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Hurriedly, they struck camp and picked their way across the moonlit ground with the warriors escorting them on either side, mocking and jeering and threatening.
Sister Raghavendra, by touch alone, bandaged Trounce's arm.
“I'll need to stitch the wound, William, but we'll have to wait until we're safely away from these ruffians. Are you in pain?”
“By Jove, Sadhvi! Between this and the ankle, I'm having a fine day of it! I feel absolutely splendid! In fact, I thought I might top things off by repeatedly banging my head against a rock! What do you think?”
“I think you'd better chew on this.” She handed him a knob of a tobacco-like substance. “These herbs have strong pain-relieving properties.”
“What do they taste like?”
“Chocolate.”
Trounce threw the herbs into his mouth and started chewing. He gave a snort of appreciation. His ear whistled.
The warriors yelled a few final insults and withdrew.
Burton, at the front of the column, crested the brow of a hill, looked down onto a small plain, and saw the stars reflected in a number of ponds and small lakes.
“We'll rest there,” he said. “And let's hope that water is fresh.”
The division between the days became ever more nebulous and confusing.
Consciousness and unconsciousness merged into a single blur, for when they slept, they dreamt of passing terrain, and when they were awake, they were so often somnambulistic that they might well have been dreaming.
From K'hok'ho into the land of Uyanzi, from village to village, through an ugly and desiccated jungle and over baked earth; then into the sandy desert of Mgunda Mk'hali, where lines of elephants marched in stately fashion, trunk to tail, past petrified trees filled with waiting vultures.
Mdaburu to Jiwe la Mkoa; Jiwe la Mkoa to Kirurumo; Kirurumo to Mgongo Thembo; Mgongo Thembo to Tura.
Days and days and days.
This long.
As they approached Tura, Burton said to Swinburne, “I keep seeing animal carcasses.”
“Fu
The two men were walking. So many of the freed slaves had left them now-gratefully returning to their home villages-that all the animals were required to help carry the supplies, and there were no more spare horses.
Burton looked down at his assistant. The roots of Swinburne's hair were bright scarlet. The rest of it was bleached an orangey straw colour all the way to its white tips. It fell in a thick mass to below his narrow, sloping shoulders. His skin had long ago gone from lobster red to a deep dark brown, which made his pale-green eyes more vivid than ever. He had a thin and straggly beard. His clothes were hanging off him in ribbons and he was painfully thin and marked all over by bites and scratches.
“I'm sorry, Algy. I should never have put you through all this.”
“Are you joking? I'm having the time of my life! By golly, in a poetical sense, this is where my roots are! Africa is real.It's authentic!It's primal!Africa is the very essenceof poetry! I could happily live here forever! Besides-” he looked up at Burton, “-there is a matter of vengeance to be addressed.”
After a pause, Burton replied, “In that, you may not have to wait much longer. The dead animals I've been seeing-I think they were killed by a bloodthirsty hunter of our acquaintance.”
“Speke!”
“Yes.”
They came to Tura, the easternmost settlement of Unyamwezi, the Land of the Moon. Burton remembered the village as being nestled amid low rolling hills and cultivated lands; that it was attractive to the eye and a balm to wearied spirits after so many days of monotonous aridity. But when his expedition emerged from the mouth of a valley and looked upon it, they saw a scene of appalling destruction. Most of Tura's dwellings had been burned to the ground, and corpses and body parts were strewn everywhere. There were only fifty-four survivors-women and children-many wounded, all of them dehydrated and starving. Sister Raghavendra and Isabella Mayson-both recovering from their afflictions-treated them as best they could; but two died within an hour of the expedition's arrival, and during the course of the following night they lost eight more.
The camp was set up, and Burton gathered those women whose injuries were slightest. For a while they refused to speak and flinched away from him, but his generosity with food and drink, plus the presence of so many women in his party, especially Isabel Arundell, whom they took to almost straight away, eventually quelled their fears, and they explained that the village had been ravaged by “many white devils accompanied by demons who sat inside plants.” This terror had descended upon them without warning or mercy, had killed the men, and had made away with grain and cattle and other supplies.
The sun, Burton was informed, had risen two times since the attack.
He gathered his friends in the village's half-collapsed bandani.
“Speke and the Prussians have not respected the customs of Africa at all,” he observed, “but this degree of savagery is new.”
“What prompted it?” Isabel Arundell asked. “John is a schemer but not a barbarian.”
“Count Zeppelin is behind this carnage, I'm sure,” Swinburne opined.
“Aye, lad,” Trounce muttered. “I agree. They went through this place like a plague of locusts. Looks to me as if they badly needed supplies and hadn't the patience or wherewithal to trade.”
“We're about a week away from Kazeh,” Burton said. “It's an Arabic town, a trading centre, and it marks the end of our eastward march. It's where we'll restock with food, hire new porters, and buy new animals, before heading north to the Ukerewe Lake and the Mountains of the Moon. Speke will be following the same route and no doubt intended to obtain fresh provisions there too, but perhaps he couldn't make it. I'd lay money on him having squandered all his supplies between Mzizima and here.”
“So Tura bore the brunt of his ineptitude,” Krishnamurthy growled.
Some of the Daughters of Al-Manat were patrolling the outskirts of the village. One of them now reported that a body of men were approaching from the west. They were carrying guns, in addition to the usual spears and bows.
Burton hurried over to where the women of Tura were sitting together and addressed them in their own language: “Men are coming, perhaps Wanyamwezi. If they've heard what has happened here, they will assume my people are responsible and they will attack us.”
One of the women stood and said, “I will go to meet them. I will tell them of the white devils who killed our men and I will say that you are not the same sort of devil and that even though you are white you have been good to us.”
“Thank you,” Burton replied, somewhat ruefully.
As he'd predicted, the new arrivals were Wanyamwezi. They stamped into Tura-two hundred or so in number-and levelled their weapons at the strangers. They were mostly very young men and boys, though there were a few oldsters, too. All were armed with matchlock rifles; all bore patterned scars on their faces and chests; all frowned at Burton and his associates; and all bared their teeth, showing that their bottom front two incisors had been removed.
From among them, a man stepped forward. He was tall, gaunt, and angular, but powerfully built, with long wiry pigtails hanging from his head. There were rings in his nose and ears and a profusion of copper bangles on his wrists and ankles.
“I am Mtyela Kasanda,” he said. “They call me Mirambo.”
It meant corpses.
“I am Burton,” the king's agent responded. “They call me Murungwana Sanaof Many Tongues.”
“Dost thou see mine eyes?” Mirambo asked.