The Map of Time

by Félix J Palma

  “Before setting up this company, I worked with my father,” he resumed a moment later. “We financed expeditions. We were one of the hundreds of societies sending explorers to the farthest corners of the world with the aim of gathering ethnographic and archaeological data to publish in scientific journals, or finding exotic insects or flowers for the showcases of some science museum eager to display God’s wildest creations. But, regardless of the business side of things, we were driven by a desire to get to know as accurately as possible the world we lived in. We were, to coin a phrase, spatially curious. However, we never know what fate has in store for us, do we, gentlemen?” Again without waiting for a reply, Gilliam Murray gestured for them to follow him. Eternal at his heel, he led them through the obstacle course of tables and globes towards one of the sidewalls. Unlike the others, which were lined with shelves crammed with atlases, geographical treatises, books on astronomy, and numerous other works on obscure subjects, this wall was covered in maps, arranged according to when the regions on them had been charted. The collection covered a journey that started with a few reproductions of Renaissance maps inspired by Ptolemy’s works, which made the world look alarmingly small, like an insect with its legs chopped off, reduced to little more than a shapeless Europe. Next came the German Martin Waldseemüller’s map, where America had broken away from the Asian continent, and finally the works of Abraham Ortelius and Gerardus Mercator, which showed a much larger world, similar in size to that of the present day. Following this chronological order from left to right as guided by Murray, the cousins had the impression of watching the petals of a flower open or a cat stretch its body. The world seemed to unfurl literally before their eyes, to grow incredibly slowly in size as navigators and explorers extended its frontiers.

  Andrew found it fascinating that only a few centuries earlier people had no idea the world went on across the Atlantic, or that its true size depended on the courage and fortunes of explorers whose daredevil journeys filled up the medieval void, the dwelling place of sea monsters. On the other hand, he regretted the dimensions of the world were no longer a mystery, that the most recent maps of land and sea constituted an official world, established, confined to its own dimensions, where the only things left to chart were its coastlines. Murray made them come to a halt in front of the last gigantic map in his collection.

  “Gentlemen, you have in front of you possibly the most accurate world map in all of England,” Gilliam announced, openly gloating, “I keep it continually updated, you see. Whenever another region of the planet is charted, I have a new version drawn up and I burn the obsolete one. I consider this a symbolic gesture, like erasing my old, imprecise idea. Many of the expeditions you see here were made possible by our funding.” The map was a blurry mass of multicolored lines which, Gilliam explained, represented all the expeditionary voyages hitherto undertaken by man, the vicissitudes of which he had written up, doubtless with morbid enjoyment, in the chart’s left-hand margin.

  However, one glance at the map was enough to see that the precision with which each sinuous voyage had been traced eventually became pointless: it was impossible to follow any single journey owing to the crisscross of the lines resulting from their host’s absurd efforts to record every single expedition. These ranged from the earliest, like that of Marco Polo (represented by a gold line snaking around India, China Central Asia and the Malaysian archipelago), to the most recent, like that undertaken by Sir Francis Younghusband, who had traveled from Peking to Kashmir crossing the Karakoram Mountains with their soaring glacier-topped peaks. The squiggles though were not confined to land: others left terra firma, imitating the foamy wake of legendary ships such as Columbus’s caravels as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean, or the Erebus and the Terror as they tried to find a shortcut to China via the Arctic Ocean. These last two lines vanished suddenly, as had the actual ships when sailing across the Lancaster Straits, the so-called Northwest Passage. Unable to make any sense of the mass of lines, Andrew decided to follow the blue one that cut across the island of Borneo, that sultry paradise overrun by crocodiles and gibbons to the southeast of Asia. This followed the tortuous journey of Sir James Brooke, nicknamed the Rajah of Sarawak, a name Andrew was familiar with because the explorer popped up in the Sandokan novels as a ruthless pirate slayer. But then Gilliam asked them to concentrate on the most intricate part of the map, the African continent. There, all the expeditions attempting to discover the mythical source of the Nile, like those undertaken by the Dutchwoman Alexine Tinné, Mr. and Mrs. Baker, Burton and Speke, and most famously by Livingstone and Stanley, as well as many more, converged to form a tangled mesh, which if nothing else illustrated the fascination Africa had held for the intrepid wearers of pith helmets.

  “The account of how we discovered time travel began exactly twenty-two years ago,” Gilliam announced theatrically.

  As though having heard the story many times before, Eternal stretched out at his master’s feet. Charles smiled gleefully at this promising beginning, while Andrew twisted his lips in frustration, realizing he was going to need a lot of patience before he found out whether or not he would be able to save Marie Kelly.

  8

  Permit me, if you will, to perform a little narrative juggling at this point, and recount the story Gilliam Murray told them in the third person instead of the first, as if it were an excerpt from an adventure story, which is the way Murray would ultimately have liked to see it. Back then, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the main ambition of most expeditionary societies was to discover the source of the Nile, which Ptolemy had situated in the Mountains of the Moon, that magnificent mountain range rising out of the heart of Africa. However, modern explorers seemed to have had no more luck than Herodotus, Nero, or anyone else who had searched in vain for it throughout history. Richard Burton and John Speke’s expedition had only succeeded in making enemies of the two explorers, and that of David Livingstone had thrown little light on the matter either. When Henry Stanley found Livingstone in Ujiji, he was suffering from dysentery. He nevertheless refused to return with Stanley to the metropolis and set off on another expedition, this time to Lake Tanganyika. He had to be brought back from there on a litter, wracked with fever and utterly exhausted.

  The Scottish explorer died at Chitambo, and his final journey was made as a corpse, embalmed then enclosed in a large piece of bark from a myonga-tree. It took porters nine months to carry him to the island of Zanzibar, where he was finally repatriated to Great Britain. He was buried in 1878 in Westminster Abbey with full honors, but despite his numerous achievements, the source of the Nile remained a mystery, and everyone, from the Royal Geographic Society to the most insignificant science museum, wanted to take credit for discovering its elusive location. The Murrays were no exception, and at the same time as the New York Herald and the London Daily Telegraph sponsored Stanley’s new expedition, they, too, sent one of their most experienced explorers to the inhospitable African continent.

  His name was Oliver Tremanquai, and apart from having undertaken several expeditions to the Himalayas, he was also a veteran hunter. Among the creatures killed by his expert marksmanship were Indian tigers, Balkan bears, and Ceylonese elephants. Although never a missionary, he was a deeply religious man and never missed an opportunity to evangelize any natives he might come across, listing the merits of his God like someone selling a gun. Excited about his new mission, Tremanquai left for Zanzibar, where he acquired porters and supplies. However, a few days after he made his way into the continent, the Murrays lost all contact with him. The weeks crept by and still they received no message. They began to wonder what had become of the explorer. With great sorrow, the Murrays gave him up for lost, as they had no Stanley to send after him.

  Ten months later, Tremanquai burst into their offices, days after a memorial service had taken place with the permission of his wife—loathe to don her widow’s weeds. As was only to be expected, his appearance caused the same stir as if he had been a ghost. He was
terribly gaunt, his eyes were feverish, and his filthy, malodorous body hardly looked as if he had spent the intervening months washing in rosewater. As was obvious from his deplorable appearance, the expedition had been a complete disaster from the outset. No sooner had they penetrated the jungle than they were ambushed by Somali tribesmen. Tremanquai was unable even to take aim at those feline shadows emerging from the undergrowth, before being felled by a cascade of arrows. There, in the stillness of the jungle, far from the eyes of civilization, the expedition was brutally massacred down to the last man. The attackers left him for dead like the rest of his men, but life had toughened Tremanquai, and it took more of an effort to kill him than those savages had made. And so he roamed the jungle for weeks, wounded and feverish, using his rifle for a crutch and some of the arrows still stuck in his flesh, until his pitiful wanderings brought him to a small native village encircled by a palisade. Exhausted, he collapsed before the narrow entrance to the fence, like a piece of flotsam washed up by the sea.

  He awoke several days later completely naked, stretched out on an uncomfortable straw mattress with repulsive-looking poultices on the various wounds mortifying his flesh. He was unable to identify the features of the young girl applying the sticky greenish dressings as belonging to any of the tribes he knew. Her body was long and supple, her hips extremely narrow, and her chest almost as flat as a board. Her dark skin gave off a faint, dusky glow. He soon discovered that the men possessed the same slender build, their delicate bone structure almost visible beneath their slight musculature. Not knowing what tribe they belonged to, Tremanquai decide to invent a name for them. He called them Reed People, because they looked slim and supple like reeds. Tremanquai was an excellent shot, but he had little imagination. The Reed People’s otherworldly physique, as well as their big black eyes darkening their exquisite doll-like faces, was a source of astonishment, but as Tremanquai’s convalescence progressed, he discovered further reasons to be amazed: the language they used to communicate with each other, a series of guttural noises he found impossible to reproduce despite being accustomed to imitating the most outlandish dialects, the fact that they all looked the same age, and the absence in the village of the most essential everyday instruments, as though the life of these savages took place elsewhere, or as if they had succeeded in reducing life to a single act: breathing. But one question above all preyed insistently on Tremanquai’s mind: how did the Reed People resist the neighboring tribes” repeated attacks? They were few in number, they looked neither strong nor fierce, and apparently his rifle was the only weapon in the village.

  He soon discovered how. One night, a lookout warned that ferocious Masai tribesmen had surrounded the village. From his hut, together with his carer, Tremanquai watched his otherworldly saviors form a group in the center of the village facing the narrow entrance, which curiously had no door. Standing in a fragile line as though offering themselves up for sacrifice, the Reed People linked hands and began chanting an intricate tune.

  Recovering from his astonishment, Tremanquai reached for his rifle and dragged himself back over to the window with the intention of defending his hosts as best he could. Scarcely any torches were lit in the village, but the moon cast sufficient light for an experienced hunter like himself to be able to take aim. He set his sights on the gap in the stockade, hoping that if he managed to pick off a few of the Masai the others might think the village was being defended by white men and flee. To his surprise, the girl gently lowered his weapon, indicating to him silently that his intervention was unnecessary. Tremanquai bridled, but the Reed girl’s serene gaze made him think again. From his window, he watched with trepidation and bewilderment as the savage horde of Masai spilled through the entrance while his hosts carried on their discordant incantation as the spears came ever closer. The explorer steeled himself to witness the passive slaughter. Then something happened which Tremanquai described in a quavering, incredulous voice, as though he found it hard to believe the words he himself was uttering. The air split open. He could think of no better way to describe it. It was like tearing a strip of wallpaper away, he said, leaving the bare wall. Except in this case, it was not a wall but another world. A world the explorer was at first unable to see into from where he was standing, but which gave off a pale glow, lighting up the surrounding darkness. Astonished, he watched the first of the Masai tumble into the hole that had suddenly opened between them and their victims, and vanish from reality, from the world Tremanquai was in, as though they had dissolved into thin air. Seeing their brothers swallowed up by the night, the rest of the Masai fled in panic. The explorer shook his head slowly, stunned by what he had seen. Now he knew how these people managed to resist the neighboring tribes” attacks.

  He lurched out of his hut and approached the hole that his hosts had opened in the very fabric of reality with their chanting.

  As he stood facing the opening, which flapped like a curtain, he realized it was bigger than he had first thought. It rose from the ground, reaching above his head and was easily wide enough for a carriage to pass through. The edges billowed over the landscape, concealing then exposing it, like waves breaking on the shore.

  Fascinated, Tremanquai peered through it as if it were a window.

  On the other side, was a very different world from ours, a sort of plain of pinkish rock, swept by a harsh wind that blew the sand up from the surface: in the distance, blurred by the swirling dust, he was able to make out a range of sinister looking mountains.

  Disoriented and unable to see, the Masai floundered around in the other world, gibbering and running each other through with their spears as those left standing fell one by one. Tremanquai watched this macabre dance of death, transfixed, sensing their bodies caressed by a wind not of his world, like the strange dust clogging their nostrils.

  The Reed People, still lined up in the middle of the village, resumed their ghostly chanting, and the hole began to close up, slowly narrowing before Tremanquai’s astonished eyes until it disappeared completely. The explorer moved his hand stupidly across the space where the air had split open. Suddenly, it seemed as if there had never been anything between him and the choir of Reed People, which started breaking up, each wandering off to a different corner of the village, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. But for Tremanquai, the world as he had known it would never be the same. He realized he now had only two choices. One was to see the world, which he had hitherto believed to be the only world, as one of many, superimposed like the pages of a book so that all you had to do was thrust a dagger into it to open up a pathway through all of them. The other was simpler: he could lose his mind.

  That night, understandably, the explorer was unable to sleep.

  He lay on his straw mattress, eyes wide open, body tense, alert to the slightest noise coming from the darkness. The knowledge that he was surrounded by witches, against whom his rifle and his God were useless, filled him with dread. As soon as he was able to walk more than one step without feeling dizzy, he fled the Reed People’s village. It took him several weeks to reach the port of Zanzibar, where he survived as best he could until he was able to stow away on a ship bound for London. He was back ten months after he had set out, but his experiences had changed him utterly.

  It had been a disastrous voyage, and naturally enough Sebastian Murray did not believe a word of his story. He had no idea what had happened to his most experienced explorer during the months he had gone missing, but he was clearly unwilling to accept Tremanquai’s tales of Reed People and their ridiculous holes in the air, which he considered the simple ravings of a lunatic. And his suspicions were borne out as Tremanquai proved incapable of living a normal life with his ex-widow and their two daughters. His wife would doubtless have preferred to carry on taking flowers to his grave rather than live with the haunted misfit Africa had returned to her. Tremanquai veered between states of apathy and random fits of madness that swiftly turned the hitherto harmonious family home upside down. His accesses of in
sanity, which occasionally drove him to run naked through the streets or shoot at the hats of passersby from his window, were a constant menace to the otherwise peaceful neighborhood, and he was eventually carted off to the asylum at Guy’s Hospital where they simply locked him away.

  Yet he was not entirely abandoned. Unbeknownst to his father, Gilliam Murray went to see him in the hospital as often as he could. He was moved by the grief he felt at seeing one of his best men reduced to such a wretched state, but also thrilled to hear him narrate that incredible story. Murray was then barely twenty and he visited the explorer with the eagerness of a child going to see a puppet show, and Tremanquai never disappointed him. Sitting on the edge of his cot, his gaze straying towards the damp patches on the walls, he needed no encouragement to retell the tale of the Reed People, embellishing it with new and extraordinary details each time, grateful for the audience and for being given time enough to inflate his fantasy. For a while, Gilliam believed he would regain his sanity, but after four years of being locked up, Tremanquai decided to hang himself in his cell. He left a note on a grubby piece of paper. In a spidery scrawl that could just as well have been his normal writing as distorted by his inner torment, he stated ironically that he was departing this world for another, which was only one of the many that existed.

  By that time Gilliam had begun working in his father’s company. Although, despite the visits, Tremanquai’s story still seemed to him sheer madness, but perhaps for that very reason, and because becoming infected by the man’s madness was the only tribute he could pay him, without his father’s knowledge he sent two of his explorers to Africa to search for the nonexistent Reed People. Samuel Kaufman and Forrest Austin were a couple of numbskulls partial to showing off and going on drunken sprees, whose every expedition ended in disaster. But they were the only men his father would not miss, and the only two who would nonchalantly set off to Africa in search of a tribe of singing witches with the power to open doorways to other worlds in the air. They were also the only men to whom, because of their glaring ineptitude, he dared assign a mission as hopeless as that of locating the Reed People, which was really only a modest tribute to the memory of the hapless Oliver Tremanquai. And so Kaufman and Austin left England almost in secret. Neither they nor Gilliam Murray could have known that they would become the most famous explorers of their day. Following instructions, as soon as they set foot in Africa they began sending back telegrams giving news of their progress. Gilliam read these cursorily before placing them in his desk drawer with a sad smile.