The sun rose and set and rose and set, and they lost count of the days. Mosquitoes bit every inch of their exposed skin. Their clothes fell to pieces and had to be replaced with cotton robes, donated by villagers. They wound rough cloth around their now bootless feet and walked with staffs, looking like a couple of heavily bearded skeletons, burned almost black, too exhausted to communicate, or even to think.
One of their guides, who'd been scouting ahead, returned and spoke quietly to his companions. He approached Burton and Speke and jabbed his finger first at one, then at the other, then toward a ridge that lay just to the south of the river, a couple of miles to the west.
He rejoined the other Chwezi and, as a man, they disappeared into the undergrowth.
Suddenly, the Britishers were alone.
“Well then,” Speke said, shading his one functioning eye and peering at the nearby high land. “I suppose we're meant to go up there.”
They set off through sucking mud and shouldered past stiff bullrushes until the terrain sloped upward, became firmer underfoot, and they climbed to the top of the ridge. On the other side of it, the Nile flowed into another vast lake, and on the near shore, just half a mile away, an air vessel was hovering about forty feet from the ground. It was a gargantuan cigar-shaped balloon with a long cabin affixed beneath it and pylons, with rotor wings at their ends, extending out horizontally from its sides. The ship, which must have been close to a thousand feet in length, was painted with a Union Jack and bore on its side the name HMA Dauntless.
A large camp of Rowtie tents lay in the shadow of the vessel.
Burton suddenly spoke: “John, I have to make a request of you.”
“What is it?”
“Tell them nothing. Not now, and not when we return to London. Don't let on anything of what we've experienced here. The future may depend on it.”
“Dick, I-”
“I need your word on it.”
“Very well. You have it.”
Burton took Speke's hand and shook it.
They stumbled down toward the camp and had crossed half the distance when they were spotted. A shout went up, men started running toward them, came close, and gathered around. One of them stepped forward.
“By James!” he exclaimed. “Is that you, Sir Richard?”
Burton's vision was swimming. The man in front of him blurred in and out of focus. Slowly, recognition dawned.
“Hello,” the king's agent whispered. “I'm very happy to see that you've recovered from your injuries, Captain Lawless.”
Everything toppled over and darkness rushed in.
CHAPTER 13
“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”
While Sir Richard Francis Burton was in Africa, electricity came to London. Now, in early 1864, thick cables were clinging to the walls of the city's buildings, looping and drooping over its streets, dripping in the fog, and quietly sizzling as they conveyed energy from Battersea Power Station across the nation's capital.
Street lamps blazed. House and office windows blazed. Shop fronts blazed. The permanent murk effortlessly swallowed the light and reduced it to smudged globes, which hung in the impenetrable atmosphere like exotic fruits.
In the gloomy gullies between, pedestrians struggled through an unyielding tangle of almost immobile vehicles. The legs of steam-driven insects were caught in the spokes of wheels, panicky horses were jammed against chugging machinery, crankshafts were hammering against wood and metal and flesh.
Animalistic howls and screams and curses sounded from amid the mess.
And to this, Burton had returned aboard His Majesty's Airship Dauntless.
The vessel was the first of her type, the result of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's solving of the gas-filled dirigible problem. Design faults had been corrected and unstable flammable gasses replaced. The Dauntlesswas a triumph.
A slow but long-range vessel, she was propelled by electric engines, which, lacking springs, should have been impervious to the deleterious influence that had so far prevented any machine from piercing Africa's heart.
Unfortunately, this had proved not to be the case.
Following the Nile upstream, the ship had reached the northern outskirts of the Lake Regions. Her engines had then failed. However, the wind was behind her, so Captain Lawless allowed the vessel to be borne along, powerless, until the air current changed direction, at which point he'd ordered her landing on the shore of a great lake.
The crew set up camp.
There were two passengers on board: John Petherick and Samuel Baker, both experienced explorers from the Royal Geographical Society. They prepared an expedition, intending to head south to search for Burton. The day prior to their planned departure, he and Speke had come stumbling into the camp.
Lawless and his engineers had taken it for granted that the engines were still dysfunctional. Burton, though, knew that the Naga were no longer present in the black diamonds, so their influence should have vanished.
He was correct. The engines functioned perfectly. The Dauntlessflew home and landed at an airfield some miles to the southeast of London. Damien Burke and Gregory Hare, Palmerston's odd-job men, were there to greet it. They took possession of the fourteen black diamonds-the seven fragments of the Cambodian Eye and the seven of the African.
“All the Naga stones are in British hands now, Captain Burton,” Burke said. “You've done excellent work for the Empire, isn't that so, Mr. Hare?”
“It most certainly is, Mr. Burke!” Hare agreed.
John Speke was taken into custody.
“He's a traitor,” Burke observed. “The irony of it is that he'll no doubt be incarcerated in our chambers beneath the Tower of London, which is where the Eyes will go, too. One of the most disreputable men in the country held in the same place as what might well be our most precious resource. Such is the way of things.”
Burton was taken to Penfold Private Sanatorium in London's St. John's Wood, where, for three weeks, the Sisterhood of Noble Benevolence fussed over him.
As his strength increased, so too did his anxiety. He had a terrible decision to make. By telling Palmerston about the future and revealing to him his fate, he might persuade him to abandon plans to use the Eyes of Naga as a means for mediumistic espionage against Prussia; might convince him that sending troops to Africa would lead to disaster. But if he succeeded in this, it would mean no reinforcements for the Daughters of Al-Manat. Bertie Wells had told him that the female guerrilla fighters survived at least into the 1870s. In changing history, Burton would almost certainly condemn Isabel Arundell, Isabella Mayson, and Sadhvi Raghavendra to much earlier deaths.
Obviously, the future he'd visited had occurred because he'd favoured Al-Manat's survival over the 130-year-old Palmerston's direct order. As much as he loved Isabel, he had no idea why he might have done such a thing, for, in anyone's estimation, could three lives-even thosethree-be worth the savagery and destruction of the Great War?
He wrote much about this in his personal journal, examining the problem from every angle he could think of, but though he produced pages and pages of cramped handwriting, he could find no answer.
The solution finally came with a visit from Palmerston himself.
Two weeks into his treatment, Burton was sitting up in bed reading a newspaper when the door opened and the prime minister stepped in, announcing: “I'd have come earlier. You know how it is. Affairs of state. Complex times, Captain Burton. Complex times.”
He took off his hat and overcoat-revealing a Mandarin-collared black suit and pale blue cravat-and placed them on a chair. He didn't remove his calfskin gloves.
Standing at the end of the patient's bed, he said, “You look bloody awful. Your hair is white!”