“Hobgoblins,” he whispered. “Great crowds of them spilling from the temple. Heaven help me, I have them inside my soul! They are setting loose their dragons!”
His face was suddenly wrenched out of shape by a ferocious cramp, his eyes became glassy, and he began to bark like a dog. He was almost entirely unrecognisable, and Sidi Bombay backed away hastily, wearing an expression of superstitious dread.
“It is kichyomachyoma,” he said. “He attack by bad spirits! He die!”
Speke screamed. He screamed ceaselessly for an entire day-but he didn't die.
Eventually he quieted, lapsed in and out of consciousness, and finally slept.
Another week slipped by.
John Speke was sitting up, sipping at a cup of tea, when Burton entered the tent.
“How are you feeling, John?”
“Better, Dick. I think we'll be able to move on soon. Maybe in a couple of days.”
“When you're ready, but not before.”
Speke put down his cup and looked Burton squarely in the eyes. “You shouldn't have said it.”
Burton frowned, puzzled. “Said what?”
“At Berbera. When we were attacked. You said: ‘Don't step back or they'll think we're retiring.’ I'm not a coward.”
“A coward? What are you talking about? Berbera was three years ago!”
“You thought I was retreating in fear.”
Burton's eyebrows rose. He was amazed, shocked. “I-what? I didn't-”
“You accused me.”
“John! You have it all wrong! I did no such thing! I have never, not for a single moment, considered you anything other than courageous in the face of danger!”
Speke shook his head. “I know what you think.”
“John-” Burton began, but Speke interrupted: “I'll rest now.”
He lay down and turned his face away. Burton stood looking at him, then quietly left the tent.
After a further three days, the safari got moving again, with the lieutenant being carried on a stretcher. The long line of men-the two explorers and their porters-wound like a snake through the undulating landscape. They seemed to make no progress, seeing only sun-baked grass for mile after mile after mile.
In fact, they were wending their way up onto higher ground, and the gradual change of air did Burton and Speke a world of good, driving the fevers, diseases, pains, and infections from their ravaged bodies, though they continued to suffer from terrible headaches.
Christmas Day came and went. By this time, they were maintaining a polite but cold relationship. Speke's excursion to the great lake was never spoken of.
Desertions and disobedience among the porters halted them for another fortnight. Burton warned the men that they'd forfeit their pay if they didn't pick up their packs and start moving. They refused. He rounded up the troublemakers and dismissed them, hiring nine new men from a passing caravan.
They moved on.
Walking, walking, walking! Would it never end?
It did.
On the 2nd of February, 1859, they climbed to the top of a hill and saw the blue sea scintillating in the far distance.
They threw their caps into the air and cheered.
“Hip, hip, hurrah!” John Speke hollered. “Let's get ourselves off this filthy damned continent, and I pray to God that my blasted headache stays behind!”
“We reached Zanzibar and from there sailed to Aden, where I decided to lay up awhile to recover my strength. John, meanwhile, jumped onto the first available Europe-bound ship. He promised to await my arrival in London, so we could report our findings to the Royal Geographical Society together. In any event, he went there alone and claimed sole credit for the discovery of the source of the Nile.”
Burton flicked his cigar stub into the hearth.
“It was a terrible betrayal,” Swinburne said.
“The worst. I was his commanding officer. It was my expedition. His evidence was so incompetent that he made an embarrassment of the entire endeavour.”
A short silence settled over the two men.
Burton ran the tip of his right index finger along the scar on his cheek, as if reminded of that old, mind-numbing pain.
“Of course,” he continued, “in going to the RGS, he wasn't acting entirely of his own volition. He'd been mesmerised during the voyage home by the leader of the Rakes, Laurence Oliphant.”
He stood, crossed to the window, and looked down at the traffic that clanked and steamed and rolled and rumbled along Montagu Place. Almost inaudibly, he said: “You think John betrayed me even before we left Africa, don't you? At Tanganyika.”
“Yes, I'm sorry, Richard, but it all adds up. I think Speke learned from Sheikh Hamed that the Mountains of the Moon were nowhere near, but far away to the northeast; that the tribes to the north of Ujiji were hostile; and that the Rusizi flows into, not out of, the lake. He then set about convincing you of the exact opposite, so that you'd waste time and resources and be forced to return to Zanzibar.”
Burton sighed. “A lust for glory. He wanted to be John Hanning Speke, the man who discovered the source of the Nile. ”
“It would seem so, and though his map didn't fool you-you're too good a geographer to be taken in by absurdly misplaced mountains-the rest of it worked. Your attempts to see the Rusizi precluded any further explorations.”
The king's agent clenched his fists and leaned with his knuckles against the window frame and his forehead touching the glass.
“So,” the poet continued, “you began the long journey back eastward and when you reached Kazeh, Speke dosed you up with Saltzmann's Tincture until you couldn't think straight. He then used rumours of a lake to justify his independent excursion north to where Hamed had told him the Mountains of the Moon were located. Whether he found them or not, something happened in that region that made the Nile question irrelevant to him.”
Burton pushed himself back upright, turned, frowned, and said: “You're referring to his subsequent hallucinations?”
Swinburne nodded. “You said he ranted and raved about dragons dragging him away from something. Dragons, Richard-mythical reptiles, just like the Shayturay, the African Naga. Is that a coincidence, do you think?”
“And the Naga are associated with a fabled black diamond that fell from the sky and gave rise to the Nile,” Burton whispered. “Bloody hell, Algy, did he see the African stone?”
“It would certainly account for his subsequent actions.”
Burton whistled and ran his fingers through his hair. He paced over to the fireplace, took another cigar from the box on the mantelpiece, and immediately forgot it, holding it unlit while he gazed thoughtfully at Swinburne.
“When Babbage said the Technologists had become aware of the black diamonds, I wondered how. Now we know: Speke told Oliphant and Oliphant told the Technologists.”
“Yes, and that's when the whole game changed. Let me ask you a question: why did Speke receive Murchison's backing for a second expedition? He's an inept geographer, a terrible public speaker, a bad writer, and has proven himself thoroughly unreliable. Yet he was chosen over you. Why?”
Burton's jaw dropped. The cigar fell from his fingers.
“My God,” he whispered. “My God. At last it's making sense. The Rakes and Technologists must have offered to fund him!”
“What still remains unclear is what actually happened during that second expedition. He took with him a young soldier named James Augustus Grant-I don't know if he was a Technologist or a Rake, but one or the other, I should think-and they used swans to fly to Kazeh. Speke failed to properly guard the birds and lions killed them. That was the first of a string of disasters that forced him to return to Zanzibar. When he arrived there, Grant was no longer with him. Speke claimed that his colleague had died of fever and was buried near the shore of the lake.”
Burton dropped back into his armchair and said: “He also reaffirmed that he'd discovered the source of the Nile-but, again, his evidence was pathetically flawed.”
Swinburne grunted his agreement. “He was scheduled to give a fuller account at the Bath Assembly Rooms last year. Instead, knowing that you were going to expose the scale of his ineptitude, he shot himself in the head. Oliphant abducted him from the hospital, and the Technologists replaced the damaged half of his brain with a clockwork mechanism.”