To Your Scattered Bodies Go

"Yeah, me, too," Frigate said. "But some day, when we stop off some place for a long time, I’m going to chew a suck every night, so help me. Even if it scares hell out of me. Of course, that’s easy to say now." Peter Jairus Frigate had been born only twenty-eight years after Burton had died; yet the world between them was wide. They saw so many things so differently; they would have argued violently if Frigate was able to argue violently. Not on matters of discipline in the group or in running the boat. But on so many matters of looking at the world.

Yet, in many ways, Frigate was much like Burton, and it may have been this that had caused him to be so fascinated by Burton on Earth. Frigate had picked up in 1938 a soft-cover book by Fairfax Downey titled Burton: Arabian Nights" Adventurer. The front page illustration was of Burton at the age of fifty, The savage fate; the high brow and prominent supraorbital ridges, the heavy black brows, the straight but harsh nose, the great scar on his cheek, the thick "sensual" lips, the heavy downdrooping moustache, the heavy forked beard, the essential broodingness and aggressiveness of the face, had caused him to buy the book.

"I’d never heard of you before, Dick," Frigate said. "But I read the book at once and was fascinated. There was something about you, aside from the obvious daring-do of your life, your swordsmanship, mastery of many languages, disguises as a native doctor, native merchantman, as a pilgrim to Mecca, the first European to get out of the sacred city of Harar alive, discoverer of Lake Tanganyika and near-discoverer of the source of the Nile, co-founder of the Royal Anthropological Society, inventor of the term ESP, translator of the Arabian Nights, student of the sexual practices of the East, and so forth…

"Aside from all this, fascinating enough in itself, you had a special affinity for me. I went to the public library — Peoria was a small city but had many books on you and about you, donated by some admirer of yours who’d passed on — and I read these. Then I started to collect first editions by you and about you. I became a fiction writer eventually, but I planned to write a huge definitive biography of you, travel everywhere you had been, take photographs and notes of these places, found a society to collect funds for the preservation of your tomb…"

This was the first time Frigate had mentioned his tomb. Burton, startled, said, "Where?" Then, "Oh, of course! Mortlake! I’d forgotten! Was the tomb really in the form of an Arab tent, as Isabel and I had planned?"

"Sure. But the cemetery was swallowed up in a slum, the tomb was defaced by vandals, there were weeds up to your focus and talk of moving the bodies to a more remote section of England, though by then it was hard to find a really remote section."

"And did you found your society and preserve my tomb?" Burton said.

He had gotten used to the idea by then of having been dead, but to talk with someone who had seen his tomb made his skin chill for a moment.

Frigate took a deep breath. Apologetically, he said, "No. By the time I was in a position to do that, I would have felt guilty spending time and money on the dead. The world was in too much of a mess. The living needed all the attention they could get. Pollution, poverty, oppression, and so forth. These were the important things."

"And that giant definitive biography?"

Again, Frigate spoke apologetically. "When I first read about you, I thought I was the only one deeply interested in you or even aware of you. But there was an upsurge of interest in you in the "60’s. Quite a few books were written about you and even one about your wife."

"Isabel? Someone wrote a book about her? Why?"

Frigate had grinned. "She was a pretty interesting woman. Very aggravating, I’ll admit, pitifully superstitious and schizophrenic and self-fooling. Very few would ever forgive her for burning your manuscripts and your journals…"

"What?" Burton had roared. "Burn…?"

Frigate nodded and said, "What your doctor, Grenfell Baker, described as "the ruthless holocaust that followed his lamented death." She burned your translation of The Perfumed Garden, claiming you would not have wanted to publish it unless you needed the money for it, and you didn’t need it, of course, because you were now dead." Burton was speechless for one of the few times in his life.

Frigate looked out of the corner of his eyes at Burton, and grinned. He seemed to be enjoying Burton’s distress.