Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (28 page)

“Excuse my language, ladies,” Trounce shouted, “but bloody hell!”

“Can the tent stand it?” asked Krishnamurthy. “I think the ocean is being emptied on top of us!”

Honesty pulled the entrance flap aside and peered out. “Can't see a thing!” he called. “Solid water.”

“There'll be two hours of this,” Burton announced, “so if Sadhvi and Isabella don't mind, I propose a brandy and a smoke.”

“I don't mind at all,” Isabella said.

“Nor I,” added Sadhvi. “In fact, I'll take a tipple myself.”

A reedy sigh of frustration came from within Herbert Spencer's many robes and scarves.

Pox, perched as usual on the clockwork philosopher's head, gave a loud musical whistle, then squawked, “Flubberty jibbets!”

“Hurrah!” Krishnamurthy cheered. “That's a new one!”

“The nonsensical insults are definitely the most entertaining,” Isabella agreed.

“By Jove!” Trounce blurted. “That reminds me. I say, Richard, those horrible plant things we saw at Mzizima—”

“What about them?” Burton asked.

“I was wondering, what with Eugenicist creations, such as Pox, here—”

“Pig-snuggler!” Pox sang.

“—always displaying a disadvantage in proportion to whatever talent the scientists have bred into them—”

“Yes?”

“Well, what might be the drawback to those vegetable vehicles, do you think?”

“That's a good question, William, and one I can't answer!”

Burton served brandies to them all, including the women, and the men lit their various cigars and pipes, with many a nervous glance at the tent roof, which was billowing violently under the onslaught of rain.

Sister Raghavendra distributed small vials of a clear liquid that she insisted they all add to their drinks. “It's a special recipe we use in the Sisterhood of Noble Benevolence to deal with fevers,” she said. “Don't worry, it's quite tasteless.”

“What's in it?” Honesty asked.

“A mix of quinine and various herbs,” she answered. “It won't make you immune, but it will, at least, make the attacks shorter and less damaging.”

The tent flap suddenly flew open and a drenched imp hopped in.

“Bounders!” it shrieked. “Cads! Fiends! Traitorous hounds! Taking a drink without me! Without
me
! Aaaiiii!”

The thing bounded to the table and, with wildly rolling eyes, snatched up the brandy bottle and took an extravagant swig from it. Banging the bottle back down, it wiped its mouth on its sleeve, uttered a satisfied sigh, belched, then keeled over like a toppled tree and landed flat on its back.

“Great heavens! Is that Algernon?” Herbert Spencer tooted.

Sister Raghavendra bent beside the sodden and bedraggled figure and put a hand to its forehead. “It is,” she said. “And despite that display, he doesn't appear to be feverish at all.”

Burton stepped over, lifted his assistant up, and carried him to a cot at the side of the tent. “Algy tends to operate, as a matter of course, at a level that most people would consider feverish,” he said. “I think, on this occasion, he has simply overestimated his own strength.”

“Indeed so,” the nurse agreed. “Any man would require a week to recover from blood loss like Algernon experienced.”

“In which case, Algy will probably need just a couple more days, for he is most certainly not
any
man!”

They dried their friend as best they could, made him comfortable, and let him sleep.

The rain eventually stopped as quickly as it had started, and the silence of another African night settled over them. They sat quietly, comfortable in each others' company, too exhausted for conversation.

A hyena cackled in the distance.

A shout came from the village.

One drumbeat sounded.

Then another.

All of a sudden, a deep, loud, rhythmic pulsation filled the air as many drums were pounded. A boy's voice hailed them from outside. Burton stepped out of the tent and a child, about ten years old, grinned up at him.

“O
Murungwana Sana
,” he said, “the fire is lit and the meat is cooking and the women are restless and want to dance. The men desire news of the far off lands of the
Muzungu
—the white man. Wouldst thou attend us?”

Burton gave a bow. “We shall come with thee now.”

So it was that the expedition's first day ended with a feast and a party, attended by all but the philosopher Herbert Spencer and the poet Algernon Swinburne.

In the tent, the brass man placed a stool beside the cot, sat on it, and leaned forward, bracing himself with his staff. Deep in the shadow of his
keffiyeh
, his metal face seemed to gaze unwaveringly at Burton's assistant.

And Swinburne dreamt of war.

“To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.”

–T
ACITUS

W
arm rain hammered against Burton's tin helmet and poured from its brim down the back of his greatcoat. An explosion momentarily deafened him, knocked him to his hands and knees, and showered him with clods of mud and lumps of bloody flesh. The black water at the bottom of the flooded trench immediately sucked at his limbs, as if the earth were greedy for yet another corpse. A head floated to the surface. Half of its face was missing. He recoiled in shock, splashing back to his feet, and ducked as another pea burst just yards away. Men and women shrieked in agony, cried out for their mothers, spat the same profanity over and over and over.

A seed thudded into a soldier's face. Blood sprayed. His helmet went spinning. He slumped as if his bones had suddenly vanished, and slid into the mire.

Burton stumbled on, sloshing forward, peering at the troops who were lining the right side of the trench and firing their rifles over its lip. He eventually saw the man he was searching for—a big Askari with a patch covering his right eye. He climbed up beside him and shouted into his ear: “Are you Private Usaama?”

“What?”

“I'm looking for Private Usaama. I was told he knows Wells.”

“I'm him. What wells?”

“Herbert Wells. The correspondent. I think he's with your company.”

The man's answer was lost as a squadron of hornets swept overhead, flying low, buzzing furiously, their oval bodies painted with the Union Jack, their guns crackling.

“What did you say?” Burton hollered.

“I said if he hasn't bought it he'll be in the forward listening post. Keep on down the trench until you come to an opening on your right. It's there.”

They both ducked as seeds howled past them and embedded themselves in the opposite wall of the trench. Rain-loosened dirt collapsed inward.

Burton jumped back down into the water and moved along, picking his way past the dead and the mutilated, whispering a Sufi meditation to keep himself sane.

A female Askari, who was propped against a pile of saturated sandbags, grabbed at his sleeve and said in a pleading tone: “I've lost my boot. I've lost my boot. I've lost my boot.”

He looked down and saw that the woman's left leg was a ragged mess beneath the knee. The foot was missing.

“I've lost my boot. I've lost my boot.”

He nodded helplessly and yanked his arm from her grasp.

Another explosion. More terrible screams.

The passage to the listening post, seen dimly through the downpour, was now just a few steps away. He waded toward it, the smell of cordite and rotting flesh and overflowing latrines thick in his nostrils.

Sirens wailed through the staccato gunfire and thumping detonations: “Ulla! Ulla! Ulla!”

He entered the narrow passage and pushed through the water to its end, which widened into a small square pit. Its sides were shored up with wood, its upper edges protected by sandbags. To his right, a mechanical contrivance rested on a table beneath a canvas hood. Nearby, a corpse lay half-submerged, its eyes gazing sightlessly at the sky. Straight ahead, a short and plump man was standing on a box and peering northward through a periscope. He had a bugle slung over his shoulder and his tin helmet was badly dented on one side.

“Bertie?”

The man turned. The left side of his face was badly disfigured by a burn scar. He was unshaven and smeared with dirt.

“Lieutenant Wells, if you don't mind,” he shouted. “Who the devil are you?”

“It's me. Burton.”

Wells squinted through the rain, then gave a sudden whoop of joy and jumped from the box. He splashed over to Burton and gripped him by the hand.

“It's true! It's true!” he yelled, his voice pitched even higher than usual. “By gum, Burton, it's been two years! I thought I'd imagined you! But look at you! Alive! In the flesh! The chronic argonaut himself!” Wells suddenly stepped back. “What happened to you? You look like a skeleton!”

“War has been happening to me, Bertie, and to you too, I see.”

They both jerked down as something whistled overhead and exploded in the trenches behind them.

“This is the ugliest it's ever been,” Wells shouted. “It's attrition warfare now. The Hun has abandoned all strategy but that of battering us into oblivion. Grab a periscope and join me. Ha! Just like when we first met! What happened to you after the Battle of the Bees?”

“The what?”

“Tanga, man!”

Burton took one of the viewing devices from the table and climbed onto the box beside Wells.

“I fell in with a group of guerrilla fighters. We spent eighteen months or so raiding Hun outposts around Kilimanjaro before I suffered a fever and severe leg ulcerations that had me laid up in a field hospital for seven weeks. While I was there, the guerrillas were killed by A-Spores. During my final week in the hospital, I heard from—” They both crouched as three explosions tore up the battlefield nearby. “—From another patient that you were heading to Dut'humi, for the attack on the Tanganyika Railway, so I hooked up with a company that was heading this way.”

“I can't tell you how good it is to see you again!” Wells exclaimed. “By heaven, Richard, your inexplicable presence is the one spark of magic in this endlessly turgid conflict! Is your memory restored? Do you know why you're here?”

Burton peered through the periscope. He saw coils of barbed wire forming a barrier across the landscape ahead. Beyond it there were German trenches, and behind them, the terrain rose to a ridge, thick with green trees. The Tanganyika railway line, he'd learned, was on the other side of that low range.

“I remember a few more things—mainly that there's something I have to do. The trouble is, I don't know what!”

From over to their left, a machine gun started to chatter. Four more explosions sounded in quick succession and lumps of mud rained down on them. Someone screeched, coughed, and died.

“Forgive the mundanity,” Wells said, “but I don't suppose you've got biscuits or anything? I haven't eaten since yesterday!”

“Nothing,” Burton replied. “Bertie, the forest—”

“What? Speak up!”

“The trees on the ridge. There's something wrong with them.”

“I've noticed. A verdant forest—and one that wasn't there two days ago!”

“What? You mean the trees grew to maturity in just forty-eight hours?”

“They did. Eugenicist mischief, obviously.”

“They aren't even native to Africa.
Acer pseudoplatanus
. The sycamore maple. It's a European species.”

“For a man whose memory is shot through you know far too much Latin. Down!”

They ducked and hugged the dirt wall as a pea thumped into the mud nearby and detonated.

Wells said something. Burton shook his head. He couldn't hear. His ears had filled with jangling bells. The war correspondent leaned closer and shouted: “The Hun have recently solved the problem with growing yellow pea artillery. The shrapnel from these projectiles is poisonous. If you're hit, pull the fragments out of your wound as fast as you can.”

An enormously long, thin leg swung over the listening post as a harvestman stepped across it. Burton looked up at the underside of its small oval-shaped body and saw a trumpet-mouthed weapon swivelling back and forth. He straightened, wiped the rain from his eyes, and lifted the scope. A long line of the mechanised spiders was crossing the forward trenches and approaching the barbed-wire barrier. There were at least twenty vehicles. Their weapons began to blast out long jets of flame.

All of a sudden the downpour stopped, and in the absence of its pounding susurration, the loud clatter of the vehicles' steam engines and the roar of their flamethrowers sounded oddly isolated.

A strong warm breeze gusted across the battlefield.

Burton was shaken by a sense of uneasiness.

Wells obviously felt it too. “Now what?” he muttered.

A shell, fired from the German trenches, hit one of the harvestmen. “Ulla!” it screamed, and collapsed to the ground. Its driver spilled from the saddle, started to run, and was shredded by gunfire.

“Something's happening up on the ridge,” Wells said.

Burton turned his attention back to the distant forest. He frowned and muttered, “Is there something wrong with my sense of perspective?”

“No,” Wells answered. “Those trees are gigantic.”

They were also thrashing about in the strengthening wind.

“This doesn't feel at all natural,” Burton said.

“You're right. I think the Hun weathermen are at work. We'd better stand ready to report to HQ.”

“HQ? Are you Army now, Bertie?”

“Aren't you? You're in uniform.”

“My other clothes rotted off my back—”

Another pea burst nearby. A lump of it clanged off Burton's helmet.

“—and I was given these at the field hospital. No one has officially drummed me into service. I think they just assume I'm a soldier.”

“Such is our state of disorganisation,” Wells responded. “The fact is, Richard, everyone is a soldier now. That's how desperate things have become. There's no such thing as a British civilian in the entire world. And right now, I'm assigning you as my Number Two. The previous, Private Michaels—” Wells gestured toward the half-submerged corpse Burton had barely registered earlier, “—poked his head over the sandbags, the silly sod, and got hit by a sniper. Be sure you don't do the same. Get over to the wireless.”

Burton glanced back at the apparatus on the table. “Wireless? I—er—I don't know how to use it.”

“Two years here and you still can't operate a bloody radio?”

“I've been—”

He was interrupted by whistles sounding all along the frontline trench.

“This is it!” Wells exclaimed. “The lads are going over!”

To the left and right of the listening post, Askari soldiers—with some white faces standing out among them—clambered from the waterlogged trenches and began to move across the narrow strip of no-man's-land in the wake of the advancing harvestmen. They were crouching low and holding bayoneted rifles. Seeds from the opposing trenches sizzled through the air. Men's heads were jerked backward; their limbs were torn away; their stomachs and chests were rent open; they went down, and when they went down, others, moving up from behind, replaced them. Peas arced out of the sky and slapped into the mud among them. They exploded, ripping men apart and sending the pieces flying into the air. Still the British troops pressed on.

“Bismillah!” Burton whispered as the carnage raged around him.

“Look!” Wells yelled. He pointed up at the ridge. “What the hell is that?”

Burton adjusted his viewer and observed through its lens a thick green mass boiling up from the trees. Borne on the wind, it came rolling down the slope and passed high above the German trenches. As it approached, he saw that it was comprised of spinning sycamore seeds, and when one of them hit the leg of a harvestman, he realised they were of an enormous size—at least twelve feet across. The seed didn't merely hit the spider's leg, either—its wings sliced right through it; they were as solid and sharp as scimitars. He watched horrified as thousands upon thousands of the whirling seeds impacted against the lofty battle machines, shearing through the long thin legs, chopping into the oval bodies, decapitating the drivers. As the harvestmen buckled under the onslaught, the seeds spun on toward the advancing troops.

“Take cover!” Wells bellowed.

Burton and the war correspondent dropped to their knees in filthy water and hugged the base of the observation pit's forward wall. Eight sycamore seeds whisked through the air above them and thudded into the back of the excavation. A ninth sliced Private Michaels' corpse clean in half. A green cloud hurtled overhead and mowed into the frontline trenches.

Its shadow passed. The wind stopped. Burton looked up at the sky. The rainclouds were now ragged tatters, fast disappearing, and the blistering sun shone between them down onto a scene of such slaughter that, when Burton stood, climbed back onto the box, and looked through his periscope, he thought he might lose his mind with the horror of what he saw. He squeezed his eyes shut. Ghastly moans and whimpers and shrieks of agony filled his ears. He clapped his palms over them. The stench of fresh blood invaded his nostrils.

He collapsed backward and fell full length into the trench water. It closed over him and he wanted to stay there, but hands clutched at his clothing and hauled him out.

“Run!” Wells cried out, his voice pitched even higher than usual. “The Germans are coming!”

Burton staggered to his feet. His soaked trousers clung to his legs; filthy liquid streamed from his jacket and shirt.

“Move! Move!” Wells shouted. He grabbed Burton and pushed him toward the connecting passage. As they splashed through it, the little war correspondent lifted his bugle to his lips and sounded the retreat. With the urgent trumpeting in his ears, Burton blundered along and passed into the forward trench. It looked as if hell itself had bubbled up out of the mud. The sycamore seeds were everywhere, their blades embedded in sandbags, in the earth, and in soldiers. The troops had been diced like meat on a butcher's slab; body parts were floating in rivers of blood; and in the midst of the carnage, limbless men and women lay twitching helplessly, their dying eyes wide with terror and shock.