Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

“It only requires a scientist to be told what variety of thing to look for, and where best to look, and it is inevitable that the thing will be found. So it was in the earliest days of Eugenics. The hints had been of the vaguest. They were passed from a madman to a drunkard, and from the drunkard to an engineer, and from the engineer to a naturalist, and from the naturalist to Mr. Francis Galton. Whether they seeded themselves in Mr. Galton's brain in anything resembling their original form seems doubtful—we all know how information is corrupted by travel—and yet, in that magnificent, terrifying mind of his, they blossomed, and he dazzled us all with his brilliance. Mr. Charles Darwin, in particular, was enthused to the point where, I regret to say, moral and ethical boundaries ceased to exist for him. To some extent, this happened to all of us in that little band of scientists. Unquestionably, I am now ashamed of certain of my actions whilst under the influence of that great wave of fervour and creativity that overtook us. And I feel somewhat responsible, too, for the dark turn Eugenics very quickly took after it was established as a unique scientific discipline, for it was I who, under Mr. Galton's direction, conjoined his and Mr. Darwin's brains, using techniques that I have since discovered are many, many decades ahead of their proper time. The thing that Darwin/Galton became, as a consequence of that operation, I now regard as a monstrosity, but while it existed I was in its thrall, and much against my better judgement, I was a principal in the horrible path that Eugenics trod. Oh that I could travel back and change everything! The death of Darwin/Galton liberated me and restored my proper senses, but with them I now suffer to witness the villainies of Eugenics; I see the terrifying speed at which its ghastly techniques develop; I see how it has moved so far beyond the original concept of guided evolution that it now perverts life dreadfully. Perhaps it is true that, as many claim, Mr. Darwin killed God. The existence of Eugenics rather suggests to me, I fear, that he did not, at the same time, succeed in destroying the devil.”

–FROM THE EUGENICISTS: THEIR HISTORY AND THEIR CRIMES BY FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, 1865

Edward Oxford thudded onto grass and bounced on his spring-heeled boots. Glancing around, he saw a rolling park surrounded by tall glass buildings whose sides flashed with advertising, and in the near distance, the ancient form of the Monarchy Museum, once known as Buckingham Palace, in which the relics of England's defunct royal families were displayed. A sonic boom echoed as a shuttle headed into orbit. People buzzed overhead in their personal fliers. His AugCom was functioning.

He checked that he was still holding the top hat he'd carried with him, then ran into the wooded corner of the park, not noticing that, in the long grass to his left, a white-haired man was lying unconscious with a sniper rifle, a jewel case, and a portmanteau bag at his side.

Oxford ducked into the trees and pushed through the undergrowth until he felt safe from prying eyes. He detached the Nimtz Generator from his chest and put it on the ground, pulled off his stilted boots and placed them beside it, then stripped off his fish-scale battery suit and draped it over a low branch. Reaching up to his helmet, he hesitated, then switched off the AugCom and removed the headgear. A foul stench assaulted his nostrils, a mix of raw sewage, rotting fish, and burning fossil fuels. He started to cough. The air was thick and gritty. It irritated his eyes and scraped his windpipe. He fell to his knees and clutched at his throat, gasping for oxygen. Then he remembered that he'd prepared for this and fumbled in his jacket pocket, pulling out a small instrument that he quickly applied to the side of his neck. He pressed the switch, it hissed, he felt a slight stinging sensation, and instantly he could breathe again. He put the instrument away and rested for a moment. The inability to catch his breath had been a perceptive disorder rather than a physical one. The helmet had protected him from the idea that the atmosphere was unbreathable; now a sedative was doing the job.

Unfamiliar sounds reached him from the nearby road: horses' hooves, the rumble of wheels, the shouts of hawkers.

He stood and straightened the reproduction mid-Victorian-era clothes that he'd worn beneath his time suit, placed the top hat on his head, and made his way to the edge of the thicket. As he emerged from the trees, a transformed world assailed his senses, and he was immediately shaken by a profound uneasiness.

There were no AugCom illusions now, and only the grass was familiar. Through dense, filthy air, he saw a massive expanse of empty sky. The tall glass towers of his own age were absent, and London clung to the ground. To his left, Buckingham Palace, now partially hidden by a high wall, looked brand new. Quaintly costumed people were walking in the park—no, he reminded himself, not costumed; they always dressed this way!—and their slow pace appeared entirely unnatural.

Despite the background murmur, London slumbered under a blanket of silence.

He started to walk down the slope toward the base of Constitution Hill, struggling to overcome his growing sense of dislocation.

Behind him, unseen, the unconscious man regained his wits, snatched up his things, staggered to his feet, and stumbled into the trees.

“Steady, Edward,” Oxford muttered to himself. “Hang on, hang on. Don't let it overwhelm you. This is neither a dream nor an illusion, so stay focused, get the job done, then get back to your suit!”

He reached the wide path. The queen's carriage would pass this way soon. My God! He was going to see Queen Victoria! He looked around. Every single person was wearing a hat or bonnet. Most of the men were bearded or had moustaches. The women held parasols.

Slow motion. It was all in slow motion.

He examined faces. Which belonged to his ancestor? He'd never seen a photograph of the original Edward Oxford—there were none—but he hoped to recognise some sort of family resemblance.

He stepped over the low wrought-iron fence lining the path, crossed to the other side, turned around to face the hill, and loitered near a tree. People started to gather along the route. He heard a remarkable range of accents and they all sounded ridiculously exaggerated. Some, which he identified as working class, were incomprehensible, while the upper classes spoke with a precision and clarity that sounded wholly artificial. Details kept catching his eye, holding his attention with hypnotic force: the prevalence of litter and dog shit on the grass; the stains and worn patches on people's clothing; rotten teeth and rickets-twisted legs; accentuated mannerisms and lace-edged handkerchiefs; pockmarks and consumptive coughs.

“Focus!” he whispered.

He noticed a man across the way, standing in a relaxed but rather arrogant manner and looking straight at him with a knowing smile on his round face. He had a lean figure and a very large moustache.

Can he see that I don't belong here?

A cheer went up. The queen's carriage had just emerged from the palace gates, its four horses guided by a postilion. Two outriders trotted along ahead of the vehicle; two more behind.

Where was his ancestor? Where was the gunman?

Ahead of him, an individual wearing a top hat, blue frock coat, and white breeches reached under his coat and moved closer to the path. Slowly, the royal carriage approached.

Is that him?

Moments later, the forward outriders came alongside. The blue-coated man stepped over the fence and, as the queen and her husband passed, he took three strides to keep up with their vehicle, then whipped out a flintlock pistol and fired it at them. He threw down the smoking weapon and drew a second.

Oxford yelled, “No, Edward!” and ran forward.

They detected Zanzibar first with their nostrils, for, prior to the island darkening the horizon, the sultry breeze became laden with the scent of cloves. Then the long strip of land hove into view at the edge of the sapphire sea, its coral-sand beaches turned to burnished gold by the fierce sun.

“By Jove,” William Trounce whispered. “What's the word for it? Sleepy?”

“Tranquil,” Krishnamurthy suggested.

“Languidly basking in sensuous repose,” Swinburne corrected.

“Whatever it is,” said Trounce, “it's splendid. I feel as if I'm inside one of Captain Burton's tales of the Arabian Nights.”

“More so than when you were actually in Arabia?” the poet enquired.

“Great heavens, yes! That was just sand, sand, and more sand. This is…romantic!”

“Seven weeks!” Krishnamurthy grunted. “Seven weeks on a blasted camel. My posterior will never recover.”

Ahead, the land swelled seductively, coloured a reddish brown beneath its veils of green, which wavered and rippled behind the heavy curtain of air.

“What do you think, Algy?” Trounce asked. The members of Burton's expedition were all on first-name terms now—one of the more positive effects of their gruelling trek through central Arabia. They were also all burned a deep brown, with the exception of Swinburne, whose skin was almost as crimson as his hair had been before the sun bleached it the colour of straw.

The poet looked up at the detective, then followed his gaze to the prow of the ship—the Indian Navy sloop of war Elphinstone—where he saw Sir Richard Francis Burton standing with Isabel Arundell.

“If you're asking me whether the romance of Zanzibar is infectious, Pouncer, then I take it you haven't read Richard's account of his first expedition.”

“There's little time for reading at Scotland Yard, lad. And, for the umpteenth time, don't call me Pouncer.”

Swinburne grinned cheekily. “Apparently, the island's infections are nothing to celebrate. By the same token, I'd suggest that Richard and Isabel's relationship is probably not exactly as it appears from here.”

He was correct. In fact, had he been able to eavesdrop upon their conversation, Swinburne would have reported to Trounce that Isabel was giving Burton “what for.”

“You're a pig-headed, self-absorbed, stubborn fool,” she said. “You have never failed to underestimate me or to overestimate yourself.”

Burton fished a cigar from his pocket. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“You'll not drive me away with tobacco fumes.”

He put a flame to the Manila, inhaled the aromatic smoke, and gazed down at the water that gurgled and sparkled against the hull below. A few yards away, a shoal of flying fish shot out of the sea and glided some considerable distance before plunging back in.

Isabel pulled a small straw-coloured cylinder from a pouch at her waist and raised it to her lips. She struck a lucifer and lit its tip.

Burton smelled the tart fumes of Latakia and looked at her, raising his eyebrows.

“Good grief! Surely that's not a cigarette?”

“All the rage since the Crimea,” came her murmured reply. “Do you object to a woman smoking?”

“I—well—that is to say—”

“Oh, stop stammering like an idiot, Dick. Let's set it out plainly, shall we? You disapprove of my lifestyle.”

“Nonsense! I simply asked you why you have chosen to live as a Bedouin when you belong to the House of Wardour, one of the richest families in Britain.”

“The implication being?”

“That you could have Society at your feet; that the comforts and advantages of an aristocratic life are yours to enjoy. You aren't Jane Digby, Isabel. She fled England after her scandalous behaviour made it impossible for her to remain there. Not so, you. So why endure the hardships and dangers of the nomadic life?”

“Hypocrite!”

“What?”

“How often have you railed against the constrictions and restraints of the Society you now endorse? How often have you purposely provoked outrage and challenged social proprieties at dinner tables with your shocking anecdotes? How often have you styled yourself the outsider, the man who doesn't fit in, the noble savage in civilised clothing? You glory in it, and yet you denounce Miss Digby! Really! They call you Ruffian Dick. I call you Poseur Dick!”

“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.”

“And of thy father's intention to end the slave trade, O Prince—hast thou made progress in this?”

Sayyid Majid took a sip of his sherbet, then frowned. “There is one who opposes me—a man named el Murgebi, though most know him as Tippu Tip. His caravans penetrate far into the interior and he brings back many slaves. This man has become rich and powerful, and I can do little against him, for his supporters outnumber my own. Nevertheless—” The prince sighed and touched his nose with his right forefinger—a gesture Burton knew meant It is my obligation.

They talked a little more of the island's politics, until, after a few minutes, the prince revealed: “A very large force of Europeans has made its base on the mainland, Captain, in the village of Mzizima, directly south of here. Thy friend, Lieutenant Speke, was among them.”

“He's no longer a friend of mine,” Burton declared.

“Ah. Friendship is like a glass ornament; once it is broken, it can rarely be put back together the same way. I believe the men are of the Almaniya race.”

“Germanic? Yes, I think that likely. Thou sayest Speke was with them? Is he no longer?”

“He and a number of men left Mzizima and are currently moving toward the central territories.”

“Then I must follow them at the earliest opportunity.”

The prince sighed. “The rains will make that difficult, and it pains me to tell thee, Captain, but also, thou hast been betrayed by Consul Rigby.”

Burton's hands curled into fists.

The prince continued, “The British government shipped supplies here some weeks ago and instructed him to hire Wanyamwezi porters to transport them to the Dut'humi Hills, where they were to await thy arrival. The supplies consisted of trading goods—bales of cotton, rolls of brass wire, beads, the usual things—plus food, instruments, weapons and ammunition, and two of the spider machines—they are called harvestmen?”

“Yes.”

“The men were never hired, and the goods never transported. A month ago, when the Almaniyas arrived, the consul handed the supplies over to them.”

“Bismillah! The traitorous hound! Ever has Rigby sought to stand in my way, but I tell thee, Prince Sayyid, this time he hath defied those to whom he owes his position. This will ruin him.”

“Aye, Captain, mayhap. But that is for the future. For now, we must put our energy into overcoming the obstacles this man hath set in thy path. To that end, I offer my resources. Tell me what I can do.”

Over the next hour, Burton and the prince made plans, with the king's agent occasionally breaking off to translate for his companions.

By mid-afternoon, they all had tasks assigned to them. Honesty and Krishnamurthy headed back to the Elphinstone to join Herbert Spencer, Isabella Mayson, and Sadhvi Raghavendra in overseeing the transfer of the expedition's supplies and equipment to a corvette named Artémis. William Trounce, Isabel Arundell, and her followers were taken by Saíd bin Sálim to the prince's country ranch, there to select horses from his extensive stud, which, in the morning, they'd ship over to the mainland aboard a cargo carrier, the Ann Lacey.

Sir Richard Francis Burton and Algernon Swinburne, meanwhile, paid a visit to the British Consulate.

It was nine o'clock in the evening by the time they left the prince's palace. The rain had just ceased and the town was dripping. The filth, rather than being washed away, had merely been rearranged.

The king's agent and his assistant picked their way cautiously through foul alleyways until they arrived at their destination. Its gates, to their surprise, were open and unguarded. They passed through, crossed the small courtyard, and pushed open the entrance doors. The building was unlit and silent.

“This isn't right,” Burton whispered.

“Does Rigby live here?” Swinburne asked.

“Yes, in the upstairs apartments, but let's check his office first.”

The ground floor consisted of the entrance hall, a waiting room, a sparsely furnished parlour, a records office and a clerks' office, a library, and the main consulting room. All were empty and dark.

In the library, Burton, upon detecting a faint rustling, drew out his clockwork lantern, shook it open, wound it, and cast its light around.

The bookshelves were teeming with ants and termites.

“My hat!” Swinburne exclaimed. “What an infestation! What on earth has attracted them, Richard?”

“I don't know, but this is certainly excessive, even for Africa.”

They moved back into the entrance hall and started up the stairs. Halfway up there was a small landing, where the steps made a turn to the right. The body of a man lay at an awkward angle upon it. Burton held his lantern over the face. He could see from the man's physiognomy that his skin would have been black in life; in death, it was a horrible ashen grey and had shrunk against the bones beneath. The lips had pulled back, exposing all the teeth, and the eyes had withdrawn to the back of the sockets.

The king's agent reached down and pressed a finger against the face.

“It feels like wood,” he said. “Like all the blood and moisture have been sucked out of it.”

“And that's how.” Swinburne pointed to the dead man's left arm. Burton moved the light to better illuminate it. He saw that a leafy vine of a purplish hue was coiled around the wrist, and that the end of it, which was splayed flat and covered in three-inch-long thorns of wicked appearance, was pressed against the forearm and had pierced the skin many times over.

Talking a dagger from his belt, he carefully probed at the plant. Its leaves were dry and fell away at his touch. The vine itself was hard and desiccated. Raising the lantern, he followed its course and saw that it coiled away up the stairs and disappeared around a corner.

“Be careful, Algy,” he said, and started toward the upper floor.

Swinburne followed, noting that the steps were swarming with beetles and cockroaches.

When they reached the hallway at the top, they saw that the vine twisted through an open doorway into a faintly illuminated chamber just ahead. Only a small part of the room was visible—the bulk of it obviously lay to the left of the portal—but the end they could see was so seething with insects that every surface seemed alive. Vines were clinging to the walls and floor and ceiling, too. Loops of vegetation hung down like jungle creepers, and through and around it, glowing softly, hundreds of fireflies were flitting.

Muttering an imprecation, Burton moved forward with Swinburne at his heels. They traversed the corridor then passed through the doorway, and, with insects crunching underfoot, turned and tried to interpret what they saw. It was difficult. No item of furniture could be properly discerned, for everything was crawling with life and half-concealed behind a tangle of thorny but dead-looking foliage. Furthermore, Burton's lantern caused the great many shadows to deepen, while the myriad fireflies made them wriggle and writhe, so that the entire space squirmed disconcertingly around the two men.

There was a shuttered window in the far wall. In front of it, what looked to be the squat and bulky main trunk of a plant humped up from the floor. Burton, ducking under a dangling creeper, stepped closer to it. He saw that it had corners and realised that what he was looking at was actually a desk, though it was hardly recognisable as such, distorted as it was by all the knotted limbs of the growth that covered it.

His lantern picked out a gnarl of woody protrusions that caught and held his attention. A few moments passed before he realised why.

It was because they resembled a hand.

The hairs at the nape of his neck stood on end.

He slowly raised the lantern and leaned closer. The protuberances grew from the end of a thick, vine-tangled branch which, a little way along its length, bent elbow-like upward before joining a hideously warped trunk—positioned just behind the desk—over which centipedes, spiders, ants, beetles, and termites scuttled in profusion. The insects were flooding in a downward direction. Burton followed their course upward, to where the trunk suddenly narrowed before then widening into a large nodule which angled backward slightly. There was a hole in it, and from this the creatures were vomiting.

Burton knew what he was going to see next, and with every fibre of his being he didn't want to set eyes on it, but the compulsion to lift the lantern higher couldn't be resisted, and its light crept upward from the hole, over the deformed nose and cheekbones, and illuminated Christopher Rigby's living eyes, which burned with hatred in his transfigured and paralysed face.

Burton's shock rendered him voiceless; he could only crouch and stare, his whole body trembling, his senses blasted by the appalling thing before him.

Rigby had been sitting at his desk when the metamorphosis came upon him. It had turned his flesh into plant tissue. Roots and creepers and vines and lianas had grown from him. Repulsive thorny leaves had sprouted. And, to judge from the corpse on the stairs, the thing he'd become was carnivorous, for it had sucked the blood from that unfortunate individual.

Now, though, with the exception of those demonic eyes, Rigby appeared to be dead, for he was withered and dried out, the majority of his leaves had fallen, and his body was riddled with termite holes.

Burton straightened. The eyes followed him. He noted that Rigby's neck had been crushed, then saw the same claw marks he'd noted on the corpse of Peter Pimlico, but they were deeper, more savage.

“The devil take him, Algy,” he muttered. “This is Zeppelin's doing.”

Swinburne didn't reply.

Burton turned, and for a second he thought his assistant had left the room. Then a flash of red drew his attention to the ceiling. To his horror, he saw the poet up there, flat against it, entwined by creepers.

“Algy!” he yelled, but his friend was limp, unconscious, and the explorer spotted a thorny extension pressed against the side of the small man's neck.

Spinning back to face Rigby, he yelled, “Let him go, damn you!”

A thick fountain of insects suddenly erupted from the consul's mouth, spraying into the air and landing on the desk, on the floor, and on Burton. The head creaked slowly into an upright position.

“You!” Rigby whispered. His voice sounded like dry leaves being disturbed by a breeze. “I have waited for so long.”

“Release him!” Burton demanded. “Maybe I can help you, Rigby!”

“I don't want your help, Burton. I only want your blood!”

A liana dropped from above and encircled the explorer's neck. Burton, realising that he still held his dagger, brought it up, sliced through the creeper, and pulled it away from his skin.

“Zeppelin did this to you, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“A Prussian, Rigby! He's working against the Empire and I've been sent to stop him. You're British, man! Do your duty! Help me!”

“Were it anyone else, Burton, I would. But you, never! I'll die a traitor rather than aid you!”

Leafy tendrils wound around Burton's calves. He felt thorns cutting through his trouser legs, piercing his skin. He ducked as a spiny appendage whipped past his face.

There was no time for persuasion. No time for discussion. Swinburne was being bled to death and, at any moment, Burton himself would likely be overwhelmed.

He jabbed his dagger into his lantern, ripped the side of it open, then prodded the point of the weapon into the oil sack. Liquid spurted out and instantly ignited.

“Don't!” the consul rasped.

“I've suffered your jealousy and enmity for too many years, Rigby. It ends here.”

Burton slammed the burning lantern onto the desk. Immediately, the burning oil splashed outward and the tinder-dry plant burst into flames, sending the king's agent reeling backward. The vines around his legs tripped him but then slithered away, thrashing back and forth.

Swinburne dropped and thudded onto the floor. Burton crawled on hands and knees over to him, feeling the spreading inferno scorching the hairs on the back of his head. With Rigby's screams ringing in his ears, he tore vines away from the poet, grasped him by the collar, and dragged him through the scuttling insects and out of the room.

The fire was expanding with frightening speed. It tore along the walls and over the ceiling, raged past the two men, and filled the corridor with roiling black smoke.

Holding his breath and staying low, Burton reached the top of the stairs and practically fell down them. He rolled onto the cadaver on the landing, then Swinburne rolled onto him, then all three tumbled down the remaining steps. The corpse's limbs broke like snapping twigs as it fell.

A blazing roof beam crashed onto the landing they'd just vacated, showering sparks and fragments of flaming wood onto them.

Burton stood, hoisted Swinburne onto his shoulder, and staggered across the reception hall, out into the courtyard, and through the consulate's gate.

He turned and looked back. There would be no saving the building, that much was plain, and Christopher Rigby, who'd hated him implacably for two decades, was being cremated inside it.

Burton felt no satisfaction at that.

He carried Swinburne back toward the Imam's palace.

Early the following day, on the East African coast below Zanzibar, two ships dropped anchor off a long, low, bush-covered sand spit some twenty miles south of the ivory-and copra-trading town of Bagamoyo.

The Artémis and Ann Lacey lowered their boats and began the long task of transporting men, mules, horses, and supplies to the mainland. In this, they were assisted by a hundred and twenty Wasawahili porters, who waited on the shore having been transported in a dhow from Bagamoyo by Saíd bin Sálim and his eight staff-wielding Askaris.

This part of the coast was known as the Mrima, or “hill land.” Cut by deep bays, lagoons, and backwaters, its banks were thickly lined by forests of white and red mangroves, the tangled roots of which made passage through to the more open land beyond extremely difficult. There was, however, a humped shelf of black rock that cut through the trees and formed a path from the spit. Burton ordered that this be strewn with sand—and straw from the Ann Lacey's hold—so the horses might traverse it without slipping. One by one, eighty of the fine Arabian mounts were lowered by harness from the cargo vessel to the boat, then landed two at a time on the spit and led across the rock and through the mangroves to an encampment, an extensive patch of white sand bordered by a wall of verdure on three sides and by a low hill, held together by tough and bright-flowered creepers, to landward. Beyond this, more grass-covered hills swelled between mosquito-infested creeks, lagoons, and black fetid ooze.

The eighty horses were the first of four livestock shipments, and once they were ashore, the Ann Lacey steamed away to pick up the next consignment from Zanzibar.

Meanwhile, Artémis offloaded seventy bundles of trading specie, crates of food and books and equipment, Rowtie tents, weapons, ammunition, and all the other paraphernalia necessary for the safari.

Amid the perpetual whine and buzz of insects, Burton directed the construction of the camp. As soon as the first Rowtie was erected, Algernon Swinburne was carried by litter into it and made comfortable on a bunk.

“He's still unconscious,” Sister Raghavendra told the king's agent. “He lost a lot of blood and also took a nasty knock to the head, but he'll get over it. I have no doubt he'll be bouncing around again in due course. His durability is astonishing. I remember remarking upon it that time he was assaulted by Laurence Oliphant. Nevertheless, I should allow him a week of undisturbed bed rest.”

Burton shook his head. “I'm sorry, Sadhvi, but that won't be possible. We can't tarry here. We have to strike camp and start moving at the first glimmer of dawn tomorrow. But I'll assign porters to his stretcher. We'll carry Algy for as long as he needs.”

“Very well. I'll stay close to him.”

Saíd bin Sálim had been appointed ras kafilah—or guide—to the expedition. Thankfully, despite sharing the same name, he was not the man who'd acted in that capacity during Burton's first exploration back in '57. That particular Saíd had caused nothing but trouble, whereas the current ras kafilah immediately demonstrated his worth by assigning tasks to the Wasawahili and ensuring they earned their pay. In this, his eight “bully boys,” as Trounce called them, were instrumental. With surprising rapidity, the camp was organised.

By the time the sun had set, two hundred and fifty horses and twenty mules were corralled at the southern end of the clearing; a semicircle of Rowtie tents had been erected at the northern end; the east side was crowded with beit sha'ar—Arabian goat-hair tents—occupied by the two hundred Daughters of Al-Manat; and the west side belonged to the porters, who sat or lay wrapped in blankets. Guards were posted, fires were lit, and chickens and vegetables and porridge were cooked and consumed.

The silence of the tropical night settled over the expedition, shattered now and then by the bellow of a bull-crocodile or the outré cry of a nocturnal heron. The atmosphere was stifling, the mosquitoes indefatigable.

Burton, his friends—with the exception of Swinburne—and Saíd had gathered in the main tent. The Englishmen wore light trousers and collarless shirts, unbuttoned at the neck and with sleeves rolled up. Isabella Mayson and Sister Raghavendra had donned summer dresses of a modest cut. Saíd and Isabel Arundell were in their Arabian robes. Herbert Spencer still wore his polymethylene suit but had wrapped around it the full robes of a Bedouin, his head completely concealed within a keffiyeh. He'd taken to walking with a staff, not only to compensate for his damaged leg, but also because it added to the impression that he was a leper—a disguise that caused the Wasawahili porters to give him a wide berth. Had they been aware of what really lay beneath those robes, superstitious dread would have caused them to desert in droves.

The group was sitting around a table upon which Burton had spread a large map. They examined it by the light of an oil lamp against which a repulsive moth was bumping.

“This was drawn up in 1844 by a French naval officer named Maizan,” Burton told them. “As you can see, I have added extensive corrections and annotations. We are here—” he pointed to a spot on the map, then to another, farther inland, “—and this is the village of Kuingani. And beyond that, here we have the village of Bomani, and here, Mkwaju. If you march at two and a half miles per hour and don't stop at the first two villages, you'll reach the third in about four and a half to five hours.”

Thomas Honesty shrugged. “Sounds too slow.”

“Don't underestimate the terrain,” Burton replied. “You'll find it hard going, and the pace I suggest won't be easy. And in addition to the difficulties of swamp and jungle, the hills that extend back from here, and which rise up along the length of the coast, belong to the Wamrima tribes. They are generally hostile and uncooperative.”

“Who wouldn't be, with slavers preying on them?” Isabella Mayson murmured.

“Quite so. My point is this: strike camp at the crack of dawn, press on as hard as you can, stay alert, and keep your weapons to hand. Don't take any nonsense from the villagers. They will undoubtedly try to charge you an extortionate tax for passing through their territory. They refer to it as hongo— meaning ‘tribute’—and they'll do everything possible to hamper your progress if they aren't satisfied with what they get. Pay only as Saíd advises—which will, anyway, be over the odds.”

He said something to the guide in Arabic. Saíd looked at Krishnamurthy and addressed him in fluent Hindustani: “I speak thy tongue, sir.”

“Ah, good, that's excellent!” Krishnamurthy responded.

Burton continued: “When you reach Mkwaju, rest and eat, but be ready to move on at a moment's notice. If everything goes to plan, by the time we catch up with you, it'll be the hottest part of the day. Despite that, we'll have to start moving again. I want to reach Nzasa, here—” He tapped another mark on the map. “That's another three-and-a-half-hour march. By the time we get there, I'm pretty sure we'll be too done in to go any farther, and the day's rains will be on their way, so this is where we'll camp for the night.”

They talked for a little while longer, then Burton stood, stretched, and fished a cigar from his pocket. He addressed Isabel Arundell and William Trounce: “It's a new moon tonight, so we'll be operating by starlight alone. Isabel, when your women are done with their evening prayers, please begin your preparations. William, come have a smoke with me. The rest of you: bed—that's an order!”

“I'll work on me book, Boss,” Herbert Spencer said. “Sleep is another pleasure I'm denied nowadays, but it ain't all bad—my First Principles of Philosophy is comin' on a treat!”

They bade each other goodnight.

Burton and Trounce stepped outside, lit up, and strolled slowly around the camp, sending plumes of blue tobacco smoke into the heavy air. It did nothing to drive away the mosquitoes. Trounce slapped at one that was attacking his forearm. “Bloody things!”

“They gather especially around swampy ground,” Burton told him. “The places where miasmic gases cause malaria. The areas where the mosquitoes are thickest are the same areas where you're most likely to succumb.”

“How long before I do?”

“The seasoning fever usually sets in fairly quickly. A fortnight at most, old chap, then you'll be sweating it out and gibbering like a loon for a month. I'm afraid it's inevitable.”

Trounce grunted. “I hope Sadhvi is as good a nurse as you say she is!”

They watched Isabel's women saddling their horses, then discarded their cigar stubs, walked back to the main tent, and retrieved their shoulder bags and rifles.

“All right,” said Burton. “Let's get on with it.”

Ten minutes later, the two men were riding at Isabel's side and leading two hundred mounted Amazons up the hill. When they reached its brow, Trounce pulled his horse around—like Honesty and Krishnamurthy, he'd learned to ride during their trek through Arabia—and looked down at the camp. It seemed a tiny island, hemmed in on three sides by riotous vegetation, with the Indian Ocean glittering in the starlight beyond, and, behind him, the endless expanse of unexplored Africa.

“I feel that we're up against impossible odds,” he said to Burton.

The king's agent replied, “We probably are.”

Mzizima village was five miles south of the camp. Originally, it had been composed of thatch-roofed beehive huts and a bandani—a wall-less palaver house, just a thatched roof standing upon six vertical beams—which were all positioned in an orderless cluster around an open central space. Surrounding the village, amid cocoa, mango, and pawpaw trees, there had been fields of rice, holcus, sugarcane, and peas, separated by clumps of basil and sage. This cultivated land stretched to the edge of a mangrove forest in the south, to the hills in the west, and to a small natural bay on the coast.

In the distant past, the Wamrima inhabitants had been farmers of the land and fishers of the sea, but the slave trade had made lying, thieving, shirking, and evasiveness the tools of survival, reducing a once-prosperous village to a clump of hovels occupied by men and women who, in the knowledge that life could be literally or metaphorically taken from them at any moment, did not bother to apply themselves to the business of living.

And now the Prussians had come.

It was four o'clock in the morning. Sir Richard Francis Burton was lying on his stomach at the top of a bushy ridge to the north and was using the field glasses he'd retrieved from the Orpheus to spy upon the settlement. Only a few of its original structures remained—the palaver house being one of them—and in their place wood-built barracks of a distinctly European design had been erected. There were six of these, plus six more half-built, and beyond them a sea of tents that spread out into the once-cultivated fields. The canvas dwellings were especially numerous farther to the south, where man groves had obviously been chopped and burned away. More half-erected wooden buildings were visible there, too.

“It looks like they're planning a permanent camp here,” Trounce whispered. “Building a village a little to the south of the original one.”

Burton grunted an agreement.

By the bright light of the stars, he could see that his stolen supplies were stacked up in the bandani. One of his harvestman vehicles squatted beside the structure. The other one was closer to his and Trounce's position, standing motionless at the outer edge of the tented area just in front of the ridge, obviously left there by its driver. A guard was standing beside it, with a rifle over his shoulder and a pipe in his mouth.

Mzizima was silent, with only a few men on patrol. Of the Wamrima, there was no sign, and Burton felt certain that the villagers had either been pressed into service as lackeys or killed.

“What the bloody hell is that?” Trounce hissed, pointing to the other side of the encampment.

Burton focused his glasses on the thing that flopped along there. Even before he caught a clear view of it, its shadowy shape caused him to shudder. Then it floundered into an area of silvery luminescence and he saw that it was a huge plant, propelling itself along on thick white roots. To Burton's astonishment, there was a man sitting in the thing, cocooned in a fleshy bloom and surrounded by flailing tendrils. He appeared to be steering the plant by thought alone, for there were coiling threadlike appendages embedded into the skin of his scalp, and when he moved his head, the grotesque vehicle turned in the direction he was looking.

“There are others,” Trounce said. “They're patrolling the outer perimeter.”

A few minutes later, it became apparent why.

One of the plants suddenly lunged forward and grabbed at something. A man, screaming wildly, was yanked out of the undergrowth and hoisted into the air. It was a Wamrima native, obviously trying to escape, and now he paid the price. Held aloft by creepers entangled around his wrists, he was mercilessly whipped by the plant's spine-encrusted limbs until his naked back was streaming blood, then he was cast back into the camp—sent spinning through the air to land in a heap between tents, where he lay insensible.

“This complicates matters,” Burton said.

“Should we call it off?”

“No. We'll need those supplies if we're to catch up with Speke. He's got a tremendous lead on us, but if we have all our resources, we can cut straight through all the circumstances that will slow him down.”

“What circumstances?”

“Mainly the obstructions the natives will throw in his path. I'm counting on his incompetence as an expedition leader, inability to communicate in any language other than English, and the fact that, believing us blown up on the Orpheus, he has no idea we're on his tail.”

Fifteen minutes later, Pox swooped out of the sky and landed on Burton's shoulder.

“Message from Isabel Arundell!” the parakeet announced.

“Shhh!” Burton hissed, but it was an instruction the bird didn't understand.

“In position, you lumpish clotpole. Awaiting the word. Message ends.”

“The guard by the harvestman is looking this way,” Trounce said softly.

“Message to Isabel Arundell,” Burton whispered. “Consider the word received. Beware. There are Eugenicist plants. Message ends.”

Pox gave a squawk and flew away.

“It's all right,” Trounce said. “He just saw Pox. Probably thinks it's nothing but a noisy jungle bird. He's giving his attention back to his pipe.”

“I think it's time to take care of him, anyway,” Burton said.

He pulled his spine-shooter from its holster.

Steadying the cactus gun on his left forearm, he took careful aim and gently squeezed the nodule that functioned as a trigger. With a soft phut!, the pistol fired.

Seven spines thudded into the guard's chest. He looked down at them, muttered, “Was sind diese?” then crumpled to the ground.

“Quietly now,” Burton hissed. “To the outer tents. Stay low.”

The two men slipped over the brow of the ridge and slithered silently down to the perimeter of the camp. They crouched in the dark shadow of a tent and waited.

When it happened, it did so with such suddenness that even Burton and Trounce, who were expecting it, were taken by surprise. One minute there was nothing but the sound of snoring men under canvas, the next the night was rent by rifle fire, the pounding of horses' hooves, and the ululation of women.

The Daughters of Al-Manat came thundering over the crest of the hill on the northwestern border of the camp, and even before a warning shout could be raised by the guards, they had stampeded over tents, set burning brands to three of the barracks, and wheeled their horses and raced back up the hill and out of sight.

The Prussian guards barely got a shot off, so panicked were they at this unexpected onslaught.

“Wir wurden angegriffen! Wir wurden angegriffen!” they bellowed. “Verteidigt das Lager!”

Men blundered out of the burning buildings, came running out of the others, and emerged from the tents, rubbing their eyes and peering around in confusion. Gunfire banged and flashed from the summit of the hill. Many of the soldiers fell to the ground with bullets in them.

Snatching up their rifles, the Prussians raced to meet the attacking forces. Burton grabbed Trounce by the arm and pointed to the Eugenicist plant vehicles. They, too, were lumbering to the northwesternmost part of the settlement.

The gunfire from one particular area of the hills intensified. The Prussians returned it, shooting blind. While their attention was thus engaged, twenty riders burst out of the verdure a little farther to the south, dashed across an overgrown field, and put torches to two of the plant creatures. Burton could barely repress a cheer when the starlight revealed that Isabel Arundell was the leader of this cavalry charge. She held a pistol in one hand and a spear in the other, and, expertly controlling her mount with her knees, she sent her charge leaping across tents to another of the Eugenicist creations. Plunging her spear into the densest part of it, she reared her horse away from its lashing tendrils, brought her pistol to bear, and shot the plant's driver through the head. She barked a command, galloped away with her band following, and disappeared into the darkness.

The part of Mzizima closest to Burton and Trounce was almost entirely abandoned now.

“Let's move,” Burton urged. “We have to get this done before the southern part of the camp joins the fray.” He and Trounce crept forward until they reached the nearest of the two harvestmen. The explorer reached up to where he expected to find a small hatch in the machine's belly. In London, harvestmen were primarily employed to transport goods, which they carried in netting suspended from their bellies. It had been his intention to reclaim the two vehicles, load them up with the supplies, and walk them away while the Prussians were distracted. He now encountered a serious setback.

“Damn!” he said. “They've removed the confounded net! It's been replaced by a bracket. Looks like they intend to fix something else to the underside of the body.”

“How will we transport our stuff?” Trounce asked.

“I don't know. Let's get to it first. Speed is of the essence!”

They ran forward, unnoticed amid the confusion.

One of the barracks, consumed by flames, collapsed, sending out a shower of sparks. Men yelled. Rifles cracked.

Pox fluttered onto Burton's shoulder.

“Message from Isabel churlish bladder-prodder Arundell. Hurry up, you foot-licker! Message ends.”

The second harvester, standing beside the bandani, was intact. Burton pulled down its net and spread it out.

“Start loading it. As many crates as you can. Ignore the specie—it's the equipment we need.”

“Was machen Sie hier?” a voice demanded.

Burton whirled, raised his spine-shooter, and shot the inquisitor down.

“Message to Isabel Arundell,” he said. “We're loading the equipment now. There's only one harvestman. Maximum distraction, if you please. Message ends.”

Pox departed.

Moments later, the Daughters of Al-Manat came pelting back down the hill with guns blazing. As they engaged at close quarters with the Prussians, Burton and Trounce lifted crate after crate from the bandani into the netting. At one point, the king's agent sensed movement at the periphery of his vision, looked up, and noted ten or twelve Africans running up the slope of the ridge and disappearing into the undergrowth.

“Good for you!” he grunted.

Two more soldiers noticed the Englishmen and both went down with venomous cactus spines in them.

“That's as much as she can take,” Burton panted. They'd loaded about a third of the stolen supplies. “Get into her, stay low, and drive back the way we came. If I haven't caught up with you by the time you reach the sand spit, wait for me there.”

William Trounce uttered an acknowledgement, climbed the rungs on one of the harvestman's legs, and settled into the driver's seat. He started the engine. Its roar was drowned out by the gunfire, but as the harvestman stalked away, with its loaded net swinging underneath and Burton running in its wake, its trail of steam was noticed and three of the Prussian plant vehicles started to converge on it.

“Keep going!” Burton yelled. “Get out of here!”

As they came abreast with the other harvestman, the king's agent quickly clambered up its leg, slipped into position, grabbed the control levers, and prayed to Allah that the machine was operational.

It was.

The engine clattered into life behind his seat, and he sent the conveyance striding into the path of the nearest plant. He raised his cactus gun and fired spines at the Prussian who was nestled in its bloom. They had no effect.

“Immune to the venom?” he muttered. “Maybe you're half-plant yourself!”

Burton sent his steam-powered spider crashing into the mutated flora. Tendrils wrapped themselves around his machine's legs and started heaving at it, attempting to turn it over. He repeatedly shot spines at its driver until the Prussian's face resembled a porcupine. The man remained conscious, snarled at the Britisher, and sent a vine whipping at the explorer's hand. It caught the cactus gun with such viciousness that the barrel was sliced completely in half. Burton cursed and dropped it.

The harvestman was jolted from side to side. Its carapace was battered and scored by swishing barbed limbs, and Burton felt it slewing sideways beneath him. Desperately hauling at its levers, he caused its front two legs to rise up and brought them sweeping down onto the soldier's chest. The man died instantly, his heart pierced through, and the plant bucked and threshed wildly, causing the harvestman to topple over. In the instant before it hit the ground, Burton dived out of it, rolled, and started running. He reached the bottom of the slope but it was too late; the two other plants were looming over him. Putting his head down, he pumped his legs as fast as he could and started up the hill. Creepers coiled at the periphery of his vision, reaching out to grab him. Suddenly, one hooked under his left arm and wrenched him into the air. Expecting to be flayed or ripped apart, Burton instead found himself flying over the ground and bumping against the side of a horse. He realised that it wasn't a creeper but a hand holding him. Unable to manoeuvre himself into a position where he could see his rescuer, he clutched at the rider's ankle in an attempt to steady himself—a female ankle!

The horse dashed up to the top of the ridge and skidded to a halt beside Trounce's harvestman. Burton was dropped unceremoniously onto the ground.

“William! Stop!” The commanding voice belonged to Isabel Arundell.

Trounce brought his machine to a halt.

“Get onto the net, Dick!” Isabel barked.

Burton looked up at her just as a bullet tore through a fold in her Bedouin robes, missing her flesh by less than an inch. She turned in her saddle, levelled her revolver, and fired six shots back into the camp.

“Move, damn it!” she yelled.

Burton snapped back into action. Three paces took him beneath the harvestman. He jumped up, gripped the net, and clambered onto it.

“Go, William!” Isabel shouted. “As fast as possible! Don't stop and don't look back! We'll keep the Prussians occupied for as long as we can.”

“Isabel—” Burton began, but she cut him off: “We'll catch up with your expedition later. Get going!”

She reared her horse around, and, as she sent it plunging down the slope, she pulled a spear from over her shoulder and jabbed its point into one of the plant vehicles.

Trounce pulled back on a lever, his harvestman coughed and sent out a plume of steam, then went striding into the night with Burton swinging underneath.

“Bloody hell!” the explorer muttered to himself. “That woman has the strength of an ox and the courage of a lion!”

William Trounce didn't stop the harvestman until he'd travelled half the distance back to the expedition's campsite. There'd been no pursuit. Distant gunshots peppered the night.

He manoeuvred one of the spider's long legs inward until it was within Burton's reach. The king's agent climbed up it to the one-man cabin and sat on the edge of it with his legs inside and feet hooked under the seat.

“All right,” he said, and Trounce got the vehicle moving again.

It was slow going. The harvestman was far heavier than a horse, and the pointed ends of its legs frequently sank deep into the sodden earth. By the time they reached the sand spit, the sun had risen, the vegetation was dripping with dew, and the land was steaming.

The sandy clearing where they'd camped was empty.

“Good,” Burton said. “They're on their way. Maybe we can catch up with them before they reach Nzasa.”

Pox glided down and landed on Trounce's head.

“Hey there! Get off!” the Scotland Yard man protested. The bird ignored him.

“Message from Isabel Arundell. We're going to withdraw and recoup. Eleven of my women killed, three injured. We shall wage an idle-headed guerrilla campaign over the next few days to prevent them following you. We'll catch up presently. Travel safely, wobble-paunch! Message ends.”

“An idle-headed guerrilla campaign?” Trounce asked, in a puzzled tone.

“I think there's a parakeet insertion there,” Burton said.

“Oh. Can you get the bloody parrot off my head, please?”

“Message for Isabel Arundell,” Burton said. “My gratitude, but don't take risks. Disengage as soon as you can. Message ends.”

The parakeet squawked its acknowledgement and launched itself into the air.

With Burton navigating, Trounce steered the harvestman up the hill on the western side of the clearing. They travelled over sandy soil, thick with thorn bushes, and, after a succession of rolling hills, descended into rich parkland dotted with mangoes and other tall trees. The sun was climbing behind them. The morning steam evaporated and the air began to heat up.

A little later, Pox rejoined them.

They came to a swamp and waded the harvestman through it, scattering hippopotami from their path.

“This would have sent Speke into a frenzy,” Burton noted.

“What do you mean?”

“He's a huntsman through and through. He'll shoot at anything that moves and delights in killing. When we were out here in '57, he slaughtered more hippos than I could count.”

The giant mechanised arachnid pitched and swayed as it struggled through the stinking sludge, then it finally emerged onto more solid ground and began to move with greater speed.

A few beehive huts came into view, and the inhabitants, upon seeing the gigantic spider approaching, bolted.

Burton and Trounce crossed cultivated land, passed the village of Kuingani, which emptied rapidly, and proceeded onto broad grasslands flecked with small forests and freestanding baobab trees possessed of bulbous trunks and wind-flattened branches. It was here that Trounce saw his first truly wide African vista and he was astonished at the apparent purity of the land. Giraffes were moving in the distance to his right; two herds of antelope were grazing far off to his left; eagles hung almost motionless high in the sky; and on the horizon, a long, low chain of mountains stretched from north to south. This Eden should, perhaps, have been caressed by the freshest of breezes, but the atmosphere was heavy and stagnant and filled with aggressive insects. The backs of Trounce's hands, his forearms, and his neck were covered with bumps from their bites.

After a further two hours of travel, Burton pointed and exclaimed: “Look! I see them!”

There was a village ahead, and around it many people were gathered. Burton could tell by the loads he saw on the ground that it was his expedition.

“That little collection of huts is Bomani,” he told Trounce.

As the harvestman drew closer, the natives reacted as those before them had done and fled en masse.

“Well met!” Maneesh Krishnamurthy cried out as the harvestman came to a halt and squatted down with a blast of steam and a loud hiss. “They wanted all our tobacco in return for safe passage through their territory. You soon saw them off!”

“You've made good time,” Burton noted, jumping to the ground.

“Saíd had us packed and moving well before sunup,” Krishnamurthy revealed. “The man's a demon of efficiency.”

Burton turned to the Arab: “Hail to thee, Saíd bin Sálim el Lamki, el Hináwi, and the blessings of Allah the Almighty upon thee. Thou hast fulfilled thy duties well.”

“Peace be upon thee, Captain Burton. By Allah's grace, our first steps have been favoured with good fortune. May it continue! Thou hast caught up with us earlier than anticipated.”

“Our mission did not take the time I expected. The Daughters of Al-Manat were ferocious and the Prussians barely looked in our direction. We were able to recover our supplies quickly. Are we fit to continue?”

“Aye.”

“Very well. Have the porters take up their loads.”

The ras kafilah bowed and moved away to prepare the safari for the next stage of the journey.

Burton spoke to Miss Mayson. “Swap places with William, Isabella. We'll take shifts in the harvester. It's more agreeable than a mule.”

The young woman smiled and shook her head. “To be honest, I'd rather stay with my flea-bitten animal. I'm better with beasts than with machines.”

“You're not uncomfortable?”

“Not at all. I feel positively liberated!”

It was Thomas Honesty who took over from Trounce in the end, for Sister Raghavendra also refused to give up her mount, preferring to ride alongside Swinburne's litter. The poet was awake but weak.

“My hat, Richard!” he said, faintly. “Was that really Christopher Rigby? What in blue blazes happened to him?”

“Count Zeppelin. I think he carries some sort of venom in his claws. Either he didn't pump much of it into Peter Pimlico or his talons were less well grown when he strangled him. Rigby, by contrast, received the full treatment.”

“And it turned him into a prickly bush?”

“Yes. It was a close call, Algy. What devils the Eugenicists have become!”

“Not just them,” Swinburne said, glancing at the harvestman. “If you ask me, all the sciences are out of control. I think my Libertine friends were right all along. We need to give more attention to the development of the human spirit before we tamper with the natural world.”

Herbert Spencer limped over to them. “Mr. Saíd says we're all set for the off.”

“Tell him to get us moving then, please, Herbert.”

“Rightio. Pardon me, Boss, but would you mind windin' me up first? Me spring is a little slack.”

“Certainly. Fetch me your key.”

The clockwork man shuffled off.

“How are you feeling, Algy?” Burton asked his friend.

“Tip-top, Richard,” Swinburne replied. “Do you think I might have a swig of gin, you know, to ward off malaria?”

“Ha! You're obviously on the mend! And no.”

When Spencer returned, he stood with his back to Burton, and the king's agent, after first checking that the porters couldn't see what he was doing, felt around for the holes that had been cut in the back of the philosopher's many robes, and in the polymethylene suit beneath them. He pushed a large metal key through and into the opening in the brass man's back, then turned it until the clockwork philosopher was fully wound.

Spencer thanked him and went to help get the safari back under way.

It took half an hour for the crowd of men and animals to open out into a long line, like a gigantic serpent, which then slowly made its way westward.

What a sight that column was! At its head, Burton and Trounce rode along on mules, the explorer noting everything in his journal, assessing the geography and geology as Palmerston had ordered, while the Scotland Yard man scanned the route before them with the field glasses. A few yards to the left, Honesty drove the harvestman, while behind, Isabella Mayson and Sister Raghavendra, with dainty parasols held over their heads, rode their mounts sidesaddle. Swinburne, in his stretcher, was carried by four of the Wasawahili, and behind him, the rest of the porters and pack mules followed, all heavily laden. Most of the men carried a single load balanced on their shoulder or head, while others shared heavier baggage tied to a pole and carried palanquin fashion. Each man also bore his private belongings upon his back—an earthen cooking pot, a water gourd, a sleeping mat, a three-legged stool, and other necessities.

The Wasawahili wore little, just rough cloth wound about their loins, and, when the rains came or the sun had set, a goatskin slung over their backs. Some had a strip of zebra's mane bound around their head; others preferred a stiffened oxtail, which rose above their forehead like a unicorn's horn; while many decorated their craniums with bunches of ostrich, crane, and jay feathers. Bulky ivory bracelets and bangles of brass and copper encircled their arms and ankles, and there were beads and circlets around their necks. At least half of them had small bells strapped just below their knees, and the incessant tinkling blended with the heavier clang of the bells attached to the mules' collars. This, along with ceaseless chanting and singing and hooting and shouting and squabbling and drumming, made the procession a very noisy affair, though not unpleasantly so.

At the rear of the long line, Krishnamurthy and Spencer rode their mules and kept their eyes peeled for deserters, but it was Saíd bin Sálim and his eight Askari bully boys who were, by far, the most industrious members of the party. With illimitable energy, they ranged up and down the column, keeping it under tight control and driving the men on with loud shouts of, “Hopa! Hopa! Go on! Go on!”

The expedition soon came upon one of Africa's many challenges: a forest, thick and dark and crawling with biting ants. They struggled through it, with low branches snagging at the loads the porters carried on their heads. Honesty had great difficulty in forcing the harvester through the unruly foliage.

They eventually broke free and descended a long gentle slope into a ragged and marshy valley. Here, the mules sank up to their knees and blundered and complained and had to be driven on by the energetic application of a bakur—the African cat-o'-nine-tails. After a long delay, with the fiery sun beating down on them, they reached firmer ground and struggled up through thick, luxuriant grass to higher terrain. From here, they could see the village of Mkwaju. Once again, the prospect of a gigantic spider approaching sent the villagers racing away.

“This is an advantage I hadn't anticipated,” Burton told William Trounce. “They're too scared of the harvestman to hold us up with demands for hongo. Damnation! If only we had all our vehicles! Without the crabs to clear a route through the jungles, we'll soon reach a point where the harvester will be stymied and we'll be forced to abandon it.”

Mkwaju was little more than a few hovels and a palaver house, but it was significant in that it was the last village under the jurisdiction of Bagamoyo. The expedition was now entering the Uzamaro district.

The sun was at its zenith, and the soporific heat drained the energy out of all of them, but they were determined to reach Nzasa before resting, so they plodded on, glassy-eyed, the sweat dripping off them.

The loss of the harvestman came much sooner than Burton expected. Less than two hours after he'd expressed his concern to Trounce, they encountered a thick band of jungle too dense to chop a wide enough path through and too high for the vehicle to pick its way across. Honesty ran the spider along the edge of the barrier for a mile southward, then back and for a mile to the north. He returned and shouted down from the cabin: “Stretches as far as the eye can see. No way through. Shall I go farther?”

“No,” Burton called back. “It wouldn't do to get separated. I don't want to lose you! We'll have to leave it. We knew it was going to happen at some point. I suppose this is it. And at least the porters will be able to dump the coal supply.”

Honesty turned off the machine's engine and climbed down a leg. “Should destroy it,” he said. “Prussians might follow. Don't want them to have it.”

Burton considered a moment then nodded. “You're right.”

While the safari began to machete its way through the dense undergrowth, the king's agent and the detective tied a rope around the upper part of one of the harvestman's legs and used it to pull the vehicle over onto its side. Honesty drew his Adams police-issue revolver and emptied its chamber into the machine's water tank. They picked up rocks and used them to batter one of the spider's leg joints until it broke.

“That'll do,” Burton said. “Let's press on to Nzasa. The sooner we get there, the better. We're all tired and hungry!”

The band of jungle sloped down to a narrow river. Mosquitoes swarmed over the water and crocodiles basked on its banks. The crossing was difficult, perilous, and uncomfortable, and by the time the expedition emerged from the tangle of vegetation on the other side, everyone was covered with mud, scratches, leeches, insect bites, and stings.

They moved out onto cultivated land and trudged past scattered abodes concealed by high grass and clumps of trees.

They were seeing kraals now—large round huts or long sheds built from sticks woven through with grass. Around these, in a wide circle, thorny barriers had been erected. Constructed by slaver caravans, their presence indicated that the inhabitants of this region were hostile and didn't welcome strangers at their villages.

The trail broadened and the going became easier. They slogged up a hill then descended into the valley of the Kinganí River—called Wady el Maut and Dar el Jua, the Valley of Death and Home of Hunger—which they followed until they spotted Nzasa, which Burton knew was one of the rare friendly settlements in the area.

He and Saíd rode ahead. They were met by three p'hazi, or headmen, each with a patterned cotton sheet wrapped around his loins and slung over his shoulder, each sheltering under an opened umbrella. The Africans announced themselves as Kizaya, Kuffakwema, and Kombe la Simba. The latter, in the Kiswahili language, greeted the two visitors with the words: “I am old and my beard is grey, yet never in all the days I have lived have I beheld a catastrophe like this—the muzungo mbáyá once again in the land of my people!”

Muzungo mbáyá translated as “the wicked white man.”

“I understand thy dismay,” Burton responded. “Thou remembers me not then, O Kombe?

The ancient chief frowned and asked, “I am known to thee?” He squinted at Burton, then his eyebrows shot up and he exclaimed: “Surely thou art not the Murungwana Sana?”

Burton bowed his head and murmured, “I am pleased that thou recollects me as such,” for the words meant “real free man” and were the equivalent of being called a “gentleman.”

Kombe suddenly gave a broad smile, his jet-black face folding into a thousand wrinkles, his mouth displaying teeth that had been filed to points. “Ah!” he cried. “Ah! Ah! Ah! I see all! Thou art hunting the shetani?”

“The devil?”

“Aye! The muzungo mbáyá of the long soft beard and gun that never ceases!”

“Thou art speaking of my former companion, John Speke? Thou hast seen him of late?”

“No, but a man from the village of Ngome, which is far north of here, came to us this many—” he extended the word to indicate the time that had passed: maaaannny, “—days ago and told of a bad man with bad men who came to his village intent on bad things. They were led by the muzungo mbáyá, and when he was described to me, I remembered the one thou callest Speke, though now they say his head is half of metal.”

Burton said, “So his expedition is taking the northern trail eastward?”

“Aye, and killing and stealing as he goes. Dost thou mean to do the same?”

“Absolutely not! My people seek only to rest for a single night, and for this we shall pay with copper wire and cotton cloth and glass beads.”

“And tobacco?”

“And tobacco.”

“And drink that burns the throat in a pleasurable manner?”

“And drink that burns the throat in a pleasurable manner.”

“I must consult with my brothers.”

The three p'hazi stepped away and conversed out of Burton's earshot.

Saíd gave a snort of contempt and said, in a low voice, “They will come back and demand much hongo to allow us passage through their territory.”

“Of course,” Burton answered. “What else do they have to bargain with?”

Sure enough, Kombe returned with what amounted to an extravagant shopping list. Burton and Saíd, both experienced in such matters, bartered until an agreement was reached. The village would receive around two-thirds of the specie demanded—which, in fact, was a much better deal than the elders had expected.

Kombe, well satisfied, allowed the expedition to set up camp beside Nzasa and announced that a feast would be held to honour the arrival of the Murungwana Sana.

Their first full day of African travel had exhausted them all. Isabella Mayson said to Burton, “I'm confused, Sir Richard. My body tells me we've travelled many miles, but my head says we've hardly progressed at all.”

“Such is the nature of our task,” he replied. “This was a good day. On a bad, a single step must be counted an achievement.”

As the afternoon wore into evening, the tents were put up, the animals corralled, and the supplies secured.

The rains came.

There were no warning droplets or preliminary showers. One minute the sky was clear, the next it was a dark purple, then the Msika fell, a sheet of unbroken water. It hit the tents like an avalanche, and Burton, Saíd, Trounce, Honesty, Krishnamurthy, Spencer, Sister Raghavendra, and Miss Mayson—who'd all gathered in the biggest of the Rowties—had to raise their voices, first against the sound of the deluge pummelling the canvas, then against the cacophonous thunder, which grumbled without a pause.

“Excuse my language, ladies,” Trounce shouted, “but bloody hell!”

“Can the tent stand it?” asked Krishnamurthy. “I think the ocean is being emptied on top of us!”

Honesty pulled the entrance flap aside and peered out. “Can't see a thing!” he called. “Solid water.”

“There'll be two hours of this,” Burton announced, “so if Sadhvi and Isabella don't mind, I propose a brandy and a smoke.”

“I don't mind at all,” Isabella said.

“Nor I,” added Sadhvi. “In fact, I'll take a tipple myself.”

A reedy sigh of frustration came from within Herbert Spencer's many robes and scarves.

Pox, perched as usual on the clockwork philosopher's head, gave a loud musical whistle, then squawked, “Flubberty jibbets!”

“Hurrah!” Krishnamurthy cheered. “That's a new one!”

“The nonsensical insults are definitely the most entertaining,” Isabella agreed.

“By Jove!” Trounce blurted. “That reminds me. I say, Richard, those horrible plant things we saw at Mzizima—”

“What about them?” Burton asked.

“I was wondering, what with Eugenicist creations, such as Pox, here—”

“Pig-snuggler!” Pox sang.

“—always displaying a disadvantage in proportion to whatever talent the scientists have bred into them—”

“Yes?”

“Well, what might be the drawback to those vegetable vehicles, do you think?”

“That's a good question, William, and one I can't answer!”

Burton served brandies to them all, including the women, and the men lit their various cigars and pipes, with many a nervous glance at the tent roof, which was billowing violently under the onslaught of rain.

Sister Raghavendra distributed small vials of a clear liquid that she insisted they all add to their drinks. “It's a special recipe we use in the Sisterhood of Noble Benevolence to deal with fevers,” she said. “Don't worry, it's quite tasteless.”

“What's in it?” Honesty asked.

“A mix of quinine and various herbs,” she answered. “It won't make you immune, but it will, at least, make the attacks shorter and less damaging.”

The tent flap suddenly flew open and a drenched imp hopped in.

“Bounders!” it shrieked. “Cads! Fiends! Traitorous hounds! Taking a drink without me! Without me! Aaaiiii!”

The thing bounded to the table and, with wildly rolling eyes, snatched up the brandy bottle and took an extravagant swig from it. Banging the bottle back down, it wiped its mouth on its sleeve, uttered a satisfied sigh, belched, then keeled over like a toppled tree and landed flat on its back.

“Great heavens! Is that Algernon?” Herbert Spencer tooted.

Sister Raghavendra bent beside the sodden and bedraggled figure and put a hand to its forehead. “It is,” she said. “And despite that display, he doesn't appear to be feverish at all.”

Burton stepped over, lifted his assistant up, and carried him to a cot at the side of the tent. “Algy tends to operate, as a matter of course, at a level that most people would consider feverish,” he said. “I think, on this occasion, he has simply overestimated his own strength.”

“Indeed so,” the nurse agreed. “Any man would require a week to recover from blood loss like Algernon experienced.”

“In which case, Algy will probably need just a couple more days, for he is most certainly not any man!”

They dried their friend as best they could, made him comfortable, and let him sleep.

The rain eventually stopped as quickly as it had started, and the silence of another African night settled over them. They sat quietly, comfortable in each others' company, too exhausted for conversation.

A hyena cackled in the distance.

A shout came from the village.

One drumbeat sounded.

Then another.

All of a sudden, a deep, loud, rhythmic pulsation filled the air as many drums were pounded. A boy's voice hailed them from outside. Burton stepped out of the tent and a child, about ten years old, grinned up at him.

“O Murungwana Sana,” he said, “the fire is lit and the meat is cooking and the women are restless and want to dance. The men desire news of the far off lands of the Muzungu—the white man. Wouldst thou attend us?”

Burton gave a bow. “We shall come with thee now.”

So it was that the expedition's first day ended with a feast and a party, attended by all but the philosopher Herbert Spencer and the poet Algernon Swinburne.

In the tent, the brass man placed a stool beside the cot, sat on it, and leaned forward, bracing himself with his staff. Deep in the shadow of his keffiyeh, his metal face seemed to gaze unwaveringly at Burton's assistant.

And Swinburne dreamt of war.