THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

"By Lake Tanganyika, Ujiji, the sickness seized me in demon fingers. In my delirium I saw myself, mocking, gibing, jeering, leering at me. That other Burton which mocks at the world but mostly at me.

"It couldn't stop me, though, I went on... no... not then. Speke went on, and he... he... hee, hee! I laugh, though it startles the revelers and wakes the sleeping. Laugh, Burton, laugh, you Pagliacci! That silly-arse Yank, Frigate, tells me that it was I who became known as the great explorer and your treachery became infamous. I, I, not you, you Unspeakable! I have been vindicated, not you.

"My misfortune began with my not being a Frenchman. I wouldn't have had to fight against English prejudice, English rigidity, English stupidity. I... but I wasn't born a Frenchman, though I am descended from a bastard of the Louis XIII. The Sun-King. Blood will tell.

"What bloody nonsense! Burton blood, not the Sun-King's, will tell.

"I traveled, restless-footed, everywhere. But Omne solum fortipatria. Every region is a strong man's home. It was I who was the first European to enter the holy and forbidden city of Harar and come alive out of that Ethiopian hellhole. It was I who made a pilgrimage as Mirza Abdulla Bushiri to Mecca and wrote the most famous, detailed, and true book about it and who could have been torn to pieces if I'd been found out. It was I who discovered Lake Tanganyika. It was I who wrote the first manual of the use of the bayonet for the British army. It was I...

"Why recount to myself these vainglories? It's not what a man's done that counts, it's what he's going to do.

"Ayesha! Ayesha! My Persian beauty, my first true love! I would've renounced the world, my British citizenship, I would have become a Persian and lived with you until I died. You were most foully murdered, Ayesha! I avenged you, I slew the poisoner with my own hands, choked the life from him and buried his body in the desert. Where are you, Ayesha?

"Somewhere. And if we met again—what? That ravening love is now a dead lion.

"Isabel. My wife. The woman... did I ever love her? Affection I had. Not the great love I had for Ayesha and still have for Alice. ‘Pay, pack, and follow' I told her whenever I left for a journey, and she did so, as obediently and as uncomplaining as a slave. I was her hero, her god, she said, and she set herself a list of rules for the perfect wife. But when I became old and bitter, a neglected failure, she became my nurse, my keeper, my eager, my prison guard.

"What if I should see her again, this woman who said that she could never love another man on Earth or in Heaven? Not that this world is Heaven. What would I do, say, ‘Hello, Isabel. It's been a long time'?

"No, I'd run like the veriest coward. Hide. Yet...

"And here's the entrance to the engine room. Is Podebrad on duty tonight? What if he is? I ca

"There goes a figure, dim in the mists. Is it an agent of the Ethicals? Or X, the renegade, skulking in the fog? He is always here now, there then, as elusive as the concept of time and eternity, nothingness and somethingness.

"Who goes there?" I should shout. But he—she—it is gone.

"While I was in that transition between sleeping and waking, between death and resurrection, I saw God. ‘You owe for the flesh,' He said, that bearded old gentleman in the garments of 1890, and in another dream He said, ‘Pay up.'

"Pay what? What is the price?

"I didn't ask for the flesh, I didn't petition to be born. Flesh, life, should be gratis.

"I should have detained Him. I should have asked him if a man does have free will or are all his actions, his nonactions, too, determined. Written down in the world's Bradshaw, so-and-so will arrive at such-a-place at 10:32 A.M. and will depart at 10:40 on track 12. If I am a train on His railway, then I am not responsible for anything I do: Evil and good are not my doing. In fact, there is no evil and good. Without free will, they don't exist.

"But He won't be detained. And if He were, would I understand his explanation of death and immortality, of determinism and indeterminism, of determinacy and indeterminacy?

"The human mind ca

"When I was surveying the Sind area in India, I became a Sufi, a Master Sufi. But watching them in the Sind and in Egypt and seeing them end by proclaiming themselves to be God, I concluded that extreme mysticism was closely allied to madness.

"Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, who is a Sufi, says that I do not understand. One, there are fake or deluded Sufis, degenerates of that great discipline. Two, when a Sufi says that he is God, he does not mean that literally. He is saying that he has become one with God, though not God.

"Great God! I will penetrate to His heart, to the heart of the Mystery and the mysteries. I am a living sword, but I have been attacking with my edge, not with my point. The point is the most deadly, not the edge. I will be from now on the point.

"Yet, if I'm to find my way through the magic labyrinth, I mush have a thread to follow to the great beast that lives in its heart. Where is that thread? No Ariadne. I will be myself the thread and Ariadne and Theseus. Just as.. .why didn't I think of this before?—I am the labyrinth.

"Not quite true. What is? It's always not quite. But in human, and divine, affairs, a near-hit is sometimes as good as a direct hit. The larger the exploding shell, the less it matters that it doesn't strike the bull's eye.

"Yet a sword is no good unless it's well balanced. It has been said of me, I have the wide-reading Frigate for authority, that some have said that I was one in whom Nature ran riot, that I had not one but thirty splendid talents. But I had no sense of balance or of direction either. That I was an orchestra without a director, a fine ship with only one flaw: no compass. As I've said of myself, a blaze of light without focus.

"If I couldn't do something first, I wouldn't do it.

"That it's the abnormal, the perverse and the savage, in men, not the divine in their nature, that fascinate me.

"That, though I was deeply learned, I never understood that wisdom had little to do with knowledge and literature and nothing to do with learning.

"They were wrong! If they were once right, no more!"

Burton prowled on and on, looking for he knew not what. He passed down a dim corridor and paused by a door. Within should be Loghu, unless she was dancing in the grand salon, and Frigate. They were together again, having gone through two or three lovers in fourteen years. She had not been able to tolerate him for a long time, but then he'd won her over— though it might be the other Frigate whom she still loved— and now they shared the same quarters. Once more.

He went on, seeing a shadowy figure faintly outlined in the light over the exit. X? Another sufferer from insomnia? Himself?

He stood outside the texas and watched the guards pacing back and forth. Watchman, what of the night? Well, what of it?

On he walked. Where have you been? From walking to and fro, not over this giant world but on this pygmy cosmos of a riverboat.

Alice was in his cabin again, having left him a little less than fourteen years ago and having returned twice. This time, they would be together forever. Perhaps. But he was glad that she was back.

He emerged on the landing deck and looked up at the dim light emanating from the control room. Its big clock boomed fourteen strokes. Two A.M.

Time for Burton to go back to bed and try to storm the citadel of sleep again.

He looked up at the stars, and, while doing so, a cold wind swept down from the north and cleared the upper deck of the mists—momentarily. Somewhere northward was the tower in the cold and gray mists. In it were, or had been, the Ethicals, the entities who thought they had a right to raise the dead without their permission.