River of the Gods E-Book

Candice Millard

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 583

Beschreibung

'This complex, compelling tale is told with simplicity and grace' - The Times A story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers. For millennia the location of the Nile River's headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the mid-19th century, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for Britain. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, Burton's opposite in temperament and beliefs. From the start the two men clashed. They would endure tremendous hardship, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, the two became sworn enemies. Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan's army, and eventually travelled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without Bombay and men like him, who led, carried, and protected the expedition, neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived.

Leseprobe

RIVER OF THE GODS

Also by Candice Millard

Hero of the Empire

Destiny of the Republic

The River of Doubt

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by Doubleday 2022

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2023

Copyright © Candice Millard 2022

The right of Candice Millard to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Book design by Maria Carella

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800752610

eISBN: 9781800752627

FOR MY CHILDREN

The lake rippled from one end of the world to the other.

Wide as a sea cradled in a giant’s palm.

—“Sidi Mubarak Bombay” by Ranjit Hoskote

CONTENTS

Prologue: Obsession

Part One Some Gallant Heart

CHAPTER ONE: A Blaze of Light

CHAPTER TWO: Shadows

CHAPTER THREE: Bond for Our Blood

CHAPTER FOUR: The Abban

CHAPTER FIVE: The Enemy Is Upon Us

Part Two What Might Have Been, What Would Have Been

CHAPTER SIX: Into the Mouth of Hell

CHAPTER SEVEN: What a Curse Is a Heart

CHAPTER EIGHT:Horror Vacui

CHAPTER NINE: Bombay

CHAPTER TEN: Death Was Written

CHAPTER ELEVEN: An Old Enemy

CHAPTER TWELVE: Tanganyika

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: To the End of the World

Part Three Fury

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Knives Are Sheathed

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: ’Twas Me He Shot

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: An Exile’s Dream

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Hard as Bricks

Part Four The Malignant Tongues of Friends

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The Prince

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Damn Their Souls

CHAPTER TWENTY: Neston Park

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Weary Heart Grows Cold

Epilogue: Ashes

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography

Plates section

RIVER OF THE GODS

Prologue

OBSESSION

As he walked through the storied gates of Alexandria in the fall of 1801, a young British officer named William Richard Hamilton found himself in the middle of a stunning tableau—abject misery set against the lost grandeur of the Pharaohs. Once the ancient world’s greatest center of learning, the city of Alexandria was now a burning ruin, caught in the grip of a European war played out on African land. In the wake of Britain’s crushing victory over Napoleonic France, injured soldiers lay dying in the scorching sun; prisoners freed from dungeons dragged their battered bodies through the streets; starving families fought over the last of the armies’ dead horses. To Hamilton, however, the moment was the opportunity of a lifetime. On his own, the twenty-four-year-old Cambridge-educated classicist had been sent to Egypt with a single mission: to find the Rosetta Stone.

Largely ignored for centuries by European elites schooled in the glory and languages of Greece and Rome, Egyptian culture had only recently begun to receive recognition for its astonishing achievements and even greater antiquity, making it a new and especially coveted prize for European powers obsessed by military and cultural supremacy. Three years earlier, in the summer of 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte had landed on the Egyptian coast, hoping to weaken Britain by blocking its land route to India. That conventional military objective, however, also forced open the door for a far more audacious scientific and cultural conquest. Behind his invading troops, Napoleon brought another, highly trained army—of scholars. These ambitious men from France, known as “savants,” were charged with appropriating everything they could unearth from the tombs or pry from the ground, attempting to assert French sovereignty over Egypt’s ancient culture. They measured the head of the Great Sphinx, mapped Cairo, surveyed towns, and painted everything that could not be rolled up and carried away. These men, botanists and engineers, artists and geologists, were living, as one of them excitedly wrote home, “at the center of a flaming core of reason,” and they believed that there was no greater symbol of their military and intellectual power than their seizing of the Rosetta Stone.

Although its neatly carved hieroglyphs were as yet undeciphered, the stone offered access to the spectacular mysteries that European scholars now realized were waiting for them along Egypt’s Nile River—mysteries that predated anything they understood, and that promised to rewrite everything they knew about history. The French had unearthed the forty-five-inch-tall stone two years earlier, in the summer of 1799, when Napoleon’s soldiers were trying to reinforce a crumbling, ancient fort on the west bank of the Nile, in the port of Rosetta. His officers immediately recognized that the dark gray slab was an object of extraordinary value, what scholars spent lifetimes hoping to find. On its face was etched a two-thousand-year-old decree written in three different languages: two unknown—Demotic, once the everyday language of the Egyptian people, and hieroglyphs, the tantalizingly mysterious language of its priests—and one known: ancient Greek, which had the power to unlock the other two. News of the find had spread quickly, and scholars and scientists throughout Europe began speaking in hushed tones of the Rosetta Stone.

That Napoleon should possess such a treasure map to ancient wisdom was intolerable to France’s imperial rival, Britain. Emerging victorious from the bloody siege of Alexandria, the British now demanded their rights as conquerors: every sarcophagus, every sculpture, every gleaming golden scarab, and, most of all, the Rosetta Stone. In defeat, hiding the stone had been France’s only remaining option, so despite its massive size—estimated at some three quarters of a ton—Napoleon’s soldiers had already moved it several times, from the fort where it was found, then to Cairo, and, finally, to Alexandria. Now it was in a warehouse, concealed in a pile of ordinary baggage and covered with mats. For the benefit of the British, the French let a rumor circulate that the stone was already gone, slipped aboard a ship leaving for Europe in the middle of the night, just as Bonaparte himself had done as soon as defeat had appeared imminent.

William Richard Hamilton, however, refused to accept such evasions. Working his way through the rubble of Alexandria, he would not believe that the Rosetta Stone had left Egypt and demanded to know where it was hidden. The commanding French general, who had personally supervised much of the cultural plunder, raged at the irritatingly determined young man, accusing the British of extorting him with “a cannon in each of my ears, and another in my mouth” and uttering a phrase that would live on as a timeless caricature of imperial double standards. “Jamais on n’a pillé le monde!” he railed scornfully—“the world had never been so pillaged!” As he knew he would, Hamilton eventually discovered the stone’s hiding place, and five months later, carried aboard the captured French frigate HMS Égyptienne, it finally reached London, where it immediately became the greatest treasure in the British Museum.

Far from quenching Europe’s interest in the mysteries of the Nile, the arrival of the Rosetta Stone fueled a decades-long obsession with Egypt, Middle Eastern cultures, and “orientalism.” By the time the stone’s hieroglyphs were finally deciphered twenty-three years later by a French scholar named Jean-François Champollion, Europe’s fascination with Egyptian history and the Nile Valley had grown into a full-scale frenzy. Once the cryptic secrets of the Pharaohs’ forgotten language were unlocked, they opened a floodgate of interest and scholarship, which in turn cascaded through popular culture. From archaeology to art, poetry to fashion, the allure of a vast, gleaming civilization lost in time proved irresistible to the public. Generations of aristocrats would devote their money and time competing to unearth new dimensions of this ancient world, and to reconcile it with the classical Greek and Roman texts and history they had been steeped in from their first days in school. Among the most beguiling of the stories they had read were the wide-ranging theories about the source of the Nile, from speculations by the Greek historian Herodotus to the failed expeditions of Roman emperor Nero’s elite Praetorian Guard.

Having vaulted his country to the forefront of this new trend, Hamilton, like the rest of the world, only grew more captivated by the secrets of the Nile. As his youthful features became creased with lines and his patrician chin softened with age, he intensified his study, publishing his own translation of the Greek portion of the Rosetta Stone. Adding yet another controversial cultural icon to his record, he helped retrieve the Parthenon Sculptures after one of the ships carrying them sank to the bottom of the sea. In 1830, he then helped enshrine Britain’s national preoccupation in institutional form by becoming an original member and later president of the Royal Geographical Society, even giving it its Latin motto: Ob terras reclusas—“For the discovery of lands.”

Putting its greatest minds and vast imperial fortunes behind the task of exploring humanity’s ancient roots, Britain rapidly took a leading role in the new fields that were opened up by that quest, with the Royal Geographical Society as its principal organizer and advocate. Even as it filled the British Museum with artifacts appropriated by imperial force, however, the Society’s ambitions in pursuing ancient Egypt to the headwaters of the Nile were frustrated by the sheer scale of the majestic river, the longest in the world, which defeated countless attempts to reach its origins. Standing in the way of any attempted exploration were vast uncharted territories, defended by local peoples and countless physical hardships, that were presumed to conceal the secret heritage of the entire modern world.

Rather than fighting their way upriver, which would also entail discerning which of the bewildering number of tributaries would qualify as the principal source of the Nile, explorers shifted their attention to a bold alternative plan: landing on the eastern coast of Africa, well below the equator, and proceeding inland in hopes of finding the watershed where a stream began to course northward on the four-thousand-mile journey to Egypt. This epic end-around tactic was supported by rumors of a giant lake region that was said to exist in the central part of the continent. This strategy also took advantage of Britain’s burgeoning military and naval strength, allowing the explorers to transport their supplies and equipment by sea to key ports and staging areas such as Aden and the island of Zanzibar, which lay protected by twenty miles of sea just off the coast where an expedition would need to land and start its journey inland.

By bringing British explorers into direct contact with the interior of Africa this undertaking would effectively reconnect, as DNA analysis would later prove, a culture from a more recent site of development to some of the most ancient lands where human migration first began. It thus set the stage for the “discovery” of regions that had in fact been occupied continuously by human beings for hundreds of thousands of years longer than London or Paris. As similar encounters from Hispaniola to Peru had amply proved, however, the disparity of power and resources between the two sides in such meetings was fraught with the potential for tragedy and exploitation. The consequences of that dangerous asymmetry had been demonstrated in Africa over the preceding centuries, as European, North American, and Arab traders who moved between two worlds capitalized on their power by enslaving African peoples and selling them for profit. For explorers, that wrenching injustice was as much a reality of the region as geography or climate, shaping everything from the location of ports and availability of food to the paths they would follow. In fact, their own efforts would doubtless lead to the plunder of the very land they wished to explore. As the British writer Samuel Johnson had written less than a century earlier, after the Arctic expedition of Captain Constantine Phipps, “I do not wish well to discoveries for I am always afraid they will end in conquest and robbery.”

Still, with all of Britain’s growing knowledge and imperial might, the task of searching such an unfamiliar region for the source of a faraway river was so difficult and forbidding that it remained all but impossible. By the 1850s, with Britain’s national pride engaged and the prestige of transformative scientific discovery and the plans for imperial expansion at stake, the Royal Geographical Society resolved to mount one of the most complex and demanding expeditions ever attempted. Although among its members were scientific luminaries that ranged from Charles Darwin to David Livingstone, the Society knew that this undertaking would require experience and insight that were beyond the reach of anything it had accomplished in the past. It would need the help of skilled African guides and porters, a heavy debt that was rarely acknowledged, but it would also need more than just an explorer. It would need a scientist and scholar, an artist and linguist, an extraordinarily skilled writer and an ambitious, obsessive researcher—an army of savants in a single man.

Part One

Some Gallant Heart

CHAPTER ONE

A Blaze of Light

Sitting on a thin carpet in his tiny, rented room in Suez, Egypt, in 1854, Richard Francis Burton calmly watched as five men cast critical eyes over his meager belongings. The men, whom he had just met on the Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, “looked at my clothes, overhauled my medicine chest, and criticised my pistols,” Burton wrote. “They sneered at my copper-cased watch.” He knew that if they discovered the truth, that he was not Shaykh Abdullah, an Afghan-born Indian doctor and devout, lifelong Muslim but a thirty-two-year-old lieutenant in the army of the British East India Company, not only would his elaborately planned expedition be in grave danger, but so would his life. Burton, however, was not worried. Even when his new friends found his sextant, the most indispensable, and obviously Western, scientific instrument in his possession, he did not think that he had anything to fear. “This,” he later wrote, “was a mistake.”

Burton’s goal was to do something that no other Englishman had ever done, and that few had either the ability or audacity to do: enter Mecca disguised as a Muslim. It was an undertaking that simultaneously acknowledged what was most sacred to the Muslim faith and dismissed the right to protect it, making it irresistible to Burton, who studied every religion and respected none. The birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, Mecca is the holiest site in Islam and, as such, forbidden to non-Muslims. Burton knew that, “to pass through the Moslem’s Holy Land, you must either be a born believer, or have become one,” but he had never even considered performing the Hajj as a convert. “Men do not willingly give information to a ‘new Moslem,’ especially a Frank [European]: they suspect his conversion to be feigned or forced, look upon him as a spy, and let him see as little of life as possible,” he wrote. “I would have given up the dear project rather than purchase a doubtful and partial success at such a price.” An Oxford dropout, self-taught scholar, compulsive explorer, and extraordinarily skilled polyglot, Burton wanted unfettered access to every holy site he reached, the trust of every man he met, and the answer to every ancient mystery he encountered—nothing less, he wrote, than to see and understand “Moslem inner life.” He also wanted to return to England alive.

By disguising himself as a Muslim, Burton was risking the righteous wrath of those for whom the Hajj was the most sacred of religious rites. Although “neither the Koran nor the Sultan enjoins the killing of Hebrew or Christian intruders,” he knew, “in the event of a pilgrim declaring himself to be an infidel, the authorities would be powerless to protect him.” A single error could cost him his life. “A blunder, a hasty action, a misjudged word, a prayer or bow, not strictly the right shibboleth,” he wrote, “and my bones would have whitened the desert sand.”

Burton’s plan, moreover, required crossing the Rubʾ al-Khali—“Empty Quarter”—the world’s largest continuous desert and, in his words, a “huge white blot” on nineteenth-century maps. So ambitious was the expedition that it had captured the attention of the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick Impey Murchison. For Murchison, who had helped to found the Society nearly a quarter of a century earlier, this was exactly the kind of exploration that the Society had been created to encourage. He “honored me,” Burton wrote, “by warmly supporting . . . my application for three years’ leave of absence on special duty.” The East India Company, a 250-year-old private corporation with armies of its own, had argued that the journey was too dangerous and that Burton, who had made more enemies than friends during his years in the military, should be given no more than a one-year furlough. The Royal Geographical Society stood by its promise to help finance the expedition. For a challenge of this magnitude, Murchison believed, Burton was “singularly well-qualified.”

•

Although the members of the Royal Geographical Society were impressed by Burton’s achievements, most had reservations about this unusual young man who seemed to be British in name only. Burton had been born in Devon, on the English Channel, but he had spent far less time in his homeland than he had roaming the rest of the world. It was a pattern that had begun early in life, when his father, Joseph Netterville Burton, a retired lieutenant colonel in the British Army, moved his family to France before Richard’s first birthday. Over the next eighteen years, he moved thirteen more times, briefly settling in towns from Blois to Lyons, Marseilles to Pau, Pisa to Siena, Florence, Rome, and Naples. By the time he was an adult, Burton, along with his younger siblings, Maria and Edward, felt less like a citizen of the world than a man without a country. “In consequence of being brought up abroad, we never thoroughly understood English society,” he wrote, “nor did society understand us.”

Not only did Burton not feel British, he had often been told, and never in an admiring way, that neither did he look particularly British. No one who met him ever forgot his face. Bram Stoker, who would go on to write Dracula, was shaken by his first encounter with Burton. “The man riveted my attention,” Stoker later wrote. “He was dark, and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. . . . I never saw anyone like him. He is steel! He would go through you like a sword!” Burton’s friend, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, wrote that he had “the jaw of a devil and the brow of a god,” and described his eyes as having “a look of unspeakable horror.” Burton’s black eyes, which he had inherited from his English-Irish father, seemed to mesmerize everyone he met. Friends, enemies, and acquaintances described them variously as magnetic, imperious, aggressive, burning, even terrible, and compared them to every dangerous wild animal they could think of, from a panther to a “stinging serpent.” Equally striking were his thick, black hair, his deep, resonant voice, and even his teeth, which may have inspired literature’s most iconic vampire. Stoker would never forget watching, enthralled, as Burton spoke, his upper lip rising menacingly. “His canine tooth showed its full length,” he wrote, “like the gleam of a dagger.”

Burton had grown up fighting, from street brawls to school skirmishes to violent encounters with enraged tutors. Although his father had dragged his children from one European town to another, he wanted for them a British education, which began at a grim boarding school in Richmond. All that Burton remembered learning at the school, which he described as “the ‘Blacking-shop’ of Charles Dickens,” was “a certain facility in using our fists, and a general development of ruffianism. I was in one perpetual scene of fights; at one time I had thirty-two affairs of honor to settle.” When he and Edward were finally sent back to Boulogne, after an attack of measles killed several boys and shut down the school, they scandalized everyone on their ship by joyously celebrating the fact that they were leaving England at last. “We shrieked, we whooped, we danced for joy. We shook our fists at the white cliffs, and loudly hoped we should never see them again,” he wrote. “We hurrah’d for France, and hooted for England; ‘The Land on which the Sun ne’er sets—nor rises.’ ”

Burton’s father taught him chess, but most of what he learned came from a succession of alternately terrifying and terrified tutors. No matter the subject, the tutors were given permission to beat their pupils, until the pupils were old enough to beat them back. In later years, Burton would express his sorrow for the incalculable harm done by “that unwise saying of the wise man, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’ ” As a teenager, he fought back. The poor, nervous musician Burton’s parents hired to teach him violin—“nerves without flesh, hung on wires,” as Burton would later contemptuously describe him, “all hair and no brain”—finally quit after his student broke a violin over his head.

The only childhood teacher Burton respected was his fencing master, a former soldier who had only one thumb, having lost the other in battle. Richard and his brother threw themselves into fencing with such wild enthusiasm that their studies nearly ended in tragedy. “We soon learned not to neglect the mask,” Richard wrote. “I passed my foil down Edward’s throat, and nearly destroyed his uvula, which caused me a good deal of sorrow.” The lessons, however, not only paid off but eventually produced one of the most skilled swordsmen in Europe. Burton earned the coveted French title Maître d’Armes; perfected two sword strokes, the une-deux and the manchette—an upward slashing movement that disabled an opponent, often sparing his life; and wrote both The Book of the Sword and A Complete System of Bayonet Exercise, which the British Army published the same year he left for Mecca. Fencing, he would later say, “was the great solace of my life.”

As Burton grew into a young man, he also developed another all-consuming, lifelong interest, one that would make him even less welcome in polite society: sex. What began as love affairs with beautiful women from Italy to India quickly transformed into something more enquiring and erotic, and far less acceptable in Victorian England. As a young officer in Sindh, now a province in southeastern Pakistan, he famously investigated the homosexual brothels, writing a report for his commander that he claimed later hindered his career. His ethnological writings, which in the end would range from Asia to Africa to North America, focused not only on the dress, religion, and familial structures of his subjects, but on their sexual practices. His readers would be shocked by open and detailed discussions of polygamy and polyandry, pederasty and prostitution. Burton, however, had little time for British priggishness and no interest in what he referred to as “innocence of the word not of the thought; morality of the tongue and not of the heart.”

•

Although Burton’s nomadic childhood and scandalous interests left him feeling cut off from his country and distrusted by his countrymen, he did learn one striking thing about himself along the way: He was, in the words of one of his flabbergasted tutors, “a man who could learn a language running.” In the end, he would speak more than twenty-five different languages, along with at least another dozen dialects. To some extent, his gift for languages was a product of natural ability and early training. “I was intended for that wretched being, the infant phenomenon,” he explained, “and so began Latin at three and Greek at four.” It was his fascination with other cultures, however, and his methodical mind that made him one of the world’s most gifted linguists. He had worked out a system early on that allowed him to learn most languages in two months, and he never seemed to understand why others found it so hard. “I never worked more than a quarter of an hour at a time, for after that the brain lost its freshness,” he wrote. “After learning some three hundred words, easily done in a week, I stumbled through some easy book-work (one of the Gospels is the most come-atable), and underlined every word that I wished to recollect, in order to read over my pencillings at least once a day. . . . The neck of the language was now broken and progress was rapid.”

After engineering his own expulsion from Oxford, where he had been ridiculed, ignored, and bored, Burton had joined the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, a regiment within the East India Company. Realizing that one of the fastest ways to rise through the ranks was to become an interpreter, he learned twelve languages in seven years. He had begun studying Hindustani immediately upon arriving in India and six months later easily passed first among the many gifted linguists taking the exam. Over the following years, one after another, he steadily added languages to his long list: Gujarati, Marathi, Armenian, Persian, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Sanskrit, Arabic, Telugu, and Turkish, rarely placing second to even his most talented rivals.

So caught up did Burton become in his passion for languages, that he often forgot that not everyone shared his outsized enthusiasm. In his book Falconry in the Valley of the Indus—one of five books he wrote between 1851 and 1853—he used so many different Indian dialects that he was openly mocked in a British review. “Were it not that the author is so proud of his knowledge of oriental tongues that he thinks it desirable to display the said knowledge by a constant admixture of Indianee words with his narrative, this would be a most agreeable addition both to the Zoology and Falconry of the East,” the reviewer admonished him. “We find his affectation all but insufferable, and devoutly wish that he were confined to the use of plain English for the remaining term of his natural life.” Burton, however, was not to be shamed or dissuaded from his obsession. “For many years I have been employed in studying the Scindian literature and language,” he wrote in reply. “You will . . . find it is the language of a country as large as England.” He even wrote a letter to The Bombay Times openly criticizing the language examination process within the East India Company and claiming that, for a serious student, it was not particularly challenging. “The task may appear a formidable one: we can assure him that the appearance is much more tremendous than the reality,” he wrote. “Any man of moderate abilities can, with careful, though not hard, study, qualify himself to pass the examination we have described in one year.”

Such shrugging dismissal of the notoriously difficult and competitive exams was maddening for Burton’s fellow officers, who struggled for years to learn the languages. One man in particular bristled at such casual arrogance, and would come to justify Burton’s assertion that “linguists are a dangerous race.” Christopher Palmer Rigby was considered one of the most distinguished linguists in the East India Company. At twenty years of age he had passed the language exams for both Hindustani and Marathi, adding Canarese, Persian, and Arabic before his thirtieth birthday. In 1840, while in Aden, he not only learned Somali but wrote An Outline of the Somali Language and Vocabulary, which Burton admired and used extensively when studying the language himself. When Rigby sat for his examination in Gujarati, he had been widely expected to receive the highest score. To everyone’s shock, however, not least of all Rigby’s, he had lost that honor to Richard Burton.

Many years later, Rigby would find himself in a position to prove to Burton that linguists were not only dangerous, they had long memories. Burton would not sit for the exam in Arabic, a language that he knew so well he referred to it as “my native tongue,” until 1855. Soon after taking the test, he would leave the country, assuming that he had easily passed. “It may be said without immodesty,” he wrote, “that I have forgotten as much as many Arabists have learned.” As he would find out much later, however, he had in fact failed the exam, the Bombay Examination Committee refusing to pass him because, it argued, his examination had been informal. Seventeen years after Burton had taken the test, the Arabic scholar George Percy Badger would write to him explaining that he had remarked “upon the absurdity of the Bombay Committee being made the judge of your proficiency inasmuch as I did not believe that any of them possessed a tithe of the knowledge of Arabic which you did.” The president of the committee at the time of the decision was Christopher Palmer Rigby.

•

Burton knew that even if he spoke Arabic like a local it would not be enough to preserve his disguise in Mecca, so he had spent months meticulously planning his journey. While still in England, he had quietly assumed the character of Shaykh Abdullah, shaving his head, growing a beard, donning loose robes, and using walnut juice to deepen the color of his skin. He had even undergone circumcision, ensuring that it was done according to the Arabic rite rather than the Jewish. Once in Cairo, despite already speaking Persian, Hindustani, and Arabic—the three languages he thought he needed to know in order to “pass muster”—and having such a detailed knowledge of Islam that he was able to recite a quarter of the Koran by heart, he had hired a former khatib, or Islamic preacher, to sharpen his grammar and expand his theology. Finally, like any pilgrim, he had carefully divided his money, sewing part of it into a leather belt and packing the rest in boxes, in expectation of being robbed by the men who haunted the Hajj’s most heavily trafficked routes. “If they find a certain amount of ready money in his baggage, they do not search his person,” Burton advised his readers. “If they find nothing they proceed to a bodily inspection, and if his waist-belt be empty they are rather disposed to rip open his stomach, in the belief that he must have some peculiarly ingenious way of secreting valuables.”

Even the most serious study and painstaking planning, however, can be undone by a single mistake. In the weeks since Burton had first met the men who now sat in his room, examining his bags, he had carefully cultivated their friendship, offering them loans for their pilgrimages, engaging them in long, rambling conversations, and impressing them with his vast knowledge of Islamic theology and literature. By the time they were warily eyeing his sextant, they had not only willingly but eagerly embraced him as a fellow pilgrim.

There had been nothing else among Burton’s belongings that had given these men a moment’s pause. He didn’t have much beyond a few items of clothing, a pistol and dagger, his Koran, three water skins, a seemingly indestructible pea-green medicine chest covered in red and yellow flowers, and a “housewife,” a gift from his cousin, which consisted of “a roll of canvas, carefully soiled, and garnished with needles and thread, cobblers’ wax, buttons.” Anything that might have raised suspicion, and which he could possibly do without, he had left behind. He had sorely needed the sextant to measure distances when he reached Mecca, so he had done his best to disguise it by replacing its gold case with a facing that he had stained and covered in Arabic numerals. The moment the men laid eyes on it, however, Burton saw the look on their faces suddenly change, the easy camaraderie turn to simmering suspicion.

Nothing was said until he left the room, but as soon as Burton disappeared from view, his only servant, a short, stout, beardless Egyptian teenager named Mohammed al-Basyúni, turned on him with a vengeance. Although he was no more than eighteen years old, Mohammed was exceedingly clever—well traveled, a skilled bargainer, and able to adapt quickly to any circumstance. “Eloquent in abuse,” Burton wrote of him, and “profound at Prayer.” All Burton had wanted in a servant was “good health and a readiness to travel anywhere, a little skill in cooking, sewing and washing, willingness to fight, and a habit of regular prayers.” What he had gotten was a quick-witted young man who kept a wary eye on him at all times. There had, moreover, been a thousand opportunities for Mohammed to catch him in a misstep. The way he held his prayer beads, sat in a chair, even lifted his glass to take a drink of water, all were riddled with complications and potential pitfalls. To be able to do what he had come to do—not just to see Mecca but to study, measure, sketch, and describe it in minute detail—Burton had been forced to resort to any subterfuge he could think of, even connecting a guide wire to his pen at night so that he could take notes in the dark, after Mohammed had fallen asleep.

Mohammed, Burton would later admit, had “suspected me from the first.” Now, seeing his opportunity to finally expose the apparently pious Shaykh Abdullah, Mohammed seized it. Turning to the men staring at the sextant, he did not hesitate to express his most damning suspicion. “The would-be Haji,” he declared, is “one of the Infidels.” To Mohammed’s surprise, instead of agreeing with him, the men leapt to their friend’s defense. One swore that the “light of Al-Islam was upon my countenance,” Burton later learned. Another, who just that morning had seen a letter Burton had written to a Muslim friend concerning matters of high theology, “felt himself justified in declaring, ex cathedra, the boy Mohammed’s position perfectly untenable.” After that, the verbal blows rained down on the stunned young man. He was called “a pauper, a ‘fakir,’ an owl, a cut-off one, a stranger . . . for daring to impugn the faith of a brother believer.”

Burton had been saved. The knowledge he had spent years acquiring had made it impossible for his friends to believe that he was anything other than what he professed to be—a devout Indian Muslim. He knew, however, that his reprieve would not be complete without sacrifice. He would not be able to keep his sextant, the one tool that would have been most useful to him in the days to come. “Determining with a sigh to leave it behind,” he wrote, “I prayed five times a day for nearly a week.”

•

Mohammed must have continued to suspect the truth about Burton, but he did not abandon him on the Hajj. Instead, he led him not just to Mecca but to the heart of Islam: the Kaaba, a shrine at the center of the al-Masjid al-Haram, the world’s most visited mosque. Although throughout his life Burton would be accused of blasphemy by outraged, puritanical Britons, he had always been fascinated by religion as a subject of study. He applied the same deep curiosity and steady, systematic approach to understanding the world’s religions that he did to languages and cultures, and he contemptuously dismissed the Western idea that Christianity was the only religion to be taken seriously. “What nation, either in the West or in the East, has been able to cast out from its ceremonies every suspicion of its old idolatry? What are the mistletoe, the Irish wake, the Pardon of Brittany, the Carnival?” he asked. “Better far to consider the Meccan pilgrimage rites in the light of Evil-worship turned into lessons of Good than to philosophize about their strangeness, and to blunder in asserting them to be insignificant.” Although he had devoted most of his study to Islam, Burton was fascinated by it all, from Catholicism to Judaism, Hinduism, Sufism, Sikhism, Spiritualism, even Satanism. In fact, he briefly considered writing a biography of Satan, who, to his mind, was “the true hero of Paradise Lost and by his side God and man are very ordinary.” Nothing for Burton was out of bounds or impure, and he never feared heavenly and certainly not earthly condemnation. The only aspect of religion that he scorned was the idea that there existed any true believers. “The more I study religion,” he wrote, “the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anyone but himself.”

Although a spy and an infidel and an agnostic, Burton could not resist the power of this, one of the world’s most profound religious experiences. Joining the thousands of men who filled the mosque’s courtyard, he circled the Kaaba seven times counterclockwise, touching the Kiswah, an enormous black silk cloth draped over the top of the shrine. After years of study, he knew exactly what to say and do now that he was in the presence of the Kaaba, but the overwhelming emotions he felt swelling his heart were born not of religious zeal but personal triumph. “I may truly say that, of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did the Haji from the far-north,” he wrote. “But, to confess humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride.”

Even while he let himself be swept up in the fervor surrounding him, Burton never for a moment forgot why he was there. He took in his surroundings with a searching eye, desperately trying to remember every detail so he could write them down as soon as he was alone. His powers of concentration, however, were put to the test as he stood in the courtyard, the September sun beating down on his bare head and arms, and was suddenly told that he had been sent for. “I thought, ‘Now something is going to happen to me,’ he later wrote, ‘now I am suspected.’ ” Then, hearing men shouting, “Open a path for the Haji who would enter the House,” he felt himself being lifted to the entrance of the Kaaba by three men, four arms pushing him from below and two pulling him from above, up the Kaaba’s eastern wall. Although this privilege had been engineered by Mohammed and was the culmination of all of Burton’s study and subterfuge, he knew that “nothing could preserve him from the ready knives of enraged fanatics if detected in the House.”

Once inside the Kaaba, the cold fear that Burton had successfully staved off until that moment finally set in. “I will not deny that, looking at the windowless walls, the officials at the door,” he wrote, “my feelings were of the trapped-rat description.” After being interviewed by a guard, successfully answering his questions in Arabic, he focused his thoughts, studying the heavy pillars, the marble floor, the walls engraved with inscriptions, and the ceiling covered in a red damask, “flowered over with gold.” Finally, as he pretended to pray, he reached down, slowly pulled out a pencil, and on the white sheeting of his ihram sketched a rough plan of the inside of Islam’s holiest shrine.

•

Soon after he was lowered from the Kaaba, relieved to have left with his disguise and his life intact, Burton “began to long to leave Mecca.” He was, he wrote, “worn out with fatigue, and the fatal fiery heat,” and he felt that it was time to begin his long journey back. While the men he had traveled with believed themselves to be free from the sins they had carried to Mecca, Burton felt his burdens not lightened but multiplied. Although proud that he had joined the Hajj, he was skeptical of religious rebirths, believing that they rarely lasted long. It was true not just of Muslims but of the followers of any religion, he argued, “equally observed in the Calvinist, after a Sunday of prayer, sinning through Monday with a zest, and the Romanist falling back with new fervor upon the causes of his confession and penance.” Those who had worshipped next to him at the foot of the Kaaba were “ ‘whitewashed’—the book of their sins was a tabula rasa,” he wrote, but “too many of them lost no time in . . . opening a fresh account.”

Burton knew that, although he had entered the Kaaba, he was not a true believer and his demons had not been banished, even temporarily. He had no real home, moreover, to which he could return. His success in Mecca would bring him fame in England, admiration from the Royal Geographical Society, and opportunities in his homeland that he had not had before, but none of that would change the fact that he would always be an outsider. He did not expect a hero’s welcome, but neither was he willing to let his countrymen stare at him with curiosity and then turn their backs. “It is a great thing to be welcomed home by some little corner of the Great World, which takes a pride in your exploits, because they reflect honour upon itself,” he wrote. “In the contrary condition you are a waif, a stray; you are a blaze of light, without a focus. Nobody outside your own fireside cares.”

When Burton finally set sail, still disguised as Shaykh Abdullah, it was not for the accolades awaiting him in England but for the ancient arms of Egypt. Crossing the narrow Red Sea, he traveled west and then north to Cairo, where the Nile River crept by on its winding journey from its still mysterious source thousands of miles away. Burton looked forward to rest and solitude while he wrote the story of his own journey and planned his next expedition, wherever and whatever that might be.

CHAPTER TWO

Shadows

Richard Burton was still in Cairo when he heard that the German missionary and explorer Johann Krapf had arrived in Egypt with tales of the Mountains of the Moon and the source of the Nile. Burton was holed up in the Shepheard Hotel, a thick, stone-walled building that “presented more the aspect of a grim old barrack,” an American consul general wrote, “than that of a hostelry.” Growing in grandeur over the years, it would one day welcome everyone from T. E. Lawrence to Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, the Aga Khan, and the Maharaja of Jodhpur. A hundred years later, it would have to be rebuilt after burning down during pre-revolutionary unrest, but in the fall of 1853 the Shepheard Hotel still sat in serene, leafy beauty on the same parkland where Napoleon had stationed his army during his invasion of Egypt. From its balconied windows, Burton could see a long bend of the Nile as it wound its way through the city.

Burton no longer needed the clothes he had worn on the Hajj, but he continued to wear them. Months after entering Mecca, he refused to cast off his disguise, speaking in Arabic and signing letters to his friends and even to the Royal Geographical Society as Shaykh Abdullah. One night, he repeatedly strode past a group of British officers who were lounging outside the hotel. With each pass he neared closer and closer to the men, several of whom he knew, finally sweeping his robes so that they brushed against one of them. Cursing what he considered to be impudence from an Arab, the man cried, “If he does that again I’ll kick him.” Hearing this, Burton stopped mid-stride, spun around to face the group, and, to their shock, said, “Well, damn it, Hawkins, that’s a nice way to welcome a fellow after two years’ absence.”

The majority of Burton’s time in Egypt was spent not with old friends but alone with his own thoughts, most of them regrets, and his exultation quickly collapsed into dejection. Despite his success in Mecca, he could focus only on the fact that he had not crossed the Arabian Peninsula as he had originally planned to do. Confiding in a letter to Norton Shaw, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, that he had suffered from dysentery since his return to Cairo, he wrote, “I won’t say it was aggravated by my disgust at my failure in crossing the Peninsulas, but joking apart the ‘physic’ of a successful man differs wildly from that of the poor devil who has failed.”

It was Burton’s triumph, however, much more than his failure that had left him despondent. He expected and did not care that his accomplishments would be questioned and criticized by his suspicious countrymen and jealous rivals. What haunted him was knowing that he now had nothing left to set his mind and talents to. “How melancholy a thing is success,” he would later write. “Whilst failure inspires a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories ‘are shadows, not substantial things.’ ” He needed another challenge, an escape from this persistent, haunting gloom, and Johann Krapf had just supplied it.

•

Krapf had spent the past seventeen years in East Africa. Like Burton, he was fascinated with languages, studying ancient Ge’ez, Amharic, and Swahili. After the deaths, one after another, of his two infant daughters and his wife, whose disease-stricken body he had burned in a pyre near Mombasa, he had established a station at New Rabai, about fifteen miles up the coast. Two years later, another missionary, Johannes Rebmann, had arrived from Germany, and together the two men had explored the region, becoming the first Europeans to see the two highest mountains in Africa—Kenya and Kilimanjaro.

Although Burton had little time for European missionaries, whose work he considered to be at best worthless and at worst cruel, he was very interested in the exploratory work Krapf had done, especially his travels with Rebmann and another young German missionary named Jakob Erhardt. Erhardt had joined Krapf and Rebmann at New Rabai four years earlier, and together the three men had made the most detailed exploration yet by Europeans of the East African coast. They had also brought back stories from ivory and slave traders, who had told them about not just snowcapped mountains but immense inland lakes. Burton himself had heard similar stories from Arabic traders while on the Hajj, scribbling everything they told him onto small strips of paper before hiding them in the hem of his robes. Now writing to the Royal Geographical Society from the Shepheard Hotel, he admitted that, although Krapf’s stories “remind one of a de Lunatico,” he was determined to track the missionary down in an effort to find out exactly what he, Rebmann, and Erhardt had accomplished. “I have not seen him but don’t intend to miss the spectacle,” he wrote, “especially to pump what really has been done & what remains to be done.”

•

In the nineteenth century, explorers were scattered across the globe, clutching their compasses and sextants as they sought to fill in maps and solve geographical mysteries from Africa to Australia, Asia to Antarctica. Despite the fact that there was still much to be learned about nearly every corner of the world, however, there was little debate about what constituted the Holy Grail of exploration. It was a question that had frustrated astronomers, philosophers, historians, and explorers for the past two thousand years: Where did the Nile begin?

Fascination with the Nile had grown not only because it is the longest river in the world, with a basin that spans more than a million square miles, one tenth of the African continent, but because it has made possible one of the oldest and richest continuous civilizations on earth. The fertile green swath of the Nile floodplain covers less than 5 percent of Egypt but is home to more than 96 percent of its population. The rest of the land is desert. So vital are the river’s annual floods that ancient Egyptians based their calendars on them, starting each new year with the first day of the floods.

Although the floods’ timing is reassuringly predictable, the volume of its waters is not. If the river was too low, there would be a shortage of both water and the nutrients it carried, which made possible the valley’s rich soil and abundant produce. If it was too high, it breached its banks, tearing away vast swaths of farmland and entire villages as it swept its way to the sea. It was a fundamentally important question that had absorbed the best minds for centuries. “An average rise [of the Nile] is one of sixteen cubits [twenty-seven feet],” the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder had written in the first century. If the river rose only twelve cubits, he warned, the result was famine. Two more cubits, on the other hand, meant “cheerfulness, fifteen complete confidence and sixteen delight.” Seventeen, Pliny warned, could spell disaster.

Fears about the Nile’s floods and efforts to understand them had led to questions about its source. Early theories varied widely, from the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who had been told by Egyptian priests that the river welled up out of a bottomless cavern, to Virgil and Alexander the Great, both of whom, three hundred years apart, briefly speculated that the river had its origins in India. The most famous early conjecturer about the source of the Nile was the legendary Egyptian mathematician, astronomer, and geographer Ptolemy. Relying largely on reports from a Greek trader named Diogenes, who had traveled twenty-five days inland from the eastern coast of Africa, Ptolemy placed the source of the Nile in two large lakes that flowed out of a snow-topped mountain range Diogenes had named the Mountains of the Moon. Although Ptolemy’s second-century maps and writings were largely ignored by Europeans between the fifth and fourteenth centuries, there had been a resurgence of interest in him during the Renaissance. By the eighteenth century his work was among the principal sources for modern-day explorers.

It had long been known that the Nile was made up of two primary branches: the Blue and the White. The longest branch, the White Nile, named for the light gray silt that gives its waters a milky hue, joins the darker Blue Nile near Khartoum, in Sudan, before continuing its combined course to the Mediterranean Sea. In 1770, Scotsman James Bruce had claimed to be the first European to discover the source of the Blue Nile when he reached Lake Tana in northern Ethiopia. When told that he had actually been beaten to it by the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Páez, who had traced the river to its headwaters 150 years earlier, he had refused to relinquish the honor. More than two hundred years after Páez, however, and nearly a hundred years after Bruce, the source of the White Nile remained a mystery.

As anyone who sought to understand it quickly learned, the White Nile protected its secrets. When confronted with an impossibility, the Roman saying was Facilius sit Nili caput invenire—It would be easier to find the source of the Nile. Attempts to explore the river’s length from north to south had been thwarted by a vast inland swamp known as the Sudd. Taken from sadd, the Arabic word for “barrier,” the flat expanse of bogs and swamps stretches for hundreds of miles through modern-day South Sudan, choked with tall grasses, papyrus, weeds, and water hyacinth that make it impossible to navigate by boat. An expeditionary force sent by Roman emperor Caesar Augustus gave up before reaching the equator. More than fifty years later, Nero’s Roman centurions were stopped by the same marshland, which they reported was so massive even the people who lived in the region had no idea how big it was. Not until the nineteenth century, when the Turkish officer Selim Bimbashi sent three expeditions up the Nile between 1839 and 1842, were explorers able to penetrate the Sudd. Two of Bimbashi’s crews made it hundreds of miles south of the swamp, but still impossibly far from the river’s source.

By the mid-1800s, explorers had begun to realize that if they were to have any hope of reaching the Nile’s headwaters the best route was not an ascent from the north but an overland journey from the south. From their base at New Rabai on the eastern coast, the German missionaries Krapf, Rebmann, and Erhardt had been doing just that. Krapf, who had long been struggling with illness, was stopping off in Egypt on his way back to Europe after being told that if he stayed in Africa he would die. Erhardt and Rebmann were still in East Africa, at least for the time being. Erhardt, whose health was not much better than Krapf’s, would also leave for Germany the following year, but he would bring with him a map that he and Rebmann had drawn together. Following a conversation about the long-standing questions surrounding the source of the Nile, they had had what Erhardt believed to be a sudden and shared spark of inspiration. “At one and the same moment, the problem flashed on both of us,” he would later write, “solved by the simple supposition that where geographical hypothesis had hitherto supposed an enormous mountain-land, we must now look for an enormous valley and an inland sea.”

•

A year earlier, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Roderick Murchison, had declared that whoever found “the true sources of the White Nile” would be “justly considered among the greatest benefactors of this age to geographical science.” In the Society’s famed publication, The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, the British naturalist Colonel William Sykes had predicted that it would take “some gallant heart to attempt the solution of geographical problems which have baffled inquiries for so many ages past.” Burton, finally awakened from the heavy spell that his success in Mecca and lonely days in Cairo had cast over him, could think of no heart more gallant than his own. “I hear that the Geographical has been speaking about an expedition to Zanzibar,” he wrote to Norton Shaw. “I shall strain every nerve to command it.”

Burton had been on the Nile for the first time when he was on his way to Mecca, and, despite its exalted history, he had not been impressed. The surrounding landscape had reminded him of his years in India, in the hot and dusty province of Sindh. “To me there was a double dullness in the scenery,” he had written. “Morning mist and noon-tide glare; the same hot wind and heat clouds, and fiery sunsets, and evening glow; the same pillars of dust and ‘devils’ of sand sweeping like giants over the plain; the same turbid water.” The idea of finding the river’s source, however, solving the greatest geographical mystery of his age, inspired in him precisely the opposite emotions, filling him with an almost overwhelming sense of adventure and the possibility of great achievement.

Although he had yet to recover from the dysentery that had plagued him since returning from Mecca, and he would soon have to sail to Bombay as his leave of absence from the East India Company was running out, Burton was not about to let any obstacle, physical or professional, prevent him from setting out in search of the source of the White Nile. It was not just a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was a chance that few men in the history of exploration had ever been given. It was, he wrote, “the possibility of bringing my compass to bear upon . . . those ‘Mountains of the Moon,’ whose very existence have not, until lately, been proved by the geographers of 2,000 years—a range white with eternal snows even in the blaze of the African summer, supposed to be the father of the mysterious Nile, briefly a tract invested with all the romance of wild fable and hoar antiquity, and to this day the [most] worthwhile subject to which human energy and enterprise could be devoted.”

Burton already had a plan. All he needed was “a few good men to accompany me (one to survey, another for physics and botany),” he wrote to Shaw. “I doubt not of our grand success.” He still wanted to find Krapf, admitting that he “must be au courant of his discoveries,” but while he respected the missionary and wanted his advice, he did not fear him as a competitor. Krapf may have been the first to bring news of the inland lakes to Europe, but Burton was confident that he would be the first European to actually find the lakes, and thus the source. Johann Krapf, he told Shaw, was “only my John the Baptist.”

CHAPTER THREE

Bond for Our Blood

When the Court of Directors of the East India Company finally agreed to let Burton search for the source of the Nile in the summer of 1854, it was under two conditions, one concerning the promise of trade and the other the threat of death. First, he would start his journey in Aden, a British-held port on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, before crossing the Gulf of Aden to what was then known as Somaliland, from where he would enter the African interior. Perched on the Horn of Africa, Somaliland was of interest to Britain both because it was strategically positioned along the Bombay-to-Suez trade route and because it was largely unexplored. It was also believed to be extremely dangerous, which led to the second condition: The company bore no responsibility for keeping Burton alive while he was there. He would be supplied with “all the instruments required, afford[ed] a passage going and returning, and pa[id] the actual expenses of the journey,” but beyond financial aid and professional leave, he was on his own. Despite the fact that he was still an officer in the East India Company, “he goes as a private traveller,” the agreement warned, “the government giving no more protection to him than they would to an individual totally unconnected with the service.”

Not only was Burton unconcerned about setting off on a dangerous expedition without a safety net, he preferred it that way. Even having to deal with James Outram, the newly appointed political resident and commandant in Aden, was more governmental interference than he wanted. Outram, moreover, had made it clear that he was there not to help Burton but to stand in his way. After being shuttled around India, and fighting in the First Afghan and Anglo-Persian Wars, Outram was ill and tired, and would soon request sick leave. In the meantime, he was determined to keep Burton from crossing the Gulf to Somaliland. “The countries opposite to Aden were so dangerous for any foreigners to travel in,” he argued, that it was his “duty as a Christian to prevent, as far as he was able, anybody from hazarding his life there.”

A largely pastoral people scattered throughout the lowlands of the eastern Horn of Africa, the Somalis had long ago developed a vigorous trade network with the towns along the Indian Ocean and Red Sea coast. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, these networks had stretched even deeper into the interior and grew increasingly complex as Somali traders worked to meet European and North American demand for everything from goat and cow hides for leather to vegetable dyes for textiles and vegetable oils for cooking and soap, while still offering a wide variety of more traditional trade goods such as ivory, livestock, incense, ostrich feathers, and leopard skins. After the British seized Aden in 1839, the enclave there had quickly come to rely on the Somalis, who supplied them with fresh meat, and by the 1850s Somalis made up roughly 15 percent of Aden’s total population.

Men like Outram, however, continued to fear the Somalis, remembering in particular two incidents that had shaken their confidence in the region. In 1825 a group of Somalis had seized the English brig Mary Ann