The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(28)
Andrew found it fascinating that only a few centuries earlier people had no idea the world went on across the Atlantic, or that its true size depended on the courage and fortunes of explorers whose daredevil journeys filled up the medieval void, the dwelling place of sea monsters. On the other hand, he regretted the dimensions of the world were no longer a mystery, that the most recent maps of land and sea constituted an official world, established, confined to its own dimensions, where the only things left to chart were its coastlines. Murray made them come to a halt 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,” Gilliam announced, openly gloating, “I keep it continually updated, you see. 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 blurry mass of multicolored lines which, Gilliam 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 crisscross of the lines resulting from their host’s absurd efforts to record every single expedition. These ranged from the earliest, like that of Marco Polo (represented by a gold line snaking around India, China Central Asia and the Malaysian archipelago), to the most recent, like that undertaken by Sir Francis Younghusband, who had traveled from Peking to Kashmir crossing the Karakoram Mountains with their soaring glacier-topped peaks. The squiggles though 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 shortcut to China via the Arctic Ocean. These last two lines vanished suddenly, as had the actual ships when sailing across the Lancaster Straits, the so-called Northwest Passage. Unable to make any sense of the mass of lines, Andrew decided to follow the blue one that cut across the island of Borneo, that sultry paradise overrun by crocodiles and gibbons to the southeast of Asia. This followed the tortuous journey of Sir James Brooke, nicknamed the Rajah of Sarawak, a name Andrew was familiar with because the explorer popped up in the Sandokan novels as a ruthless pirate slayer. But then Gilliam asked them to concentrate on the most intricate part of the map, the African continent. There, all the expeditions attempting to discover the mythical source of the Nile, like those undertaken by the Dutchwoman Alexine Tinné, Mr. and Mrs. Baker, Burton and Speke, and most famously by 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,” Gilliam announced theatrically.
As though having heard the story many times before, Eternal stretched out at his master’s feet. Charles smiled gleefully at this promising beginning, while Andrew twisted his lips in frustration, realizing he was going to need a lot of patience before he found out whether or not he would be able to save Marie Kelly.
8
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, that magnificent mountain 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 that of David Livingstone had thrown little light on the matter either. When Henry Stanley found Livingstone in Ujiji, he was suffering from dysentery. He nevertheless 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, wracked with fever and utterly exhausted.
The Scottish explorer died at Chitambo, and his final journey was made as a corpse, embalmed then enclosed in a large piece of bark from a myonga-tree. It took porters nine months to carry him to the island of Zanzibar, where he was finally repatriated to Great Britain. He was buried in 1878 in Westminster Abbey with full honors, but despite his numerous achievements, the source of the Nile remained a mystery, and everyone, from the Royal Geographic Society to the most insignificant science museum, wanted to take credit for discovering its elusive location. The Murrays 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 apart from having undertaken several expeditions to the Himalayas, he was also a veteran hunter. Among the creatures killed by 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 evangelize 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 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, the Murrays gave him up for lost, as they had no Stanley to send after him.