“But if I chance across you now—what? Would you run? Surely you’d not have the perverted courage to hold out your hand for me to shake. Judas! Would I kiss you as Jesus kissed the traitor? Judas! No, I’d kick your arse halfway up a mountains!
“Sickness, the iron talons of African-disease, gripped me. But I’d have recovered, and I’d have discovered the headwaters of the Nile! Not Speke, not hyena, not jackal Speke! My apologies, Brother Hyena and Sister Jackal. You’re only animals and useful in the scheme of things. Speke wasn’t worthy to kiss your foul arseholes.
“But how I wept!
“The headwaters of the Nile. The headwaters of The River. Having failed to get to one, will I fail to get to the other?
“My mother never showed any of us, me, Edward, Maria, any affection. She might as well have been our governess. No. Our nannies showed us more love, gave us more time, than she did.
“A man is what his mother makes him.
“No! There is something in the soul that rises above the lack of love, that drives me on and on toward… what?
“Father, if I may call you that. No. Not father. Begetter. You wheezing selfish humorless hypochondriac. You forever self-exile and traveler. Where was our home? A dozen foreign lands. You went here and there seeking the health which you thought you didn’t have. And we dragged along in your wake. Ignorant women our nannies and drunken Irish clergymen our tutors. Wheeze away, damn you! But no more. You’ve been cured by the unknowns who made this world. Have you? Haven’t you found some excuse to cozen yourself into hypochondria? It’s your soul, not your lungs, that has asthma.
“By Lake Tanganyika, Ujiji, the sickness seized me in demon fingers. In my delirium I saw myself, mocking, gibing, jeering, leering at me. That other Burton which mocks at the world but mostly at me.
“It couldn’t stop me, though, I went on… no… not then. Speke went on, and he… he… hee, hee! I laugh, though it startles the revelers and wakes the sleeping. Laugh, Burton, laugh, you Pagliacci! That silly-arse Yank, Frigate, tells me that it was I who became known as the great explorer and your treachery became infamous. I, I, not you, you Unspeakable! I have been vindicated, not you.
“My misfortune began with my not being a Frenchman. I wouldn’t have had to fight against English prejudice, English rigidity, English stupidity. I… but I wasn’t born a Frenchman, though I am descended from a bastard of the Louis XIII. The Sun-King. Blood will tell.
“What bloody nonsense! Burton blood, not the Sun-King’s, will tell.
“I traveled, restless-footed, everywhere. But Omne solum fortipatria. Every region is a strong man’s home. It was I who was the first European to enter the holy and forbidden city of Harar and come alive out of that Ethiopian hellhole. It was I who made a pilgrimage as Mirza Abdulla Bushiri to Mecca and wrote the most famous, detailed, and true book about it and who could have been torn to pieces if I’d been found out. It was I who discovered Lake Tanganyika. It was I who wrote the first manual of the use of the bayonet for the British army. It was I…
“Why recount to myself these vainglories? It’s not what a man’s done that counts, it’s what he’s going to do.
“Ayesha! Ayesha! My Persian beauty, my first true love! I would’ve renounced the world, my British citizenship, I would have become a Persian and lived with you until I died. You were most foully murdered, Ayesha! I avenged you, I slew the poisoner with my own hands, choked the life from him and buried his body in the desert. Where are you, Ayesha?
“Somewhere. And if we met again—what? That ravening love is now a dead lion.
“Isabel. My wife. The woman… did I ever love her? Affection I had. Not the great love I had for Ayesha and still have for Alice. ‘Pay, pack, and follow’ I told her whenever I left for a journey, and she did so, as obediently and as uncomplaining as a slave. I was her hero, her god, she said, and she set herself a list of rules for the perfect wife. But when I became old and bitter, a neglected failure, she became my nurse, my keeper, my eager, my prison guard.