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, long-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—
—I made the hajj to Mecca and Medina and visited Herat without my note paper and the surveying instruments of a spy.
You still betrayed the purity of these sacred places with your penetrating Frankish eye. How often has your hubris submerged your spirit beneath ambition?
My very soul—if I have one, if indeed anyone possesses an inextinguishable essence—has admittedly fallen prey to the aspirations of the Whiteman.
Yet even if attained, the realization of these overreaching dreams will not gain for you acceptance among your peers.
Blast your eyes, Doubt of Mine! Peers I have not!
You will never be ought among the dark races but a trifling interloper. And among your own, no number of outlandish accomplishments shall ever earn you a dear place among your fellow Englishmen. Among them you shall ever be derided as “Dick the Rogue” and “that damned white niցցer Burton.”
Blast it to dust. I should simply pursue my pleasures and satiate my curiosities until the uncaring clock’s hand strikes midnight.
Then what of Isabel?
Yes, what of darling Isabel, the milk-tone light of my uneasy night?
And so she lays her cold hand yet upon my weakening shoulder.
“Captain Burton, Sir, if you might, I have borne your things down to the ketch.”
Yes, good little Humbolt.
He turned to the small, maimed Cornishman, who had been turned out by Her Majesty’s Admiralty—as if the Sea Lords 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.
It remains little enough, even as a gesture, as prolific as you are, my dear aspiring Saint Richard.
Perhaps that little verse shall be my most gloried literary work, the one stamp in time to achieve immortality for its etcher?
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.
“Good air?”
“I think not.”
