The Map of Time

Everyone, from the Royal Geographic Society to the most insignificant science museum, wanted to take credit for discovering its elusive location. The Murray family 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 he had undertaken several expeditions to the Himalayas. He was also a veteran hunter. Among the creatures he killed with 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 evangelise 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 had 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, they gave him up for lost as they had no Stanley to send after him.

Ten months later, Tremanquai burst into their offices, days after a memorial service had taken place with the permission of his wife – loath to don her widow’s weeds. As was only to be expected, his appearance caused the same stir as if he had been a ghost. He was terribly gaunt, his eyes were feverish, and his filthy, malodorous body hardly looked as if he had spent the intervening months washing in rosewater. As was obvious from his deplorable condition, the expedition had been a complete disaster from the outset. No sooner had they penetrated the jungle than they were ambushed by Somali tribesmen. Tremanquai was unable even to take aim at those feline shadows emerging from the undergrowth before he was felled by a cascade of arrows. There, in the stillness of the jungle, far from the eyes of civilisation, the expedition was brutally massacred. The attackers had left him for dead, like his men.

But life had toughened Tremanquai and he had survived. He roamed the jungle for weeks, wounded and feverish, arrows still stuck in his flesh, using his rifle as a crutch, until his pitiful wanderings brought him to a small native village encircled by a palisade. Exhausted, he collapsed before the narrow entrance to the fence, like a piece of flotsam washed up by the sea.

He awoke several days later completely naked, stretched out on an uncomfortable straw mattress with repulsive poultices on his wounds. He was unable to identify the features of the young girl applying the sticky greenish dressings as belonging to any of the tribes he knew. Her body was long and supple, her hips extremely narrow and her chest almost as flat as a board. Her dark skin gave off a faint, dusky glow. He soon discovered that the men possessed the same slender build, their delicate bone structure almost visible beneath their slight musculature. Not knowing what tribe they belonged to, Tremanquai decided to invent a name for them. He called them the Reed People, because they were as slim and supple as reeds.

Tremanquai was an excellent shot, but he had little imagination. The Reed People’s otherworldly physique, as well as the big black eyes in their exquisite doll-like faces, was a source of astonishment, but as his convalescence progressed, he discovered further reasons to be amazed: the impossible language they used to communicate with each other, a series of guttural noises he found impossible to reproduce, even though he was accustomed to imitating the most outlandish dialects; the fact that they all looked the same age; and the absence in the village of the most essential everyday implements. It was as though the life of these savages took place elsewhere, or as if they had succeeded in reducing it to a single act: breathing.

But one question above all preyed insistently on Tremanquai’s mind: how did the Reed People resist the neighbouring tribes’ repeated attacks? They were few in number, they looked neither strong nor fierce, and apparently his rifle was the only weapon in the village.

He soon discovered the answer. One night, a lookout warned that ferocious Masai tribesmen had surrounded the village. From his hut, with his carer, Tremanquai watched his saviours form a group in the centre of the village facing the narrow entrance, which curiously had no door. Standing in a fragile line as though offering themselves up for sacrifice, the Reed People linked hands and began to chant an intricate tune. Recovering from his astonishment, Tremanquai reached for his rifle and dragged himself back to the window with the intention of defending his hosts as best he could. Scarcely any torches were lit in the village, but the moon cast sufficient light for an experienced hunter like himself to take aim. He set his sights on the gap in the stockade, hoping that if he managed to pick off a few Masai the others might think the village was defended by white men and flee.

To his surprise, the girl gently lowered his weapon, indicating to him that his intervention was unnecessary. Tremanquai bridled, but the Reed girl’s serene gaze made him think again. From his window, he watched with trepidation and bewilderment as the savage horde of Masai spilled through the entrance and his hosts carried on their discordant incantation while the spears came ever closer. The explorer steeled himself to witness the passive slaughter.

Then something happened, which Tremanquai had described in a quavering, incredulous voice, as though he found it hard to believe the words he himself was uttering. The air had split open. He could think of no better way to describe it. It was like tearing off a strip of wallpaper, he said, leaving the wall bare. Except in this case it was not a wall but another world. A world the explorer was at first unable to see into from where he was standing, but which gave off a pale glow, lighting the surrounding darkness. Astonished, he watched the first of the Masai tumble into the hole that had opened between them and their intended victims and vanish from reality from the world Tremanquai was in, as though they had dissolved into thin air. On seeing their brothers swallowed up by the night, the rest of the Masai fled in panic. The explorer shook his head slowly, stunned by what he had seen.

He had lurched out of his hut and approached the hole that his hosts had opened in the very fabric of reality with their chanting. As he stood facing the opening, which napped like a curtain, he realised it was bigger than he had first thought. It rose from the ground, reaching above his head, and was easily wide enough for a carriage to pass through. The edges billowed over the landscape, concealing then exposing it, like waves breaking on the shore. Fascinated, Tremanquai peered through it as if it were a window. On the other side, there was a very different world from ours, a sort of plain of pinkish rock, swept by a harsh wind that blew sand up from the surface: in the distance, blurred by the swirling dust, he was able to make out a range of sinister mountains. Disoriented and unable to see, the Masai floundered in the other world, gibbering and running each other through with their spears. Those left standing fell one by one. Tremanquai watched the macabre dance of death, transfixed: the Masais’ bodies were caressed by a wind not of his world, like the strange dust clogging their nostrils.

The Reed People, still lined up in the middle of the village, resumed their ghostly chanting, and the hole began to close, slowly narrowing before Tremanquai’s eyes until it had disappeared. The explorer moved his hand stupidly across the space where the air had split open. Suddenly it seemed as if there had never been anything between him and the choir of Reed People, which now broke up, its members wandering to different corners of the village, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

For Tremanquai, the world as he had known it would never be the same. He realised he now had only two choices. One was to see the world, which he had hitherto believed to be the only world, as one of many, superimposed like the pages of a book, so that all you had to do was thrust a dagger into it to open a pathway through all of them. The other was simpler: he could lose his mind.

That night, understandably, the explorer was unable to sleep. He lay on his straw mattress, eyes wide open, body tense, alert to the slightest noise coming from the darkness. The knowledge that he was surrounded by witches, against whom his rifle and his God were useless, filled him with dread. As soon as he was able to walk more than one step without feeling dizzy, he fled the Reed People’s village. It took him several weeks to reach the port of Zanzibar, where he survived as best he could until he was able to stow away on a ship bound for London. He was back ten months after he had set out, but his experiences had changed him utterly.

It had been a disastrous voyage and, naturally enough, Sebastian Murray, Gilliam’s father, did not believe a word of his story. He had no idea what had happened to his most experienced explorer during the months he had gone missing, but he was clearly unwilling to accept Tremanquai’s tales of Reed People and their ridiculous holes in the air, which he considered the ravings of a lunatic. And his suspicions were borne out as Tremanquai proved incapable of living a normal life with his ‘widow’ and their two daughters. His wife would doubtless have preferred to carry on taking flowers to his grave than to live with the haunted misfit Africa had returned to her.

Tremanquai veered between apathy and random fits of madness, which swiftly turned the hitherto harmonious family home upside down. His accesses of insanity, which occasionally drove him to run naked through the streets or shoot at the hats of passers-by from his window, were a constant menace to the otherwise peaceful neighbourhood, and he was eventually carted off to the asylum at Guy’s Hospital, where he was locked away.

Yet he was not entirely abandoned. Unbeknown to his father, Gilliam Murray went to see him in hospital as often as he could, moved by the grief he felt that one of his family’s best men should be reduced to such a wretched state, but also thrilled to hear him narrate that incredible story. The young man of barely twenty, as Murray then was, visited the explorer with the eagerness of a child at a puppet show, and Tremanquai never disappointed him. Sitting on the edge of his camp-bed, his gaze straying towards the damp patches on the walls, he needed no encouragement to retell the tale of the Reed People, embellishing it with new and extraordinary details each time, grateful for the audience and for being given time to inflate his fantasy.

For a while, Murray believed he would regain his sanity, but after four years of incarceration, Tremanquai hanged himself in his cell. He left a note on a grubby piece of paper. In a spidery scrawl that could just as well have been his normal writing as distorted by his inner torment, he stated ironically that he was departing this world for another, which was only one of the many that existed.

By that time Murray had begun working in his father’s company. Although Tremanquai’s story still seemed to him sheer madness, but perhaps for that very reason, without his father’s knowledge he sent two explorers to Africa to search for the apparently non-existent Reed People. Samuel Kaufmann and Forrest Austin were a couple of numbskulls, partial to showing off and drunken sprees, whose every expedition ended in disaster. But they were the only men his father would not miss, and the only two who would nonchalantly set off to the Dark Continent in search of a tribe of singing witches with the power to open doorways to other worlds. They were also the only men to whom, because of their glaring ineptitude, he dared assign a mission so hopeless, which was really only a modest tribute to the memory of the hapless Oliver Tremanquai.

Kaufmann and Austin left England almost in secret. Neither they nor Gilliam Murray could have known that they would become the most famous explorers of their day. Following instructions, as soon as they set foot in Africa they sent telegrams giving news of their progress. Murray read these cursorily before placing them in his desk drawer with a sad smile.

Everything changed when, three months later, he received one telling him they had at last found the Reed People. He could not believe it! Were they playing a joke on him in revenge for his having sent them on a wild-goose chase? he wondered. But the details contained in the telegrams ruled out any possibility of deceit because, as far as he remembered, they tallied entirely with those embellishing Oliver Tremanquai’s story. Astonished though he was, he could only conclude that both they and Tremanquai were telling the truth: the Reed People did exist.

From that moment on, the telegrams became Gilliam Murray’s reason for getting up in the morning. He awaited their arrival with eager anticipation, reading and rereading them behind the locked door of his office, unwilling for the time being to share the amazing discovery with anyone, not even his father.

According to the telegrams, once they had located the village, Kaufmann and Austin had no difficulty in being accepted as guests. In fact, the Reed People were apparently incapable of putting up any form of resistance. Neither did they seem particularly interested in the explorers’ reasons for being there. They simply accepted their presence. The two men asked for no more and, rather than lose heart when faced with the difficulty of carrying out the essential part of their mission (which was to discover whether or not these savages could open passageways to other worlds), they resolved to be patient and treat their stay as a paid holiday. Murray could imagine them lounging around in the sun all day, polishing off the crates of whisky they had sneaked with them on the expedition while he had pretended to be looking the other way.

Amazingly, they could not have thought up a better strategy, for their continual state of alcoholic stupor, and the frequent dancing and fighting they engaged in naked in the grass, drew the attention of the Reed People, who were curious about the amber liquid that generated such jolly antics. Once they began sharing their whisky, a rough camaraderie sprang up between them, which Murray rejoiced in back in his office, for it was without doubt the first step towards a future co-existence. He was not mistaken, although fostering this primitive contact until it grew into a common bond of trust and friendship cost him several consignments of the best Scotch. To this day he wondered whether so many bottles had really been necessary for such a small tribe.

At last, one morning, he received the long-awaited telegram, in which Kaufmann and Austin described how the Reed People had led them to the middle of the village and, in a seemingly beautiful gesture of friendship and gratitude, had opened for them the hole through to the other world. The explorers described the aperture and the pink landscape they had glimpsed through it, using exactly the same words as Tremanquai had employed five years earlier. This time, however, the young Murray no longer saw them as part of a made-up story: now he knew it was for real.

All of a sudden he felt trapped, suffocated, and not because he was locked away in his little office. He felt hemmed in by the walls of a universe he was now convinced was not the only one of its kind. But this constraint would soon end, he thought. He devoted a few moments to the memory of Oliver Tremanquai. He assumed that the man’s deep religious beliefs had prevented him from assimilating what he had seen, leaving him no other course than the precarious path of madness. Luckily, that pair of oafs, Kaufmann and Austin, possessed far simpler minds, which should spare them a similar fate.

He reread the telegram hundreds of times. Not only did the Reed People exist, they practised something that Murray, unlike Tremanquai, preferred to call magic, rather than witchcraft. An unknown world had opened itself up to Kaufmann and Austin, and naturally they could not resist exploring it.

As Murray read their subsequent telegrams, he regretted not having accompanied them. With the blessing of the Reed People, who left them to their own devices, the pair made brief incursions into the other world, diligently reporting its peculiarities. It consisted largely of a vast pink plain of faintly luminous rock, stretching out beneath a sky permanently obscured by incredibly dense fog. If there were any sun behind it, its rays were unable to shine through. As a consequence, the only light came from the strange substance on the ground, so that while one’s boots were clearly visible, the landscape was plunged into gloom, day and night merging into an eternal dusk, making it very difficult to see long distances. From time to time, a raging wind whipped the plain, producing sand storms that made everything even more difficult to see.

The two men had immediately noticed something strange: the moment they stepped through the hole their pocket watches stopped. Once back in their own reality the mechanisms mysteriously stirred again. It was as though they had unanimously decided to stop measuring the time their owners spent in the other world. Kaufmann and Austin looked at one another – it is not difficult to imagine them shrugging their shoulders, baffled.

They made a further discovery after spending a night, according to their calculations, in the camp they had set up right beside the opening so that they could keep an eye on the Reed People. There was no need for them to shave, because while they were in the other world their beards stopped growing. In addition, Austin had cut his arm seconds before stepping through the hole, and as soon as he was on the other side it had stopped bleeding, to the point that he had even forgotten to bandage it. He did not remember the wound until the moment they were back in the village and it bled again.

Intrigued, Gilliam Murray wrote down this extraordinary incident in his notebook, as well as what had happened with their watches and beards. Everything pointed to some impossible stoppage of time. While he speculated in his office, Kaufmann and Austin stocked up on ammunition and food and set out towards the only thing that broke the monotony of the plain: the ghostly mountain range, scarcely visible on the horizon.

As their watches continued to be unusable, they decided to measure the time their journey took by the number of nights they slept. This method soon proved ineffective, because at times the wind rose so suddenly and with such force they were obliged to stay awake all night holding the tent down, or their accumulated tiredness crept up on them when they stopped for food or rest. All they could say was that after an indeterminate length of time, which was neither very long nor very short, they reached the mountains. They proved to be made of the same luminous rock as the plain but had a hideous appearance, like a set of rotten, broken teeth, their jagged peaks piercing the thick clouds that blotted out the sky.

The two men spotted a few hollows that looked like caves. Having no other plan, they decided to scale the slopes until they reached the nearest one. This did not take long. Once they had reached the pinnacle of a small mountain, they had a broader view of the plain. Far off in the distance the hole had been reduced to a bright dot on the horizon. They could see their way back, acting as a guiding light. They were not worried that the Reed People might close the hole, because they had taken the precaution of bringing what remained of the whisky with them.

It was then that they noticed other bright dots shining in the distance. It was difficult to see clearly through the mist, but there must have been half a dozen. Were they more holes leading to other worlds?

They found the answer in the very cave they intended to explore. As soon as they entered it they could see it was inhabited. There were signs of life everywhere: burned-out fires, bowls, tools and other basic implements – things Tremanquai had found so conspicuous by their absence in the Reed People’s village. At the back of the cave they discovered a narrow enclosure, the walls of which were covered with paintings. Most depicted scenes from everyday life, and from the willowy rag-doll figures, only the Reed People could have painted them. Apparently, that dark world was where they really lived. The village was no more than a temporary location, a provisional settlement, perhaps one of many they had built in other worlds.

Kaufmann and Austin did not consider the drawings particularly significant. But two caught their attention. One of these took up nearly an entire wall. As far as they could tell it was meant to be a map of that world, or at least the part the tribe had succeeded in exploring, which was limited to the area near the mountains. What intrigued them was that this crude map marked the location of some other holes, and, if they were not mistaken, what they contained. The drawings were easy enough to interpret: a yellow star represented a hole, and the painted images next to it, the hole’s contents. At least, this was what they deduced from the dot surrounded by huts, apparently representing the hole the explorers had climbed through to get there and the village on the other side. The map showed four other openings, fewer than those the two men had glimpsed on the horizon. Where did they lead?

Whether from idleness or boredom, the Reed People had only painted the contents of the holes nearest their cave. One seemed to depict a battle between two different tribes: one human-shaped, the other square or rectangular. The remainder of the drawings were impossible to make out. Consequently, the only thing Kaufmann and Austin could be clear about was that the world they were in contained dozens of holes like the one they had come through, but they could only find out where any of them led if they passed through them: the Reed People’s scrawls were as mystifying as the dreams of a blind man.

The second painting that caught their eye was on the opposite wall and showed a group of Reed People running from what looked like a gigantic four-legged monster with a dragon’s tail and spikes on its back. Kaufmann and Austin glanced at one another, alarmed to find themselves in the same world as a wild animal whose mere image was enough to scare the living daylights out of them. What would happen if they came across the real thing? However, this discovery did not make them turn back. They both had rifles and enough ammunition to kill a whole herd of monsters, assuming they existed and were not simply a mythological invention. They also had whisky, which would fire up their courage – or, at least, turn the prospect of being eaten by an elephantine monster into a relatively minor nuisance. What more did they need?

Accordingly, they decided to carry on exploring, and set out for the opening where the battle was going on between the two tribes because it was closest to the mountains. The journey was gruelling, hampered by freak sandstorms that forced them to erect their tent and take refuge inside if they did not want to be scoured like cooking pots. Thankfully, they did not meet any of the giant creatures. Of course, when they finally reached the hole, they had no idea how long it had taken them to get there, only that the journey had been exhausting.

Its size and appearance were identical to the one they had first stepped through into that murky world. The only difference was that, instead of crude huts, inside this one there was a ruined city. Scarcely a single building remained standing, yet there was something oddly familiar about the structures. They stood for a few moments, surveying the ruins from the other side of the hole, as one would peer into a shop window, but no sign of life broke the calm. What kind of war could have wrought such terrible devastation?

Depressed by the dreadful scene, Kaufman and Austin restored their courage with a few slugs of whisky, then donned their pith helmets and leaped valiantly through the opening. Their senses were immediately assailed by an intense familiar odour. Smiling with bewilderment, it dawned on them that they were simply smelling their own world again: they had been unaware of it during their journey across the pink plain.