Andrew found it fascinating that only a few centuries earlier people had had no idea that the world went on across the Atlantic, or that its true size depended on the courage and fortunes of explorers, whose dare-devil journeys had filled the medieval void, the dwelling place of sea monsters. On the other hand, he regretted that the world’s dimensions were no longer a mystery, that the most recent maps of land and sea constituted an official world in which all that was left to chart were coastlines.
Murray made them pause in front of the last gigantic map in his collection. ‘Gentlemen, you have in front of you possibly the most accurate world map in all of England,’ he announced, openly gloating. ‘I keep it continually updated. Whenever another region of the planet is charted, I have a new version drawn up and I burn the obsolete one. I consider this a symbolic gesture, like erasing my old, imprecise idea. Many of the expeditions you see here were made possible by our funding.’
The map was a blurred mass of multicoloured lines that, Murray explained, represented all the expeditionary voyages hitherto undertaken by man, the vicissitudes of which he had written up, doubtless with morbid enjoyment, in the chart’s left-hand margin. However, one glance at the map was enough to see that the precision with which each sinuous voyage had been traced eventually became pointless: it was impossible to follow any single journey owing to the criss-cross of the lines that recorded every expedition. These ranged from the earliest, such as that of Marco Polo (represented by a gold line snaking around India, China, Central Asia and the Malayan archipelago), to the most recent, like that undertaken by Sir Francis Younghusband, who had travelled from Peking to Kashmir, crossing the Karakoram mountains with their soaring glacier-topped peaks.
The squiggles were not confined to land: others left terra firma, imitating the foamy wake of legendary ships such as Columbus’s caravels as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean, or the Erebus and the Terror as they tried to find a short-cut to China via the Arctic Ocean. These last two lines vanished suddenly, as had the actual ships when sailing across the Lancaster Strait, the so-called North-west Passage. Andrew decided to follow the blue line that cut across the island of Borneo, that sultry paradise overrun by crocodiles and gibbons to the south-east of Asia. It followed the tortuous journey of Sir James Brooke, nicknamed the Rajah of Sarawak, a name with which Andrew was familiar because the explorer popped up in Salgari’s novels as a ruthless pirate slayer.
Then Murray asked them to concentrate on the most intricate part of the map, the African continent. There, all of the expeditions that had attempted to discover the mythical source of the Nile -those of the Dutchwoman Alexandrine Tinné, Mr and Mrs Baker, Burton and Speke and, most famously, Livingstone and Stanley, as well as many more – converged to form a tangled mesh, which, if nothing else, illustrated the fascination Africa had held for the intrepid wearers of pith helmets.
‘The account of how we discovered time travel began exactly twenty-two years ago,’ Murray announced theatrically.
As he had heard the story many times before, Eternal stretched out at his master’s feet. Charles smiled gleefully at this promising beginning, while Andrew’s lips twisted in frustration. He realised he would need a lot of patience before he found out whether or not he would be able to save Marie Kelly.
Chapter VIII
Permit me, if you will, to perform a little narrative juggling at this point, and recount the story Gilliam Murray told them in the third person instead of the first, as if it were an excerpt from an adventure story, which is the way Murray would ultimately have liked to see it.
Back then, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the main ambition of most expeditionary societies was to discover the source of the Nile, which Ptolemy had situated in the Mountains of the Moon, the magnificent range rising out of the heart of Africa. However, modern explorers seemed to have had no more luck than Herodotus, Nero or anyone else who had searched in vain for it throughout history. Richard Burton and John Speke’s expedition had only succeeded in making enemies of the two explorers, and David Livingstone’s had thrown little light on the matter.
When Henry Stanley found Livingstone in Ujiji, he was suffering from dysentery. Nevertheless, he refused to return with Stanley to the metropolis and set off on another expedition, this time to Lake Tanganyika. He had to be brought back from there on a litter, racked with fever and utterly exhausted. The Scottish explorer died at Chitambo, and his final journey was made as a corpse, embalmed and enclosed in a large piece of bark from a myonga tree. It took porters nine months to carry him to the island of Zanzibar, whence he was finally repatriated to Great Britain. He was buried in 1878 in Westminster Abbey with full honours, the source of the Nile remaining a mystery.
Everyone, from the Royal Geographic Society to the most insignificant science museum, wanted to take credit for discovering its elusive location. The Murray family were no exception, and at the same time as the New York Herald and the London Daily Telegraph sponsored Stanley’s new expedition, they, too, sent one of their most experienced explorers to the inhospitable African continent.
His name was Oliver Tremanquai, and he had undertaken several expeditions to the Himalayas. He was also a veteran hunter. Among the creatures he killed with his expert marksmanship were Indian tigers, Balkan bears and Ceylonese elephants. Although never a missionary, he was a deeply religious man, and never missed an opportunity to evangelise any natives he might come across, listing the merits of his God like someone selling a gun.
Excited about his new mission, Tremanquai left for Zanzibar, where he acquired porters and supplies. However, a few days after he had made his way into the continent the Murrays lost all contact with him. The weeks crept by and still they received no message. They began to wonder what had become of the explorer. With great sorrow, they gave him up for lost as they had no Stanley to send after him.
Ten months later, Tremanquai burst into their offices, days after a memorial service had taken place with the permission of his wife – loath to don her widow’s weeds. As was only to be expected, his appearance caused the same stir as if he had been a ghost. He was terribly gaunt, his eyes were feverish, and his filthy, malodorous body hardly looked as if he had spent the intervening months washing in rosewater. As was obvious from his deplorable condition, the expedition had been a complete disaster from the outset. No sooner had they penetrated the jungle than they were ambushed by Somali tribesmen. Tremanquai was unable even to take aim at those feline shadows emerging from the undergrowth before he was felled by a cascade of arrows. There, in the stillness of the jungle, far from the eyes of civilisation, the expedition was brutally massacred. The attackers had left him for dead, like his men.
But life had toughened Tremanquai and he had survived. He roamed the jungle for weeks, wounded and feverish, arrows still stuck in his flesh, using his rifle as a crutch, until his pitiful wanderings brought him to a small native village encircled by a palisade. Exhausted, he collapsed before the narrow entrance to the fence, like a piece of flotsam washed up by the sea.
He awoke several days later completely naked, stretched out on an uncomfortable straw mattress with repulsive poultices on his wounds. He was unable to identify the features of the young girl applying the sticky greenish dressings as belonging to any of the tribes he knew. Her body was long and supple, her hips extremely narrow and her chest almost as flat as a board. Her dark skin gave off a faint, dusky glow. He soon discovered that the men possessed the same slender build, their delicate bone structure almost visible beneath their slight musculature. Not knowing what tribe they belonged to, Tremanquai decided to invent a name for them. He called them the Reed People, because they were as slim and supple as reeds.
Tremanquai was an excellent shot, but he had little imagination. The Reed People’s otherworldly physique, as well as the big black