Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (23 page)

“Oh stop it, and tell me why you've settled upon this extraordinary lifestyle.”

“Because I'm a woman.”

“Indubitably. How is that an answer?”

“Just this: I accepted your proposal of marriage not just because I loved you, but because I saw in you the solution to my problem, and in me the solution to yours.”

“Mine?”

“When we met, you had no security. You were adrift. I could have given you a sense of belonging.”

A breath of wind pushed at them, driving away the scent of cloves and replacing it with the odour of putrefying fish. Burton wrinkled his nose, puffed at his cigar, and looked at the looming island.

“And in you,” Isabel continued, “I might have found liberation from the suffocating corsets of the English gentlewoman. I mean that metaphorically, of course.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Well, perhaps not entirely metaphorically.”

Burton flashed a savage smile and turned his attention back to her.

“What I mean to say,” Isabel continued, “is that I require something the Empire is not willing to give to a woman.”

“You mean liberty?”

“And equality. I am not one to be laced-up and condemned to the parlour to while away my days crocheting antimacassars. Why should I allow my behaviour to be dictated by the protocols of a society in which I'm granted neither a voice nor representation?”

“I hardly think Bedouin women have a better time of it,” Burton murmured.

“That's true. But at least they don't pretend otherwise. Besides, I'm not a Bedouin woman, am I? And the Arabs don't know what to make of me. To them, I'm a curiosity, whose foreign ways can be neither understood nor judged. I've found a niche where the only rules that apply are the ones I make myself.”

“And you're happy?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, Isabel—believe me—I don't disapprove. I detected both courage and resourcefulness in you very soon after our initial meeting, and I've always admired you for them. I salute your spirit of independence. And, incidentally, while it may be true that I was at one time uncertain of myself, I assure you that's not the case now. As the king's agent, I have a purpose. I no longer feel that I don't belong.”

She sought his eyes. “But still there's no room for a wife.”

He took another drag at his cigar, then looked at it with dissatisfaction and flicked it over the side of the ship. “When I called off our engagement, it was because I thought my new role would be dangerous for anyone too closely associated with me. Now I know for certain that I was right.”

“Very well,” she said. “And accepted. But if I can't support you as Isabel the wife, I shall most certainly do so as Al-Manat, the warrior.”

“I don't want you in harm's way, Isabel. It was good of you to escort us through the desert to Aden, but there was no need for the Daughters of Al-Manat to sail with us.”

“We will march with you to the Mountains of the Moon.”

Burton shook his head. “No, you won't.”

“Do you still imagine that, as my husband, you would have been in a position to command me? If so, I must disillusion you. Besides which, you are not my husband, and I take orders from no one. If I see fit to lead my women alongside your expedition, what can you do to stop me?”

“Nothing.”

“Then our conversation is done.”

With that, Isabel dropped her cigarette, crushed it beneath her heel, and paced away.

The
Elphinstone
manoeuvred through sharp coral reefs and steered toward a white Arabic town dominated by a plain square fort, which rose from among the clove shrubs, the coco-trees, and the tall luxuriant palms. Though the sun was high in the azure sky, the light it cast over the settlement was hazy and mellow, perhaps an effect of the high humidity, making the place appear beautiful in the extreme. However, twenty minutes later, when the steamer glided past the guard ship and into the mirror-smooth harbour waters where the rank stench of rotting molluscs and copra became overwhelming, the illusion broke. The idyllic landscape, seen up close, proved anything but. The shoreline was marked by a thick line of refuse, including three bloated human corpses upon which cur dogs were chewing, and the buildings were revealed to be in dire need of renovation.

Small fishing vessels now swarmed around the arriving sloop, and from them men shouted greetings and questions, and requested gifts, and demanded
bakhshish
, and offered fish and tobacco and alcohol at exorbitant prices. They were a mix of many races; those with the blackest skin wore wide-brimmed straw hats, while those of a browner cast wore the Arabic fez. Their clothing was otherwise the same: the colourful cotton robes common to so much of Africa.

Burton watched the familiar details unfold and thought,
I no longer feel that I don't belong.

He'd been reflecting upon that statement ever since he'd made it. Now, while deck hands milled around making preparations to secure the vessel, it occurred to him that he hadn't adapted himself to British society at all—rather, British society was changing at such a pace, and with so little planning and forethought, that it had become extremely volatile, and, while this precarious state caused most of its people to feel unsettled, for some reason Burton couldn't comprehend, it was an environment he practically relished.

He stretched, turned, and walked over to Swinburne, Trounce, and Krishnamurthy.

Trounce grumbled, “It's not quite the paradise I expected, Richard.”

Burton examined the flat-roofed residences, the Imam's palace, and the smart-looking consulates. Beyond them, and ill-concealed by them, the decrepit hovels of the inner town slumped in a mouldy heap.

“Zanzibar city, to become picturesque or pleasing,” he said, “must be viewed, like Stanbul, from afar.”

“And even then,” Swinburne added, “with a peg firmly affixed to one's nose.”

The ship's anchors dropped, and, with gulls and gannets wheeling and shrieking overhead, she came to a stop in the bay, nestling among the dhows and half a dozen square-rigged merchantmen. The British collier ship
Blackburn
was also there, waiting forlornly for the
Orpheus.

As tradition demanded, the
Elphinstone
loosed a twenty-one-gun salute, and the detonations momentarily silenced the seabirds before rolling away into the distance. Strangely, no response came, either in the form of raised bunting or returned cannon fire.

“That's a curious omission. I wonder what's happening,” Burton muttered. He turned to his friends and said, “The captain will order a boat lowered soon. Let's get ourselves ashore.”

They had spent seven weeks in the Arabian Desert, two weeks in Aden, and ten days at sea. The expedition was considerably behind schedule. It was now the 19th of March.

Time to disembark.

Time to set foot on African soil.

Burton, Swinburne, Trounce, Honesty, and Krishnamurthy were met at the dock by a half-caste Arab who placed his hand over his heart, bowed, and introduced himself, in the Kiswahili tongue, as Saíd bin Sálim el Lamki, el Hináwi. He was of a short, thin, and delicate build, with scant mustachios and a weak beard. His skin was yellowish brown, his nose long, and his teeth dyed bright crimson by his habitual chewing of betel. His manner was extremely polite. He said, “Draw near, Englishmen. I am wazir to His Royal Highness Prince Sayyid Majid bin Said Al-Busaid, Imam of Muscat and Sultan of Zanzibar, may Allah bless him and speed his recovery.”

Burton answered, in the same language: “We met when I was here last, some six years ago. Thou wert of great help to me then.”

“I was honoured, Sir Richard, and am more so that thou doth remember me. I would assist thee again, and will begin by advising thee to accompany me to the palace before thou visit the consulate.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Aye, there may be, but I should leave it for Prince Sayyid to explain. He is looking forward to seeing thee.”

Eight men had accompanied Saíd. They were Askaris—a title created some years ago by the prince's grandfather, Sultan bin Hamid, to distinguish those Africans who took military service with him. Through means of immoderately wielded staffs, they now kept the hordes of onlookers, beggars, and merchants away from the group as it moved into the town.

“His Highness has been ill?” Burton enquired.

“With smallpox,” Saíd answered. “But by Allah's grace, the worst of it has passed.”

They entered a deep and winding alley, one of the hundreds of capricious and disorderly lanes that threaded through the town like a tangled skein. Some of the bigger streets were provided with gutters, but most were not, and the ground was liberally puddled with festering impurities, heaps of offal, and the rubble of collapsed walls. Naked children played in this filth, poultry and dogs roamed freely through it, and donkeys and cattle splashed it up the sides of the buildings to either side.

The fetor given off by the streets, mingled with the ubiquitous odour of rotting fish and copra, made the air almost unbreathable for the visitors. All of them walked with handkerchiefs pressed against their noses.

Their eyes, too, were assaulted.

Initially, it was the architecture that befuddled Burton's companions, for they had seen nothing like it before. Built from coral-rag cemented with lime, the masonry of the shuttered dwellings and public establishments to either side of the alleys showed not a single straight line, no two of their arches were the same, and the buildings were so irregular in their placement that the spaces between them were sometimes so wide as to not look like thoroughfares at all, and often so narrow that they could barely be navigated.

Slips of paper, upon which sentences from the Koran had been scribbled, were pinned over every doorway.

“What are they for?” Krishnamurthy asked.

“To ward off witchcraft,” Burton revealed.

As for the inhabitants of Zanzibar, they appeared a confusing and noisy mélange of Africans and Arabs, Chinamen and Indians. The Britishers saw among them sailors and market traders and day labourers and hawkers and date-gleaners and fishermen and idlers. They saw rich men and poor men. They saw cripples and beggars and prostitutes and thieves.

And they saw slaves.

Swinburne was the first to witness the island's most notorious industry. As he and his friends were escorted through the crowded and chaotic Salt Bazaar—thick with musky, spicy scents, and where Saíd's men swung their staffs with even less restraint—the little poet let out a terrific yell of indignation. Burton, following his assistant's shocked stare, saw a chain gang of slaves being driven forward by the whip, approaching them through the crowd to the right.

Swinburne hollered, “This is atrocious, Richard! Why has our Navy not stopped it?”

“They can't be everywhere at once,” the king's agent replied. “For all our successes on the west coast of Africa, here in the east the miserable trade continues.”

The poet, gesticulating wildly in his frustration, made a move toward the slaves but was held back by his friend, who said, “Don't be a fool, Algy. More than forty thousand slaves pass through Zanzibar every year—you'll not change anything by causing trouble for us now.”

Swinburne watched miserably as the captive men and women were herded past like animals, and he was uncharacteristically silent for a considerable time afterward.

Saíd led them into the main street leading up to the palace.

As they neared the blocky, high-windowed edifice, Thomas Honesty remarked on the tall purple clouds that had suddenly boiled up in the southeastern sky.

“It's the
Msika,”
Burton told him. “The greater rain. This is the worst season to commence an expedition, but it lasts for two months and we can't delay.”

“We're English,” Honesty said, in his usual jerky manner. “Conditioned to rain.”

“Not such as Africa has to offer, old thing. You'll see.”

The palace, when they came to it, looked little better than a barracks. Roofed with mouldering red tiles, it was double-storied, square, and unencumbered by adornment.

They were ushered through the big entrance doors into a pleasant vestibule, then up a staircase and into a parlour. Saíd left them for a few moments before returning to announce that the prince was ready to receive them. The four men were then escorted into a long and narrow room, furnished with silk hangings, divans, tables, lamps, a plethora of cushions, and with colourful birds singing in its rafters.

Prince Sayyid Majid greeted them in the European manner, with a hearty handshake for each. He was a young man, thin, and possessed of a pleasant though terribly pockmarked countenance.

They sat with him on the floor, around a low table, and waited while two slaves served sweetmeats, biscuits, and glasses of sherbet.

“It pleases me to see thee again, Captain Burton,” the prince intoned, in high-spoken Arabic.

Burton bowed his head, and employing the same language replied, “Much time has passed, O Prince. Thou wert little more than a child when I last visited the island. It pained me to hear of thy father's death.”

“He taught me much and I think of him every day. May Allah grant that I never disgrace his name. I intend to continue his efforts to improve the island. Already I have cleared more land for
shambas
—plantations.”