Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon bas-3

by Mark Hodder

  Swinburne jumped to the ground. “Pox called me a fumbling toad-gobbler, and Malady told me to sod off.”

  Burton moved away from Bombay and over to his friends. “It looks like this expedition has had a happy ending for one of our little family, anyway,” he said. “Come on, let's leave them to it and get ourselves moving.”

  “I've divided what's left of the supplies into light packs,” Trounce advised. “What equipment remains, we'll have to leave here.”

  Swinburne, looking up into the branches he'd just vacated, shook his head. “Why would they want to live in a place like this?” he asked. “There are no other birds.”

  “P'raps they likes their privacy,” Herbert Spencer suggested.

  “Maybe they need the space so they can begin a dynasty,” Trounce offered.

  The poet sighed. “I shall miss the foul-mouthed little blighters.”

  They hefted their bags, took up their spears, and started to scrabble up steep loose shale, sending rivulets of stone clattering down behind them.

  Sir Richard Francis Burton, Algernon Swinburne, William Trounce, Herbert Spencer-with his discoloured, scratched, and dented body unencumbered by robes or polymethylene-and Sidi Bombay entered the Mountains of the Moon, and more than one of them had a question on his mind.

  How many of us will come back?

  CHAPTER 11

  The Temple

  “-the sombre range

  Virginal, ne'er by foot of man profaned,

  Where rise Nile's fountains, if such fountains be.”

  — Jose Basilio Da Gama, O URUGUAY, CANTO V

  Burton and Wells drew their harvestmen to a halt at the top of an incline and turned the vehicles to face the way they'd come. Beneath the mechanised spiders' feet, poppies grew in abundance. The red flowers weaved away in an irregular line, disappearing into the hazy distance, back toward the dirty grey smudge that marked the position of Tabora.

  High overhead, looking enormous even though it was flying at a very high altitude, the L.59 Zeppelin drifted closer to the city.

  It was a remarkable craft-a vegetable thing, like a gargantuan pointed cigar with ruffled seams on its sides. All along this join, oval bean-like growths swelled outward, and even from afar, it was apparent that they'd been hollowed out and fitted with portholes.

  A giant purple flower grew from the rear of the vessel, similar in appearance to a tulip. Its petals were opening and closing, throbbing like a pulsing heart, driving the ship through the air.

  “It's magnificent,” Wells said. “And utterly horrible.”

  “Horrible because we know what it's carrying,” Burton replied. “I wonder how big an area the A-Bomb will destroy? Surely the spores will drift?”

  “Perhaps they're potent for only a few minutes,” Wells mused. “But even if the effects are of short duration and confined to the city, thousands of people are going to die. There simply hasn't been time for everyone to get out. Look! Those dots rising up from Tabora-that's a squadron of hornets!”

  “We need a rotorship.”

  “There are none. Our last was brought down more than a year ago.”

  The hornets-twelve of them-raced across the shrinking distance between the city and the German vessel. As they neared the bomb carrier, they exploded one after the other and fell to the earth trailing smoke behind them.

  “No!” Wells shrilled. “What the hell happened?”

  “There!” Burton pointed. “See the trails of vapour curving out from the Zeppelin? The Germans must have some sort of manoeuvrable shells.”

  “By heavens, Richard. Has it reached Tabora already? I can't tell.”

  “Any time now,” Burton replied. “Be prepared to-”

  Without warning, the sun erupted from the ground beneath the city. A blinding light blazed outward, and though Burton squeezed his eyes shut in an instant and clapped his hands over them, still he could see it. He heard Wells scream.

  “Bertie, are you all right?” he yelled.

  Wells groaned. “Yes. I think-I think it's passed.”

  Burton, realising that his friend was right, lowered his hands and opened his eyes. Wherever he looked, he saw a ball of fire.

  “The damned after-image has blinded me,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  They sat with hands held to faces, waiting for their retinas to recover.

  A strong wind hit them.

  “Shockwave!” Wells exclaimed.

  “No! It's going in the wrong direction,” Burton noted, puzzled.

  They looked up, blinking, vision returning.

  A dense yellow mass of Destroying Angel spores was bubbling up from where the city stood-and as the two men watched, the billowing substance slowly revolved, as if around a central axis.

  “The wind!” Wells said. “It's the blasted Hun weathermen! They're keeping that damned mushroom cloud in check, concentrating it in the city, preventing it from drifting!”

  Burton moaned: “Quips! Poor Quips! Bismillah, Bertie! How many have just died?”

  “Tens of thousands,” Wells said, and his voice was suddenly deep and oily and unpleasant. “But I am not one of them.”

  Burton looked at the little war correspondent and was shocked to see that every visible part of his eyes had turned entirely black. There was a terrible menacing quality about them, and Burton couldn't tear his own away.

  Wells gestured at the dying city.

  “The generals are eager to locate a safe haven,” he said, “so, regrettably, the SS Britannia is rolling in an easterly direction and will soon turn south, whereas you, I see, are heading north. Why is that, Private Frank Baker? Hah! No! That won't do! That won't do at all! Let us call you by another name. Let us call you Sir-Richard-Francis-Burton.” He enunciated Burton's name slowly, emphasising each syllable, as if to drive home the point that he knew the explorer's true identity.

  “Bertie?” Burton asked, uncertainly.

  “Obviously not! Tell me, how did you do it?”

  “How did I do what? Who are you?”

  “Control the lurchers-make them open up a route through the besieging German forces?”

  “Crowley?”

  “Yes, yes! Now answer the question!”

  “I didn't.”

  “What? You didn't control them? Then who-or what-did?”

  “I have no idea. What do you want, Colonel?”

  “I have seven black diamonds, Sir Richard, the fragments of the South American Eye of Naga. There is much about them I do not understand.” The black eyes glittered. The king's agent felt them penetrating his soul. “For example, you, sir, who should be three decades dead-your metaphorical fingerprints are all over them. Are they somehow responsible for transporting you from your time to mine?”

  Burton didn't respond.

  Wells-Crowley-regarded him silently.

  The wind gusted past them.

  “I shall tell you a secret, Sir Richard Francis Burton-something that, were it known by the generals aboard this ship, would prompt my immediate execution.”

  “What?”

  “I am in contact with Kaiser Nietzsche.”

  “You're a collaborator?”

  “Not in the sense you mean it. The German emperor and myself share a talent for clairvoyance. We've both detected through the diamonds that other realities exist, and that other versions of ourselves inhabit them. We want to know more. Your presence here appears to have some bearing on the matter.” Wells gave an elaborate shrug and his oleaginous voice took on a carefree airiness. “But here we are: you fleeing in one direction and me fleeing in the other. Very inconvenient! I really should do away with this Wells fellow. He acted against me. But I shall allow him to live, for I sense that he's a vital ingredient in the shape of things to come.”

  “Crowley,” Burton said. “Nietzsche dropped a bomb on you.”

  Wells emitted a thick chuckle. “Ah! So you doubt his commitment to me? Do not concern yourself. He gave me fair warning, and it was preordain
ed that I would get away.”

  “You knew Tabora would be destroyed? You allowed all those people to die? Your countrymen?”

  “Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people. The end of the British Empire was long overdue. I merely bowed to the inevitable.”

  “In the name of Allah, what kind of man are you?”

  “Allah? Don't be ridiculous. And as for what I am, perhaps the embodiment of the Rakes, who, if I remember rightly, prospered in your age.”

  “You're an abomination!”

  “I'm an individual who shares with Nietzsche the desire to create a superior species of man.”

  For the first time since he'd taken possession of Wells, Crowley took his eyes from Burton. He looked at the yellow cloud enveloping Tabora.

  “Multiple futures,” he said. “Different histories. Maybe some of them don't end like this. I should like to visit them.” He returned his dreadful gaze to the explorer. “Perhaps we'll get it right in one of them, hey?”

  He made Wells stretch and groan.

  “Ho hum, Sir Richard! Ho hum! I've been here long enough. It's not comfortable. Has he told you how his leg is perpetually paining him? I don't know how he can bear it. Anyway, I'll say farewell. We shall meet again, sir; in this world or another version of it; maybe in your time, maybe in mine, maybe in another. But we shall meet again. And when we do-”

  Wells smiled wickedly. The expression lingered, then the black faded from his eyes, they slipped up into his head, and he fell sideways from his saddle to the ground.

  Burton hurriedly dismounted and threw himself down beside his friend.

  “Bertie! Bertie!”

  The war correspondent rolled onto his side and vomited. He curled into a fetal position and moaned. “He was in my head. The filth, Richard! The filth of the man! He's the Beast personified!”

  “Has he gone? Is he watching us?”

  “He's gone. But he's going to come after you. Wherever-whenever-you are-he's coming after you!”

  Burton helped Wells to sit up. The smaller man wiped his mouth and looked at the far-off mushroom cloud, and the flying machine shrinking to the south.

  “It's finished,” he said. “The Germans probably think they've won, but they're wrong. Everything is ending. This world is done for.”

  Burton could think of nothing to say, except: “I'm sorry, Bertie.”

  Wells stood, swayed slightly, and reached up to the stirrup of his harvestman.

  “Let's get back on the trail. I want to find out where these poppies are leading us.”

  They clambered back into their saddles and turned their vehicles, sending them scuttling over the savannah.

  For two days, they steered their harvestmen over what, to Burton, was eerily familiar territory.

  He felt detached. All the connections to this world, formed over the past five years, were unfastening. Change was coming to him, of that he was certain, but he didn't know how.

  Change, or, perhaps, restoration.

  The Mountains of the Moon.

  His destiny lay there.

  Maybe it always had.

  The trail of poppies led to those peaks, that was obvious even before the snow-capped summits rose over the horizon. He saw them, jagged and white, seeming to hover in the air above the blood-red base of the mountains.

  “Red!” he exclaimed. “I remember this view-but the mountains were green!”

  “That might have been true in the 1860s,” Wells replied, “but the Blood Jungle has grown since then.”

  They raced over the empty landscape. Where there had once been villages, there were none. Were there had once been herds of antelope and zebra, there was nothing. Where fields had been cultivated, there was now rampant undergrowth.

  Increasingly, they saw lurchers. The ungainly plants were shuffling over the hills and through the valleys with an unnerving air of sentience that prompted Wells to ask: “What are the damned things up to, Richard?”

  “I know what you mean,” the explorer replied. “They look purposeful, don't they? Do you remember the one that attacked us at Tanga? See how differently they move now! The mindless thrashing has been replaced by shudders and ticks, as if they're operating under some sort of restraint.”

  With so much of his memory restored, Burton recognised that the lurchers were the same species of plant as the vehicles the Prussians had used back in 1863-the same but horribly different, for there were no men enfolded in their fleshy petals-which meant, if there was something still controlling them, it wasn't necessarily human.

  As they drew closer to the mountains, the vegetation grew thicker and wilder. Its flowers and fruits took on a reddish hue, deepening the farther they travelled, until blood-coloured blooms and berries and globular dew-dripping swellings of indiscriminate form surrounded them. The poppies guided the steam-driven spiders straight into the humid tangle, and, astonishingly, the chaotic verdure parted in front of them to allow their passage.

  Shafts of light angled through the trees. Lianas drooped and looped and dangled. The air was heavy with scent, one minute perfumed, the next pungent with the stench of maggoty meat, then delightful again. Fat bees droned lazily through it. Dragonflies and butterflies flitted hither and thither. Seeds floated past on feathery wings. And in the canopy overhead, thousands upon thousands of parakeets squawked and screeched and cackled and whistled and cursed and insulted.

  Burton started to laugh and couldn't stop.

  Wells, who was at that point leading the way, looked back, raised his eyebrows, and asked: “What the heck has got into you?”

  “Pox!” Burton cried out. “Pox and Malady! Ye gods! How many eggs did that confounded bird lay? Hah!” He raised his face to the sky and bellowed: “Pox! Pox! Pox!” then bent forward and was suddenly wracked by violent sobs, for too many memories were returning, and he knew for sure that he was going back, and he recalled what to.

  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 th
e 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.