Over the next few days, they followed the river north, struggled across an extensive quagmire, pushed through thickets of water hyacinth, and found themselves on the shore of a second lake, smaller and much shallower than the Ukerewe. It was completely covered with water lilies and smelled of rotting vegetation.
“What shall we name it?” Speke asked.
“Why name it at all?” Burton growled. “It is what it is. A bloody lake.”
The lieutenant shook his head despairingly and walked away. He couldn't understand the other's mood at all. Burton had hardly spoken since their discovery of the falls. He wasn't even bothering to acquire the Chwezi language, which was entirely out of character, for in Speke's experience Burton was driven by a mania to conquer every foreign tongue he encountered.
The Wanyambo warriors, now far from home and unwilling to go any farther, left them.
Over the next three days, the Chwezi guided the two Britishers around the southern shores of the lake to where, at its western tip, the river flowed out of it.
They followed the waterway. The land was boggy and swarming with snakes. Foul-smelling gasses bubbled out of the ground.
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
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
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
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
“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
