Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon bas-3

by Mark Hodder

  “I've never seen anything like it,” Wells muttered. “I have the distinct impression that this is all one single plant. I feel as if we're inside a gigantic living thing.”

  Now the parakeets became less numerous, and a deep hush settled over them, broken only by the quiet chugging of the vehicles' steam engines and the buzzing of insects.

  “We're being watched,” Burton announced.

  “What? By whom? Where?”

  Burton pointed to a gap in the leaves up to his right. Wells squinted into the gloom and saw, vaguely illuminated by the red light, a naked man squatting on a branch. His skin was black and looked reptilian. There was a bow in his hands.

  “Chwezi,” Burton said. “The Children of the Eye. They won't harm us.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I'm sure, Bertie.”

  They spotted more of the silent, motionless observers as they drove on, deeper and deeper into the gorge.

  All of a sudden, there was daylight.

  They'd emerged into a wide natural amphitheatre. Sunshine filtered through leaves and branches and slanted across such an unruly mass of vegetation that both men cried out in wonder. Branches and leaves and creepers and vines and lianas and stalks and stems and fruits and flowers were all jumbled together, all red, all climbing the surrounding cliffs, carpeting the ground, and drooping from overhead.

  A colossal trunk rose from the centre of it all, dividing high above them into many limbs from which big fleshy leaves grew, and among which bizarre vermillion flowers blossomed. One of the branches was moving down toward them, with much groaning and screeching as its wood bent and stretched. It manoeuvred a giant flower, a thing with spiny teeth in its petals and odd bladder-like protuberances at its base, until it hung just in front of Burton.

  The bladders inflated. The petals curled open to reveal a tightly closed bud-like knot. The bladders contracted. Air blew from between the lips of the bud making a high-pitched squeal, like a child's balloon being deflated. The lips moved and shaped the squeal into words.

  The plant spoke.

  “My hat, Richard! You took your giddy time! What the blazes have you been up to?”

  From the deep indigo of the African sky, a thin line descended.

  It wobbled and wavered through the hot compressed air, arcing down into the crevasse.

  Sidi Bombay shouted, “Spear!” an instant before it emerged from the heat haze and thudded into his chest, knocking him backward. He sat on the rocky ground, looked at the vibrating shaft, looked at the sky, then looked at Burton.

  “Wow!” he said. “Mr. Burton, please send a message to my fourth wife. Tell her-”

  He fell backward and the shaft swung up into a vertical position.

  Blood gurgled out of his mouth. His eyes reflected the azure heavens and glazed over.

  “Ambuscade!” Burton bellowed. “Take cover!”

  The Englishmen dropped their packs and dived into the shadow of an overhanging rock. Spears rained down, clacking against the rocky ground.

  From behind a boulder, Burton peered up at the opposite lip of the gorge. Figures were silhouetted there. A spear thwacked against the stone inches from his face. He ducked back.

  Spencer was beside him. “Are you all right, Herbert?” Burton asked.

  “Yus, Boss.”

  “William!” the explorer shouted. “Are you fit?”

  “As a fiddle! But I'd feel a lot better if our bloody rifles worked!” came the response from behind an outcrop some hundred and eighty feet away.

  “Algy?” Burton called.

  Swinburne-who'd thrown himself behind a rock off to Burton's right-leaped back into the open. He looked up and waved his arms like a lunatic.

  “Hi!” he hollered at the shadowy figures overhead. “Hi there! You Prussians! Why don't you do us a favour and bloody well bugger off out of here?”

  His voice bounced off the high walls. Spears descended and clattered around him.

  “Algy!” Burton yelled. “Get under cover, you addle-brained dolt!”

  Swinburne walked casually over to Burton and joined him behind the boulder.

  “I'm trying to make them throw more of the bally things,” he said. “They don't have an infinite supply.”

  “Actually, that's not too bad an idea,” Burton muttered, “but poorly executed. Try to remember the difference between fearless and foolhardy.”

  He examined the rock-strewn fissure. The expedition's packs lay scattered, with multiple spear shafts rising out of them.

  “There's not going to be much left that's usable in that lot-least of all the water bottles!” he grumbled.

  Trounce's voice echoed: “How many bloody spears have they got up there?”

  “Far fewer than before!” returned Burton. “Algy had it right-the more they waste, the better.”

  “Perhaps not such a waste,” Swinburne said. “They're purposely trying to keep us pinned down, which suggests to me that some of them have gone on ahead.”

  Burton called: “William! Can you make it over here?”

  “Watch me!” came the response.

  Trounce leaped into view and sprinted across the intervening space, weaving from side to side as spears started to rain around him. He swept up three of the packs as he passed them, dragging them along, then, batting a falling shaft aside, hit the ground and slid into shelter in a cloud of dust.

  “Phew! Am I in one piece?”

  “Not a single perforation as far as I can see. How do you fancy a little bit more of that?”

  The Scotland Yard man handed over the packs for Swinburne to check. “I don't much. My legs are still afire with damned sores. What's the plan?”

  “We'll dart from cover to cover and keep moving. Don't so much as pause for breath in the open or you'll end up a pincushion!”

  “Right you are.”

  The king's agent looked over at Sidi Bombay's body. Another death. Another friend lost. Another part of his world ripped out of him.

  He wondered how much more of it he could take.

  There was no option but to leave the African where he lay. Perhaps there'd be an opportunity to bury him later, if animals didn't get to the corpse first.

  Trounce watched Swinburne reorganising the contents of the three bags, fitting it all into one pack. “What do we have?” he asked.

  “Not a lot!” the poet replied. “One intact water bottle, a dented sextant, Herbert's key, an oil lamp, a box of lucifers, the field glasses from the Orpheus, and a small stock of food that looks as if it's been trampled by a herd of elephants.”

  “What took a hundred and twenty men to carry at the start of the expedition now takes one!” Burton muttered. “Throw away the sextant, and let's get on with it.”

  He took the bag, slung it over his shoulder, and pointed at fallen rocks farther up and to either side of the faint trail that wound through the middle of the crevasse. “William, you leg it to the base of the cliff, there. Algy, you dive beneath the overhang, there. And Herbert, you make for that boulder, there. I'm going to try for the rock at the bend in the trail-do you see it? From there, I'll survey the next stretch and call instructions to you. All ready? Good. Get set! Go!”

  The three men-and one clockwork device-burst out of cover and dashed toward the locations the explorer had indicated. Spears started to fall, their points shattering as they landed.

  Swinburne dived into cover first.

  Burton was next, though his allotted position was farthest away.

  Trounce stumbled when a rebounding shaft cracked painfully against the side of his face but made it without any more serious injury.

  Herbert Spencer fared less well. Hampered by his damaged leg, his run was more of a fast shuffle, and three spears hit him. The first bounced from his shoulder with a loud chime.

  “Ow! Bleedin' heck!” he piped

  The second ploughed a furrow down his back.

  “Aagh! They've got me!”

  The third sliced throug
h his left ankle, leaving his foot dragging behind him, attached by a single thin cable.

  “Cripes! That's agony!” he hooted, falling into the shadow of the large boulder Burton had assigned to him.

  “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” he said, and, reaching down, he tore the foot off completely and held it up so the others could see it. “Look at this!” he cried. “Me bloomin' foot's been chopped off!”

  “Can you still walk, Herbert?” Burton called.

  “Yus, after a fashion. But that ain't the point, is it?”

  “What is the point?” Swinburne asked from his nearby position.

  “That me bleedin' foot's come off, lad!”

  “I'm sure Brunel will have you polished and repaired in no time at all after we get back to Blighty,” Swinburne responded. “There's no need to worry.”

  “You're still missin' the point. Me foot's come off. It hurts!”

  Burton, who'd identified points of cover among the rocks ahead, shouted instructions back to them.

  They ran.

  Herbert Spencer hobbled along, scraping his stump over the hard ground. A spear clunked into his hip and stuck there.

  “Yow!” he cried. He yanked it out and threw it aside.

  Another clanged off his head.

  “Bloody hell! Bloody hell!”

  He reached the sidewall, where it bulged outward, and collapsed into its shadow. He lay there, groaning.

  “Herbert,” Swinburne called. “For the umpteenth time: it's all in your mind! You can't feel pain!”

  “Ready for more dodging?” Burton called.

  “Wait a moment!” Trounce shouted. A spear tip had scooped a furrow across his thigh and blood was flowing freely. He tore off one of his shirtsleeves and used it to bind the wound. “All set!”

  Another mad dash, more spears-but far fewer this time-and they reached the space beneath a leaning slab without further injury.

  “They must have stolen every spear from every village they pillaged,” Swinburne noted. “Either that or they have a portable pointy-stick factory with them.”

  A wailing scream suddenly echoed and a body thumped into the gorge near to where they squatted. It was a white man, blond-haired and blue-eyed and dead. An arrow, striped red and black, was sticking out of his chest.

  Shouts and screams sounded from above.

  “They're being attacked!” Burton exclaimed.

  “Who by?” Swinburne asked.

  “Let's not dally to ponder that! Come on!”

  They dashed out of their hiding place-the king's agent giving support to Trounce, and Swinburne to Spencer-and hurried along the cleft, leaving the embattled Prussians behind.

  After they'd traversed perhaps two miles, the ground angled steeply upward. It was tough going.

  Burton's stomach rumbled. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose.

  He tried to remember what it felt like to sit in his old saddlebag armchair by the fire in his study.

  “We're gettin' close, Boss,” Spencer announced. “I can feel the Eye's presence.”

  The group struggled on through the fissure. By mid-afternoon, its walls had opened out and they emerged onto a low summit. The temperature plummeted, and suddenly they were shivering. The low mountains and hills they'd trekked through humped away to the rear; to either side, a long ridge zigzagged away to rising snow-covered peaks, which jaggedly heaped into the distance; and ahead, a long slope of crumpled strata plunged steeply downward and was split by a second shadowy crevasse.

  Footing became precarious now; the ground was very uneven, with patches of loose slate-like rock that slipped from beneath their feet and rattled away down the incline.

  They reached the fracture in the mountain's side and entered it. Darkness closed around them. Sheer rock faces soared up to the left and right, reaching such a height that the sky was reduced to nothing but a thin line of serrated blue.

  They stopped for a moment while Burton rummaged in the pack for the oil lamp. Its glass was broken but it was functional. He struck a lucifer, put it to the wick, and moved on, illuminating the cracks and irregularities in their path.

  “That's rummy!” Swinburne muttered. “No echoes!”

  It was true: their footsteps and voices, the knocks and scrapes of displaced stones-every sound was sucked into an overwhelming silence.

  The eerie atmosphere increased as the party moved ever deeper into the gloom.

  “If Speke went on ahead while the Prussians tried to stick us with spears, then surely we must be hot on his heels by now,” Trounce whispered.

  Burton clenched his jaw and fists.

  After a while, they found themselves catching swift movements from the corners of their eyes-indistinct things flitting through the shadows-but when they looked, there was nothing to see.

  The thread of sky was so far away that the darkness was almost complete. Burton raised his lamp. It illuminated men, naked but for loincloths and necklaces of human finger bones, standing dark and motionless against the cliffs to either side. Their faces were scored by networks of scars, making their skin resemble the segmented hide of reptiles; they were holding bows fitted with red-and-black-striped arrows, and their eyes were fixed on Herbert Spencer.

  “How many?” Swinburne hissed.

  “Hard to tell. A lot,” Burton replied. “Chwezi. It was obviously they who attacked the Prussians.”

  “Look at the way they're all a-gogglin' at me,” Spencer said.

  “I'm not surprised,” Swinburne responded. “With all those dents and scratches, you're quite a sight!”

  “Thank you, lad. But it ain't that. I reckons they can feel the diamonds what's in me head.”

  “They're closing in to the rear,” Trounce warned.

  The others looked back and saw a number of the Chwezi slowly moving toward them.

  “But they've left the way ahead open,” Swinburne observed. “Seems to me like they're here to escort us. Or do I mean herd us?”

  “To the Eye?” Burton asked.

  “It's in this direction, Boss,” Spencer confirmed. “The emanations are very strong now.”

  “Then I suggest we allow ourselves to be guided.”

  The king's agent continued on along the narrow path, and Swinburne, Trounce, and Spencer trailed after him. The Chwezi stood in eerie silence, not moving until the Britishers had passed, then falling in behind.

  Untouched by the sun, the mountain air grew increasingly frigid, and the men's breath clouded in front of their faces. Snow, piled at the sides of the crevasse, reflected the light of Burton's lamp, stark white in the black shadows, and ice glittered on the walls.

  “This fault line,” Swinburne said, “we climbed up through it on the other side of the mountain, and now we're descending through it on this. It's as if the whole peak has been split down its centre. What unimaginable energy must have caused that?”

  “Not volcanic,” Burton mumbled, distractedly. “This is metamorphic rock. You can see from the angle of the strata how subterranean pressures have pushed it upward.” He frowned and looked up at the thin strip of blue sky high overhead. “You're right, though, Algy. There are very powerful geological forces at work here!”

  Half a mile farther on, the chasm suddenly opened out to form a broad, bowl-shaped arena into which the sun shone, warming the air dramatically.

  “Look!” Trounce said softly, and pointed ahead.

  Across the space, the high wall was cut through as the great crack in the mountain's side continued, the mouth of it blocked by more of the silent Chwezi. Burton glanced about. He and his companions were surrounded.

  “There's a cave,” Spencer announced. He pointed to the right, at a gap in the ranks of encircling warriors, where a shadow in the rock concealed a blacker patch of darkness.

  “Bombay said the temple was underground and accessible through a cave. I suppose that's it,” Burton said. “And our escort obviously wants us to go down there.”

  He moved warily to the opening and extende
d his lamp into it, illuminating a deep hollow at the back of which he saw a narrow opening.

  “Come on,” he called, and ushered the others in with a wave of his hand. They filed past and he followed, stepping through the aperture in the rear wall while watching to see if the Chwezi were going to come in after them. They didn't.

  He turned and saw a smooth rocky passage.

  “Wait,” he instructed. His friends stopped and he squeezed past them until he was in point position.

  They moved on, following the irregular tunnel. It descended, bending to the right and to the left.

  There were no sounds of pursuit.

  After a while, the detective became aware of something peculiar. He ordered a halt and blew out his lamp's flame. By degrees, a faint bluish luminescence became apparent.

  “What's that?” came Swinburne's whisper.

  “Some sort of phosphorescent fungus or lichen, by the looks of it. Let's proceed without the lamp. Our eyes will adjust.”

  Gingerly, measuring every step as the passage inclined more steeply, they inched onward. As they did so, the glowing fungus became more prevalent until, a few yards farther on, it covered the walls entirely, lighting the way with a weird, otherworldly radiance.

  The crooked corridor veered sharply to the left and plunged downward at a severe angle. They struggled to maintain their footing, slipping and stumbling until they were moving faster than they could help. Almost running, they plunged down and out onto the level floor of a fantastical chamber-a large domed grotto-so filled with ambient blue light that its every feature stood out in sharp focus.

  They gasped, astonished at the spectacle.

  Stalagmites, ranging from tiny to huge, rose from the floor, stretching toward stalactites of similar proportions, which hung from the high roof. Many of them had met and melded together to form massive asymmetrical pillars, giving the chamber the appearance of a gigantic organic cathedral.

  Veins of glittering quartz were embedded in the walls, and serrated clumps of the crystal rose from the floor. On the far side of the chamber, a small fountain of clear water tinkled as it bubbled up from its underground source, spreading into a pool, roughly oval in shape and about twenty feet across at its widest point. Draining from it, a narrow stream had cut a channel through the stone floor to the centre of the cavern, where the kidney-shaped forty-foot-wide mouth of a sinkhole opened in the floor. The stream plunged into the darkness of this cavity, disappearing back into the depths of the Earth.