Mark Hodder - Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

“O Murungwana Sana ,” he said, “the fire is lit and the meat is cooking and the women are restless and want to dance. The men desire news of the far off lands of the Muzungu -the white man. Wouldst thou attend us?”

Burton gave a bow. “We shall come with thee now.”

So it was that the expedition's first day ended with a feast and a party, attended by all but the philosopher Herbert Spencer and the poet Algernon Swinburne.

In the tent, the brass man placed a stool beside the cot, sat on it, and leaned forward, bracing himself with his staff. Deep in the shadow of his keffiyeh , his metal face seemed to gaze unwaveringly at Burton's assistant.

And Swinburne dreamt of war.

Warm rain hammered against Burton's tin helmet and poured from its brim down the back of his greatcoat. An explosion momentarily deafened him, knocked him to his hands and knees, and showered him with clods of mud and lumps of bloody flesh. The black water at the bottom of the flooded trench immediately sucked at his limbs, as if the earth were greedy for yet another corpse. A head floated to the surface. Half of its face was missing. He recoiled in shock, splashing back to his feet, and ducked as another pea burst just yards away. Men and women shrieked in agony, cried out for their mothers, spat the same profanity over and over and over.

A seed thudded into a soldier's face. Blood sprayed. His helmet went spinning. He slumped as if his bones had suddenly vanished, and slid into the mire.

Burton stumbled on, sloshing forward, peering at the troops who were lining the right side of the trench and firing their rifles over its lip. He eventually saw the man he was searching for-a big Askari with a patch covering his right eye. He climbed up beside him and shouted into his ear: “Are you Private Usaama?”

“What?”

“I'm looking for Private Usaama. I was told he knows Wells.”

“I'm him. What wells?”

“Herbert Wells. The correspondent. I think he's with your company.”

The man's answer was lost as a squadron of hornets swept overhead, flying low, buzzing furiously, their oval bodies painted with the Union Jack, their guns crackling.

“What did you say?” Burton hollered.

“I said if he hasn't bought it he'll be in the forward listening post. Keep on down the trench until you come to an opening on your right. It's there.”

They both ducked as seeds howled past them and embedded themselves in the opposite wall of the trench. Rain-loosened dirt collapsed inward.

Burton jumped back down into the water and moved along, picking his way past the dead and the mutilated, whispering a Sufi meditation to keep himself sane.

A female Askari, who was propped against a pile of saturated sandbags, grabbed at his sleeve and said in a pleading tone: “I've lost my boot. I've lost my boot. I've lost my boot.”

He looked down and saw that the woman's left leg was a ragged mess beneath the knee. The foot was missing.

“I've lost my boot. I've lost my boot.”

He nodded helplessly and yanked his arm from her grasp.

Another explosion. More terrible screams.

The passage to the listening post, seen dimly through the downpour, was now just a few steps away. He waded toward it, the smell of cordite and rotting flesh and overflowing latrines thick in his nostrils.

Sirens wailed through the staccato gunfire and thumping detonations: “Ulla! Ulla! Ulla!”

He entered the narrow passage and pushed through the water to its end, which widened into a small square pit. Its sides were shored up with wood, its upper edges protected by sandbags. To his right, a mechanical contrivance rested on a table beneath a canvas hood. Nearby, a corpse lay half-submerged, its eyes gazing sightlessly at the sky. Straight ahead, a short and plump man was standing on a box and peering northward through a periscope. He had a bugle slung over his shoulder and his tin helmet was badly dented on one side.

“Bertie?”

The man turned. The left side of his face was badly disfigured by a burn scar. He was unshaven and smeared with dirt.

“Lieutenant Wells, if you don't mind,” he shouted. “Who the devil are you?”

“It's me. Burton.”

Wells squinted through the rain, then gave a sudden whoop of joy and jumped from the box. He splashed over to Burton and gripped him by the hand.

“It's true! It's true!” he yelled, his voice pitched even higher than usual. “By gum, Burton, it's been two years! I thought I'd imagined you! But look at you! Alive! In the flesh! The chronic argonaut himself!” Wells suddenly stepped back. “What happened to you? You look like a skeleton!”

“War has been happening to me, Bertie, and to you too, I see.”

They both jerked down as something whistled overhead and exploded in the trenches behind them.

“This is the ugliest it's ever been,” Wells shouted. “It's attrition warfare now. The Hun has abandoned all strategy but that of battering us into oblivion. Grab a periscope and join me. Ha! Just like when we first met! What happened to you after the Battle of the Bees?”

“The what?”

“Tanga, man!”

Burton took one of the viewing devices from the table and climbed onto the box beside Wells.

“I fell in with a group of guerrilla fighters. We spent eighteen months or so raiding Hun outposts around Kilimanjaro before I suffered a fever and severe leg ulcerations that had me laid up in a field hospital for seven weeks. While I was there, the guerrillas were killed by A-Spores. During my final week in the hospital, I heard from-” They both crouched as three explosions tore up the battlefield nearby. “-From another patient that you were heading to Dut'humi, for the attack on the Tanganyika Railway, so I hooked up with a company that was heading this way.”

“I can't tell you how good it is to see you again!” Wells exclaimed. “By heaven, Richard, your inexplicable presence is the one spark of magic in this endlessly turgid conflict! Is your memory restored? Do you know why you're here?”

Burton peered through the periscope. He saw coils of barbed wire forming a barrier across the landscape ahead. Beyond it there were German trenches, and behind them, the terrain rose to a ridge, thick with green trees. The Tanganyika railway line, he'd learned, was on the other side of that low range.

“I remember a few more things-mainly that there's something I have to do. The trouble is, I don't know what!”

From over to their left, a machine gun started to chatter. Four more explosions sounded in quick succession and lumps of mud rained down on them. Someone screeched, coughed, and died.

“Forgive the mundanity,” Wells said, “but I don't suppose you've got biscuits or anything? I haven't eaten since yesterday!”

“Nothing,” Burton replied. “Bertie, the forest-”

“What? Speak up!”

“The trees on the ridge. There's something wrong with them.”

“I've noticed. A verdant forest-and one that wasn't there two days ago!”

“What? You mean the trees grew to maturity in just forty-eight hours?”

“They did. Eugenicist mischief, obviously.”

“They aren't even native to Africa. Acer pseudoplatanus . The sycamore maple. It's a European species.”

“For a man whose memory is shot through you know far too much Latin. Down!”

They ducked and hugged the dirt wall as a pea thumped into the mud nearby and detonated.

Wells said something. Burton shook his head. He couldn't hear. His ears had filled with jangling bells. The war correspondent leaned closer and shouted: “The Hun have recently solved the problem with growing yellow pea artillery. The shrapnel from these projectiles is poisonous. If you're hit, pull the fragments out of your wound as fast as you can.”