“Certainly,” I said, taking another sip of my drink. “Colonel Carcosa, I have discovered the lost burial ground of the elephants!”
“I didn't even know it was missing,” he said.
“This is the place where all the elephants go to die,” I said. “It's just chock full of skeletons, most of them loaded down with ivory, and it just stands to reason that as long as elephants keep feeling the need to die they'll keep going to the burial ground and adding to the treasure that awaits us there.”
Colonel Carcosa signaled for his aide. “No more liquor for Doctor Jones,” he said. “He doesn't seem to be able to handle it.”
“But it's true!” I said. “I saw it with my own eyes!”
“This is the silliest story I have ever heard in a long lifetime of hearing silly stories,” he said. “I'm afraid I must ask you to leave.”
“Wait!” I cried. “If I take you there and let you see it yourself, are we partners?”
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“We got to buy that graveyard before anyone else stakes a claim!” I said. “I ain't got no money, but I know where it is; you don't know where it is, but you can put up the money. If I can convince you it really exists, do we have a deal?”
“How far is it from here?” he asked suspiciously.
“About six days’ march,” I said.
He pulled a map out of his desk. “Mark its location,” he said.
“I can't,” I said.
“Then how are we to find this mythical graveyard?” he demanded.
“I got three Mangbetus waiting for me outside of town,” I said. “They were with me when I discovered it. They can show us the way.”
“Mangbetus?” he said, his eyebrows raised.
“Right,” I said. “And a God-fearing race they are, except in matters of diet.”
“You know, I could arrest you for coming to me with a hare-brained scheme like this,” he said.
“True, Brother Carcosa,” I said. “But then I'd just have to go out and find another partner once you set me free, and I truly don't see how that could possibly benefit either of us.”
“All right,” he said. “Come back here tomorrow morning and I will be ready to leave with you. But if this graveyard does not exist, it is going to go very hard with you, Doctor Jones. Very hard indeed.”
“Brother Carcosa,” I said, rising and shaking his hand, “you got yourself a deal.”
I picked him up the next morning, and we were joined by Sam and the boys when we got a couple of miles west of the city limits. I knew he wasn't all that thrilled with the Mangbetu tribe, but I warned him to keep it under his hat, because the very last thing anyone in his right mind would want was to be viewed as an enemy by the Mangbetus, especially if they had a little mustard and onions handy. He took it under advisement, and the following six days were kind of routine.
Colonel Carcosa had a big map folded up in his backpack, and every couple of hours he'd pull it out and make certain notations on it. When we finally got to Sam's village he made us spend an extra day there while he checked out various landmarks to make sure he had the place spotted on the map. Then we spent a couple more days hunting up the graveyard, but we finally found it despite Sam's deficiencies at bushcraft.
“By God, Doctor Jones!” exclaimed Colonel Carcosa. “I must confess that until this minute I really didn't believe you!”
“Then why did you come along?” I asked as we moseyed down into the valley.
“If nothing else, I could always have turned the Mangbetus in for the reward,” he said. Sam kind of tensed at that, and started looking at the Colonel the way a chef looks at a choice piece of tenderloin, but the Colonel simply smiled back and said, “Of course, that won't be necessary now, especially in view of the fact that we're going to need a nonstop stream of highly-paid porters.”
That soothed Sam down a bit, and after a while he looked like he might settle for maybe only cutting off two or three of the Colonel's toes to flavor up a stew or something.
We walked down to the skeletons, and started counting, and came up with seven elephants.
“But that's just what's on the surface,” said the Colonel. “There's no telling how many have sunk under the soft moist ground. Possibly thousands.”
“Not only that,” I pointed out, “but we might not even be safe standing right here. I mean, for all we know there's a couple of dozen elephants making their way here right now just to die on this very spot.”
He thought about that for a moment and then walked a few feet away. I nodded my approval and told him he looked much safer in his new location.
“Well, Doctor Jones,” he said after a few minutes, “I've seen enough. Let's get back to Beria and stake a claim to this place before anybody else stumbles onto it.”
That made a lot of sense to me, especially since there were a few million army ants discussing combat strategy and logistics a couple of hundred yards away. So we went back to the Mangbetu village very slowly, with the Colonel marking things down on his map every half mile or so. We rested up for a day and then, accompanied only by Sam, who came along mainly to guide me back after we'd claimed the place, we returned to Beria.
I took a room in a local hostelry, Sam hung around a nearby restaurant getting hints on different ways to soften meat, and Colonel Carcosa went to the proper authorities to purchase the tract of land that contained the burial ground. He was in a real good mood when we met for dinner.
“Did you get it?” I asked as soon as he had pulled up a chair.
“Of course,” he said.
“No problems?” I said. “Nobody suspects nothing?”
“Doctor Jones, you're not dealing with an amateur,” he replied smugly. “The graveyard was in the middle of a privately owned two-hundred-thousand-acre tract of land. I purchased the whole thing at five British shillings an acre.”
“The whole thing?” I said. “But why?”
“Because if it were known that I had bought one hundred acres or so in the interior of Portuguese East Africa, it would arouse curiosity. But two hundred thousand acres? It might seem peculiar, but no one is going to race out to search every square centimeter of the land to find out what I want with it.”
I opined as to how it made a bit of sense at that, and we spent the rest of the evening toasting each other's good health and success in the world of high finance.
The next morning Sam and I set out for the graveyard, armed with saws and such other equipment as we might need to separate the various tusks from their skeletons. We stopped off at the Mangbetu village long enough to recruit a little help and for Sam to refresh Missus Sam, and then we headed off for the burial ground. Four of the skeletons had tusks, and we removed them and toted them all the way back to Mozambique.
“Excellent,” said Colonel Carcosa, when the tusks averaged out at one hundred thirty pounds apiece. “I've ordered some earth-moving equipment which should be here in about four months, at which time we can begin digging up all the skeletons that have sunk into the muck and mire.”
It made sense to me, and I prepared to spend the next four months loafing and sleeping and enjoying the company of the local ladies, but Colonel Carcosa started getting itchy a few days later and sent me and Sam off to pick up the tusks from any new corpses.
I got back to Beria two weeks later with the news that there weren't any new corpses.
“That's very odd,” said the Colonel. “After all, it's been almost a month since I was there. You would think some elephants would have died since then.”
“Maybe this ain't the season for it,” I suggested.
“And maybe you are being less than honest with me,” he said accusingly.
“Brother Carcosa,” I said. “I been telling you nothing but God's own truth. If you don't believe me, come on right now and we'll march out there together.”
He stared long and hard at me, as if he was making up his mind. “I'll trust you for the moment,” he announced at last, “but if I should ever find out that you were stealing ivory from our property, Doctor Jones, I have the power to make the rest of your life very unpleasant.”
Getting threatened by your partner can be pretty thirsty work, so after he finished talking I moseyed on over to the local pub, where I ordered a bottle of beer, and started carrying it to a table in the corner.
“Well, if it ain't the Reverend Lucifer Jones!” hollered a familiar voice.
I turned and saw Capturing Clyde Calhoun sitting at the bar.
“I sure didn't expect to see you here, Clyde,” I said, walking over and joining him. “I figured your circus would be taking you to Bucharest and Rotterdam and all them other glittering exotic capitals of Europe.”
“I'll be joining the circus in a couple of days,” said Calhoun, pouring himself a glass of rye whiskey and offering one to me. “I'm just here to ship some survivors back to various zoos in the States.”
“Well, it sure is good to see a friendly face,” I said. “How's Lord Bloomstoke getting along?”
“Just fine,” replied Calhoun. “Of course, I've had to land on him a couple of times about organizing the monkeys, but other than that he's doing a right creditable job. And how about yourself, Reverend? You ever get that tabernacle?”
I told him the sad story of the Tabernacle of Saint Luke, and then he told me the sad story of how he figured out that he had a career waiting for him in the Dark Continent on the day he accidentally shot the mayor's horse back in Billings, Montana, and then I told him the sad story of losing the affections of Miss Emily Perrison to Major Theodore Dobbins, late of His Majesty's armed forces, and then he told me the sad story of his first five wives.
“We've sure had our share of bad luck, ain't we, Clyde?” I said, starting to feel downright weepy.
“We sure have,” he agreed.
“I don't mean to butt in, gents,” said the bartender. “But I got a hard-luck story to match anything you've got. I used to be a hunter like Mister Calhoun here.”
“What happened?” I asked, ordering another beer and pouring two shots of rye into it, just to bring out the subtle nuances of its flavor.
“I got flim-flammed so bad I had to take this here bartending job to climb out from under a mountain of debts that I had taken on in good faith,” said the bartender. “Seems this fellow hired me to go to some valley out in the middle of nowhere, right next to some cannibal sanctuary about five or six days’ march from here, and offered me a thousand pounds for every elephant I could lure there and shoot. Then, after I'd spent a couple of weeks fighting off mosquitoes and hornets and tsetse flies and black mambas and the like and had actually shot a batch of elephants, I came back to town here and wrote notes against the money I was owed, but the son of a bitch took off and I never saw him or heard from him again.”
“How much did he owe you?” I asked with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Seven thousand pounds!” said the bartender. “And of course we were so far out in the middle of the bush he knew there was no way for me and my one gun bearer to bring any of that ivory back to civilization.”
“Did he say why he wanted you to shoot the elephants?” asked Calhoun.
“I gather he'd just bought a couple hundred thousand acres at a penny an acre or some such ridiculous price, and he seemed to think that leaving a bunch of dead elephants at this particular spot would make his real estate appreciate. I told him and told him that ivory ain't like flowers and that you can't just leave it on the ground and hope it'll take root and multiply, but he just kind of chuckled and said he was a patient man and that sooner or later someone would be impressed by the fact that I'd killed all them elephants. I dunno; I guess he thought shooting elephants in that stupid little valley would make it a national historic shrine or something.”
“This feller's name didn't happen to have a Germanic sound to it, did it?” I asked, feeling kind of weak about the knees.
“Sure as hell did,” said the bartender.
“What was it?” I asked.
“Von Horst,” he replied.
“Damn!” I moaned. “I
knew
it!”
“Yep. Erich Von Horst it was,” continued the bartender. “I'll remember that name to my dying day.”
“You got lots of company,” I said.
I explained to Capturing Clyde that I suddenly remembered that I had urgent business elsewhere, and made a beeline toward Sam's favorite restaurant, where I told him that we should give serious thought to leaving the country at the earliest possible opportunity, like right that moment.
He told me that we'd be better off stopping by his village one last time so he could pick up some warriors to defend us against the denizens of the jungle and take along enough women to keep us all happy. I told him that I appreciated the thought, but right now I was a little more concerned with one particular denizen of the Portuguese East African government. He told me that he'd like to accommodate me, but it wouldn't be fair to the Mangbetu tribe as a whole for him to leave the country without sharing his newfound cooking knowledge with them.
Well, I could see I wasn't going to talk him out of it, and it made more sense to start walking toward the village right away than to spend all night standing in the street arguing, so I fell into step and we reached the village some six days later.
Sam conducted a three-hour graduate cooking seminar, gathered the people he thought we'd be most in need of, and headed off toward Tanganyika. We must have been within two miles of the border when a group of about twenty Portuguese soldiers, all armed to the teeth, intercepted us.
Sam was willing to fight to the death, but I explained to him that I had a feeling that the soldiers weren't really after the Mangbetu. The soldier nearest to us nodded, so I wished Sam and his people
bon appetit
as they retreated into the bush. My hands were chained behind me and I was marched all the way back to Beria, where I spent nine days in jail and was then brought to the office of an elderly gentleman named Alfredo Montenegro, who happened to hold the position of Chief Justice.
“Ah, Doctor Jones,” he said. “I have been wondering exactly what you looked like. Now at long last I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance.”