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By Root 1205 0

a master of disguise, travelling through the bazaars of India, sitting in mosques, playing chess and lying around in opium dens, pretending to be a half-Persian, half-Arab merchant, having stained his face, arms, hands and feet and grown a beard and shoulder-length hair. So confident was Burton of his disguise that he claimed to have investigated male brothels in Karachi at the request of a senior officer.* In 1852 Burton proposed to the Royal Geographical Society that he make the hajj, or pilgrimage, to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, from which infidels were banned. Discovery would have meant certain death, but Burton so successfully refined his disguise that he was able to pass himself off as an itinerant sufi. His account of the penetration of the forbidden Muslim holy cities made him something of a national hero: his descriptions of his adventures count among the best non-fiction of the nineteenth century. He would not, however, be mistaken for an intellectual on first sight – big-browed and strong-jawed, with a prodigious moustache and beard tumbling over each side of his upper lip and hanging from his chin like rusty chain-mail. He looked, thought one man who met him, ‘like a prize-fighter’, an impression not diminished by the scars on his face left by a lance which had pierced both cheeks. But it was the eyes which everyone remarked upon. In a typically extravagant phrase, the poet Swinburne described a ‘look of unspeakable horror in those eyes which gave him at times an almost unearthly appearance … the brow of a god and the jaw of a devil’.

In 1856 this remarkable man applied for leave from the army to enable him to make an attempt on the true source of the Nile. He was granted two years’ paid absence, with the endorsement of the Foreign Office and the RGS. His partner on the expedition was six years younger, tall, slim, fair-haired and blue-eyed, clean-living, fit and determined. John Hanning Speke came from a West Country family which could trace its roots back to the Saxons. He had the English country gentleman’s interest in field sports and had decided to travel the Nile well before he met Burton, his main motive being to kill and preserve birds and animals for a museum he was developing at his father’s house: there were, he said, very few species left in India, Tibet or the Himalayas which he had not shot already. He was also intensely ambitious and quite fastidious: he hardly drank, so Burton’s pleasure in drink, drugs and pornography and his preoccupation with African genitalia left Speke a little cold. It was not the most auspicious of teamings, but Burton claimed that he owed Speke the opportunity to join him (despite the fact that ‘he was not a linguist … nor a man of science, nor an accurate astronomical observer’), because they had travelled together in Somalia in 1855. That journey had ended with Speke captured and at the point of death, with his gaoler stabbing a spear into his shoulder and then through each thigh. Astonishingly, Speke still retained the strength to make a run for it, to be reunited with his surviving companions. Burton later made the odd claim that ‘before we set out, [Speke] openly declared that, being tired of life, he had come to be killed in Africa’.

For the expedition to find the source of the Nile the two men decided that, instead of following the river upstream from Egypt, they would land on the east coast of Africa and strike inland. They arrived on the island of Zanzibar in December 1856. It was a foul, stinking place, racked by malaria, dysentery, venereal diseases, yellow fever and elephantiasis, some instances of which, Burton noted, caused the scrotum to swell so much that it hung down around men’s knees. Zanzibar still had a flourishing slave trade, which the British Empire was committed to terminating. But that was not their concern: despite the support of the Royal Geographical Society and the sponsorship of the British Foreign Office, they would make their journey under the red flag of the sultan of Zanzibar. The two men did not travel especially light