“It can't be done,” he told them.
“We'll see, Sir Richard. We'll see!” Baker replied, with a smile and a slap to Burton's shoulder.
The three of them discussed the matter for an hour or so before the two would-be rescuers took their leave of the more experienced man. Burton shook his head.
“The bloody fools are going to their deaths,” he muttered.
He swallowed his drink and turned to leave only to find himself facing another member of the RGS. It was Richard Spruce, a botanist, author of The Hepaticae of the Amazon and the Andes of Peru and Ecuador; a man who knew South America extremely well.
“Ah, Spruce!” the king's agent enthused. “Just the man! Would you allow me to buy you a tipple? I have an ulterior motive, mind-I want to grill you about Brazil and Chile.”
Spruce acceded, and, for half an hour, Burton questioned him about black diamonds and the mythical Cherufe. Spruce just shrugged and declared that there were no diamonds in that part of the world and he'd never heard of any prehistoric reptilian civilisation. He then turned the subject to his ongoing work with the Eugenicists to solve the great Irish famine, and talked with such obsessive zeal that Burton began to feel uncomfortable, sensing that he was in the presence of a fanatic.
“The seeds my fellows and I have developed are already growing!” Spruce raved. “You should see them! They've sprouted into massive plants! Huge, Burton, huge! And they're pollinating far earlier than we'd anticipated!”
He banged a fist onto the bar, causing glasses to rattle along its length.
“It's just the beginning! Soon we'll be cultivating plants that'll perform specific functions in society in much the same way as machines do! Imagine a factory that was actually a plant! Imagine if we could grow our industrial infrastructure from seeds!”
Burton, whose encounters with Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, and, more recently, with Sir Charles Babbage, had made him extremely wary of such propositions, gave an excuse and departed in haste. There was, he reflected, something quite unnerving about Richard Spruce.
T he next morning, Algernon Swinburne called at 14 Montagu Place and was ushered through the house by Mrs. Angell, into the yard, and to the garage beyond. Inside, he found Sir Richard Francis Burton, who was applying oil to his rotorchair's many moving parts.
“I say! What happened to your beard?” the diminutive poet enquired.
“Vanity happened,” Burton admitted. “I got tired of seeing that forked bird's nest in the mirror.”
“You look younger, but no less barbaric. Are you feeling better? You're still skinny and yellowish.”
“I'm through the worst of it, Algy, and feeling stronger by the day. What have you been up to? Here, hold this.”
“What is it?”
“The flywheel. I want to lubricate the bearings.”
“Ah.” Swinburne sighed. “I know a rather fetching young doxy who does something similar. You'd like her.”
Burton clicked his tongue disapprovingly and said: “Then my question is answered. It's quite apparent what you've been up to.”
The poet adopted a wounded expression and objected: “I've been writing, too! As a matter of fact, my latest efforts have caused quite a stir.”
“So I read. The Empire is calling you a genius.”
“Yes, but the Times is calling me a deviant.”
“It's hardly surprising. Your poetry is somewhat-shall we say- florid? Here, give me that back.”
Swinburne handed over the flywheel and watched as his friend fitted it into its housing.
“ Filthy was the word the Times used. Are you preparing it for a flight or just tinkering?”
“I'm flying out to Hampshire this afternoon.”
“What's there?”
“Tichborne House.”
“What! What!” Swinburne cried, twitching and jerking like a maniac. “Surely you haven't got yourself mixed up in that business!”
Burton picked up a cloth and wiped oil from his hands.
“I'm afraid so. There's a remote possibility that the Francois Garnier Collection is involved, too.”
“Eh? The Fra-What? How? You mean Brunel-? What?”
“Really, Algy, you're the most incomprehensible poet I've ever met! But to answer the question you haven't managed to ask: no, I don't think the Steam Man has anything to do with the Tichborne case. However, I do suspect that whoever stole the diamonds from right under his mechanical nose might have some connection with the returning heir.”
“Ah ha! So there's a safe cracker among the Tichborne clan!”
“It's not impossible. All I know thus far is-”
Burton went on to recount the legends concerning the three Eyes of Naga. He then told the history of the Tichborne family.
“So you see,” he concluded, “I'm working on the premise that perhaps Sir Henry found the South American Eye-even though Henry Arundell pooh-poohs the suggestion-and that someone in or connected in some way with the family might now have possession of the Choir Stones, too.”
“Which just leaves the African diamond,” Swinburne commented.
“Indeed.”
“Which strikes me as peculiar.”
“Peculiar?”
“It gave rise to the Nile.”
“According to myth, yes. What are you getting at?”
“Just that you and Speke went hunting for the source of that river, then Henry Stanley did, and now his expedition has disappeared.”
Burton frowned. “His expedition has disappeared because he was stupid enough to fly over the region in these-” He rapped his knuckles against the side of his rotorchair. “Not a single flying machine that's entered the region has ever come out again. He knew that, but still he flew.”
“Yes, but that's not what I meant.”
“What, then?”
“Come into the house with me. Have a cigar. I want you to tell me a story.”
The king's agent considered his friend for a moment, then shrugged, nodded, put away his tools, and led Swinburne from the garage.
Minutes later, they were relaxing in the study.
Burton took a sip of port and said: “What do you want to know?”
“About your expedition with Speke. If I remember rightly, you reached Lake Tanganyika by March of ’58. What happened next?”
“Illness, mainly. We'd heard there was a port town named Ujiji on the eastern shore of the lake where we could establish a base camp, but when we got there we found that it consisted of nothing but a few decrepit beehive-shaped huts and a pitiful market-”
Captain Richard Francis Burton was blind.
Lieutenant John Hanning Speke's face had become paralysed down one side.
Both men were too weak to walk more than a few paces.
For two weeks, they rested in a half-derelict domed hut and ate the boiled rice brought to them by their guide, Sidi Bombay. They lay limply on their cots, crushed by the oppressive heat, and suffered and slept and moaned and vomited and lapsed in and out of consciousness.
“Mary, mother of God, is it worth it, Dick?” Speke whispered.
“It has to be. We're almost there, I'm sure of it. You heard what Bombay told me this morning.”
“No, I didn't. I was out of my mind with fever.”
“The locals claim a river flows northward out of the lake. If we can get a dhow onto her, I'm certain we'll find ourselves floating down the Nile, straight past the warring tribes, and all the way to Cairo.”
Burton clung on to that conviction and used it to slowly haul himself out of the pit of ill health. Infuriatingly, Speke, who was far less driven than his commanding officer, nevertheless made a much speedier recovery, and was soon strolling around during the short spells of cool morning and evening air, bathing in the lake, and shopping in the little market, where he would appear with a native holding an umbrella over him, with strings of trading beads slung over his arm, and with smoked-glass spectacles protecting his eyes.