Mark Hodder - Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

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 Dauntless.

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 Dauntless was a triumph.

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 Dauntless flew home and landed at an airfield some miles to the southeast of London. Damien Burke and Gregory Hare, Palmerston's odd-job men, were there to greet it. They took possession of the fourteen black diamonds-the seven fragments of the Cambodian Eye and the seven of the African.

“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 beneath the Tower of London, which is where the Eyes will go, too. One of the most disreputable men in the country held in the same place as what might well be our most precious resource. Such is the way of things.”

Burton was taken to Penfold Private Sanatorium in London's St. John's Wood, where, for three weeks, the Sisterhood of Noble Benevolence fussed over him.

As his strength increased, so too did his anxiety. He had a terrible decision to make. By telling Palmerston about the future and revealing to him his fate, he might persuade him to abandon plans to use the Eyes of Naga as a means for mediumistic espionage against Prussia; might convince him that sending troops to Africa would lead to disaster. But if he succeeded in this, it would mean no reinforcements for the Daughters of Al-Manat. Bertie Wells had told him that the female guerrilla fighters survived at least into the 1870s. In changing history, Burton would almost certainly condemn Isabel Arundell, Isabella Mayson, and Sadhvi Raghavendra to much earlier deaths.

Obviously, the future he'd visited had occurred because he'd favoured Al-Manat's survival over the 130-year-old Palmerston's direct order. As much as he loved Isabel, he had no idea why he might have done such a thing, for, in anyone's estimation, could three lives-even those three-be worth the savagery and destruction of the Great War?

He wrote much about this in his personal journal, examining the problem from every angle he could think of, but though he produced pages and pages of cramped handwriting, he could find no answer.

The solution finally came with a visit from Palmerston himself.

Two weeks into his treatment, Burton was sitting up in bed reading a newspaper when the door opened and the prime minister stepped in, announcing: “I'd have come earlier. You know how it is. Affairs of state. Complex times, Captain Burton. Complex times.”

He took off his hat and overcoat-revealing a Mandarin-collared black suit and pale blue cravat-and placed them on a chair. He didn't remove his calfskin gloves.

Standing at the end of the patient's bed, he said, “You look bloody awful. Your hair is white!”

The king's agent didn't reply. He gazed dispassionately at his visitor's face.

Palmerston's most recent treatments had made his nose almost entirely flat. The nostrils were horizontal slits, as wide as the gash-like mouth beneath. A dimple had been added to the centre of his chin. His eyebrows were painted on, high above the oriental-looking eyes.

“You'll be pleased to hear, Captain, that not only do I fully endorse your recommendations, but I have acted upon them even in the face of virulent opposition led by no less than Disraeli himself,” he announced.

Burton looked puzzled. “My recommendations, Prime Minister?”

“Yes. Your reports confirmed my every suspicion concerning Bismarck's intentions. Obviously, we cannot allow him to gain a foothold in East Africa, so British troops have already been conveyed there by rotorship, and I have more on the way. It's by no means a declaration of war on my part, but I do intend that they offer resistance to any efforts made by Prussia to claim territories.”

Burton's fingers dug into the bedsheets beneath him. “My-my reports?” he whispered hoarsely.

“As delivered to us by Commander Krishnamurthy. A very courageous young man, Burton. He will be given due honours, of that you can be certain. And I look forward to receiving the remainder of your observations-those made between Kazeh and the Mountains of the Moon. Do you have them here?”

“N-no,” Burton stammered. “I'll-I'll see that they're delivered to you.” He thought: Bismillah! Krishnamurthy!

“Post-haste, please, Captain.”

Burton struggled for words. “I–I wrote those reports before I had-before I had properly assessed the situation, Prime Minister. You have to-to withdraw our forces at once. Their presence in Africa will escalate hostilities between the British Empire and Prussia to an unprecedented degree.”

“What? Surely you don't expect me to allow Bismarck free rein?”

“You have to, sir.”

“Have to? Why?”

“Your actions will-will precipitate the Great War, the one that Countess Sabina has predicted.”

Palmerston shook his head. “The countess is working with us to prevent exactly that. She and a team of mediums have already employed the Naga diamonds to great effect.” He pointed at Burton's newspaper. “No doubt you've read that a second Schleswig conflict has broken out between Prussia, Austria, and Denmark. We precipitated that, my dear fellow, by means of undetected mediumistic manipulations. I intend to tangle Bismarck up in so many minor difficulties that he'll never have the strength to challenge us in Africa, let alone establish his united Germany!”

Burton squeezed his eyes shut and raised his hands to his head in frustration. It was too late. The circumstances that would lead to all-out war had already been set into motion!

He thought rapidly. Now he understood the 130-year-old Palmerston's claim that he-Burton-had never revealed his visit to the future. The king's agent knew the way the prime minister's mind worked. Having already outmanoeuvred Benjamin Disraeli-a formidable political force-to get his way, Palmerston wouldn't under any circumstances backtrack, not even on his own advice! So what would he do instead? The answer was obvious: the prime minister would attempt to outguess his future self by ordering a preemptive strike; he'd throw every resource he could muster into defeating Bismarck before Prussia could properly mobilise its military might; and in doing that, in Burton's opinion, he was much more likely to incite the war at an earlier date than to prevent it.