Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (30 page)

“Yes,” Burton murmured. “There's some sort of inscription.”

Wells reached into his pocket and pulled out a dagger. “Here, use this.”

Burton took it and used the blade to scrape the moss away. Words were revealed. They read:

Thomas Manfred Honesty
1816-1863
Lost His Life While
Liberating the Enslaved.
R.I.P.

On the morning the expedition departed Nzasa, having stayed there for a single night, Sir Richard Francis Burton sent Pox to Isabel to report his position. When the parakeet returned, it squawked: “Message from Isabel Arundell. We are still harassing the stinky-mouthed enemy. I have so far lost eighteen of my women to them. They are preparing a moronic party to follow you. We will try to hold them back. Grubby pants. Message ends.”

With the threat of pursuit, Burton tried to establish a greater sense of urgency among his porters, but already his safari was assailed by problems. Upon packing to leave the village, it was discovered that two boxes of equipment were missing and three of the Wasawahili had deserted; one of the mules appeared to be dying; and water had found its way into three sacks of flour, rendering them unusable.

The explorer, who from previous experience had resigned himself to such misfortunes, put a bullet through the mule's head, discarded the flour, redistributed the loads, and got his people moving.

The second day saw them trek from Nzasa to Tumba Ihere. The route led over gently undulating grasslands and through miry valleys, past a bone-strewn burial ground where witches and other practitioners of
ucháwi
—black magic—had been burned at the stake, and across a fast-flowing stream where they lost another mule after it slipped and broke a leg.

They rested for an hour.

Swinburne abandoned his stretcher.

“I'm fine and dandy! In the pink! Fit as a fiddle!” he announced. “How far to the next village?”

“At least four hours' march,” Burton replied. “You can't possibly be in full bloom. You had half your blood sucked out a couple of days ago.”

“Pah! I'm perfectly all right. Confound it! I was hoping the village would be closer.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to try that
pombe
African beer you once told me about!”

They started moving again, crossing a plain that seethed with wildlife, and for half an hour, Swinburne, who was now riding a mule while holding an umbrella over his head, amused himself by shouting the names of every species he spotted: “Zebra! Koodoo! Giraffe! Guinea-fowl! Lion! Quail! Four-legged thingummy!”

He then fell off his mount, having fainted.

They put him back onto the stretcher.

After wrestling their way through a long stretch of sticky red soil and onto firmer, hilly ground, they were met by men from the village of Kiranga-Ranga. These Wazamaro warriors each bore three long puckered scars extending across both cheeks from their earlobes to the corners of their mouths. Their hair was plastered down with ochre-coloured mud and twisted into a double row of knobs that circled their heads. They wore loincloths of unbleached cotton and had strings of beads looped around their necks, which were also fitted with tightly beaded bands, known as
mgoweko
collars. A solid ring of brass circled their wrists. They carried muskets, spears, bows with poisoned arrows, and long knives.

They were not friendly.

Tribute was demanded, haggled over, and finally paid in the form of two
doti
of cloth and some much-prized
sami-sami
beads.

The safari continued, meandering past fertile fields of rice, maize, and manioc before coming up against a snarled and riotous jungle, which they were still hacking through when the rains started. They eventually stumbled out of it, soaked to the skin and covered with ticks, and found themselves amid fetid vegetation from which misshapen dwarf mango trees grew, and in this unlikely spot—Tumba Ihere—they were forced to establish their camp.

That evening, in the main Rowtie, Isabella Mayson announced that she was feeling out of sorts. By the morning she was trembling with ague and hallucinating that ravenous birds were trying to peck out her eyes. Swinburne gave up his stretcher for her.

“I have developed a horror of the horizontal!” he declared.

“Sit on your mule,” Burton instructed, “and don't overexert yourself.”

The explorer ordered the commencement of the next march.

“Kwecha! Kwecha!” Saíd bin Sálim and his Askaris yelled. “Pakia! Hopa! Hopa!” Collect! Pack! Set out! Safari! A journey! A journey today!

So began the third day of their hike.

Pox made the daily flight eastward and back again. The report was not good. A ship had delivered two thousand Prussian reinforcements to Mzizima. The Daughters of Al-Manat had divided into two groups of ninety women, one continuing to wage a guerrilla campaign against the burgeoning town, the other harassing a contingent of men that had set off in pursuit of Burton's expedition.

“We have to move faster,” the king's agent told Saíd.

“I will do all I can, Mr. Burton,” the
ras kafilah
promised in his habitually polite manner, “and the rest is as Allah wills it.”

They tramped through alternating bands of richly cultivated land and matted flora, with Saíd's Askaris forcing the porters to a brisk pace wherever possible, until they eventually found themselves in a large forest of copal trees that oozed resin and filled the air with a cloying perfume. Horseflies attacked them. Thomas Honesty was stung below the left eye by a bee and the side of his face swelled up like a balloon. Trounce started to feel a stiffness in his limbs. For an hour a strange whistling noise assaulted their ears. They never discovered its source.

They kept going.

About noon, Burton—who'd succumbed to the turgid heat and was gazing uncomprehendingly at the back of his mule's head—was roused by Swinburne, who, in his piping voice, suddenly announced:

“The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.”

“What?” Burton mumbled.

“Police pottery,” Swinburne replied. “Do you remember Matthew Keller in Leeds? Feels like a long time ago, durn't it?”

“I'm losing track,” Burton replied. “Since we left the
Orpheus
, I've been forgetting to record the date in my journal. I don't know why. It's out of character.”

He squinted against the glaring light and for the first time realised that the forest had been left behind; they were now traversing broad grain fields. He recognised the place—he'd passed through it during his previous expedition.

“We're approaching the village of Muhogwe. Its people have a reputation for violence but last time I was here they settled for mockery.”

William Trounce cleared his throat and said, “My apologies, Richard.” He slipped to the ground.

It was another case of seasoning fever.

“We're succumbing considerably sooner than I expected,” Burton said to Sister Raghavendra as they lowered the police detective onto a litter.

“Don't worry,” she replied. “There's usually a fairly long incubation period with this sort of affliction but the medicine I've been feeding you negates it. The stuff brings on the fever more rapidly, makes it burn more fiercely, and it's all over and done with in a matter of hours instead of weeks.”

Burton raised his eyebrows. “I should have liked that during my previous expedition!”

They came to Muhogwe. It was abandoned.

“Either the slavers have taken the entire population, or the entire population has upped and moved to avoid the slavers,” Burton observed.

“The latter, I hope,” Swinburne responded.

Beyond the village it was all jungle and forest again, then a quagmire where they had to fire their rifles into the air to scare away a herd of hippopotami.

A slope led up to a plateau, and here they found a
boma
—a fenced kraal—and decided to set up camp. No sooner had they erected the last tent than the clouds gathered and the rain fell.

They ate and rested, except for Burton who braved the downpour to take stock of the supplies. He found that two more porters had run away and three bundles of specie were missing.

Night came. They tried to settle but the air smelled of putrefying vegetation, the mosquitoes were remorseless, and they all felt, to one degree or another, ill and out of sorts.

Hyenas cackled, screamed, and whined from dusk until dawn.

And so it went. The days passed and the safari crept along, seemingly at a snail's pace, and wound its way over the malarious plain of the Kinganí River toward the low peaks of the Usagara Highlands. Each in turn, they came down with fever then made an astonishingly rapid recovery. Burton was in no doubt that Sister Raghavendra was a miracle worker, for there could be no greater contrast than that between his first Nile expedition, during which he and John Speke had been permanently stricken with an uncountable number of ailments, and this, his second, where illness was the exception rather than the rule.

Isabel's reports came every morning. A force of four hundred men was now following in the expedition's tracks. The Daughters of Al-Manat were making daily attacks against them but nine more of her followers had been killed and the distance was closing between the two groups.

“If we can just make it to Kazeh before they catch up,” Burton told his friends. “The Arabians there are well disposed toward me—they will loan us men and weapons.”

They trudged on.

Plains. Hills. Forests. Swamps. Jungle. The land challenged their every step.

Sagesera. Tunda. Dege la Mhora. Madege Madogo. Kidunda. Mgeta. The villages passed one after the other, each demanding
hongo
, each whittling away at their supplies.

Desertions. Theft. Accidents. Fatigue. The safari became ever more frayed and difficult to control.

One night, they heard distant gunshots.

They were camped at Kiruru, a small and semi-derelict village located deep in a plantation of holcus, whose tall, stiff canes almost completely hid the ragged beehive huts and slumping
bandani.

Herbert Spencer, freshly wound up, had been explaining to them some of his
First Principles of Philosophy
when the crackle and pops of rifle fire echoed faintly through the air.

They looked at each other.

“How far away?” Thomas Honesty asked.

“Not far enough,” Maneesh Krishnamurthy grunted.

“It's from somewhere ahead of us, not behind,” Burton noted.

“Lardy flab!” Pox added.

“Sleep with your weapons beside you,” the explorer ordered. “Herbert, I want you to patrol the camp tonight.”

“Actually, Boss, I patrol the camp every blinkin' night,” the philosopher answered.

“Well, with extra vigilance tonight, please, and I think Tom, William, Maneesh, Algy, and I will stand shifts with you.”

Burton turned to Saíd. “Wilt thou see to it that we are packed and on the move well before sunrise?”

Saíd bowed an acknowledgement.

The night passed without incident but the march the following morning was one of the worst they'd so far experienced.

They found themselves fighting through thick razor-edged grass, which towered over their heads and dripped dew onto them. The black earth was greasy and slippery and interlaced with roots that caught at their feet. The mules brayed in distress, refused to be ridden, and had to be forced along with swipes of the
bakur
, not moving until the cat had raised welts on their hindquarters.

Pox, who'd been sent to Isabel earlier, returned and shrieked: “Message from Isabel Big Nose Arundell. We have reduced their cretinous number by a quarter but they are less than a day behind you. Move faster, Dick. Message bleeding well ends.”

“We're moving as fast as we bleeding well can!” Burton grumbled.

The grass gave way to a multitude of distorted palms, then to a savannah which promised easier going but immediately disappointed by blocking their progress with a sequence of steep
nullahs
—watercourses whose near-vertical banks dropped into stinking morasses that sucked them in right up to their thighs.

“I suspect this plain is always water-laden,” Burton panted, as he and Krishnamurthy tried to haul one of the mules through the mire. “The water runs down from Usagara and this area is like a basin—there's no way for it to quickly drain. Were we not in such a confounded hurry, I would have gone around it. The ridge to the north is the best route, but it would've taken too long to get there. Bismillah! I hope they don't catch us here. This is a bad place for armed conflict!”

Krishnamurthy pointed ahead, westward, at plum-coloured hills. “Higher ground there,” he said. “Hopefully it'll be easier going. The height would give us an advantage, too.”

Burton nodded an agreement and said, “Those are the hills of Dut'humi.”