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With so much of his memory restored, Burton recognised that the lurchers were the same species of plant as the vehicles the Prussians had used back in 1863-the same but horribly different, for there were no men enfolded in their fleshy petals-which meant, if there was something still controlling them, it wasn't necessarily human.
As they drew closer to the mountains, the vegetation grew thicker and wilder. Its flowers and fruits took on a reddish hue, deepening the farther they travelled, until blood-coloured blooms and berries and globular dew-dripping swellings of indiscriminate form surrounded them. The poppies guided the steam-driven spiders straight into the humid tangle, and, astonishingly, the chaotic verdure parted in front of them to allow their passage.
Shafts of light angled through the trees. Lianas drooped and looped and dangled. The air was heavy with scent, one minute perfumed, the next pungent with the stench of maggoty meat, then delightful again. Fat bees droned lazily through it. Dragonflies and butterflies flitted hither and thither. Seeds floated past on feathery wings. And in the canopy overhead, thousands upon thousands of parakeets squawked and screeched and cackled and whistled and cursed and insulted.
Burton started to laugh and couldn't stop.
Wells, who was at that point leading the way, looked back, raised his eyebrows, and asked: “What the heck has got into you?”
“Pox!” Burton cried out. “Pox and Malady! Ye gods! How many eggs did that confounded bird lay? Hah!” He raised his face to the sky and bellowed: “Pox! Pox! Pox!” then bent forward and was suddenly wracked by violent sobs, for too many memories were returning, and he knew for sure that he was going back, and he recalled what to.
Wells reined in his harvestman until it was beside the explorer's. “What is it, man? Are you all right?”
“I can't bear it,” Burton whispered. “I can't bear it. It would be too much for any man. I have to find a way to change everything, Bertie. Everything.”
“Let's rest here,” the war correspondent suggested. “There's some grub left in one of the packs. We'll eat and grab forty winks.”
They turned off their vehicles' engines and dismounted. Beside them, a thick mass of crimson foliage suddenly rustled and parted like a pair of curtains, unveiling a short pathway to a beautiful poppy-filled glade.
“By golly! An invitation, if ever I saw one!” Wells exclaimed. “Whatever's behind your poppies obviously has power over this jungle, too!”
They walked into the open space and sat down. Wells had carried one of the pa
Burton appeared lost in himself. His dark eyes were haunted, his cheeks sunken. Wells, feeling concerned, was watching him from the corner of his eye when something else caught his attention. At the edge of the clearing, a tree, heavy with large pear-shaped gourds, was moving. One of its branches, with creaks and snaps, was extending outward, into the open space. Burton, upon hearing it, turned his head and watched as the limb manoeuvred a gourd above them, then lowered it until it hung between the two men.
“A gift?” Wells asked.
Burton reached up to the red pumpkin-sized fruit. It snapped loose from the branch-which swung back out of the way-with ease, and as he lowered it, a small split opened in its top and an amber-coloured liquid sloshed out. He sniffed it, looked surprised, tasted it, and smacked his lips.
“You'll not believe this!” he said, took a swig, and passed the gourd to the war correspondent.
Wells tried it.
“It's-it's-it's brandy!”
They drank, they ate, they were insulted by parakeets.
Night came. They slept.
At dawn, the two men returned to their vehicles and continued along the trail of poppies.
“Either I'm riding a giant steam-powered spider through a benevolent living jungle with a man from the past,” Wells pondered, “or I'm dreaming.”
“Or stark staring mad,” Burton added.
At noon, they came to a steep incline, bracketed on either side by tall pointed outcrops of blueish rock. Burton stopped his harvestman and peered through the branches at the mountains that towered ahead of them. He slid down from his saddle, bent, and examined the ground. The slope was comprised of shale bound together by a network of threadlike roots.
“This is it, Bertie.”
“What?”
“This is the path that leads to the Temple of the Eye.”
“Then onward and upward, I say!”
Burton remounted and steered his vehicle up the incline and into the mouth of a narrow crevasse. Thickly knotted vines grew against the rocky walls to either side and the ground was deep in mulch, from which poppies and other flowers grew in profusion.
As the walls rose and the shadows deepened, swarms of fireflies appeared, bathing the two travellers in a weird fluctuating glow.
They'd travelled for about a mile through this when the harvestmen passed a small mound of rocks-quite obviously a grave-and Burton, remembering who was buried there, was stricken with misery.
They went on, through thick foliage that parted as they approached, under hanging lianas that rose to allow them passage, over tangled roots that burrowed into the mulch so as not to trip the big machines.
And even in this place, so sheltered from the sunlight, parakeets ran riot through the vegetation, enthusiastically delivering their insults, which, as Wells noted, were invariably in English, despite that they were deep in the heart of German East Africa.
On, up, and the fissure opened onto a broad forested summit. Through the thick canopy, the men glimpsed distant snow-topped mountain peaks chopping at the sky.
“The Blood Jungle covers the whole range,” Wells noted, “and has been gradually expanding beyond it for the past couple of decades.”
The terrain angled downward, and the trail of poppies eventually led them into the mouth of a second crevasse, this one narrower and deeper than the previous. As they entered it, the verdure closed around them like a tu
“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 a
“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.