Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (47 page)

Wells reined in his harvestman until it was beside the explorer's. “What is it, man? Are you all right?”

“I can't bear it,” Burton whispered. “I can't bear it. It would be too much for any man. I have to find a way to change everything, Bertie.
Everything.”

“Let's rest here,” the war correspondent suggested. “There's some grub left in one of the packs. We'll eat and grab forty winks.”

They turned off their vehicles' engines and dismounted. Beside them, a thick mass of crimson foliage suddenly rustled and parted like a pair of curtains, unveiling a short pathway to a beautiful poppy-filled glade.

“By golly! An invitation, if ever I saw one!” Wells exclaimed. “Whatever's behind your poppies obviously has power over this jungle, too!”

They walked into the open space and sat down. Wells had carried one of the panniers with him, and now opened it and pulled out a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese. The two men ate.

Burton appeared lost in himself. His dark eyes were haunted, his cheeks sunken. Wells, feeling concerned, was watching him from the corner of his eye when something else caught his attention. At the edge of the clearing, a tree, heavy with large pear-shaped gourds, was moving. One of its branches, with creaks and snaps, was extending outward, into the open space. Burton, upon hearing it, turned his head and watched as the limb manoeuvred a gourd above them, then lowered it until it hung between the two men.

“A gift?” Wells asked.

Burton reached up to the red pumpkin-sized fruit. It snapped loose from the branch—which swung back out of the way—with ease, and as he lowered it, a small split opened in its top and an amber-coloured liquid sloshed out. He sniffed it, looked surprised, tasted it, and smacked his lips.

“You'll not believe this!” he said, took a swig, and passed the gourd to the war correspondent.

Wells tried it.

“It's—it's—it's brandy!”

They drank, they ate, they were insulted by parakeets.

Night came. They slept.

At dawn, the two men returned to their vehicles and continued along the trail of poppies.

“Either I'm riding a giant steam-powered spider through a benevolent living jungle with a man from the past,” Wells pondered, “or I'm dreaming.”

“Or stark staring mad,” Burton added.

At noon, they came to a steep incline, bracketed on either side by tall pointed outcrops of blueish rock. Burton stopped his harvestman and peered through the branches at the mountains that towered ahead of them. He slid down from his saddle, bent, and examined the ground. The slope was comprised of shale bound together by a network of threadlike roots.

“This is it, Bertie.”

“What?”

“This is the path that leads to the Temple of the Eye.”

“Then onward and upward, I say!”

Burton remounted and steered his vehicle up the incline and into the mouth of a narrow crevasse. Thickly knotted vines grew against the rocky walls to either side and the ground was deep in mulch, from which poppies and other flowers grew in profusion.

As the walls rose and the shadows deepened, swarms of fireflies appeared, bathing the two travellers in a weird fluctuating glow.

They'd travelled for about a mile through this when the harvestmen passed a small mound of rocks—quite obviously a grave—and Burton, remembering who was buried there, was stricken with misery.

They went on, through thick foliage that parted as they approached, under hanging lianas that rose to allow them passage, over tangled roots that burrowed into the mulch so as not to trip the big machines.

And even in this place, so sheltered from the sunlight, parakeets ran riot through the vegetation, enthusiastically delivering their insults, which, as Wells noted, were invariably in English, despite that they were deep in the heart of German East Africa.

On, up, and the fissure opened onto a broad forested summit. Through the thick canopy, the men glimpsed distant snow-topped mountain peaks chopping at the sky.

“The Blood Jungle covers the whole range,” Wells noted, “and has been gradually expanding beyond it for the past couple of decades.”

The terrain angled downward, and the trail of poppies eventually led them into the mouth of a second crevasse, this one narrower and deeper than the previous. As they entered it, the verdure closed around them like a tunnel. Strange vermillion fruits hung from its branches, spherical and glowing with a ghostly radiance.

“I've never seen anything like it,” Wells muttered. “I have the distinct impression that this is all one single plant. I feel as if we're inside a gigantic living thing.”

Now the parakeets became less numerous, and a deep hush settled over them, broken only by the quiet chugging of the vehicles' steam engines and the buzzing of insects.

“We're being watched,” Burton announced.

“What? By whom? Where?”

Burton pointed to a gap in the leaves up to his right. Wells squinted into the gloom and saw, vaguely illuminated by the red light, a naked man squatting on a branch. His skin was black and looked reptilian. There was a bow in his hands.

“Chwezi,” Burton said. “The Children of the Eye. They won't harm us.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I'm sure, Bertie.”

They spotted more of the silent, motionless observers as they drove on, deeper and deeper into the gorge.

All of a sudden, there was daylight.

They'd emerged into a wide natural amphitheatre. Sunshine filtered through leaves and branches and slanted across such an unruly mass of vegetation that both men cried out in wonder. Branches and leaves and creepers and vines and lianas and stalks and stems and fruits and flowers were all jumbled together, all red, all climbing the surrounding cliffs, carpeting the ground, and drooping from overhead.

A colossal trunk rose from the centre of it all, dividing high above them into many limbs from which big fleshy leaves grew, and among which bizarre vermillion flowers blossomed. One of the branches was moving down toward them, with much groaning and screeching as its wood bent and stretched. It manoeuvred a giant flower, a thing with spiny teeth in its petals and odd bladder-like protuberances at its base, until it hung just in front of Burton.

The bladders inflated. The petals curled open to reveal a tightly closed bud-like knot. The bladders contracted. Air blew from between the lips of the bud making a high-pitched squeal, like a child's balloon being deflated. The lips moved and shaped the squeal into words.

The plant spoke.

“My hat, Richard! You took your giddy time! What the blazes have you been up to?”

From the deep indigo of the African sky, a thin line descended.

It wobbled and wavered through the hot compressed air, arcing down into the crevasse.

Sidi Bombay shouted, “Spear!” an instant before it emerged from the heat haze and thudded into his chest, knocking him backward. He sat on the rocky ground, looked at the vibrating shaft, looked at the sky, then looked at Burton.

“Wow!” he said. “Mr. Burton, please send a message to my fourth wife. Tell her—”

He fell backward and the shaft swung up into a vertical position.

Blood gurgled out of his mouth. His eyes reflected the azure heavens and glazed over.

“Ambuscade!”
Burton bellowed. “Take cover!”

The Englishmen dropped their packs and dived into the shadow of an overhanging rock. Spears rained down, clacking against the rocky ground.

From behind a boulder, Burton peered up at the opposite lip of the gorge. Figures were silhouetted there. A spear thwacked against the stone inches from his face. He ducked back.

Spencer was beside him. “Are you all right, Herbert?” Burton asked.

“Yus, Boss.”

“William!” the explorer shouted. “Are you fit?”

“As a fiddle! But I'd feel a lot better if our bloody rifles worked!” came the response from behind an outcrop some hundred and eighty feet away.

“Algy?” Burton called.

Swinburne—who'd thrown himself behind a rock off to Burton's right—leaped back into the open. He looked up and waved his arms like a lunatic.

“Hi!” he hollered at the shadowy figures overhead. “Hi there! You Prussians! Why don't you do us a favour and bloody well bugger off out of here?”

His voice bounced off the high walls. Spears descended and clattered around him.

“Algy!” Burton yelled. “Get under cover, you addle-brained dolt!”

Swinburne walked casually over to Burton and joined him behind the boulder.

“I'm trying to make them throw more of the bally things,” he said. “They don't have an infinite supply.”

“Actually, that's not too bad an idea,” Burton muttered, “but poorly executed. Try to remember the difference between fearless and foolhardy.”

He examined the rock-strewn fissure. The expedition's packs lay scattered, with multiple spear shafts rising out of them.

“There's not going to be much left that's usable in that lot—least of all the water bottles!” he grumbled.

Trounce's voice echoed: “How many bloody spears have they got up there?”

“Far fewer than before!” returned Burton. “Algy had it right—the more they waste, the better.”

“Perhaps not such a waste,” Swinburne said. “They're purposely trying to keep us pinned down, which suggests to me that some of them have gone on ahead.”

Burton called: “William! Can you make it over here?”

“Watch me!” came the response.

Trounce leaped into view and sprinted across the intervening space, weaving from side to side as spears started to rain around him. He swept up three of the packs as he passed them, dragging them along, then, batting a falling shaft aside, hit the ground and slid into shelter in a cloud of dust.

“Phew! Am I in one piece?”

“Not a single perforation as far as I can see. How do you fancy a little bit more of that?”

The Scotland Yard man handed over the packs for Swinburne to check. “I don't much. My legs are still afire with damned sores. What's the plan?”

“We'll dart from cover to cover and keep moving. Don't so much as pause for breath in the open or you'll end up a pincushion!”

“Right you are.”

The king's agent looked over at Sidi Bombay's body. Another death. Another friend lost. Another part of his world ripped out of him.

He wondered how much more of it he could take.

There was no option but to leave the African where he lay. Perhaps there'd be an opportunity to bury him later, if animals didn't get to the corpse first.

Trounce watched Swinburne reorganising the contents of the three bags, fitting it all into one pack. “What do we have?” he asked.

“Not a lot!” the poet replied. “One intact water bottle, a dented sextant, Herbert's key, an oil lamp, a box of lucifers, the field glasses from the
Orpheus
, and a small stock of food that looks as if it's been trampled by a herd of elephants.”

“What took a hundred and twenty men to carry at the start of the expedition now takes one!” Burton muttered. “Throw away the sextant, and let's get on with it.”

He took the bag, slung it over his shoulder, and pointed at fallen rocks farther up and to either side of the faint trail that wound through the middle of the crevasse. “William, you leg it to the base of the cliff, there. Algy, you dive beneath the overhang, there. And Herbert, you make for that boulder, there. I'm going to try for the rock at the bend in the trail—do you see it? From there, I'll survey the next stretch and call instructions to you. All ready? Good. Get set! Go!”

The three men—and one clockwork device—burst out of cover and dashed toward the locations the explorer had indicated. Spears started to fall, their points shattering as they landed.

Swinburne dived into cover first.

Burton was next, though his allotted position was farthest away.

Trounce stumbled when a rebounding shaft cracked painfully against the side of his face but made it without any more serious injury.

Herbert Spencer fared less well. Hampered by his damaged leg, his run was more of a fast shuffle, and three spears hit him. The first bounced from his shoulder with a loud chime.

“Ow! Bleedin' heck!” he piped

The second ploughed a furrow down his back.

“Aagh! They've got me!”

The third sliced through his left ankle, leaving his foot dragging behind him, attached by a single thin cable.

“Cripes! That's agony!” he hooted, falling into the shadow of the large boulder Burton had assigned to him.

“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” he said, and, reaching down, he tore the foot off completely and held it up so the others could see it. “Look at this!” he cried. “Me bloomin' foot's been chopped off!”

“Can you still walk, Herbert?” Burton called.

“Yus, after a fashion. But that ain't the point, is it?”

“What is the point?” Swinburne asked from his nearby position.

“That me bleedin' foot's come off, lad!”

“I'm sure Brunel will have you polished and repaired in no time at all after we get back to Blighty,” Swinburne responded. “There's no need to worry.”

“You're still missin' the point. Me foot's come off. It hurts!”

Burton, who'd identified points of cover among the rocks ahead, shouted instructions back to them.