The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes Page 24

  "About a hundred came with officers on the flanks and one in front. Half way to our position, they stopped on a barked command as if a lion had been Regimental Sgt Major or a gorilla. Just what the Guards would like, unless they've changed. Behind this advance now came the cavalry, the most amazing body of mounted troops that ever existed, past or present.

  "When I saw the first one, the leader or colonel or whatever, appear, I damned near choked. T'wasn't the rider, and I don't say 'man' for all the infantry who'd come first were our giant ape men. And so were the lines of mounted troops, and they were troops, now emerging. But that first one!

  "She was another of these ultra females, gold breastplates and all, who might at a distance have been a twin to my big catgirl!

  "Have you noticed I've carefully said 'mounts' and not 'horses' once? No, they weren't mules, donkeys or even zebras. They were massive, with legs like elephants, though smaller, hair like coarse, greyish wire and long noses like pigs, noses that were pink and twitched but with broad, flat muzzles and nostrils set side by side. And tiny, short tails that hung straight. They each weighed about as much as a medium horse but had narrow, ridged backs and the massive legs were so short that the riders' bare feet almost hit the ground, even though their knees were pulled up high.

  "In short, Lucas and I were observing a force, the only such there ever was, of jungle cavalry, designed for the rain forest. Their mounts were not equids at all but tapirs!"

  Ffellowes stopped and looked around at us, a grin on his face as he watched our reaction to this fantastic story. In the silence that followed, someone else cleared his throat and then spoke quickly. It was an older man named deCamp, an economist I believe for the U.S. Government "I'm a student of zoology as a hobby, Brigadier," he said. "Did you know, by any chance, that tapirs, rhinoceroses and all types of horses, asses, donkeys and so on are all related? They're the only living mammals, I mean those three groups, that are related, each to the other two sets. I mean like rats and squirrels both being members of the Rodentia?"

  Ffellowes laughed aloud. "Yes, My dear man, I do know it; know it now, that is. I certainly didn't at the time, and would have had you clapped into bed or a hospital due to either alcohol or fever if you had ventured to tell me such a thing in those days.

  "And now, my friends, I suddenly understood a lot of what I had heard, and more than that I knew a lot that made perfect sense from the very beginning, from the story of 'Jones' for instance and the secret message thrown aboard the Hooper vessel.

  "There was an army, a secret army, which had given our poor ex-agent the fits when he somehow discovered it. There were actual and very real reasons for the Amerindians to avoid this territory and there always had been, since the dawn of human civilization. Certainly since the Classic Age of Greece. Aristotle and Plato had known what they were talking about, gentlemen. There had been a great culture far to the West, whose name at least had come to them. I was standing in its lost and last colony, preserved through the ages. There was an Atlantis!

  "All of this data flashed through my mind at once, as lightning comes through a cloud. I knew it all. And I knew more. Alone in the world, the world of Homo sapiens, the world of what Science calls Reasoning Man or Modern Man, Man the gorilla hunter, the Orangutan shooter, the Chimpanzee trapper, there had been one wiser branch long ago. And this one, isolated by its home's disappearance under the Atlantic waves, had survived!

  "Like the British garrison at Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, this colony too had survived. In this case, they had been surrounded by the oncoming hordes of alien Amerindians who were pouring down from North America to the end of South America at Cape Horn. Some, perhaps many, had already gone past the lost colony of Atlantis, gone South forever. But more would come and Home could never now send help or even exist as a place to go back to, if evacuation had been possible at all.

  "What to do, when all seemed lost, for these isolated men and women and probably some children too? What help was there in this hostile forest world? Think of it, men, think of it. Picture perhaps a few lonely ships, the last galleys perhaps, but possibly better ships than galleys, for the Atlanteans were wise, far ahead of the Minoans, the Egyptians and the south-migrating Dorian Greeks. Read Plato, who knew something of them. Can you see those lonely vessels and their crews with straining eyes, as they used the stars to navigate and again and again, crossed and recrossed the stormy Atlantic, looking, always looking, for the Home that now was not the Home that Never Was, for them?"

  As the Brigadier brought that tragic story, one of the greatest of human tragedies ever, to life again and I thought of those gallant and forever lost seamen, my own eyes filled with moisture and my breath caught. I could hear some vigorous nose-blowing and throat clearing nearby, and I knew that I was neither a hurt child nor alone in my feelings.

  Like the born tale spinner he was, Ffellowes gave it a moment to sink in. Then he started again, his calm uninfected voice as soothing and quieting as some old nurse's. There is some child in every thinking man, I am sure.

  "You may ask, did these folk know Europe? Did they know that behind the Gates of Hercules lay the Mediterranean and its peoples, the ones I have mentioned? Why of course they did. No doubt they took them for slaves on occasion and traded with some of them on others. How else could the bare knowledge of that lost and mighty realm have come to Plato and to others from whom he, in turn, got it? Consider two facts, taken in order. First the far-ranging and skilful seamen of Carthage, Hannibal's city which Rome killed; plowing the levelled ground with salt and obliterating her great foe forever.

  "We know from the Greek historians that the Carthaginians rounded the tip of Africa, going South down the East Coast and North up the West Coast. We know they reached the Canary Islands, whose still extant natives, the caucasoid or 'white' if you like, Guanches have never had any boats, not so much as a raft and still speak a dialect or rather their own language related to the mountaineers of the Moroccan Rif. Who put them there? Carthage or perhaps an earlier race of seamen? And remember this, too. The men of Carthage were most secretive. They did not and would not, say where they had been and especially how one got to any trading place by sea. They kept the secret of British tin, vital to the ancient world, for centuries. And why were they always want to go West? All the other seamen of the ancient Mediterranean and the Black and Red Seas too, knew about this obsession of the Carthage rovers. They were thought to be, and were called by others, mad. What were they seeking? Hell, Gentlemen, those folk knew the world was round, a knowledge later lost. There was regular sea trade with India and Ceylon, now called by its name of those days, Sri Lanka. Could they have learnt of this lost colony?

  "Fact two. Why were blond Spaniards, starting with that greedy bastard Alvarado, Cortez' lieutenant, revered by the Aztecs and other Amerindians of Central America? Not North, mind you or South. Only by the MesoAmerican folk, from Aztec to Mayan, and many more minor tribes. What was so holy about blonds and redheads? A lot of that scrambled mythos of Quetzalcoatl has to do with fair skins and light hair.

  "So back to my own story. All of the above hit me at once and in one orderly, intelligible blast, as in the aforesaid lightning bolt. And more besides, the ultimate key to the whole mystery and it was a complex key, a mix of Genetics, Myth and Anthropology, all fused together. As another detective that imaginary," (Ffellowes paused a strangely long time at this point in the sentence which was odd) "chap S. Holmes, was wont to remark, 'When one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer.' I had it now. What about the long-rumored Sasquatch, the 'Big Foot,' the Wendigo of the northern Amerindians? There are clever men, scientists, who are still searching and sure that a few are alive and in hiding. And if so, who and what might they be?

  "Having just shot a cross-bred specimen and captured another, I had no doubts on the matter. The male I had shot had more of the early strain in him, call it Gigantopithecus, Pithecanthropus or whatever. My catgirl
had far less. Probably a caste system existed, with those who had more of the ancient genes of Atlantis running things on an hereditary basis. Logical isn't it? We Britons have had an absurd passion for logic, always.

  "So there's the key, Chaps. Lost Atlanteans, mostly fair-skinned, on one side. On the other, primitive apemen, not lost but frightened and in hiding. Because, like our cousins the anthropoid apes I named above, they got killed mercilessly whenever Modern Man, be his skin red, yellow, black or white, in short, our nice ancestors, found them around. And that was true on any part of the planet from the Himalayas and Alaska up north, to Capes Horn and Good Hope in the southern reaches." He sighed and looked weary before going on.

  "A lovely example is modern Germany. Hitler and his fellow crooks were warped fanatics in the bargain. And they were reverting to a very old and horrible idea. The Past is unsleeping. It never dies.

  "What was the greatest crime a German could then commit? Male or female, sleeping with and/or breeding with a Jew of the opposite sex. To our remote forbears it must have been quite similar. Sleeping with, and/or breeding with intelligent hominids, who still lived in the wilder places and, mark you, had enough of the same genes to produce fertile offspring!" He sighed again and was silent. His eyes saw nothing as he mused on human cruelty and racism. Then he shook himself out of it and resumed.

  "One gets hints in the Old Testament of all places. I was given one earlier that same day. 'For Esau was an hairy man.' How about, 'There were giants on the earth in those days?' To me, that's just another one.

  "But those lost Atlanteans had another idea. Their isolated, cut-off group needed men. Here were strange folk, also in hiding, who knew the rain forest and how to live in it better than anyone. Why not use logic and do some crossbreeding? Those leaders of the abandoned survivors were eminently practical and must have been real leaders and damn persuasive as well, to get those two sets of isolated aliens to do it. But they had. And I was at this point, along with another modern man, looking at the result of that ancient decision. Its last and only army, officers and NCOs, rulers and ruled, was parading in front of me, having emerged from their place of refuge and ancient retreat to do so.

  "And who knew where this very dangerous force was going next? Or why and what they would do, or had plans to do when they got there? I was back in our time and place and taking a deep series of gulps of air as I recalled who I myself was and the fact that I could hardly die now and here, not because of any scientific discoveries of fabled realms which had become real. I was an officer of the British Army, sent on a scout, and I had found an unknown and wickedly-effective looking foreign army on British territory and totally unknown to any branch of His Majesty's Government!

  "I tapped Lucas's shoulder and his head turned. 'Crawl back to the curve,' I murmured in his ear, and then run like Hell back to George and the girl. I'll be doing the same, but do not wait for me, understand? You can run quicker. Wait with George and the other for three minutes by your watch. Not a second longer. If I haven't come, get out and head for the coast and that Hooper boat fast! The Government has to know about this! That's all that's important. Understand? Let's go!'

  "We crawled back, going backward, always a slow job, but it wasn't far. All the time our eyes never left that incredible army that was still issuing from the gate and forming up in the little valley below us. At last we reached the trail at the last curve, went around it, stood up and began to run.

  "As I knew he would, Lucas took an instant lead and within a minute was out of sight, though I was doing my best and the trail, for a jungle trail, was good and firm with no obstacles. God, how I ran! All the time I was listening intently for any sound from behind me, checking my watch as my left arm flailed up and down and burning every ounce of energy I possessed in the process. Despite tobacco and alcohol, I was in pretty good shape, though nothing like that of my vanished woodsman whom I'm sure could have done anything he was trained to do in the Olympics for an equally sure gold medal.

  "I was racing through the trail junction and fifty feet into the small trail, the one down which my catgirl had come and up which we two had retraced her steps, when I heard the first noise that was not that of a bird or insect. Ahead of me and not too far away there came the sound of a rifle shot. Just the one shot and no more, but that was enough to make me race even faster, faster than I'd known that I could. I burst out on the little savannah and tore through the grass, ignoring the cover of the stream up which Lucas and I had come. I was at the big pool in seconds and saw just what I'd feared I'd find.

  "My two stalwart friends were standing together, looking sadly down at a long, still shape on the water's edge. George kept looking down and away from me but Lucas, who wasn't even breathing hard, by the way, met my eyes directly and stood erect as he did so. 'Jawj had to do it Captain,' he said quietly. 'She tried to run the minute I come in sight. She move quick too, maybe quicker than me even an' much too quick foh Jawj. But it was me, too, Suh. I yelled to him to shoot an' he done it. It was the orders an' what I knew you wanted, after what you said an' what we seen back there.'

  "Well, I'd got some breath back and I stepped over and put my arm around George's big shoulder. He was crying, poor lad. 'Lucas was right, Son,' I said. 'War is sometimes Hell, like this, but we're alone in enemy country. If they've heard that shot, they'll be coming fast on our tracks, I think. We'll leave her right here. Her own folk can bury her. We three have to move and move fast or they'll get us too, so let's go. Lucas, take the lead again!

  "That splendid young man straightened up. He wiped his eyes once with the back of his arm and we moved out and over the cliff edge, doing a dog trot whenever possible. I had looked just once at the shape in the grass and never again. If I had, I don't think I could have left at all, except manacled and under restraint. Frankly, in a rather full life, never before had my sworn duty seemed so hard, so ugly and so meaningless."

  He stopped talking and the silence in that big room was such that the sound of one cockroach crawling would have seemed like a train coming by five feet away.

  At least two minutes of the utter quiet went by while the Brigadier stared at the floor. No one could have spoken, I think, even had they tried.

  Then, he lifted his head again, and the even, level tones resumed. "Since I'm here in this room, Gentlemen, you can see we got away. All three got away and back to George's father's boat.

  "What came next? That's locked in Her Majesty's most thoroughly guarded files. Certain picked units of paratroops, allegedly training for jungle warfare in one of our quieter possessions, found a hilltop in one of the remoter areas, quite by accident, of course, where there had been a recent minor earthquake. This in turn seemed to have been followed by a subsidence of soil and rock over a wide area, as much as five square miles. Fortunately no one lived anywhere near the place. Simply a lot of ruined jungle and twisted rock was absolutely all there was to be seen. Wouldn't have made a line in the papers if it had been reported, but since the troop training was secret, only the War Office ever heard about it" He smiled a little. "I do hear the Mayan Indians still don't like that area, or ever go there. They must have much knowledge of seismic forces and the danger of earthquakes, eh?

  "Well, I've got to go now and can't say when I'll be back. I need a vacation and I'm thinking of the Caribbean shores. Probably why I recalled this tale just now."

  I went to the club's front door with him and we two were alone. He shook my hand very hard indeed and something hard hurt my unready fingers. It was a massive ring, a huge gold thing with a great green stone set in the top. There was odd carving on the stone, but I could hardly study it then, could I?

  The End

  Table of Contents

  The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes

  INTRODUCTION

  FORE/THOUGHT/WORD

  GHOST OF A CROWN

  AND THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE ...

  A FATHER'S TALE

  COMMANDER IN THE MIST

  T
HINKING OF THE UNTHINKABLE

  THE BRIGADIER IN CHECK AND MATE

  FIRST MOVE

  COUNTER MOVE