At only 47 years Richard Francis Burton was already—or had long ago been—a great man: speaker of 29 languages; author of numerous books; and John Company’s vaunted secret agent, having been the first Whiteman to penetrate some of the deepest mysteries of Africa and the Orient.

Why than am I overwrought with such dark melancholies? Why, in all things that I do, do I feel Kismet’s cold waiting hand at my nape?

Perhaps man she has gotten the lay of your inner mind. You may have shown piety and even pursued your education in the submission to God without reserve.

And so she lays her cold hand yet upon my weakening shoulder.

*If a 21st Century man, Burton would undoubtedly have though in terms of a Freudian “ego” complex. If a 24th Century man he would of course, have blamed his intrusive avatar. Burton, as an iconoclastic and backward looking man of his times thought in terms of the ancient Greek concept of hubris, just as he appreciated the concept of Fate in its Islamic guise of Kismet, which Burton rendered as Qismet in his writings due to his mystic leaning among fringe Moslem societies and his literary preference for phonetic spelling.

-Professor Seneschal Tours

“Captain Burton, Sir, if you might, I have borne your things down to the ketch.”

He turned to the small maimed Cornishman, who had been turned out by Her Majesty’s Admiralty—as if the Brass knew he existed—without a pension. As Fate would have it the rejected Royal Navy sailor—having lost his hand in an anchor cable, and forced to make his living on this Uruguayan paddle-frigate—had been assigned as Burton’s orderly; a rejected sailor serving a rejected diplomat. He had liked his Brazilian man-servants and had wished to maintain their company, but they had not been permitted by the lords of that slave nation to leave their cruel home for service in a freer land.

How our masters do treasure our reassuring presence.

After considering the little pre-maturely aged man, who stood before him with the infinite patience of the unlettered brute, Burton blinked to revive himself from his self-imposed hypnosis. He then heard himself with all of his famed and sometimes feigned verve, “Yaas, than it is done my good fellow, the closing act of our tranquil little play.”

The man stood dumbfounded before him—a state that was common for him and many of his numbed ilk—not knowing what to say, as Burton thoughtfully handed his unlettered countryman a carefully folded vellum page from his coat pocket. “Here Humbolt, a draft of something I have been working on. You might pass it on to a lettered child, or even sell it as you will. Good day Man.”

As cruel as Kismet has been to me, my troubles are paltry indeed.

Bah!

Humbolt stammered uneasily, “Good day to you too Sir—aye, and with much gratitude. My Bessie would like this if we should meet again—an admirer of letters she be Sir!”

He proceeded down the rocking gangplank to the waiting ketch with the grateful little sailor standing in his wake, holding his new treasure —perhaps his only treasure—in his one calloused hand. He stood by his case and bag in the rocking ketch—never one for trunks and such when he was headed out into the wild alone—and waved to Humbolt with an intended smile that never managed to crease his mouth, buried as it was so far below.

Good day and good long life to you Humbolt. May you see your dear little wife again some fine day.

He turned his back on the kindly unfortunate as he had so much in life and gazed ahead at his decrepit destination, the ill-situated Port of Buenos Aires. Another seven miles through these miserable shallows and he would have the honor of riding ashore on a half-submerged cart as some wretched member of the lower orders dragged him and his bags to shore through the hip deep muck.

What a pestilential pit of despair.

Yes indeed and such miserable towns are ever dotted with the dens where a man of your melancholy might drown his sorrows in drink.

Yes man, just find a place to sink forever into a bottomless glass of port while you drift aimlessly into Kismet’s open maw.

He was soon soaking his ankles despite the efforts of the lout that bore him to shore. As the acrid stench of coal and the sea-salted air gave way to the deeper reeks of the city ahead he twitched his nose in disgust.

Blast the reek of it! The gutters are overflowing with human feces, fouler by far than the manure around which you shall soon step.

He persevered though, giving off the air of superiority natural to men of his race and class, rather than sulking like some inconvenienced Yankee merchant, as he marched through the milling stevedores and merchants before his nameless immigrant Italian bearer, bent beneath the weight of his books.

Yaas, out of my way you mongrel colonial sots!

Not far up the street he found a place to begin his drinking, or, as Kismet would have it, encounter his very own confessor, in the guise of that fawning twit Wilfrid Blunt.

Ah, so here I fall in with Isabel’s dear sissy Wilfrid, with narrow shoulders and weepy eyes to bear witness to my descent.

Blunt was a younger man who had served as attaché in Sao Paulo and had befriended Burton’s dear wife. As much woman as man, Wilfrid was of the type to identify and comfort the ladies of real men; not amorously, but with an understanding ear that was all the more infuriating for it being genuine. Wanting the physicality of a real man Blunt had always been openly intimidated by the ultra-masculine Burton. Still possessing something of the mischievous streak that had so confounded his nurse as a boy, Burton would ever fan the flames of Wilfrid’s shocking indignation by telling tale after barbarous tale, in which he often committed atrocious acts. Some of these tales were true, though always embroidered, and some were woven into a whole fictional cloth by the tireless loom of Burton’s rampant mind.

Yes, how might I horrify him today?

Make the sissy sense his frailty.

Yes tales of cannibalism and bloody fornication among the West Coast Negroes shall do.

He drank with Wilfrid long into the night, forwarding his bags—keeping only his coat, hat and revolver—up the street to the hotel he had been referred to. He was told that the ‘White House’ was a passable hotel free of vermin. He decided to have the cantina owner’s daughter take some coin to acquire a room. She would be far better suited to select for him a proper room than would he when he finally staggered in drunk around midnight.

And my, I would not mind acquiring her services after a different fashion if it would not be so awkward to inquire in this catholic backwater.

At last, after sissy Wilfrid finally recoiled to the point of silence after some story or other of bibi fornication, he downed the last contents of their decanter—an outwardly rude act—hefted his heavy revolver gifted him by Captain Londrina, and staggered off up the street in the cool rain of early spring, as it turned to a river of feces through which he slogged with boots now as sullied as his soul.

Is this, after all, my River Styx?