Blankenship & Dawes in: Crocopolis! Part One.
The follow-up to “Isle of Ignominy!” I love these characters. They are two things: an opportunity for me to pay homage to the great canon of 19th century adventure literature - Wells, Verne, Doyle, and, particularly in this story, H. Rider Haggard (and a bit of Kipling) - as well as a handy lens with which to deconstruct Victorian culture. For example, King Solomon’s Mines - helluva book, a great thrilling adventure, but, by our modern standards, fairly racist (and Haggard was one of the more enlightened writers of his time). We can try to reconcile or excuse these things, but wouldn’t it be more fun if the author himself had done that in the book itself? By means of inexplicable and shocking violence? I give you that and more, and ask you to let yourself enjoy it. Because reading is meant to be challenging, dammit.
I’ll publish this in four parts.
Blankenship & Dawes
in
Crocodopolis!
By Jens Rushing
“Sir Richard Burton asserts it as verifiable fact,” Bellows said, ashing his cigar in the cut-glass tray, adjusting his aim carefully to account for the slight pitch of the Bellerophon. “I don’t know how many papist missionaries have said the same over the past two-three hundred years, but my twenty years in old Afrique have led me to agree with them: it is simply impossible to navigate the Red Nile all the way to its source.”
“It’s amazing what you can do with money,” Avery Dawes replied.
Bellows grunted his assent. “And the Royal Geographic Society is honored to aid you, gentlemen. Pending your success, of course.”
“We’re most beholden,” James Blankenship said acidly. “This is how the hare must feel when the hawk deigns to notice him.”
Bellows laughed at length and sucked his cigar until the tip glowed in the half-light of the Bellerophon’s cabin. He puckered his thick, wrinkled lips and blew a perfect smoke ring. Avery whistled his admiration. Avery admired a good deal too much about the old bastard, James thought with a bit of irritation.
After boarding the amphibious ship at Khartoum, Archibald Bellows had thoroughly charmed the young Avery with his easy mastery of African customs and languages, his experience, his skill at firearms. A friendly shooting match from the boiler deck had established the old man as Avery’s superior – and Avery was no slouch. He came to respect, then revere the old man, annoying James with his prattle. Bellows spoke Arabic and a dozen other African tongues as naturally as if they were English. Bellows could split a toothpick with a thrown knife at twenty paces. Bellows could overpower an enraged alligator. Bellows – Bellows – Bellows.
James compared the two men. Bellows was weathered and tanned as a piece of bootstrap leather, and just about as savoury, with muscles like cables beneath his dark skin. Broken blood vessels stitched his hawk-nose, and James noticed that his hands shook if he went a day without a bit of “summat hot,” but there was still enough strength in those arms to break a man in half. He caught James studying him and croaked in his gin-thickened voice, “Care for a tipple, lad?” James declined.
Hard, dangerous living had corroded the old man; rather, the habits one forms as a result of hard, dangerous living had corroded him. Avery, on the other hand, was in the very blush of youth, the paragon of British manhood. Tall, broad-shouldered, strong-chinned, well-limbed, handsome enough in his way, James conceded, if you cared for that “Greek god” look. Avery could run a mile in four and a half minutes and hold his breath for three. He had demonstrated this, on several occasions, but not for vainglory; in addition to his other virtues, he was aggravatingly humble.
But beneath that craggy forehead slumbered an uncultivated mind, James reflected sadly. His friend sometimes exhibited a sort of animal cunning, but he had little predilection for the sciences, for the search for hard truths behind the gauzy enigmas of the banal. Not James. A restless drive possessed him to pierce that shroud and glimpse the naked profundity of the natural world. So, aside from Avery, his friends were Erlenmeyer flasks, test tubes, Bunsen burners, and the writings of Darwin, Newton, Pasteur, and Copernicus – though Copernicus was on thin ice.
“The Society expects a full return on their investment in this expedition,” Bellows said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have funded the construction of this – tell me, Blankenship, why’d you give it such a mouthful of a name?”
“Bellerophon, the slayer of the Chimera, flew to Olympus and was struck down for his arrogance.”
“Is that your opinion of this little expedition?” Bellows said with a slanted smile. James reminded himself to be pleasant; Bellows was a Chartered Geographer in the RGS, and if James wanted to get his fellowship, and the attendant access to the coveted Foyle Reading Room, he needed to humor the man.
“No man of any color has sailed the Nile,” James said. “We’re attempting an upstream navigation along a fork only recently discovered – by myself – with no clear map of our path to Lake Tanganyika. We have braved crocodiles, bandits, mad monks and holy warriors of the Sudan, hippopotamuses…”
“And we’re almost there,” Avery interjected. “We should arrive tonight, in fact.”
“My point remaining,” James continued, “that our success aside, this is an extremely audacious undertaking. And we’re not half finished. Navigating the White Nile to its source is quite an accomplishment, but it is only a means to an end, the end being, of course, the search for Burton’s lost city.”
“And what do you think of that?” Bellows gestured with his cigar, now a stub.
“The source – ” James began. Bellows guffawed.
“The source,” he said, “is the most egregious liar, rake, muckrake, scoundrel, and fornicator in the Empire!”
James was perturbed. “If he were here, I’m sure Sir Burton would demand satisfaction for your words against him.”
“If he were here, I believe he’d take it as a compliment.”
“Regardless,” James said, “he claims to have learned of a pre-Moslem city beneath the waves. It could be true. Research leaves room for such a civilization, perhaps a fiefdom of the old Egyptian pharaohs, a vestigial appendage of their empire that outlived them and was deluged when the lake was created…” A grinding sound from below told him that the Bellerophon had left the river and was crawling uphill on its great treaded wheels. The smooth operation of the amphibious vessel satisfied him. It ought to; it was his own design.
“The lake appears in Ptolemy. Ptolemy was referencing Il Kha-Hati.” Bellows was smug. “I sincerely doubt the city predates Kha-Hati, who died in the sixth century before Christ. If it exists.”
James shrugged. “Maybe a Sumerian colony, traders from the Fertile Crescent. Or from the Indus valley. Pre-Ptolemaic ships could certainly cross from Baluchistan to Tanzania. Or a native civilization. Who knows? The possibilities are numerous. Africa is the cradle of mankind, after all.”
“Not any cradle of mine,” Bellows snorted, tilting his head at the Sudanese woman who was serving tea. “I wouldn’t share a cradle with these black bastards, eh?” He roared with laughter.
“Yes, well…” James said.
“How about you, Sonny Jim?” Bellows said to Avery. “Why’re you on this errand?”
“I just want a crack at Eustace, sir,” Avery enthused.
Eustace was a man-eating crocodile. Burton had named him, too, in his book on the Tanganyika expedition. The natives claimed that the giant reptile had devoured more than three hundred victims over the past four centuries. Avery was skeptical – if the victims were devoured, how could you tell how many there had been? – but if there was world-class game to be had, Avery and his Sharps buffalo rifle would be there.
“Aye, that’d be a prize, all right,” Bellows allowed. “Almost worth leaving what passes for civilization on this benighted continent and going back into the bush, among the dullest of the darkies. Now, you may think your average colored servant back in old England is stupid and lazy – God’s wounds! A backwoods Mulwesi could give him lessons on stupid and lazy! Thank God we’re here to lift them up with the hand of civilization.”
James bristled, and Bellows saw it. “I hope I haven’t offended you,” Bellows said.
“I subscribe to the emerging field of ethnology, sir, and the idea that one cannot judge another culture qualitatively; indeed, such would be a futile effort. Circumstance has rendered the European knowledgeable and ‘civilized,’ and circumstance has left these poor peoples subsistence-level farmers. It might have been otherwise – and was, fifteen hundred years ago, when the Italians ruled the degenerate rabble of Europe. No inherent virtue makes us superior.”
“Precisely,” Bellows said. “We are superior by Providence, and the virtue has followed as a result.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant,” James said.
“I know a little of that discipline of ethnology,” Bellows said. “It outlines five stages of the path to civilization: hunter-gatherer, agriculture, early civilization, feudalism, and, the apex of human achievement, modern liberal-capitalism. Only Europe has reached the last stage.”
The ride became smooth again. They were back on the river, the wheels retracting to allow the props to come out.
“What of cultures like China and Japan, which have great cities, huge noble classes, complex laws, and millennia of painting, sculpture, and poetry?”
Bellows dismissed them with a wave. “Static and corrupt. Well-painted corpses, but eaten up with worms on the inside. But, my son, you miss the benevolence of European superiority. We don’t hoard our wealth and knowledge, like the Manchoos of China or the brahmins of India. We build schools and make pygmy headhunters into little black Christians. We educate. We enlighten. We work great good on this Earth. Read your Kipling, my son.” Bellows’s tone was very gentle.
Before James could reply, a great crash echoed through the boat and they were thrown to the deck. Avery recovered with his customary alacrity and helped Bellows up, though the old man hardly needed help. He stomped out a fledgling fire where an oil lamp had fallen.
“A boulder – ” James gasped.
“A boulder!” Avery said. “Maybe you’ve never been whaling, old boy, but I’ve done a tour, just for fun, around the Horn – ”
“I sincerely doubt a whale has attacked us.”
“Not a whale, but some kind of beastie.” Avery snatched up his Sharps. “With me, sir?” he cried, and Avery and Bellows dashed from the cabin.
James staggered to his feet and followed them. They stood at the railing of the boiler deck, scanning the water over their rifle barrels. The river was a black swath with a lace of silver moonlight. “If it’s Eustace, may I have the first crack?” Avery asked.
“Take it if you can,” Bellows jibed.
James listened to the operation of the boat. A gurgle added to the swoosh of the props told him that they might be damaged, and he set off in that direction. The rifles boomed.
“Was that him?” Avery shouted.
“A mighty big croc, anyway!” Bellows said. James rolled his eyes. Leave them to their barbaric sport; he had the most advanced watercraft in existence to operate. The boat shuddered; another impact. James hurried through the trap that led to the boiler room, and beyond it the marvelous engine that converted steam to forward thrust. He opened the door to the engine room. Water washed his ankles. The twin drive shafts that terminated in the exterior props were submerged in water; the iron at the rear was torn and jagged; the Bellerophon, slowly but irrevocably, began to acquire a sternward slant as the river flowed into the hole. “Bloody – ” James said, but he didn’t get to finish that sentence.
The boat shook, and he sprawled on the floor, rolling into the watery end of the engine room. He grabbed a drive shaft and pulled himself up it. Rending metal screamed behind him and giant jaws clacked. A warm breath gusted over him, and James violated his most sacred rule of self-preservation; he looked back.
There was a flash of white teeth as big as Gurkha knives; a reptilian eye the size of a cricket ball; scaly armor that would make a legionnaire proud. Then the immortal Nile poured in to claim him.
#
Avery’s rifle was a part of his body. With the Sharps he had downed leviathan American buffalo, Swaziland bull elephants, Atlas bears, Bengal tigers, and Barbary lions. He leveled it at the river and waited for the slightest movement, his senses humming. Bellows was in the same state of a hunter’s readiness, and the old adventurer’s camaraderie warmed Avery.
A ripple creased the water, just a moment’s interruption of the smooth surface, and Avery and Bellows fired together. “Criminy!” Avery said. “Missed the devil!”
“If a devil there was,” Bellows said. “I think we were duped by a fish or serpent.”
The Bellerophon pushed upstream slowly. Before them the broad Nile widened further, and further still, until Avery wondered if they had reversed their course and returned to the Mediterranean. But, no, there were cliffs and dark, dense African forests far to starboard. They had reached Lake Tanganyika.
A second impact threw Avery against the rail; Bellows went over. Avery caught him with one hand – the old man weighed as much as a corn husk – and swung him back on board. The bow lifted slightly and the boat began to list. “We’re taking on water,” Bellows said.
“I suppose I’ll pop belowdecks and investigate. I thought I saw Jim disappear that direction earlier…”
Below, metal shrieked under tremendous strain. “No time for that,” Bellows said. “Get to the pilot deck and run us aground before we sink.”
“Jim won’t like that.”
“Better than losing his precious kit. This lake’s known for its crocs, my son. A swim here would hardly be a dip at Brighton.”
Avery nodded and leapt up the stairs to the pilothouse. Larsen, the pilot, struggled with the wheel. “It’s no good, sir,” he said. “She won’t answer. Rudder’s shot, and we’ve got plenty of steam, but props don’t seem to be doing a blasted thing.”
“Don’t fret, Mr. Larsen. Just aim for that sandy patch.” Avery pointed at a stretch of beach perhaps two hundred yards to starboard. “Run her aground.”
“Yessir.” Larsen knew how to follow orders.
Avery patted him on the shoulder. “There’s a fellow,” and he jumped down the stairs, intent on the engine room. In the boiler room he met Blankenship, dripping wet and white as a sheet. “What happened? Jim, my friend, are you uninjured?”
“I have made the acquaintance of your Crocodylus niloticus. But I append the appellation: Crocodylus niloticus rex.”
“Ye gads! Point me at him!” Avery shook his rifle.
“In the engine room – but you can’t – ” But he had. Avery flung open the door and water rushed into the boiler room. The boat tilted upward as the river sucked it downward; Avery struggled to seal the door, and sprang backward as a pair of giant jaws thrashed in the great hole before him. The snout measured five feet across, and Avery was sure he could fit his fist inside the flaring nostrils.
“This is what I came for, I suppose,” Avery reflected as the monstrous crocodile rammed its great head into the wall, bending the steel bulkhead as if it were aluminum. Fortunately, it could not fit through the narrow door and into the boiler room; though, due to the rate at which the Bellerophon was taking on water, they would soon find themselves in the unusual position of having a rampaging forty-foot reptile as the least of their worries. “Larsen’s taking the boat aground,” he told James. “We must seal this door, or we’ll sink before we make the beach!”
Eustace rammed the door again, the impact jarring Avery to his bones. He raised his rifle and fired; the shot went wild and glanced off the crocodile’s armor. “If not for this deuced rough ride, I could pick my shot and put one through his eye.”
“Here.” James put a canister in his hands. Avery recognized the cylinder as one of James’s anti-fire devices. He pulled the pin from a spring-loaded catch; white foam spewed from the nozzle. Eustace lunged again, jaws open. The boat rocked with the great reptile’s thrashing weight. Avery pitched the cylinder down his throat.
The jaws crashed together a foot from Avery’s face. His pugilist instinct compelled him to ram his fist into the crocodile’s nose. He might as well have punched a brick wall. Eustace snorted. “You know how to take a punch!” Avery said. “That would’ve felled Jack Gull himself!” Eustace snorted again, and foam sprayed from his nostrils, then bubbled through the locked teeth. The huge maw opened, foam gushed out, Eustace groaned terribly, and retreated into the river. Avery scowled. “Next time you’ll not be so lucky!”
He sealed the door. “Sorry about the bang-up, old boy,” he said.
“No bother,” James said. “As long as the equipment is safe, our research can go on.”
“By Gad, if he wasn’t a big one!”
“I am somewhat disappointed. The local legends put his age at four centuries. From what I know of Nile crocodile growth rates, and can extrapolate in this heated moment, he could not be over two hundred and fifty years old.” The ship’s horn blasted a deep note. “Now what could that mean?” James wondered.
“It means wrap your fists around that railing, Jim, my chum, and don’t let go – we’re landward bound!”
“Confound that Nordic numskull at the helm!” James shouted, but the shout was lost amongst a cacophony from the end of creation as half a hundred tons of boat collided with the shore: a crash, a grinding that penetrated the bones, and a long squeal of taxed steel that raked the brain. The boilers rattled in their mountings, and bolts under high pressure shot off and ricocheted around the room. They hurried to the deck. The Bellerophon was ruined. The pilothouse was a heap of planks, flattened in the crash; Eustace had shredded the stern; the beach, which was composed less of sand than small boulders, had crumpled the bow. A muted explosion, followed by a brief tremor, told them that the boilers had at last given up. The scent of smoke reached their nostrils.
“We’ve made it!” Avery said happily.
Wasn’t that thrilling? Come back Thursday to see what happens next.
Do you know why the sea captain is named “Larsen”? Because I’d just read The Sea Wolf. My brain, she is transparent.