bubbled out of the ground.

The sun rose and set and rose and set, and they lost count of the days. Mosquitoes bit every inch of their exposed skin. Their clothes fell to pieces and had to be replaced with cotton robes, donated by villagers. They wound rough cloth around their now bootless feet and walked with staffs, looking like a couple of heavily bearded skeletons, burned almost black, too exhausted to communicate, or even to think.

One of their guides, who'd been scouting ahead, returned and spoke quietly to his companions. He approached Burton and Speke and jabbed his finger first at one, then at the other, then toward a ridge that lay just to the south of the river, a couple of miles to the west.

He rejoined the other Chwezi and, as a man, they disappeared into the undergrowth.

Suddenly, the Britishers were alone.

“Well then,” Speke said, shading his one functioning eye and peering at the nearby high land. “I suppose we're meant to go up there.”

They set off through sucking mud and shouldered past stiff bullrushes until the terrain sloped upward, became firmer underfoot, and they climbed to the top of the ridge. On the other side of it, the Nile flowed into another vast lake, and on the near shore, just half a mile away, an air vessel was hovering about forty feet from the ground. It was a gargantuan cigar-shaped balloon with a long cabin affixed beneath it and pylons, with rotor wings at their ends, extending out horizontally from its sides. The ship, which must have been close to a thousand feet in length, was painted with a Union Jack and bore on its side the name HMA
Dauntless.

A large camp of Rowtie tents lay in the shadow of the vessel.

Burton suddenly spoke: “John, I have to make a request of you.”

“What is it?”

“Tell them nothing. Not now, and not when we return to London. Don't let on anything of what we've experienced here. The future may depend on it.”

“Dick, I—”

“I need your word on it.”

“Very well. You have it.”

Burton took Speke's hand and shook it.

They stumbled down toward the camp and had crossed half the distance when they were spotted. A shout went up, men started running toward them, came close, and gathered around. One of them stepped forward.

“By James!” he exclaimed. “Is that you, Sir Richard?”

Burton's vision was swimming. The man in front of him blurred in and out of focus. Slowly, recognition dawned.

“Hello,” the king's agent whispered. “I'm very happy to see that you've recovered from your injuries, Captain Lawless.”

Everything toppled over and darkness rushed in.

“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”

–O
SCAR
W
ILDE

W
hile Sir Richard Francis Burton was in Africa, electricity came to London. Now, in early 1864, thick cables were clinging to the walls of the city's buildings, looping and drooping over its streets, dripping in the fog, and quietly sizzling as they conveyed energy from Battersea Power Station across the nation's capital.

Street lamps blazed. House and office windows blazed. Shop fronts blazed. The permanent murk effortlessly swallowed the light and reduced it to smudged globes, which hung in the impenetrable atmosphere like exotic fruits.

In the gloomy gullies between, pedestrians struggled through an unyielding tangle of almost immobile vehicles. The legs of steam-driven insects were caught in the spokes of wheels, panicky horses were jammed against chugging machinery, crankshafts were hammering against wood and metal and flesh.

Animalistic howls and screams and curses sounded from amid the mess.

And to this, Burton had returned aboard His Majesty's Airship
Dauntless.

The vessel was the first of her type, the result of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's solving of the gas-filled dirigible problem. Design faults had been corrected and unstable flammable gasses replaced. The
Dauntless
was a triumph.

A slow but long-range vessel, she was propelled by electric engines, which, lacking springs, should have been impervious to the deleterious influence that had so far prevented any machine from piercing Africa's heart.

Unfortunately, this had proved not to be the case.

Following the Nile upstream, the ship had reached the northern outskirts of the Lake Regions. Her engines had then failed. However, the wind was behind her, so Captain Lawless allowed the vessel to be borne along, powerless, until the air current changed direction, at which point he'd ordered her landing on the shore of a great lake.

The crew set up camp.

There were two passengers on board: John Petherick and Samuel Baker, both experienced explorers from the Royal Geographical Society. They prepared an expedition, intending to head south to search for Burton. The day prior to their planned departure, he and Speke had come stumbling into the camp.

Lawless and his engineers had taken it for granted that the engines were still dysfunctional. Burton, though, knew that the Nāga were no longer present in the black diamonds, so their influence should have vanished.

He was correct. The engines functioned perfectly. The
Dauntless
flew home and landed at an airfield some miles to the southeast of London. Damien Burke and Gregory Hare, Palmerston's odd-job men, were there to greet it. They took possession of the fourteen black diamonds—the seven fragments of the Cambodian Eye and the seven of the African.

“All the Nāga stones are in British hands now, Captain Burton,” Burke said. “You've done excellent work for the Empire, isn't that so, Mr. Hare?”

“It most certainly is, Mr. Burke!” Hare agreed.

John Speke was taken into custody.

“He's a traitor,” Burke observed. “The irony of it is that he'll no doubt be incarcerated in our chambers beneath the Tower of London, which is where the Eyes will go, too. One of the most disreputable men in the country held in the same place as what might well be our most precious resource. Such is the way of things.”

Burton was taken to Penfold Private Sanatorium in London's St. John's Wood, where, for three weeks, the Sisterhood of Noble Benevolence fussed over him.

As his strength increased, so too did his anxiety. He had a terrible decision to make. By telling Palmerston about the future and revealing to him his fate, he might persuade him to abandon plans to use the Eyes of Nāga as a means for mediumistic espionage against Prussia; might convince him that sending troops to Africa would lead to disaster. But if he succeeded in this, it would mean no reinforcements for the Daughters of Al-Manat. Bertie Wells had told him that the female guerrilla fighters survived at least into the 1870s. In changing history, Burton would almost certainly condemn Isabel Arundell, Isabella Mayson, and Sadhvi Raghavendra to much earlier deaths.

Obviously, the future he'd visited had occurred because he'd favoured Al-Manat's survival over the 130-year-old Palmerston's direct order. As much as he loved Isabel, he had no idea why he might have done such a thing, for, in anyone's estimation, could three lives—even
those
three—be worth the savagery and destruction of the Great War?

He wrote much about this in his personal journal, examining the problem from every angle he could think of, but though he produced pages and pages of cramped handwriting, he could find no answer.

The solution finally came with a visit from Palmerston himself.

Two weeks into his treatment, Burton was sitting up in bed reading a newspaper when the door opened and the prime minister stepped in, announcing: “I'd have come earlier. You know how it is. Affairs of state. Complex times, Captain Burton. Complex times.”

He took off his hat and overcoat—revealing a Mandarin-collared black suit and pale blue cravat—and placed them on a chair. He didn't remove his calfskin gloves.

Standing at the end of the patient's bed, he said, “You look bloody awful. Your hair is white!”

The king's agent didn't reply. He gazed dispassionately at his visitor's face.

Palmerston's most recent treatments had made his nose almost entirely flat. The nostrils were horizontal slits, as wide as the gash-like mouth beneath. A dimple had been added to the centre of his chin. His eyebrows were painted on, high above the oriental-looking eyes.

“You'll be pleased to hear, Captain, that not only do I fully endorse your recommendations, but I have acted upon them even in the face of virulent opposition led by no less than Disraeli himself,” he announced.

Burton looked puzzled. “My recommendations, Prime Minister?”

“Yes. Your reports confirmed my every suspicion concerning Bismarck's intentions. Obviously, we cannot allow him to gain a foothold in East Africa, so British troops have already been conveyed there by rotorship, and I have more on the way. It's by no means a declaration of war on my part, but I do intend that they offer resistance to any efforts made by Prussia to claim territories.”

Burton's fingers dug into the bedsheets beneath him. “My—my reports?” he whispered hoarsely.

“As delivered to us by Commander Krishnamurthy. A very courageous young man, Burton. He will be given due honours, of that you can be certain. And I look forward to receiving the remainder of your observations—those made between Kazeh and the Mountains of the Moon. Do you have them here?”

“N-no,” Burton stammered. “I'll—I'll see that they're delivered to you.” He thought:
Bismillah! Krishnamurthy!

“Post-haste, please, Captain.”

Burton struggled for words. “I—I wrote those reports before I had—before I had properly assessed the situation, Prime Minister. You have to—to withdraw our forces at once. Their presence in Africa will escalate hostilities between the British Empire and Prussia to an unprecedented degree.”

“What? Surely you don't expect me to allow Bismarck free rein?”

“You have to, sir.”

“Have to? Why?”

“Your actions will—will precipitate the Great War, the one that Countess Sabina has predicted.”

Palmerston shook his head. “The countess is working with us to prevent exactly that. She and a team of mediums have already employed the Nāga diamonds to great effect.” He pointed at Burton's newspaper. “No doubt you've read that a second Schleswig conflict has broken out between Prussia, Austria, and Denmark. We precipitated that, my dear fellow, by means of undetected mediumistic manipulations. I intend to tangle Bismarck up in so many minor difficulties that he'll never have the strength to challenge us in Africa, let alone establish his united Germany!”

Burton squeezed his eyes shut and raised his hands to his head in frustration. It was too late. The circumstances that would lead to all-out war had already been set into motion!

He thought rapidly. Now he understood the 130-year-old Palmerston's claim that he—Burton—had never revealed his visit to the future. The king's agent knew the way the prime minister's mind worked. Having already outmanoeuvred Benjamin Disraeli—a formidable political force—to get his way, Palmerston wouldn't under any circumstances backtrack, not even on his own advice! So what would he do instead? The answer was obvious: the prime minister would attempt to outguess his future self by ordering a preemptive strike; he'd throw every resource he could muster into defeating Bismarck before Prussia could properly mobilise its military might; and in doing that, in Burton's opinion, he was much more likely to incite the war at an earlier date than to prevent it.

Burton felt ensnared by inevitability.

“What's the matter?” Palmerston asked. “Should I call a nurse?”

The explorer took his hands from his head, feeling the ridges of his tattoo sliding beneath his fingertips.

“No, Prime Minister. I have a headache, that's all.”

“Then I won't disturb you any further, Captain.” Palmerston picked up his coat, shrugged it back on, took up his top hat, and said: “We've blown hot and cold, you and I, but I want you to know that I have renewed faith in you. You've done a splendid job. Absolutely splendid! Thanks to your actions, the Empire is secured.”

He turned and departed.

Burton sat and stared into space.

A week later he was released from hospital and returned to his home at 14 Montagu Place.

Mrs. Angell, his housekeeper, was horrified at his appearance. He looked, she said, as if he'd just been dug out of an Egyptian tomb.

“You'll eat, Sir Richard!” she pronounced, and embarked on a culinary mission to restore his health. She also cleaned around him obsessively, as if the slightest speck of dust might cause his final ruination.

He put up with it stoically, too weak to resist, though there was one item he wouldn't allow her—or the maid, Elsie Carpenter—to touch, let alone dust: the rifle that leaned against the fireplace by his saddlebag armchair.

It was an anomaly, that weapon, and the image of it arose again and again in his Sufi meditations, though he couldn't fathom why.

A few days after his homecoming, a parakeet arrived at his study window. “Message from thick-witted Richard Monckton Milnes, otherwise known as Baron hairy-palmed Houghton. Message begins. I will call at three o'clock, bum-slapper. Message ends.”

The new 1st Baron Houghton arrived on time and found Burton wrapped in his
jubbah
and slumped in his armchair beside the fireplace, with a cheroot in his mouth, a glass of port in his hand, and Fidget the basset hound stretched out at his feet. Whatever greeting Monckton Milnes had planned died on his lips at the sight of the explorer. He stood in the doorway of the study, his mouth hanging open.

Burton removed his Manila, set down his glass, and gave a half-grin. “What you see is the much-recovered model,” he said, rising to his feet. He crossed to his friend and shook his hand. “You should have seen the state of me before! Hang up your coat, old man, and take a seat. Congratulations on your peerage. Would you prefer me to bow or pour you a drink?”

“Hell's bells, Richard! You look twenty years older!”

“I'm four years older. No, five, counting the year since you last saw me, the rest is down to the vicissitudes of Africa.”

His visitor sat down and accepted a glass of port.

“By heavens, it's good to see you again. But five years? What are you talking about?”

“It will require a suspension of disbelief on your part.”

“A little over a year ago you told me that Spring Heeled Jack was a man from the future and that history had been changed. Is what you have to tell me more incredible even that that?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, it is.”

“Ouch! Very well, fire away. You talk and I'll drink.”

Over the course of the next two hours, Burton told his friend everything that had happened in Africa, and he withheld nothing.

A long silence followed as Monckton Milnes digested the tale, along with the copious amount of port he'd gulped.

Burton showed him the rifle and pointed out the inscription on its stock:
Lee-Enfield Mk III. Manufactured in Tabora, Africa, 1918.

“You have to change history,” his guest said softly.

“That's the problem,” Burton replied. “To do so I have to outmanoeuvre myself, as well as Palmerston.”

“And if you succeed,” Monckton Milnes interjected, “if you create yet another branch of history, you'll just be adding to the chaos poor Algernon warned of.”

Burton sucked at his cigar. “Not so much
poor
Algernon. He seemed very content with his new form. But yes, you're correct. He told me to put an end to all the divergences, despite that doing so would wipe out the history in which he currently resides. How, though, am I to do that?”

He looked down at the rifle that lay across his legs. “How am I to do that?”

Quite without warning or obvious reason, the last words Burton had ever heard Detective Inspector Honesty speak leaped into his mind with such clarity they might have been muttered into his ear:
“Needs pruning, hard against the stem.”