Benny Kaplan. Johannesburg pawnbroker.

Skinny. Gold ring on smallest finger. Born in Riga. Seven years in South Africa. Believes he’s seen it all.

Fordsburg shop caters to struggling tradesmen. Cantonese tailors. Malay curry-shop cooks. Gujarati law clerks. Yiddish-speaking cobblers from the Pale of Settlement. Scottish railway engineers. African mine workers from all over the country commuting from Sophiatown - shebeens, matchbox houses, overcrowded corrugated-iron shacks.

Swazi jazz bands. Zulu a cappella groups. Tswana gardeners. Xhosa housemaids. Parks, train cars, lavatories, cinemas all segregated. Black people required to carry passes - only allowed in the city to serve white people’s economic needs. Curfew on their movements aggressively enforced by Boer and British police.

Smear of civilisation over roaring gold-rush town. Department stores. Streetcars. Mansions of the Randlords. Mine dumps - gigantic flat-topped conical mountains of windblown yellow dust. Old Boers in ox wagons with chinstrap beards and long-bowled pipes, clucking their tongues, bemoaning the pace of change.

Communist Party organising under the slogan “Workers of the world, unite and fight for a white South Africa!”. Brawls in the streets. Syndicalists in bars reminiscing about the 1922 uprising, when union snipers and dynamite-wielding saboteurs almost conquered the city. Commandos with fond memories of the Orange Free State.

Zulu battle-axe hanging from wall above shop counter behind Kaplan’s head.

Old coats. Boots. Stacks of hats. Fountain pens. Cracked pocket watches. Battered violins. Carbide mining lamps. Pickaxes. Revolvers. Martini-Henry rifles. Elephant guns. Afrikaans Bibles. Adventure novels. Maps. Candlesticks. Shields. Wooden masks.

Giraffe-hide rug. Leopard-skin cloak. Ostrich-feather fan. Crocodile-leather wallet. Porcupine-quill lampshade. Elephant’s-foot umbrella stand. Comically posed stuffed monkeys. Four-metre black mamba preserved in huge jar.

Sawn-off shotgun under the counter next to small impregnable iron safe. Peanut-sized gold nuggets. Rough Kimberley diamonds. Mexican silver dollars. Bearer bonds issued by the Belgian Congo and De Beers. Small packages of cocaine, taduki, black lotus powder. Massive black ledger detailing dozens of small loans.

Salt-white crystal fragments. Rainbow sheen at edges. Not diamonds, or any other mineral known to science. Crumble into dust on exposure to strong sunlight.

Reproduce if fed on drops of blood. Can bond with flesh - grow into muscle fibres. Infiltrate nervous systems. Soothing. Peaceful. You like having them on you.

Sold for half a pound by Lesego. Out-of-work Sotho miner. Said he was given them by preacher at Zion Kingdom Church. Told to sit in the dark and count them while he prayed. Didn’t like the sound of it. Needed the money more.

Industrial wasteland on town outskirts. Abandoned machinery. Tin shacks. Sickly streams. Holes dug in the dirt. Tools cast down in disappointment. Secretarybird picking over rubble. Baboons squatting balefully on mine heaps, fur matted with yellow dust.

Africans in blue, green, white robes. Peace-symbol badges. Sashes. Fur headbands. Shirts and ties. Shepherd’s crooks. Crosses in circles mounted on top of wooden staves.

Bonfires. Columns of smoke. Dancing. Singing. Chanting Christian hymns. Occasional speaking in tongues. Greet you with big smiles and cries of “Peace!”

Barnabas Raphela. Pentecostal prophet.

Casts out demons. Heals the blind and sick. Invests glasses of water, sheets of paper, cups of coffee with curative powers - sells them at bargain prices. Explains how polygamy is fully sanctioned by the Bible. Promotes exciting new concept of “sexual confession”. Baptises new followers in big tub of water under flapping tent.

Struck by lightning on mountaintop. Studied in America. Walks on water. Pacifies lions. Immune to bullets. Reads one thousand books a day. Personally converted Mahatma Gandhi to Christianity. Never lies.

Founder of Zion City.

Sacred Drakensberg valley. Somewhere in Basotholand. Workers’ commune where people can live in style of ancient Christians. Only most loyal and virtuous devotees allowed to go there. Leads yearly pilgrimage. Nobody returns.

Half-built church on the highveld.

Distant mountains. Rocky kopjes. Lion-coloured plains. Farmhouse standing alone on hilltop. Bare against blue sky.

Creaking rust-brown windpump. Rotting barbed-wire fences. Cows have all wandered off. Meerkat holes. Zebras grazing in middle distance. Lake at base of hill - water trickling through cracks in dam.

Peter Pienaar. Boer War scout. Hunter. Smuggler. Traitor - sold his countrymen out to the British. Nothing ever proven against him.

Steady hands. Mild blue eyes. Long lined sorrowful face. Sits on porch smoking pipe, reading newspapers, watching clouds scud across horizon. Eats wife’s roast chicken. Boerewors on braai with monkey gland sauce.

Way station on road to Zion City.

Pilgrims on foot welcomed in for meal. Shown altar in church overgrown by crystals. Shafts of light from incompletely tiled roof. Old fat Zulu evangelist Siphosethu reclines in shadow. Shambling human geode. Sparkles in a dozen colours where he’s struck by the light.

Selects the strongest pilgrims. Demands proof of their faith. Gives them sticks and makes them fight among each other. Failures’ bodies fed to crystals. Huge mineral deposit under farmland - visible if you scrape away the earth.

Strangely intelligent wildlife. Meerkats watch you pass - chatter to each other. Warthogs scratch at dirt. Vultures leap from grass - surprised in act of picking over unrecognisable corpses. All neighbours for miles have packed up and moved away.

Lost city of Zu-Vendis.

Snow-capped Maloti Mountains. Eroded escarpments. Layered pinnacles of rock. Sheba’s Breasts - round twin nipple-topped peaks with startling resemblance to their namesake. Green valley between them impregnable to outsiders unless you know the way.

Sotho highland horsemen in conical straw hats. Thatched rondavel huts. Colourful woolen blankets. Potion pouches attached to leather bandoliers. Hunt for lost cattle. Watch pilgrims from a distance. Warn you the Breasts are cursed by ancient ghosts. Don’t think it’s funny. Curious Englishmen died trying to scale them in the days of King Moeshoeshoe I.

Climb through narrow rock defile leads to black marble balcony with spectacular view. Flight of stairs descends into valley. Domes. Bridges. Lily-sprinkled bathing pools. Lion sculptures. Red granite palaces overlooking farm-terraced hillsides, deep mountain lake.

Underground rivers. Sacred hippopotami. Flower-garnished temples to the sun. Priests with golden trumpets. Sacred flames in stone bowls lit by prisms. Law code values property over human life.

Twin queens Sorais and Nyleptha sharing single throne. Linen dresses. Golden torcs. Each has one breast bare - Sorais left, Nyleptha right. Speak with one voice on formal occasions. Despise each other. High priest Agon has full-time job preventing civil war.

Proto-Zulu all-female warrior caste with assegai. Dignified. Formal. Unimpressed by cheap tricks. Enforce royal decisions. Sleep on stone beds in austere barracks. Harden selves by wrestling crocodiles, drinking poison, walking barefoot on thorns.

Ancient stronghold of King Solomon. Built into mountainside. Piled high with treasure - Egyptian gilded jackals, alabaster lamassu, Nimrud ivories of winged genies and griffins, Assyrian bronze lions biting out men’s throats. Diabolical traps. Heavy stone doors that suddenly slam closed. False floors over bottomless shafts.

Built over lost mine. Workers toil in depths. Convinced this is Zion. Not allowed to see the sun. Flesh eaten away by crystals until nothing’s left. Ambulatory skeletons encrusted with parasitic jewels. Still digging by torchlight.

Xipehuz. Intelligent alien mineral. Deposited in veins under highveld by Vredefort bolide impact. Malevolent. Hungry. Wants to be dug up. Sold to rich eccentrics. Use their wealth and power to reproduce.

Cackling crone Gagool. Wizened beyond belief. White hair ornamented by puffed bladders of cave-fish. Can smell out and magnify grief, regret, despair. Leads whole cabal of witches. Oversees miners. Dreams of reigning over barren, bone-white mineral world.

Frederick Selous. Aged, white-bearded hunter. Forty years in Matabeleland, contacting new tribes, shooting game. Small. Quiet. Patient. Self-effacing. Talks to himself. Lives to collect specimens. Deadly with bolt-action rifle. Almost impossible to spot in tall grass.

Founder of Shikar Club - international huntsman’s brotherhood based in London hotel. Famous in his circles. Trusted by the government. Presidents, aristocrats, hotel managers everywhere owe him favours.

Travelled world in pursuit of prey. Transylvania. Caucasus. Wyoming. Codename “Galahad” in Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table conspiracy for universal British rule. Mistakenly believed shot dead by Tanganyika Germans during Great War.

Rediscovered Zu-Vendis in last couple of years. Married to Gagool. Small translucent crystal lodged in back of neck.

Solomon Joel. Randlord. Owns dozen gold mines. Son of Whitechapel publican. Married to beautiful young actress. Suspected of throwing diamond-magnate uncle Barney Barnato off boat near Madeira in 1897. Stalked for years and threatened with death by mad anti-semitic blackmailer and conman Ludwig von Veltheim. Dozens of enemies. Could be gunned down at any moment. Affects not to care.

Throws wild parties in his ridgetop Parktown mansion. Champagne. Jacarandas. Views of sprawling veldt. Spends extravagantly. Champion racehorse breeder - ongoing rivalry with his brother Jack.

Approaches by Selous to handle crystal business. Hands them out as party favours. In over his head.

Hermann Kallenbach. Architect. Gandhi disciple. Devoted to principles of non-violence, celibacy and universal peace.

Runs Tolstoy Farm ashram. Meditation retreat for disaffected young Johannesburgers - failed accountants and pop-eyed Theosophists who’ve dropped out of life. Satyagrahis training themselves to full knowledge of Truth. Revolutionaries of the soul.

Communal living. Kitchen rosters. Vegetarian cooking. Fruit trees. Spinning wheels. Rough blue cloth. Homemade bread, marmalade, sandals. Lectures from local gurus. No guns allowed. Residents explicitly banned from killing poisonous snakes.

Crystals supplied by Joel. Gifted to acolytes. Kallenbach believes they’re a gift from the universal consciousness - hold secret to world enlightenment. Technically correct.

Jan van Hunks. Table Mountain warlock.

Beat the Devil in a smoking contest. Stole his power. Outgambled Van der Vecken, captain of the Flying Dutchman, and won from him three favours. Wrestled Adamastor, the Giant of the Cape. Moustache. Wide-brimmed hat. Red nose. Fat. Jolly.

Ancient feud with Gagool. Interferes with her plans just to annoy her. Interested in crystals - want to see if he can bend them to his own evil will.

Plane crash on the Zambezi.

Downstream of Livingstone. Cowboy frontier town on Rhodesian plains. Relocated from the Old Drift on construction of Victoria Falls Bridge - old-timers still remember all-night saloon poker games, hippo hunts, gunfights, death in the mud.

Railway station. Chemist. Post office. Undertaker. General store. Pioneer cemetery. Agents of Bulawayo and Bechuanaland trading companies. Texans. Turks. Swiss missionary on bicycle preaching to the Makololo in loose village clusters outside town.

Neat little hospital with cases of blackwater fever - invariably fatal. Eccentric Kiwi doctor with dog-harassing pet marabou stork. Curly-haired Welshman drinking beer on stoop - addled in his brain by decades of unaccustomed sun.

Lozi elephant hunter Mobita - has theory that animals can’t see you if you wear black and white. Wears zebra-skin trousers, white shirt, black waistcoat, white ostrich feather in black cowboy hat. Plays piano and chess. Big smile. Huge elephant gun.

Griqua snake-oil salesman Dr. Bumpus camped in ox-drawn wagon outside of town. Sells old African remedies. Lion fat for courage. Vulture brains for wisdom. Herbs for menstrual problems and swollen feet. Battered top hat. Tells future with bones.

Prospector MacGregor. Gummy smile. Incredibly old and thin. Knobby hands. Undershirt. Suspenders. White beard reaches to the waist. Carried pea-sized rubies in blue medicine bottle marked “fever mix.” Found in a “zimbabwe” ruin - won’t say which one.

Bookseller Wilberforce. Trained as reverend in Kingston, Jamaica - grew bored of ministry, decided to see world. Gold spectacles. Brass watch-chain. Green umbrella. Loves Victorian nonsense fiction. Polysyllabic - addicted to ten-dollar words.

Station agent Patel. Neat. Punctual. Three daughters. Avid photographer. Backyard shed darkroom hung about with negatives of Falls, tourists, elephants, traditionally costumed African dancers. Dabbles in taxidermy. Unpromising results.

Victualler Joe Randall. Runs cheap restaurant and boarding house. Mutton hash, collard greens, potatoes, suet pudding, served on one plate at same time each day. Abuses toffs. Despises “airs and graces”. Toothbrush dangling from bathroom wall by piece of string as sole concession to fancy guests.

Upstream of Victoria Falls.

“The Smoke that Thunders”. Zambezi River plummets into perpendicular canyon - like great slash in the earth drawn by God to block its path. Roaring curtain of white water. Rocky islets at falls’ edge. Dr. Livingstone’s name carved into gigantic baobab. Bathing pool for tourists where current’s pull is gentle enough to resist.

Permanent rising mist bank - anyone standing too close gets soaked. Sparkling rainbows. Hippos. Crocodiles. Mokoro dugout canoes. Boathouses in canyon. The vast iron span of Rhodes’ bridge - vital link in his Cape-to-Cairo railway - above the boulder beaches of the Boiling Pot whirlpool, where anything swept over the Falls washes up.

Crash site on Long Island, above the Falls. Site of yearly regatta. Avro-Avian biplane painted friendly green belonging to “Flight of Angels” tourist aviation company.

Pilot Jock Cobham instantly deceased. Red toothbrush moustache. Graceful in air, clumsy on land. Avid tiger-fish angler. Used to buy everyone drinks. Widely mourned.

Co-pilot Kitso Dikgang brought into hospital with broken arm.

Tswana river guide turned small-scale cattle rancher. Slouch hat. Squint. Salt-and-pepper goatee. Stubborn. Inquisitive. Takes everything seriously - doesn’t get jokes.

Cobham’s oldest friend. Leasing land from him in complex legal arrangement designed to evade informal racial restrictions on property ownership. Frustrated entrepreneur. Paying for flying lessons - has idea for black-owned aerial postal service.

Confined to bed. Radiation burns across face and torso. Doctor baffled. Sometimes fairly lucid. Other times rants about the hell-blur of black wings crossing the radiant abyss. The tower in the dark. The three-lobed burning eye.

Frederick Russell Burnham. “King of Scouts.”

Born on Minnesota Sioux reservation. Western Union message rider. Tangles with Tiburcio Vasquez. Tracks Apaches. Hunts Geronimo. Scottish Rite Mason. Learns bushcraft from frontiersmen and Gettysburg survivors. Fights on losing side of Pleasant Valley War.

Fixated on Africa since he was a boy. Sails for Durban in 1893 with wife and child to join Cecil Rhodes’ Matabeleland pioneers. Recruited by Rhodes into Round Table cabal - elite secret society aimed at British world domination. Granted “Lancelot” codename.

Fights with Leander Starr Jameson in First Matabele War. Narrowly escapes slaughter of Shangani Patrol. Explores central African copperbelt. Loots stone birds and gold beads from Dhlo-Dhlo and Great Zimbabwe ruins - speculates on their possible Phoenician origin.

Prophet Mlimo starts Second Matabele War. Burnham’s infant daughter Nada kidnapped from besieged Bulawayo by soldiers of war witch Mbuya Nehanda. Tracks her to sacred cave in Matopos Hills. Misses her by hours. Assassinates Mlimo. Ends war.

Steals Mlimo’s most precious treasure.

The Shining Trapezohedron. Crazy-angled prism. Offers glimpse into mind of Yog-Sothoth, the Lurker at the Threshold, coterminous with all of space and time. Fashioned on distant planet by parties unknown.

Brought to Earth by Elder Things in Cambrian era. Handled by Yithians, Serpent Men, Atlanteans. Used in Egypt’s Old Kingdom to weaken interdimensional membranes by abhorred and forgotten pharaoh Nephren-Ka.

Traded south by Phoenicians to Ophir - southern African source of King Solomon’s gold. Held by lords of Mapungubwe. Sultans of Sofala and Kilwa. Nomad warlord Mzilikazi kaMashobane, Shaka Zulu’s deputy, founder of a great Matabele kingdom.

Burnham devotes life to unlocking its secrets.

Mines gold in Klondike. Fights in Boer War. Prospects for minerals in Upper Volta and Lake Turkana country. Builds dams in Sonora. Finds the Esperanza Stone in Yaqui River valley - meteorite etched with enigmatic spiral glyphs.

Saves President Taft from assassin. Lobbies in favour of American Hippo Bill alongside old Boer War nemesis Fritz Duquesne, seeking to import hippos to Louisiana as reliable “lake bacon” food supply. Tries and fails to volunteer for Great War.

Founds Boy Scouts with Robert Baden-Powell - front for Church of Starry Wisdom. Occult principles of cruelty and self-determination encoded in classic guidebook Scouting for Boys only perceptible to those under ten.

Strikes oil outside Los Angeles in early 1920s. Becomes millionaire.

Victoria Falls Hotel.

Last word in frontier elegance. Starched white tablecloths. Deferential waiters. Mosquito nets. Smoking lounge. Cheetah-skin rug. Framed pictures of grinning hunters standing on dead elephants. Hunting trophies over bar - rhino, eland, sable antelope. High tea on the lawn - cucumber sandwiches and scones.

Sam Ndima. Xhosa barman. Impeccably dressed. Serves perfect gin and tonics. Smoothly fields guest banter. Makes it his business to know everything that’s going on.

Clarence Cook. Manager. Paranoid. Bristly moustache. Takes potshots at baboons. Always seems to be juggling half a dozen catastrophes. Would be helpless without Sam.

Themistocles Papadopolous. Runs restaurant. Irascible. Screaming fits. Threatens to quit five times a day. Carries metre-long hippo-hide sjambok whip - thrashes anyone he suspects of leering at his beautiful Egyptian wife Laura, who spends a lot of time lounging by the pool in diaphanous gowns reading mystery novels. Serves best duck à l’orange and beef bourguignon south of Cairo.

Boris. Clarence’s nemesis. Gigantic bull hippo. Tramples flowerbeds. Knocks over sheds. Crashes garden parties. Ambushes maharajas in bathtubs. Has a special way of flicking feces with his tail over freshly-washed sheets.

Burnham camped out with entourage on hotel’s top floor. Been here six weeks. Neckerchief. Stetson campaign hat. Takes long river strolls. Leafs through occult books. Conducts strange experiments on captive monkeys. Frightens the staff.

Two maids have quit rather than dust his room.

Soapstone Zimbabwe bird once kept in Groot Schuur library - Rhodes’ Cape Town mansion. Mammoth-tusk tupilaqs dug from Yukon glaciers. Phoenician arrowheads. Katanga copper crosses. Apache rawhide playing cards. Cursed head of Congolese slaver king Msiri preserved in kerosene can. Obscene grimoires left half-open on bed.

The Trapezohedron locked in small portable safe. Never left alone. Addictive to look at. Provides brief glimpses of everything in entire universe, as seen from outside.

Green aurora flickers in sky above hotel - explained away by Clarence as just another side effect of the wonderful Falls. Deranges aviators who fly through it. Side-effect of Burnham’s tampering with substance of reality.

Blanche. Burnham’s wife. Completely loyal to him. Doesn’t blame him at all for dragging her into an war zone and getting her newborn daughter abducted. Fondly reminisces about the sweetest little orange grove they used to own. Crack shot with rifle. Coddles fox terrier Pip.

“Yank” Allen. Elderly lion hunter. Tendency to deafness. West Texas cowboy. Murdered man in gunfight - fled to Brazil. Hasn’t been home in forty years. Contemptuous of lions - always speaks of them as “dawgs”. Distrusts Africans. Only hunts alone.

Francis Buzzacott. Inventor. Scoutmaster. Polar explorer. Zulu War mess boy. Fought at Wounded Knee. Publisher of a dozen sportsman’s guides. Fascinated by hermaphrodites and bisexuals. Patent on wireless “thought indicator” - radio that reads minds.

Gwendolyn X. Spirit medium. Languorous. Veiled. Calls everyone “darling”. Kicked out of Psychical Research Society after plagiarising report on second sight in the Outer Hebrides. Taduki addict. Spends a lot of time in bed, reliving past life as Japanese shrine maiden.

Jacques Malan. Huguenot alchemist deported to Cape Town in 1688 after revocation of Edict of Nantes. Stays young forever by eating human hearts. Hooded eyes. Black beard. Loathes God and all his angels. Rhodes’ occult advisor - seeks destruction of France.

Burnham plans to “open” Trapezohedron with ancient Phoenician human-sacrifice ritual on Livingstone Island at top of falls. Feed the stone Blanche’s life-blood. Manifest Yog-Sothoth in towering plume of mist. Gain total knowledge of cosmos. Use it to ensure eternal British dominance. Only a few days until the stars align.

Nada.

Burnham’s daughter. Raised among Matabele as herald and avatar of Nyarlathotep. Tasked with eating soul of anyone who seeks to usurp the Trapezohedron’s power.

Has been stalking Burnham for last thirty years. Drowned her younger brother Bruce in the Thames in 1905. People around Burnham plagued with bizarre accidents - fed by him to Nada as substitutes whenever she gets close.

Married to Kaguvi. Son of the Mlimo. Speaker for Mwari, force behind Creation, author of all things, worshipped in Great Zimbabwe as the Supreme Presence. Tall. Grim. Tailored suits. Each word pregnant with divine authority - rarely speaks.

Commands the Haunter from the Dark. Buzzing creature from unknown stellar abyss. Only manifests in total darkness. Slightest gleam of light repels it. Spiritually obliterates victims - no marks on their body.

Hands blaze as if dipped in blue fire. Twin pet black leopards who lick blood from her fingers. Master of atomic science. Pale. Beautiful. Totally irredeemably insane.

American film producer Merian C. Cooper found wandering Mombasa docks. Dazed. Hollow-cheeked. Filthy. Clothing in tatters. Can’t explain how he got there. Memories distorted. Keeps repeating the word “Hell”.

Expelled from U.S. Naval Academy for hell-raising and championing air power. Becomes Midwestern reporter. Chases Pancho Villa with National Guard. WWI bomber pilot. Founds volunteer Koścuiszko Squadron to fight Reds in Polish-Soviet War. Spends nine months in Soviet POW camp.

Travels world as New York Times reporter and American Geographical Society researcher. Meets Ras Tafari. Dodges pirates. Makes films among Persian nomads, Siamese farmers, desert warriors of Sudan. Explorers’ Club member. On Pan American Airlines board.

Last seen with film crew en route to island of Nosy Be in northern Madagascar. Hired ship, porters in Mombasa. Planning to make lemur documentary. Cagey about details. Carefully recruited team.

William Sclater. Naturalist. Editor of journal Ibis. Bird Room curator at London’s Natural History Museum. Pompous. Stubborn. Travelled all over Africa. Determined to prove his father’s theories about lost Indian Ocean lemur continent. Inspired by Tamil mythology. Believes lemurs ghostly devolved remnants of superior Lemurian race.

Ernest B. Schoedsack. Cameraman. First job filming slapstick for “King of Comedy” Mack Sennett. Joins army Signal Corps. Works with Cooper feeding refugees in Poland. Does all his films. Meets and marries actress Ruth Rose on Galapagos expedition - small, mousy, persistent, specialist in doe-eyed ingénue roles. Brings her along.

Marguerite Harrison. Baltimore society princess. Woman’s Civic League director. Runs free hospital school for indigent children. Journalist. Volunteers to spy on postwar Soviet Union - immediately caught. Imprisoned for ten months in Lubyanka. Writes a book about it. Meets Cooper at Warsaw ball. Hosts his documentaries. Easy to dislike.

Kurt Engelbrecht. Captain of steamer Java Queen. Forty years on Indian Ocean - knows every rock and harbour between Cape Town and Perth. Resigned to forever wrangling with petty landsman’s squabbles. Grey-faced. Schnapps flask. Eager first mate Jack Cabot from Boston wants to be a playwright - sees Rose, falls in love.

Hell-Ville. Sleepy tropical French colonial port on Nosy Be. Cooper’s last known port of call.

Ylang-ylang and vanilla plantations. Perfumed steam wafting from stills. Dhows bobbing in bay. Postman on bicycle. Bare-footed fishermen. Canoes hauled up on beaches. Tin-roofed Gujarati general store under branches of spreading tamarind tree.

Chief of police snoozing on verandah. Bungalow among ferns. Fruit stalls under umbrellas. Humped zebu cattle wandering among white headstones. Sakalava tomb posts - wooden figures erotically entwined. Lamba cloth wraps. Cow wrestlers training for big show on the mainland. Kids counting to ten in French in village schools.

Zero crime. Everyone knows each other. Corpses of night-crawling aye-ayes - said to creep into huts and puncture people’s hearts with long pointed fingers - hung up outside farmers’ cottages as warning to the others. Fluffy white sifakas. Ring-tailed lemurs hopping about. Startled-looking orange-eyed black lemurs dining off fruit scraps.

Fruit bats. Sea turtles. Chameleons. Spiny hedgehog-like tenrecs. Fossa - weasel-cougar hybrids - climbing trees in search of quivering nocturnal mouse lemurs with gigantic eyes. Ancestors’ bodies wrapped in silken shrouds - removed from crypts every seven years, paraded through village, provided with new cloth.

Pierre de Hell.

Local eccentric. Three-quarters Malagasy. Short. Pugnacious. Wears tricorn hat. Full of island gossip and implausible sea stories. Claims to be grandson of Anne Chrétien Louis de Hell, French admiral and 19th-century governor of Réunion. Runs beachside bar where people congregate on warm summer evenings - popular with sailors.

Shady palm trees. Rum. Plantain fritters. Croissants. Samosas. Groundnuts cooked with pork. Bottled lemon and mango pickle. Scratchy jazz records. Women on djembe, valiha bamboo zither, handmade kabosy box guitar.

Met Cooper in Mombasa years ago. Tried to sell him inherited sea chart showing unknown island northeast of Mayotte. Not always there. Shrouded by fog banks. Magnetic anomalies drive sailors away. Spoken of in hushed tones by navigators. Mentioned in old texts - Greek, Arabic, Portuguese. Sorabe flowered-paper grimoires made for Merina kings by Antemoro astrologer sages, living in spike-walled villages, descended from Somalis, barred by taboo from wearing shirts or hats.

Cooper finally took him up on the offer. Set off to find the legendary island. Photograph its wildlife. Introduce its natives to the modern world.

May vaguely remember at this point the Java Queen wrecking on a coral reef. Immense black figure emerging from the fog. Doesn’t know what happened next.

Hell Island.

Grown from crystal fragments of Lemuria. Lost to mists of time. Difficult to get to - can only be found by people who know it’s there.

Smouldering volcano. Black lava fields. Ridges. Headlands. Crater lakes. Shark-infested lagoons. Coastal mangrove forests. Thick primeval jungle. Orchids. Ferns. Grandidier’s baobab - twined around each other in romantic pairs.

Tsingy - eroded karst plateaus turned into fields of limestone needles. Riddled with caves and sinkholes. Mosses cling to sides. Secret routes cut through them - rope bridges and stairs.

Prehistoric wildlife.

Easily frightened three-metre elephant birds stomping through underbrush like unusually stupid and baleful chickens. Gorilla-sized lemurs hanging upside-down from branches of towering banyans and rosewoods, peacefully feeding on figs. Fat pink metre-long hippos squatting happily in waterholes. Overstuffed dodos angrily pecking rocks.

Pack-hunting giant fossa. Red-throated frigatebirds. White Mauritian tomb bats. Coelacanths in rockpools. Spider colonies festooning canyons. House-sized coconut crabs feasting on dead whales. Ten-foot aye-ayes stealing sleepers from their beds.

Scorpions. Centipedes. Jumping leeches. Flesh-eating leaf-tailed geckoes. Lumbering moss-covered boulder tortoises. Vengeful crocodiles - stalk their brothers’ murderers. Horned tiger-striped twenty-foot chameleons - hard to see until they move.

Horrible stunted half-monkey old man wraps his legs around your neck and won’t let go. Diamond vein glitters in crevasse - gigantic screaming snakes eat anyone who enters. Turbanned skeletons with scimitars restage the First Fitna - decapitate each other, reassemble every morning to start fighting again.

Roc sleeps in volcano’s dead crater. Big enough to carry off elephants. Terrifying. Rarely seen.

Cyclopean basalt structures in jungle around mountain’s base. Sabaean votive inscriptions. Egyptian graffiti from Necho II’s circumnavigation of Africa. Qarmatian scriptures among Persian sailors’ bones. Fifty-foot smooth black glass walls across green valleys - unclear what they’re supposed to be keeping out.

Vazimba dwarves. Madagascar’s first inhabitants - resentful of outsiders. Only active at night. Bury their dead in highland bogs. Practice debased form of Judaism mixed up with demon worship. Spears. Pit traps. Bones and teeth glow blue in the dark - faintly visible through flesh. Obscenely lucky so long as they have their sampy amulets - can kill half a dozen men with throw of a single rock.

Libertalia.

17th-century pirate settlement around idyllic lagoon on Hell Island’s north shore. Stilt huts over water. Dhows, canoes, frigates anchored in harbour. Grog. Tavern brawls. Swordfights. Flintlocks. Treasure chests. Captains recruiting for new piratical ventures. Swarthy bearded Welshmen, Marathis, Spaniards, Rhode Islanders, Swahilis, escaped Jamaican slaves. Smiling Malagasy women in bright skirts tending bar.

Time a little slippery. Pirates evasive when asked what year it is. Stone fortress on headland. Cannons. Dungeons. Jolly Roger flying high.

James Mission. Mayor. Devoted to absolute freedom of the individual. Outrageous French accent. Long pointy moustache. Always drunk. Presides over Pirate Court in King’s Head tavern. Keeps Pirate Code in gigantic cryptic book that only he can read.

Marius Cazeneuve. Stage magician. Comically sombre. Flamboyant. Twirls his moustache. Lampoons the British. Sent to explore the island by Queen Ranavalona III. Too entertaining to be allowed to leave. Often found in pub. Pirates never get tired of even the most banal sleight of hand. Fought in Franco-Prussian War - knows how to use a gun.

Caraccioli. Mayor’s sidekick. Harmlessly horny priest. Makes all real decisions.

Explains all newcomers must suffer the tangena ordeal to prove they have the pirate spirit. Swallow three fatty pieces of chicken skin followed by death drink - glass of banana juice mixed with poison brewed from mangrove fruit. Don’t die. Regurgitate all three chicken pieces - this proves you’re not a symbolic cannibal.

Cooper failed the test - went mad, staggered off into jungle. Cabot passed with flying colours. Has become pirate chief and Java Queen’s new captain. Harrison his first mate. Schoedsack and Engelbrecht refused to drink poison - hang suspended in gibbets from headland’s rocky arch until pirates settle on funniest way to kill them.

Sclater given pass on test - immediately recognised by pirates as loveable eccentric who it would be a waste to kill. Obsessively studying local wildlife. In his element. Working with Cabot on scheme to return to New York in triumph with greatest prize of all.

Long Kong.

Fifty-foot sloth lemur. Moves on all fours. Huge staring orange eyes. Black muzzle. Ruff of pure white fur. Worried expression. Incredibly long arms. Fears only the roc.

Worshipped by the pirates as a god. Sacrificial captives tethered on basalt platform in jungle clearing - taken back by him to volcano-side waterfall den where they live long and peaceful lives. Crushes anything he dislikes to putty in bare hands.

Cabot wants to capture him.

Furious that Rose won’t marry him. Has her locked in cabin watched by unsavoury pirate crew. Eyepatches. Peg legs. Gold teeth. Dice games. Jigs. Hornpipes. Free-flowing rum. Familiar with modern boats - no difficulty at all handling the Java Queen.

Intends to use her as bait for Kong.

Stake her out on the platform. Wait for Kong to appear. Knock him out with ship’s stockpile of gas bombs, brought to island by Cooper in expectation that some monster hunting might be on the cards.

Chain him up. Take him to America. Exhibit him on Broadway. Get his name in lights as world’s most famous adventurer and showman. Be elected President. Win thousands of girls’ hearts.

Najma. Perfectly engineered clockwork starling.

Made from gold. Tiny diamond in its brain, held in place by gold filigree. Tiny chirping voice. Tells its tale in flowery archaic Arabic. Partly crushed. Stutters. Repeats itself. Can’t fly.

It was made by a prisoner. The prisoner wants to be free.

Bought by Juma Hassan, trader in wonders, from gold-toothed Omani dhow captain who found it crawling across the ground in the Mogadishu docks. Clearly trying to get aboard a boat. Already damaged when he found it - so he claims.

Two of its comrades still imprisoned in the Garesa fortified palace.

Built for a sultan of Zanzibar. Converted by the Italians into a museum. Blank crenellated white oblong flanked by palm trees on long neoclassical boulevard cutting through medieval heart of old Mogadishu. Cannons out the front. Khat-chewing Somali zaptié gendarmes in fez, boots, breeches patrolling with rifles, slouching in the shade.

Cesare de Vecchi. Governor of Italian Somaliland.

Turin lawyer. Great War captain. Helped organise March on Rome, Turin Massacre of 1922. Quadrumvir in Mussolini’s Grand Council of Fascism. Wrapping up successful campaign to bring Hobyo and Majeerteen coastal sultanates under Fascist control.

Allied with Chief Hersi Guray of the Habar Gidir clan. Ogaden interior district still overrun by rebel forces of Hersi Boqor, son of deposed sultan. Employs fierce camel cavalry of dubat irregulars in white sarongs and turbans to raid Abyssinia and pacify frontier.

Stockpile of mysterious artefacts in Garesa basement. Spends more time contemplating them each week. Won’t let anyone else in. Anonymous dhow brings shipments to him at irregular intervals. Sarcastic talking fish. Orange-eyed djinn in bottle. Wind-up marching dervish dolls. Gloomy homunculus with immobile legs of stone. Caged naked mole rat gnawing on gobbets of bloody flesh.

Cesare meets with the captain, Said, hairy-armed corsair from the Dhofar Mountains, in a small sticky taverna by the waterfront. Asks about radio experiments on captured Majeerteen soldiers at Francisco Crispi Lighthouse on Cape Guardafui - reinforced concrete fasces with huge stone axe blade. Informed of new breakthroughs in “la Scienza Radiosa” by Italian research outpost at “la Grotta dei Miracoli”.

Dhow crew seems deformed - strangely lopsided. Cheeky. Pick fights. Pallid under turbans. Dislike sun. Speak Soqotri among themselves. Bargain for raw flesh in Mogadishu markets. Act like they know something you don’t.

Heat. Flies. Dust. Palms. Wide roads. Warships in the harbour. Sentries on rooftops. Flags flying over modernist forts, warehouses, cinemas, customs offices - experimental architects given a free hand. Precise. White. Pure. Mathematically correct.

Stocky octagonal stone lighthouse looming above breakwater. Cathedral under construction. Triumphal arch going up.

Uniformed Blackshirt officers from the Fifth Legion of the Milizia Coloniale saunter down seaside promenades. Direct traffic. Bicker in cafes over tiny cups of espresso. Take riding crops to white-robed porters. Scream at them in Italian.

Adopt pose of exaggerated courtesy the second they notice European ladies watching. Invite them for aperol spritzes and negronis at the Italian Club. Aggressive if refused.

Tall, slender, graceful Somalis draped in loose-fitting cotton wander narrow streets between grey-white coral-stone buildings in preserved souk districts of Hamar Weyne and Shingani. Flatbread heaps. Khat pouches. Sacks of cloves and cardamom. Baskets of limes, tamarind, pomegranates, sardines. Goldsmiths. Frankincense. Myrrh. Incense burners. Cool maze of columns inside cone-domed Fakhr al-Din Mosque.

Desert nomads with waterskins made from entire goats turned inside-out. Boards with Koranic verses secured to sides of jangling camel caravans led by small thoughtful boys. Women in shady courtyards chattering by wells, drinking endless cups of black tea spiced with cinnamon and ginger. Qadiri Sufi dhikr circles cross-legged on mats, clutching prayer beads, shoes piled in a corner, ritually chanting 99 names of God.

Amerigo Dumini. Il Duce’s hitman.

Secret policeman. Blackshirt. Street fights with Arditi del Popolo. Assassinates socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti. Jailed. Granted amnesty. Demands Fascists pay his legal fees. Jailed again, this time for insulting Mussolini.

Released again. Departs for Italian Africa. Brags to everyone he meets that he’s “il Sicario del Duce.” Secretly tasked by Ur Group - deniable fascist occult research task force led by Julius Evola - with hunting Omar al-Mukhtar’s Senussi Order rebels.

Serapis cults in Sabratha. Ba’al worshippers among Leptis Magna Carthaginian ruins. Ritually scarred Garamantian lost tribes in Fezzan desert. Resurgent Knights of Malta making converts at Tripoli International Fair.

Finds papyrus scroll in mortuary temple of Hatshepsut describing pilgrimage to mythical wonderland of Punt.

Land of the Macrobians. Long-lived reverse Hyperboreans - hot instead of cold. Astonishingly rich merchant cities in the Horn of Africa where all the world’s wealth accumulates and peasants live like kings. Ports of Opone and Rhapta at crossroads between Axum and Azania, Serendib and Mountains of the Moon.

Treasure vault and tomb of legendary Queen Arawelo.

Builder of flying castles. Slayer of seven-headed serpent. Oppressor and castrator of old bald ugly men. Led female army into Hell - captured Iblis, infernal blacksmith, father of all djinn. Bound him to her service. Tasked him with making trinkets to glorify her reign.

Buried alive with all her wealth at height of her power and beauty, so her legacy would not be poisoned by tales of her decline. Lost eighth voyage of Sinbad the Sailor describes descent into her Cave of Miracles. Brass sparrow presented to court of Haroun al-Rashid - promises secret of immortality to anyone who can liberate its creator.

Dumini follows clues to island of Socotra.

Hajhir Massif foothills. Hospitable curly-haired Hadhrami shepherds. Dense canopies of dragon’s-blood trees bleeding crimson sap. Steep-sloping palm-lined wadi. Crystal-pure water trickles from cavern mouth.

Bejewelled ecosystem of sparkling speleothems. Delicate branching calcite frostwork. Luminous fungi. Opal veins in walls. Foot-worn paths. Cold still air disrupted by sulphurous belches from below.

Sailors’ graffiti - Brahmi, Ge’ez, Nabataean, Ancient South Arabic, Palmyrene, Bactrian, Greek. Warnings - those who enter don’t come out.

Clusters of round mud huts like swallows’ nests on ledges above icy black torrents. Stunted blue engineer gnomes in loincloths, goatees, topknots. Copper tubing. Bubbling alembics. Steam-belching machines that serve no obvious purpose. Mermaids lounging on rocks. Translucent fish in water that speak Arabic - tell wonderful tales of underwater adventures. Promise to grant wishes if caught. Have no power to do this. Taste great.

Banquet hall. Blood-dyed tapestries - obscene images of slaughter. Cultivated ghouls feasting on human bones. Captured sailors in cages. Mostly illiterate. Pleading for mercy. Ghouls refuse to believe they’re as stupid as they seem - petulantly demand poetry in exchange for life. Table headed by Ahmad ibn Majid, “The Lion of the Sea” - 1400s poet-cartographer with endless font of maritime stories.

Piratical monkeys sitting on vast hoard of treasure - battered brass, porcelain, old nails, empty glass jars, gramophone records. Sail out at night to raid boats of unlucky Arab fishermen who are never believed. Captain Shar - yellow fangs, turban, scimitar, white stripe down his back - offers what he believes to be a priceless fortune in exchange for modern weapons. Will attempt to take them by force if refused.

Flesh-eating eusocial naked mole-rats. Patiently gnaw at earth. Attack in swarms. Chew flesh off bone. Store remains in larders. Slippery. Hard to kill. Set primitive traps. Brooding obese hive queen. Monkeys like to mock them. Tunnel network bridges Guardafui Strait. Rotting human limbs sometimes found sticking out of volcanic heaps of earth in middle of Somalian desert - now you know why.

One-eyed Iblis toiling at machine forge in vast smoky pit.

Huge. Blue. Turban. Pointy beard. Lower body cloud of smoke. Bombastic laugh. Makes jokes. Does impersonations. Pleased to receive visitors. Seems to be having a good time. Kit of thousand gleaming tools, each one subtly different. Gnomes on assembly line doing grunt work - fashioned from chunks of his own essence whenever he needs more.

Laboriously fashioning metal automata that run wild through caves. Dancers. Wasps. Trains. Knights. Gryphons. Beetles. Rhinoceri. Centaurs. Jewelled peacocks. Six-armed goddesses. Invented monstrosities. Slave galleys walking on oars. Birds designed to carry messages to the outside world.

Dumini has taken over his indenture. Set him to making weapons.

Soldiers with gilded spears. Serpents with electric fangs. Lifelike spike-filled odalisques. Flying bombs. Intercontinental rockets. Hypnotic radio frequencies. Intelligent diseases - microscopic cogwork that metallises flesh.

Engineers on loan from Fiat extract new scientific principles from his designs. Aircraft manufacturer Giovanni Caproni studying the birds.

Fascist sentries patrol caves - establish electric light system and underground research camps. Mole-rats take about one a week.

At centre of complex, above forge - indestructible translucent resin pillars support roof of silent vault. Guarded by coiling dragon. Each one holds perfectly preserved nude body of Macrobian noble - not dead but sleeping. Awaiting resurrection. Gigantic piles of treasure scattered over floor - gold dinars, silver dirhams, rubies, emeralds, diamonds, pearls.

Arawelo in largest pillar. Eyes wide open. Immobile. Seems to study you. Dragon watches her carefully. Iblis’ indenture can never be broken so long as she’s alive. Entire complex collapses the second she dies - all treasure dragged to Hell.

Giyorgis. Abyssinian court dwarf.

Orthodox bishop. Grave demeanour. Conical embroidered robes. Gilded staff and mitre. Spiritual advisor to recently deceased Empress Zewditu. Renowned for his knowledge of Ethiopian monastic history. Sense of humor. Fond of biblical parables. Strong opinions on Neoplatonism and Arian controversy. Four foot tall.

Kidnapped in dead of night from sleeping cell in monks’ quarters of Gebbi imperial palace in Addis Ababa. Taken into countryside - waste dump on town outskirts. Featureless brown flatland. Thorn trees. Round huts. Camel caravans. Blue mountain horizons. Eucalyptus groves. City new, unfinished - built in southern highlands to lock in Menelik II’s conquests. Low-density village clusters. Half-built train stations and hotels.

Hogtied. Smeared with gravy. Left to mercy of hyenas. Soothes beasts by reciting scripture. Chews through his bonds. Escapes Abyssinia one step ahead of the Kebur Zabagna - the Grand Negus’ private guard.

Has a grim tale to tell.

Ras Tafari Makonnen. Born to offshoot branch of Solomonic dynasty. Regent under Zewditu. Enemies among traditional nobility. Abyssinia’s most powerful man.

Moderniser. Scarlet Isotta Fraschini limousine. Chauffeur in powder-blue livery. Pages with crimson silk parasols. Loyal chiefs resplendent in lion skins, curved swords, striped shirts. Tight-uniformed soldiers with stern hawklike features and curly black beards. Fixed bayonets. Lion-of-Judah badges in polished brass.

Spies everywhere. Palace coups, rebellions crushed by disciplined riflemen, Fiat 3000 tank delivered by Prince Luigi Amedeo as tribute from Mussolini. Friendship treaty signed with Fascists. Keeps morbidly obese Muslim-convert former emperor Lij Iyasu, still considered Mahdi by some Somalians, in solitary confinement, under heavy guard.

Crowned Negus by Zewditu. Beat her seditious husband at Battle of Anchem - man on white horseback vs. machine guns and aerial bombardment. Zewditu drowns in tub of ice-cold water - said to die of grief.

Now preparing for coronation as Ethiopian Emperor, Negusa Nagast, King of Kings, under name Haile Selassie. Dignitaries from across world invited to ceremony. Every world power will have someone in attendance.

National anthems played in full to point of tedium by Armenian musicians rescued from Jerusalem orphanage, led by bandleader Kevork Nalbandian - first orchestra of the nation. Concrete. Scaffolding. Work gangs clearing rubble. Corrugated-iron sentry boxes. Spotless white robes. Cartridge belts as personal adornment and medium of exchange.

Stick-wielding boys driving mules. Veiled women on horseback with floppy felt hats. Greek hoteliers and brothel-keepers. Ubiquitous Indian traders selling tinned food and coarse soap. Vaguely Byzantine chapels and mausoleums. Bumpy roads. Dusty courtyards. Markets like construction sites selling bales of cloth. Butchers with tethered goats. Spongy injera bread. Coffee. Spicy meat stew. Honey wine.

Perplexed hard-working diplomats. Scholars of Chinese. Private secretaries who speak thirteen languages perfectly, none of them Ethiopian. Bankrupt German planters ranting unintelligibly. Cheeky Australian prospectors who’ve heard rumours of platinum. French Foreign Legionnaires. Curiosity shops with monkey skins, jewelry, Amharic illuminated manuscripts, wooden-panel paintings of saints, bones of the giant of Harar.

Royal Marine dance band. Tobacco-chewing sergeant majors. Casino entrepreneurs. The Duke of Gloucester. French general, American ambassador, Italian prince. Journalists like locusts chasing down the emperor for Time magazine.

Pudgy, sarcastic Evelyn Waugh covering the whole affair for consortium of English papers. Makes fun of everything he sees. Running out of reading material - desperate for more books. Easily annoyed and bored.

Dr. Vitalien. Guadeloupe physician. Tafari’s early French tutor - proud of how far he’s come. Deep in conversation about his childhood with Jamaican sailor Henry Archibald Dunkley, who’s developing a theory that Ras Tafari is Jesus Christ returned.

Arthur Rimbaud, limping, scarf wrapped around his face, debating theology with excitable Beta Israel Jew. Gave up career as groundbreaking Symbolist poet due to dream vision of impossibly beautiful androgynous figure. Devoted rest of life to finding them. Wooden leg. Faked own death in Marseille after several years as coffee merchant and arms dealer in walled Muslim holy city of Harar.

Julius Evola. Fascist mystic.

Son of Sicilian baron. Studied engineering. Painter. Futurist. Great War artillery officer. Dadaist. Mountaineer. Brooding. Shy. Judgmental. Wears a monocle. Prone to fits of bombast. Quick to dismiss entire fields of human achievement.

Convinced not to kill himself by reading of obscure Buddhist texts.

Alchemy. Hermeticism. Tantric yoga. Left-hand path warlock. Believes all reality illusion that can be shaped by Ego. Self-proclaimed heir to aristocratic caste of Hindu golden age - world currently plunged into darkness of Kali Yuga. Pagan imperialist - wants revived Hyperborean Caesar ruling caste.

Searches for Holy Grail with French Muslim Orientalist René Guénon in ruined Cathar fortress Château de Montségur. Delves into Pyrenean caves with Nazi medievalist Otto Rahn and Tarascon mystic Antonin Gadal. Breaks into the sealed Neapolitan Masonic library of Guistiniano Lebano, the Wizard of Torre Annunziata, Grand Master of the Egyptian Osiridean Order.

Co-founds Ur Group with Arturo Reghini - mathematician, Mason, journal editor and devoted nemesis of democracy. Adopted by Mussolini as deniable cabal of esoteric advisors. Italian Thule Society equivalent. Given funds, airship, soldiers.

Leads expedition to north Abyssinia. Explores Danakil Depression. Lalibela rock-cut churches. Gondar castles. Lake Tana monasteries. Obelisks of Axum.

Finds in secluded valley in Semien Mountains the lost city of Kor.

Ayesha. “She.”

Claims to be biblical Queen of Sheba from Sabaean kingdom in south Yemen. Exiled from Solomon’s court by jealous rival wives after his tragic death. Leads retainers to Abyssinian highlands. Enters hollow cavern below ancient ruins. Finds pillar of flame sprouting from crack in barren rock.

Steps into it. Granted eternal life. Trapped forever in the rage and humiliation she felt at the exact moment of her apotheosis.

Immortal. Condescending. City rose to greatness, wrecked by plague, rose and ruined again. Gigantic statue of Truth - naked veiled woman poised on huge stone sphere - in central plaza. Domes. Empty reservoirs. Vaulted halls gathering dust.

Silent catacombs. Noble Korite corpses laid out on stone biers - infused by sacred resin, preserved exactly as they were in life. Seem asleep. Hope to one day be resurrected by future science. Ritually burnt as celebration torches by Amahagger nomads - clan of mountain brigands who force travellers’ heads into red-hot iron pots.

Highlands inhabited by mutants. Faceless troglodytes. Cynocephali. Monopods. Blemmyae. Shadowless men. Pygmies who war with cranes. Gather in Kor for midnight bonfire dances, dressed as animals - baboons, impala, pythons, goats.

Ayesha is master chemist. Surprisingly well-stocked lab. “Vision pool” of black water in depths of cave enables remote viewing. Spends much of her time contemplating huge pyramid of bones. Spares Evola’s life when he shows her picture of Tafari - a direct descendant of King Solomon, and his spitting image.

Grasps immediately that she must marry him. Revive the ancient empire. Teach him to conjure demons. Dominate the world from this new place called “Rome”.

Can turn hair white with a touch. Must travel veiled. Anyone who sees her face immediately and permanently falls in love with her, to the exclusion of all others. This in no way means they cannot hurt her.

Only a return to the pillar of flame can permanently kill her. Love lingers after she dies.

Tafari is in thrall to Ayesha and Evola.

Mysterious masked advisors who came out of nowhere in the last few months. Subject of frightened palace servant gossip. Abuse of Zewdita loyalists - clerics used as target practice, favourite cooks drowned, noble widows beaten and locked in oubliettes. Strange chanting from behind closed doors of Tafari’s private quarters.

Evola has commandeered Giyorgis’ study - treats the servants as his own. Demands to be fetched sacred texts from monastery libraries. Debre Libanos, with its baboons and healing spring. Debre Damo on its mesa, accessible only by climbing a rope. Abuna Yemata in cave atop 200m sandstone pillar. Flies into shrieking petulant rage and orders executions when his slightest whim is denied.

Midnight expeditions to Menelik II’s palace among imported eucalypts on slopes of Mount Entoto. Black Mass conducted in blue-painted octagonal Entoto Maryam Church. Debtera white magicians tortured for their secrets.

Zār demon possession. Goat blood mixed with butter. Playboy spirits conjured into women’s bodies - Eve’s invisible rejected children. Old woodcutter women overhear shrieks, indecent noises, thick bubbling laughter. Stray minor devils inhabit hyenas - form vicious red-eyed packs that attack Western tourists in broad daylight with no fear of guns.

Special dignitary banquet on night before coronation. Only most important people invited. Guests promised view of priceless religious artefact, recently recovered by intrepid adventurers from forgotten storeroom below Axum church.

Long dining table in glittering royal feast hall. Guards on all doors. Honey wine flows freely. Passable French cooking. Vermouth. Cigars. Awkward diplomatic chatter. Ayesha and Evola occupy places of honour at Tafari’s sides.

Ark of the Covenant sits in centre of table. Possibly one of many - duplicates floating about. Draped in red velvet. Mysterious. Subject of discussion. Revealed at end of banquet. Opened in full public view.

Tower of golden light. Swarms of howling angels. Evola prepared with blindfold.

Faces, souls of anyone who looks directly at it melted by direct experience of God. Power of gathered nations transferred directly into body of Tafari, who as Solomon’s descendant can bear unflinching witness to the majestic presence of the divine.

Ayesha unfazed. Unstoppable force meeting immovable object. Veil blown back from face. Not a hair disturbed.

Rises from the table. Lights cigarette on column of holy fire. Raises glass. Toasts oozing skeletons. Welcomes her destined consort, King Solomon, back into the world.

Apollo Kagwa. Katikoro (prime minister) to King Daudi Chwa II of Uganda.

Court page under Mwanga II. Declined to fellate him. Almost burnt alive with the Uganda Martyrs. Spared due to his excellence as treasury assistant.

Head of Anglican faction against Catholics and Muslims in the 1880s religious wars. Expert rifleman. Brought to power as regent for infant prince in 1897 after Mwanga’s deposal. Cut deal to accept British rule while preserving power of hereditary Buganda kings.

Attends coronation of Edward VII in England in 1902. Establishes boarding schools. Provides yearly free bicycle to best student. Writes ethnographies. Oversees network of Buganda tax collectors and hereditary land-owning chiefs.

Grand Old Man of Uganda politics. Opposed by Bunyoros of Albert Nyanza who resent Buganda dominance, British officials who suspect him of corruption, new generation of educated young men who think it’s time they ran the show.

Broad solemn face. White kanzu robe. Gold-braided jacket. Fez.

Compound on Kampala’s Mengo Hill, close to king’s Lubiri Palace. Western-style redbrick house. Corrugated-iron roof. Wraparound verandah. European furniture. Writing desk in office. Photographs with dignitaries. Religious books. Imported grandfather clock.

Reed fences. Banana plantations. Coffee shrubs. Goat enclosure. Steady hum of visitors - missionaries, chiefs, Indian traders squabbling with cooks. Separate wattle-and-daub hut for each of his three wives. At least twenty kids scampering around.

Struck down by mysterious sleeping sickness. Lying in his bed, under cool white sheets, sweating, comatose, as his wives fuss over him and the clock ticks away. Unclear if he’ll wake up.

Ham Mukasa. Apollo’s private secretary. Known him for decades. Met him as page. Fought with him for Anglicans. Visited England with him - wrote a book about it. Preaches in hilltop cathedrals. Sincerely delighted by Western technology. Waistcoat over kanzu. Pocketwatch. Gold-headed walking cane. Drives rusty green Dodge that keeps breaking down.

Wants your help. Believes Apollo was poisoned. Knows just who to blame.

Assa Aatte. Herbalist to the Buganda royal family. Often found in palace women’s quarters. Sinuous. Intense. Has occasional seizures. Midwife to Queen Irene Drusilla Namaganda - helped her conceive after years of trying.

Priestess of Yakanje Order. Anti-colonial secret society from West Nile district. Founded by hermaphrodite priest Remje. Consults rainbow-coloured oracle - half water snake, half man. Ritually drinks “Allah water”, extracted from kamiojo lily - the hands of any European who tries to arrest a man under its influence will wither up.

Married to policeman Amin Dada. Newborn baby Idi Amin - suspected by everyone to be son of the King. Born during hailstorm in Shimoni police barracks. Abandoned for four days in jungle as paternity trial, on clan elders’ insistence - protected from wild beasts by Nakan, the legendary seven-headed snake. Assa carries him everywhere, slung over her back. Likes to talk about how strong he’ll be when he grows up.

Caged collection of mouse-sized flies. Bulging eyes. Ragged wings. Sickly iridescent green fur. Bite puts you into a coma - injects microscopic worms into your bloodstream. You don’t age or die as long as you’re asleep.

Klaus Allnut. German riverboat pilot. Unshaven. Unscrupulous. Addicted to Gordon’s Gin. Served on as engineer on screw steamer SMS Kingari during Battle for Lake Tanganyika in Great War. Sold intelligence to British. Charges never made to stick.

Israel Magombe. Klaus’ first mate and business partner. Abayudaya Jew from foot of Mount Elgon. Keeps kosher. Observes the sabbath. Zionist. Asks every foreigner he meets if they’re Jewish - hopes one day to meet a rabbi who can help him do it right.

Co-owners of Fat Duchess - Lake Victoria rustbucket. Thirty foot long. Unsteady in high winds. Boiler explodes if not kicked every four hours. Shallow draft enables navigation of papyrus swamps, hippo-haunted rivers that connect whole Great Lakes system.

Crocodiles. Fireflies. Waterbuck. Mangy hyenas. Bright-eyed shoebills eating lungfish. Once-populous islands emptied out by tsetse fly - haunted by sleepwalking ghosts. Hazy mistlike columns of gnats - caught on screens and turned into condiment paste.

Low-quality bicycles packed by turbaned traders onto Kisumu ferries. Patrolling police. Ornithologists. Arabs with business propositions. Hereditary cowherds bathing in butter and red mud. Reed causeways across marshes. Half-floating villages dug out of swampy coast.

Luo fishermen with reed baskets. Drunken feasts. Banana beer. Cackling madwomen nursing monkeys. Warriors’ upper arms ulcerated by tight coils of iron wire. Twelve-year-old girls smoking bhang and tobacco from long-stemmed copper-bound pipes.

War canoes. Blackwater fever. Fat-tailed sheep. Zebu cows. Boma - livestock enclosure - fenced by thorned euphorbia with sticky white poison sap. Chiefs in fez and leopard skin. Cramped smoke-filled huts. Tired missionaries dressing infected feet.

Green hills. Jungle valleys. Lianas. Dry lightning storms. Clay water pots. Milk in smoked vessels. Roasted sweet potatoes. Millet porridge flavoured with locusts and white ants. Monotonous tunes on elephant-grass flutes, antelope-horn trumpets, lizardskin drums.

Assa covertly meets the Duchess at bustling Entebbe docks. Strange cargo brought east from Fort Portal in Rwenzori foothills along Katonga River. Plague flies. Mist projectors. Clinging web armour. Black elixir bulbs - heal bullet wounds, impart a doughlike consistency to flesh. Porters tipped in Roman sesterces, strangely charred.

Coup planned against Daudi and British authority. Young Buganda Association, led by publicist Z. K. Sentongo, ready to strike. Demand modernisation of Uganda, freedom from oppressive power of customary chiefs and end to monopolisation of all best administrative jobs by old men.

Luigi Amedeo. Duke of the Abruzzi. Cousin to Italy’s King.

Explorer. Mountaineer. World traveller. Climbed Mount Saint Elias in search of the Silent City of Alaska. Lost two fingers to frostbite trying to reach the North Pole. Attempted K2 in the Himalayas. Honorary member of the New York Explorers’ Club.

Great War naval officer. Mussolini’s diplomat. Founder of experimental village north of Mogadishu. Smoothed path to Italo-Ethiopian Treaty by gifting Ras Tafari Makonnen with limousine and tank.

Bequeathed ancient Roman coin in will of journalist Henry Morton Stanley - said to be confiscated from Arab slave trader on shores of Lake Edward in 1889. Stages Rwenzori expedition in 1906. Discovers lost colony of Aquileia Nova, founded by legionaries from Nero’s Nile expedition of 61.

Entire Roman city in secluded mountain valley. Forum. Baths. Amphitheatre. Aqueducts channeling snowmelt. Chariot-racing circus. Insulae apartment blocks. Temples to Jupiter and Minerva. Bickering old senators in togas. Soothsayers. Vestal virgins. Fat merchants feasting on exotic delicacies. Arena where gladiators with nets and tridents fight lions, enraged mountain gorillas, bizarre alien beasts.

Moss. Cloud. Glaciers. Spongy bogs. Giant lobelias and groundsels. Trees draped in hanging lichen. Tropical rainforest gives way with remarkable speed to alpine meadows. Gigantic elephants. Chattering chimpanzees wearing stolen gladiator helmets. Colobus monkeys. Duiker. Mountain hyrax. Bone-eating bearded vultures.

Towering cliffs. Waterfalls streak rock faces. Bakonzo farms cling to hillsides. Howling winds drive mist through valleys. Most Africans keep clear - despise the cold and are baffled, though fascinated, by concept of snow.

Imperator Thrax. Mad emperor. Rules over Aquileia Nova with an iron fist. Caligula-style orgies. Masked guards serve his every whim. At least three gorilla senators. Condemns enemies to death in the arena vs. leopards, visored murmillones, ooze-dripping mollusc hydras, giant venomous fungal crustaceans from Planet X.

In league with Amedeo to extend Fascist control over Uganda, as preparatory step to reviving Roman empire. Zero effort required to persuade him to do this.

Under influence of Kronos. Sorcerer prince of the mi-go who inhabit Rwenzori’s highest peaks. Every previous member of his dynasty has made pilgrimage to cosmic wasp nest atop Mount Stanley, had eggs laid in brain, been eaten screamingly alive.

Shadrack Muranga. Itinerant preacher of the Arathi religious movement.

Shaved head. Long white robe. Ritually burns money. Prays facing Mount Kenya. Shouts “The Holy Spirit greets you!” while robustly shaking hands. Believes Kikuyu are descended from Israel’s lost tribes. Predicts all Europeans will soon be swallowed up by a big hole. Heals the sick by laying on hands and calling on Mwene-Nyaga (God).

Fixture on Nairobi streets. Lives in the Swahili Town slum district, in a shack made from flattened paraffin tins. Refuses to wear his kipande identity papers. Carries sword and poison arrows. Colonial police have been keeping an eye on him for some time.

Currently rotting in dank jail cell. Charged with homicide. Refuses to defend himself - loudly prays in the courtroom.

Frank Williams. Wasteful second son of aristocratic family. Thin. Pale. Patchy beard. Rheumy eyes.

Drug dealer to “the Happy Valley set” - rich British settlers notorious for parties. Traffics in cocaine, morphine, heroin, taduki, black lotus, Mombasa elephant honey. Flies own Gypsy Moth plane. Supplies Aberdare bungalows and Moorish-style mansions on the shores of Lake Naivasha.

Found dead in locked room on second floor of Norfolk Hotel by stern proprietress “Auntie”, bulky woman with a rolling pin who’s said to run the town. Skeletonised. Just bones with a few scraps of fabric. No sound heard. Drug supply untouched.

Shadrack preaching on nearby street corner. Picked up in random police sweep. Said “yes” when asked if he did it. Also said “yes” when asked if he killed the King of England and walked on the Moon.

Thought to have used rare African poison. Crown Counsel barrister thinks it’s an open-and-shut case.

Johnstone Kenyatta. General Secretary of Kikuyu Central Association.

Born into traditional polygamous family in rural village. Grandfather a respected prophet and magician. Educated in mission school. Carpenter’s apprentice - took variety of jobs. Worked as shop clerk and meter reader. Lived with Maasai to evade Great War draft.

Seen by British settlers as dangerous agitator and possible witch doctor. Travels around highlands on motorbike establishing new KCA branches. Edits Kikuyu-language newspaper Mũigwithania. Demands land rights, lower taxes, better education, abolition of forced labour, permission to grow coffee, release of political detainees and freedom to practice Kikuyu cultural traditions, such as polygamy and female genital mutilation.

Charismatic. Friendly. Full of energy. Spends far too much money. Loves talking about Kikuyu stuff - likes to compare collectivist Africa to the individualist West.

Knows Muranga is innocent. Wants your help.

Josslyn Hay. 22nd Earl of Erroll.

Blond Adonis. Scornful. Lazy blue eyes. Old family. No money. Seduces everybody - married women preferred.

Asked to leave Eton for escapade involving rabbi and motorbike that nobody knows the details of. Passes Foreign Office exams - ditches diplomatic post to abscond to Kenya with twice-divorced Lady Idina Sackville-West.

Builds thatched mansion named Clouds with dozens of guest bedrooms in Wanjohi Valley, beneath Mount Kipipiri, on rainy slopes of Aberdare Range.

Bamboo forests. Moorland. Elephant. Buffalo. Leopard. Hyena. Bushbuck. Black rhino. Bongo antelope. Colobus monkeys. Giant forest hogs. Moss. Cold mist. Small Kikuyu sugarcane and banana farms. Cattle thieves raiding settler estates.

Throws massive parties. Play sex games - blow feather across table to determine who sleeps with who. Champagne, whiskey, gin fizzes. Drugs supplied by Williams. Quiet African servants calmly study whole affair. Idina only happy if everyone’s swapped wives by end of night. Guests often trapped by rain - have to stay for weeks.

Old Githinji. Kikuyu morogi - poison wizard. Lives by himself in bamboo grove hut on escarpment above Clouds. Cast out from village society - known to local farmers as individualist and freak. Bald head. Hooded eyes. Skeletally thin.

Keeps poison dust made from dessicated human genitals and reptile flesh in calabashes, banana-leaf parcels and hollowed-out gazelle horns. Carries brass rogambi bell to frighten off good spirits. Meets other morogi in wizards’ anonymous mountaintop councils, naked, faces painted black with white dots.

Impersonates mondo-mogo healer to entrap and secretly poison victims. Will be burnt alive or crucified by Kikuyu elders if caught.

Meets Josslyn in 1925. Shows him gigantic cavern under Mount Satima’s black volcanic crags. Introduces him to Father of Ants - avatar of Nyarlathotep that has dwelt in these caves since time immemorial. Quivering house-sized mass of protoplasm. Moist orifices sprout in flesh. Births millions of inch-long driver ants. Whole cavern crawls with them. Wriggles in ecstasy as they eat it alive.

Josslyn seduces it. Gets it pregnant. Has Thule Society connections - anticipates his son will be perfect blonde Aryan messiah and preside over eternal Anglo empire. Must supply proper nutrients to bring baby to term.

Introduces new wrinkle to sex games. Pregnant Happy Valley settlers brought to Satima cavern. Delightful drug-fueled subterranean orgies. Ants enter their wombs - eat embryos right out of their bodies. Feed Father with pieces of half-formed infant souls.

Kiki Preston. “The Girl with the Silver Syringe.” Wealthy socialite. Openly shoots up at dinner parties. Cheerful when high. Morbid when sober. Brags about affairs with Rudolf Valentino and Prince George.

Williams makes special trips out to Lake Naivasha to see her. Gets her pregnant. Vague plans to marry her and get his act together. Finds her no longer pregnant, weeks later. Demands to know what happened. Gets whole ant story out of her.

Told everyone in Nairobi who’d listen that Josslyn’s been procuring back-country abortions from African witch doctor. Getting the girls high. Convincing them it was a supernatural experience.

Made no secret of his plans to expose scandal to press. Githinji, at Josslyn’s instigation, magically dispatched ant swarm to eat him alive. Few dead ants remain on hotel room carpet. Screaming heard. Acrid stench.

Muthaiga Country Club.

Hub of Nairobi social life. Highly exclusive. Africans only allowed in as servants. No Jews - piano once lit on fire to protest their admission. Bar reserved for men between hours of six and eight. Golf course. Squash court. Croquet lawn. Ballroom. Cell-like bachelor bedrooms. Payment in chits - no money changes hands. Drinking starts before lunch.

Coffee farmers. Bush pilots. Magistrates. Army officers. Horse breeders. Yankee debutantes. Bored wives of millionaire industrialists. Dazzling socialites - gowns changed by the hour. Nightly balls. Royal visits. Syd Zeigler’s Red-Hot Jazz Band on Saturday nights.

Interminable safari stories. Racetrack gossip. Impromptu boxing matches. Wagers with obscene forfeits. Ape impersonations - dangling by arms from rafters. Sexual conquests bragged of. Strip musical chairs. Plates thrown at servants. Gramophone records hurled through windows. Furniture routinely wrecked. Fines levied by staff for ungentlemanly behaviour paid without complaint.

Ali. Dignified Somali maître d’hôtel. Gold-braided uniform. Master of genteel invisibility. Long-suffering observer of European shenanigans. Presides over dining room. Can get anyone a table. Knows all servant gossip. Leaned on by Josslyn to not spread Williams’ story around.

Other club regulars more or less know what’s going on.

Lord Delamere. Unofficial leader of Kenya’s European community. Grandfatherly. Twinkle in his eye. Fond of schoolboy pranks.

Stories of lion hunting in British Somaliland - travelled with warrior poet Hussain Hasan and his famous horse Mangalool. Life saved from mauling by gunbearer and right-hand man Abdullah Ashur - still walks with a limp.

Dairy pioneer. Raises ostriches. “Wheat laboratory” on Gilgil River farm. Likes to live in Maasai-style grass huts. Rides horse into Norfolk Hotel dining room. Hits golf balls onto Muthaiga roof - climbs up to retrieve them. Local British intelligence head in WWI. Much younger fiancee Gwladys likes to pelt him with bread.

White supremacist. Paranoid about any hint of scandal that might undermine British rule. Doesn’t care about the details of any specific case as long as imperial prestige remains undamaged. Respected among Englishmen - word goes a long way.

Count Frédéric de Janzé. Heir to old Breton family. Le Mans racing driver. Fought Berbers in Rif War. Friends with Marcel Proust. Collecting short character sketches for his memoirs. Married to Alice de Janzé, bipolar heiress to meatpacking fortune with pet black panther and suicidal tendencies from Buffalo, New York.

Met Josslyn and Idina in Paris. All sleeping together. Alice subject to fits of black rage and melancholy - constantly has to talk her down from using her gun.

Raymond de Trafford. Remittance man - paid by grand Lancashire family to never return home. Former Coldstream Guard. Raconteur. Amateur boxer. Drunk driver. Picks fights. Nurses grudges. Clumsily seduces women - frequently rebuffed. Sets African huts on fire as pranks - has to be bullied by friends into paying compensation. Also sleeping with Alice - jokes about how badly she wants him dead.

Bror von Blixen. Swedish nobleman. Big-game hunter. Lives on coffee plantation in Ngong Hills. Terrible farmer - losing money. Womaniser. Notorious Muthaiga binges. Running joke about fictional Doctor Turvy, who sends him telepathic messages urgently prescribing gin. Recently divorced from ghost-story writer Karen Blixen - gave her syphilis first.

Denys Finch-Hatton. Hunter and bush pilot. Aristocratic family - uncle gambled away fortune. Sleeping with both Karen and aviatrix Beryl Markham, who makes her living spotting elephants from the air. Conflicted about it. Friends among the Maasai. Wears Somali shawl. Planting mango trees among Arab ruins at Takaunga Creek, north of Mombasa. Lives on Karen’s farm - never quite feels at home.

Mungai. Muthaiga dishwasher. Dirt poor. Lives off charity and scraps. Made deal with Githinji as young man. Renounced all claim to land and cattle in exchange for sexual success. Stood in hyena hole, vowing to pursue love with a hyena’s gluttony, while the wizard hit his buttocks seven times with a magic bag.

Spent his youth having sex with countless women instead of building wealth. Now bitterly regrets it. Wants to track Githinji down and get revenge.

To the west of Mombasa’s Old Town - the Indian bazaar district. Narrow alleyways. Latticed balconies. Mud-brick huts. Tin roofs. Umbrellas. Blinding white coral stone - buildings glare in the sun. Mackinnon covered market provides much-needed shade.

Gujarati spice traders. Goan clerks on bicycles. Ayurvedic healers. Swahili weavers, grocers, silversmiths, porters. Dawoodi Bohra moneylenders - Ismailis from Surat in round caps and long white tunics. Well-organised Khoja followers of the Aga Khan. Bombay-trained hakim from the Rann of Kutch - practitioners of unani, Islamic traditional medicine, with tanks full of scuttling red velvet mites.

Mangoes. Dates. Ghee. Masala. Dried chillies. Jaggery. Pickles. Headscarves. Gold bangles. Kerosene. Cigarettes. Salted mackerel on woven mats. Spiked multicoloured fish. Turtles. Dried sharks. Barracuda. Sacks of Kenyan highland coffee. Brightly coloured kanga wraps bordered with Arabic proverbs. Food stalls - mandazi doughnuts, coconut curries, biryani, octopus soup.

Tea shops. Big copper kettles. Jars of cardamom, sugar, condensed milk. Samosas. Chapati. Jalebi. Bhajias - vegetables fried in chickpea batter. Crumpled back issues of Bombay newspapers. Old men playing mancala and Indian variants of chess.

Elephant honey.

Pale viscous substance taken in fingernail-sized portions at end of long brass spoon. Smells faintly of rotting citrus. Grants in brief bursts the strength of ten men, and a sort of delirious joy which inspires users to crash through walls and lift police over their heads.

Sold in small clay jars by Nemchand Shah, a nervous Jain trader who operates out of his family’s cloth store and doesn’t want to say who his supplier is. Avoids killing insects. Hates the sight of animals suffering. Heavily in debt.

Lieutenant Basil Chapman.

British officer in charge of Fort Jesus - old Portuguese fort which has been pressed into service as a prison by the colonial government. Stiff upper lip. Handlebar moustache. Pith helmet. Avoids the sun. Convinced no Englishman can possibly thrive in a tropical climate. Barks contradictory orders - changes his mind twice in span of single sentence. Expects instant obedience. Chalks all confusion up to idiocy of underlings.

Small staff of askari guards. Bored rifle-toting Swahili soldiers. Not much to do.

Handful of short-term prisoners. Mijikenda petty thieves. Baloch and Yemeni immigrants without proper papers. Ceylonese, Tamil, Sindhi lascars accused of piracy and desertion. Kamba and Luo labourers who’ve broken their indentures. Bombay lawyers accused of seditious activity. Kikuyu unionists and anti-British pamphleteers.

Labyrinth of pirate tunnels behind fort’s imposing mottled yellow walls. Old barracks still in use. Black iron cannon. Round crenellations. White beach. Crystalline waters. 17th-century dungeons hidden below trapdoors - shackles, oubliettes, the rack.

Well in deepest dungeon. Coiled leathery elephantine worm - mottled pink and grey. Kept half-submerged in ocean water to make it sluggish. Hauled up twice a day and milked for honey. Tended by Mutunga - lanky acid-scarred Kamba lion hunter - and Nineteen - his pallid morlock wife.

Pellucidar.

Vast cave network beneath central Africa. Ruled over by Mahars - telepathic pterodactyls. Inhabited by prehistoric life - evolved dinosaur descendants. Mammoths. Cavemen. Giant ants. Barbary pirates. Lizard riders. Aardbears. Man-eating mushroom jungles. Vegetarian whales. Bronze Age priests in hideous masks. Tusked albino cannibals - reincarnated surface world serial killers. Floating miniature suns. Megalodon-haunted seas.

Secret tunnels to Opar in Congo jungle - lost city of white apes and beautiful priestesses. Morlock slave empire devoted to worship of chthonians - gigantic worms that bore through earth’s mantle, even deeper down.

Tippu Tib. 19th-century Zanzibari slave trader and clove plantation owner.

Discovers Opar in Stanley Falls area of Upper Congo on early 1860s slave-hunting expedition. Enters and explores Pellucidar. Develops profitable relationship with morlocks. Dies rich and happy in his Stone Town manor surrounded by luxury in 1905.

Philip Percival. “The Dean of Hunters.”

Works as expedition leader for Safariland tour company in Nairobi. Guide to Theodore Roosevelt and Walter Rothschild. Tall. Calm. Possessed of natural authority. Gun slung over shoulder. Wide-brimmed hat. Respects African staff - relies heavily on Kamba trackers and gun bearers.

Buys map to Opar’s location from wrinkled old Luba beggar who once toiled in Tippu Tib’s kitchens. Approaches Edward VIII, Prince of Wales with hunting opportunity of a lifetime. Leads him to Pellucidar to bag a pterodactyl. Expedition goes south. Party barely escapes with their lives.

Mutunga works as porter on Pellucidar expedition. Captured by morlocks. Escapes six months later with rapidly-growing infant chthonian in jar and subterranean slave-artisan trained from birth to tend it. Marries the latter.

Finds way to Mombasa. Picked up for vagrancy. Imprisoned. Discovers unguent milked from worm is powerful intoxicant. Works out deal with Chapman to make them both rich.

Unaware that this is all part of Mahar plan to weaken humanity’s mental defences and begin psychic domination of surface world. Nineteen in on it. Accustomed to slavery. Zero concept of freedom. Would happily return underground at any time.

Percival is planning second Pellucidar expedition. Recruiting porters in Mombasa markets. Trying to persuade Edward to give it another crack. Still wants that pterodactyl head.

Hassan will want the worm captured alive to sell. As soon as it’s removed from water it will start to grow.

Viscount Greystoke.

Son of British aristocrats marooned by mutineers on West African coast. Raised by apes in Congo Basin. Rediscovered as young man and returned to civilisation by Baltimore professor Archimedes Q. Porter and his daughter Jane.

Marries Jane. Becomes globetrotting adventurer. Discovers Opar and Pellucidar. Takes high priestess La as second wife. Has one son - Jack Clayton, aka Korak, which means “killer” in ape language.

Lives with family on vast coffee plantation estate in Ngong Hills south of Nairobi.

Believes Congo super-apes morally superior to homo sapiens. Spy for world ape conspiracy headquartered in Zermatt, Switzerland, led by Ape Pope, which execrates Darwin’s memory and schemes to make humanity obsolete.

Korak in Mombasa on mission from La to reclaim stolen chthonian. Ostensibly to keep peace with morlocks. Actually to use it for own sinister purposes - want super strength to power up surgically altered ape agents implanted in every world government.

Quarter ape on his mother’s side. Sharp canines. Suspiciously long arms. Passes as genteel young man of leisure until he gets into trouble and the killer ape instinct comes out.

The League of the Pearl.

Alliance of convenience - three villains scheming for collective profit. Want control of honey trade for purely opportunistic financial reasons. Already have petty criminal agents planted inside jail.

Fatuma of Unguja. Pirate queen of the Indian Ocean. Commands fleet of war dhows from hidden island base in Seychelles. Descended from 17th-century queen of Zanzibar. Covets throne of current sultan Khalifa bin Harub. Desperately in love with Faisal, his sinister grand vizier, who claims to care for no living soul.

Joaquim da Silva. Mozambique Company agent. Born onto decrepit estate of declining Afro-Portuguese prazeiro family in Zambezi valley. Mentored by chikunda ex-slave soldiers from warlord Manuel de Sousa’s bandit army. Ruthless. Honourable. Devout Catholic. Carries sword - slashes at random objects when annoyed.

Ranjitsinhji. Maharaja of Nawanagar. Retired cricket prodigy. Once famed for innovative batting style. Poisoned predecessor to inherit title. Unscrupulous. Heavily taxes peasants. Doesn’t pay debts. Owns Irish castle. Eye lost in grouse-hunting accident. Opponent of democracy. Private secretary Archie McCracken is ex-gentleman thief.

Esther Lusingu. Albino detective from Dar es Salaam. Avoids the sun. Wears headscarf and bulky robes. Devout Christian. Moves around a lot to evade witch doctors who want her legs, ears and russet-coloured hair. Half blind. Enormous glasses. Famously solved the Mystery of the Askari’s Trumpet and broke up the Oyster Bay ivory-smuggling ring. Antagonistic relationship with the colonial police.

STR 0 - DEX 0 - ACA 3 - TEC 2 - CHA 0 - CON 2

Specialties - criminology, law enforcement.

Wanjiku wa Mwangi. Kikuyu mechanic and chauffeur. Cheerful. Can fix anything. Always knows what’s going on. Has worked on the Uganda Railway and the Lake Victoria paddle steamers. Light-fingered. Can’t resist temptation. Moves on to next job before she can be blamed for passengers’ vanished valuables. Sends money to sisters in ancestral village at foot of Mount Kenya. Will return to get married some day.

STR 0 - DEX 2 - ACA 0 - TEC 3 - CHA 2 - CON 0

Specialties - picking pockets, engineering.

Deepinder Kaur. Coast trader. Dhow captain. Part-time ivory smuggler. Small. Prominent nose. Shouts a lot. Goes through crewmen quickly - sometimes travels alone. Knows every inch of shoreline between the Horn of Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. Hold full of cloth, tea, spices, candles, soap. Drives a hard bargain. Lends small amounts of money - debtors in every port. Carries Nagant revolver. Never struggles to collect.

STR 0 - DEX 2 - ACA 0 - TEC 2 - CHA 0 - CON 3

Specialties - seamanship, commerce.

Ismail Warsame. Somalian gun bearer. Works for big-game hunters on safari expeditions. Maintains weapons. Guards camp. Tracks wounded animals and finishes them off. Skins carcasses. Organisers porters. Backup shot in case the client misses. Occasional poet. High opinion of himself. Dhulbahante man - hates all other Somali clans. Brother killed by RAF bomber during Dervish War endgame in 1920. Sworn to revenge.

STR 2 - DEX 3 - ACA 0 - TEC 2 - CHA 0 - CON 0

Specialties - big-game hunting, gunplay.

Joseph Sikawa. Maasai faith healer. Raised in Great Rift Valley on diet of blood and milk. Joined King’s African Rifles. Fought in East Africa Campaign of WWI. Saw vision of God in eyes of dying Bavarian boy. Spent three years wandering veldt alone. Founded Church of Holy Jesus in tin shack on Nairobi outskirts. Authorities broke it up. Now itinerant street preacher w/ walking cane. Seven foot tall. Wears colourful cloth.

STR 3 - DEX 0 - ACA 2 - TEC 0 - CHA 2 - CON 0

Specialties - religion, close combat.

!Khwa. !Kung forager of the Namibian Kalahari. Led to civilisation by discovery of lost beer bottle. Thinks everything he sees is work of marvellous but crazy gods. Mistaken in Cape Town for Italian prince. Accidentally booked aboard round-the-world voyage. Saves heiress from bumbling pirates. Declines her hand in marriage when she admits she doesn’t know how to gather mongongo nuts. Now just trying to get home.

STR 2 - DEX 2 - ACA 0 - TEC 0 - CHA 3 - CON 0

Specialties - wilderness survival, blind luck.

Dhows with billowing sails ply the shallow channel. Pilots in oar-driven longboats shout at errant steamers. Sacks of rice, coffee, cotton, salt, frankincense, dates. Bales of sisal. Piled animal hides. Live goats on rope leashes. Ivory smugglers conceal tusks from prowling customs officials.

The labyrinthine Old Town. Gleaming coral-stone houses with elaborately carved wooden balconies and ornate inset doors. Peeling white and yellow paint. Shopfronts built into houses. Dried fish. Coconuts. Curry. Pan-fried sesame bread.

Traffic from Kilindili Harbour. Baobabs festooned with lanterns. Minarets. White beaches. Dugouts fishing turquoise lagoons at edge of coral reefs. Shady mango trees. Wall-climbing purple bougainvillea. Turbaned Arab sailors with hooked khanjar daggers in their belts disappearing into mosques.

Women in black abayas balancing clay pots of water on their heads. Gujarati grocers. Goan flute players. Omanis and Hadhramis in shisha bars smoking molasses tobacco. Swahili stevedores on low stone benches smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Calls to prayer. Sailors’ shouts. Ships’ horns. Arabic poetry recitals. Clattering shop bells.

Deep shadows. Brilliant sunlight. Airy courtyards. Dim red lamps at the Mombasa Club. Tennis-playing Europeans on vacation in tropic white. The guns of Fort Jesus - built by the Portuguese to guard the harbour in 1596. Now repurposed by the British as a prison. A crumbling hive of stone.

Juma Hassan’s Emporium of Wonders.

Towering Swahili man in long white kanzu robe. Round white kofi hat embroidered with abstract symbols, punctured with pinholes so the air can pass through. Bald. Prominent nose. Fringe of salt-and-pepper beard.

Sits in rattan chair on porch outside rickety office-warehouse complex. Waves away flies with ostrich-feather fan. Smokes his pipe. Browses his Koran. Watches world go by.

Jovial. Known and liked by everyone. Hailed by passing acquaintances - replies with a smile.

Approached as judge for petty disputes.

Kid with stolen pet lizard. Butcher haggling over goats with livestock trader. Ship’s chandler with disobedient apprentice. Sweets vendor with firm grip on sticky-handed teenage thief. Locked-room mysteries - giraffe found in courtyard, pearls vanished from safe. Only British authorities question his decisions.

Trades in wonders, as per the sign. Warehouse full of them. Lying around everywhere. Some packed in straw - others sitting in half-open crates. Open windows. Rumours of Hassan’s supernatural vengeance deter thieves.

Himyarite idols. Persian swords. Azanian pearls. Turkana wrist knives. Coins from Kilwa Kisiwani. Celadon from Gedi ruins. Blocky, scarred Makonde masks. Crystals of scarlet dragon’s-blood tree sap. Tanzanite crystals. Porcupine quills. Cowrie shells. Calabash rattles. Maasai shields. Zulu assegais.

Swazi king’s leopard-skin mantle. Stuffed dodo. Portuguese compass. Malinese griot’s lute. Congolese nail fetish. Golden rhinoceros of Mapungubwe. Three-metre catfish found by sardine fishermen in Lake Nyasa. Stuffed leopard found near summit of Kilimanjaro. Australopithecus skull from Olduvai Gorge.

Tasselled Abyssinian slipper made for the Queen of Sheba. Unicorn horn from Ngorongoro Crater with terrifyingly potent aphrodisiac properties. Centuries-old roc egg from a nest on Mount Karthala, packed in straw, its shell deep midnight blue.

Madness-inducing Somalian incense in soapstone censer. Dancing scimitar inscribed with names of God that beheads any man who blasphemes in its presence. Green wine in crystal vases liberated by rogues from a palace at the bottom of the sea.

Glittering purple crystalline djinn’s heart plucked from the depths of a Witwatersrand mine. Revolving brass Andalusian horseman in armillary sphere who always faces a fixed spot in the deep Sahara. Orange-breasted dove from Ceylon in a gilded cage who can when released lead you infallibly to your heart’s desire.

Heir to an Indian throne transfigured by a witch into a gelada bleeding-heart baboon - needs true love’s kiss to free him. Gold-and-ivory chess set made for Nyatsimba Mutota, king of Great Zimbabwe - pieces move by themselves. Thousand minor demons trapped in humble bronze oil lamp who promise to grant wishes if you let them go.

Three sleeping immortal children stung by unknown fly on Bugala Island in Lake Victoria. Martini-Henry rifle used in the last stand of the Shangani Patrol - haunted by Major Allan Wilson’s ghost. Knobkerrie used by King Lobengula of the Ndebele to execute his sister Mncengence for witchcraft - still matted with blood and brains.

Mummified alien reptile from Queen Amanitore’s Meroe pyramid tomb. Porter petrified by chameleon basilisk near Gondokoro on Teddy Roosevelt’s 1909 expedition - sometimes shows signs of life. Holy bread from rock-hewn Lalibela churches, baked in Kingdom of Axum - never gets stale or old.

Mascarene Islands ghoul-seeds - grow into hungry white flowers when planted in rotting corpses. Sullen omnilingual cannibal dwarf found haunting Bombay Parsi tower of silence. Segment of gravity-resistant black stone obelisk looted from Martian highlands in famous military raid by Emperor Tewodros I.

The Shams al-Ma’arif of the Maghrebi sorcerer Ahmad al-Buni. The Book of the Zanj, stolen by Enrico Cerulli from the qadi of Kismayo. Ge’ez hymnal composed by Giyorgis of Segla for Zara Yaqob. The Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity. Jabir ibn Hayyan’s Great Book of Mercy. Al-Masudi’s Meadows of Gold. Ibh Khordadbeh’s Book of Roads And Kingdoms. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

Three loyal assistants.

Amna. Sudanese master thief. Round head. Spider fingers. Curious expression. Born into a poor religious family on the banks of the Blue Nile. Stole priceless turquoise amulet from travelling Sufi mystic. Suffered his curse. Ran away from home.

Picked pockets in Khartoum. Caught by Winston Churchill looting bodies at the Battle of Omdurman. Recruited as a spy. Operated in Cairo and Mecca, keeping tabs on anti-British organisations. Betrayed her paymasters to the Saudis for enormous pile of gold. Had to leave most of it behind when she fled.

Can never stay in one place for more than three years. Has tried. Accumulates money - loses it, starts again. Amulet the only thing she keeps.

Zodwa. Strongwoman. Friend to animals. Distant cousin of the Zulu king. Terror of her wealthy father’s kraal. Outwrestled all his warriors. Declined their marriage offers. Once famously threw a policeman across a river. Eats half a cow a day.

Goes everywhere with Hubert - full-grown pet hippopotamus from Lake St. Lucia. Promises he won’t bite. Keeps menagerie in courtyard - Aldabra giant tortoise, colobus monkeys, bateleur eagle, hand-fed Thomson’s gazelle. Struggles to earn enough money to feed them. Worked double shifts as stevedore before getting recruited by Hassan as security chief.

Fends suitors off with a stick. Standing offers of marriage from Dutch sea captain, Saudi prince, Rhodesian millionaire, Jaisalmer maharaja.

Makoma. Weather witch. Former handmaiden to Khesethwane Modjadji III, Rain Queen of the Balobedu. Tasked with tending the sacred cycad garden of Duiwelskloof, near Tzaneen in the northern Drakensberg of Limpopo province.

Caught breaking into the queen’s quarters in search of rainmaking secrets. Exiled. Stripped of her titles. Studied for a time with the sages of Njelele Shrine in the Matobo hills, south of Bulawayo. Met undines in cavern springs. Learnt the unreliable knack of conjuring storms. Discovered to her chagrin that she can’t do it for money.

Consulted by dhow captains for her dubious blessing. Claims to be able to grant favourable winds. Sometimes actually can. Depends how the spirits feel that day.

Cabal of villains plot to steal his treasures.

Zikali. “Opener-Of-Roads.” Shrunken misanthropic Zulu wizard. Controls international taduki trade - drug that enables you to relive past lives, which inevitably prove superior to monotony of present day. Addict Lady Luna Ragnall feigns death in Egypt, sails for Durban to devote her immense wealth to his service and become his grovelling slave.

Lives in kraal in the Black Kloof - secluded Drakensberg valley. Terrified servants. Hoard of gold stashed behind whirlpool in deep river caves. Sends oily miscarriage spirits - waddling hunks of flesh - to smother his enemies in their sleep. Familiar is buffalo with twisted lip. Immune to bullets. Mysteriously vanishes. Kill it and he dies.

Faisal bin Harub. Grand vizier and half-brother to Khalifa bin Harub, Sultan of Zanzibar, who now lives with his ageing harem in peaceful semi-retirement on a fat British pension. Dreams of restoring the Sultanate’s glory. Wants to be caliph instead of the caliph. Master occultist. Turban. Small pointy beard. Tendency to cackle madly. Pet vulture.

Office in the House of Wonders in Stone Town. Wide verandahs. Clock tower. Doors wide enough to ride an elephant through. Marble floors. Huge central courtyard. Doors inscribed with Koranic verses. Tame lions. Banquets with samosas, pepper steak, huge platters of pilaf. Secret passages to neighbouring palaces where women can pass unseen.

“Breaker” Nelson. Australian big-game hunter. Fifteen years as a roustabout and drover between north Queensland and the Flinders Ranges. Alcoholic. Balladeer. Womaniser. Liar. Never pays back debts. Boer war despatch rider. Fought with Bushveldt Carbineers. Controversionally acquitted of executing prisoners in cold blood.

Getting old. Planning for retirement. Still deadly with a rifle or his fists. Safari business run from trophy-filled Mombasa office. Sidekick Cecil Goodyear, shellshocked Mafeking Cadet. 30-year-old boy scout. Idolises Nelson. Unable to grow up. Believes he’ll outrun bullets forever as long as he stays young.

Harut and Marut. Twin Egyptian sorcerors. Bald. Identical. Think everything is funny. Eternally reborn in same bodies, to new mothers, with all memories of past lives. Keep snakes. Talk in private baby language. Pop up where least expected. Advise influential people on path leading to world’s ultimate consumption by Azathoth.

Playing a long game. Hassan member of ancient conspiracy to oppose their influence, founded in Atlantis by alien greys.

Hassan supplies wonders to wealthy collectors, occultists, governments all across the world. Leads humble lifestyle. Gives freely but in small quantities to the poor. Vaguely alludes to “overhead” if directly asked what he does with the money.

Secretly enslaved to powerful djinn who rescued him from shipwreck. Not allowed to die until he buys his freedom. Pours heaps of gold at midnight into moon pool in Portuguese pirate tunnels under warehouse. Has been doing this for at least three hundred years.

Sideline in esoteric mysteries. Known as the man to see. Doesn’t handle them himself. Always on the lookout for investigators to recruit.

The hills of Valparaiso. Brightly painted houses sloping to the bay.

Ascensors - steep funicular cable railways. Wooden cars and tracks. Jammed between dockworker cottages and blocky apartments. Facades in all shades of the rainbow - dusky red, butter yellow, indigo, sky blue. Cobbled alleys. Stone stairs. Green doors. Wrought iron. Bougainvillea. City an amphitheatre with ocean as stage.

British and German merchants. International schools. Courtyard football. Sombre men in fedoras on bicycles en route to dockside offices. Cafes and patisseries where poets drink tiny cups of coffee and talk confidently about France. City’s wealth fading with opening of Panama Canal - still major Pacific port.

Peddlers with donkeys. Italian watchmakers. Violin lessons advertised by Hungarian Jews. Retired sailors from every nation. Flophouses. Knocking-shops. Broken bottles in gutters. Boys sell dirty postcards. Pickpockets stalk drunk Yankees. Anarchist stevedores knock each other down. Melancholy Belfast exiles bore strangers in pubs.

Basement bookstores. Repurposed figureheads. Tea rooms. Talking parrots. Pacific idols. Recluses in cobwebbed attics with spectacular harbour views. Scottish admirals trying to grow orchids in pocket-sized rooftop greenhouses. Fish market at Playa Caleta Portales. Sea lions under pier fighting pelicans for scraps.

Powder-blue Victorian manor teetering at cliff edge over Ascensor Artilleria. Weatherbeaten. Three stories. Seems liable to collapse at any moment. Overlooks port.

Boarding house. Run by Angela Potter. Elderly tyrant. Fines lodgers a dollar for failing to appear at breakfast, where she serves kippers and toast.

Dead sea-captain husband’s photo on the mantelpiece. Talks ceaselessly of what he wouldn’t stand for if she was still alive. Sons all working overseas. Gets brief letters from Seattle, Dublin, Auckland every six months.

Soft spot for Azaro.

Poet. Lives upstairs. Rarely leaves his room. Monosyllabic at meals. Pale. Gentle. Oily. Supposed to be working on mysterious surrealist epic about the conquest of Araucania. Hasn’t been seen in weeks.

Deformed corpse found on the funicular track below the house.

Battered. Clearly fallen from a great height. Hairless. Corpse-blue. Backwards head. Twisted limbs. Forked tongue. Sharp teeth. One of its legs bent upwards and tucked behind its neck - apparently sewn in place.

Returns to life in police morgue. Strangles attendant one-handed. Escapes into the street.

Police break into Azaro’s penthouse. Find it empty. Unmade bed. Food stains. Rotting dissected street cat - vivisected and roughly resewn. Pinned to walls - newspaper airship photos. Diagrams from bicycle repair manuals. Torn-out pages from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Film-magazine celebrity photographs cut up and reassembled.

Signs of a scuffle. Furniture knocked over. Broken window above corpse landing site.

Detective Alberto Bolaño has no clues. Rigid atheist. Not looking for help. Sergeant Juan Donoso has guilty habit of visiting clairvoyants - quietly reached out to nearest esoteric detective society, which is you.

Vicente Azaro has sold his soul to the Devil.

Born into a prominent aristocratic family. Grandmother Luz Lynch married and had children with her diplomat uncle. Mother Ximena Azaro Lynch founded Grupo 7 esoteric circle - held woman-only seances with sisters, became Chile’s most prominent spirit medium. Father’s identity unclear.

Raised in isolation on sprawling wine estate in Casablanca Valley. Taught from an early age that he was God. Servants instructed to obey his slightest whim. Sincerely believed self omnipotent until seventeenth birthday, when he was introduced to outer world.

Handful of early publications - poetry collection called The Mirror of Silence, magazine called Blue. Moved to Paris. Hung out with Picasso, Modigliane, Tristan Tzara. Studied astrology and the Kabbalah in Madrid. Contributed to Borges’ ultraismo movement. Briefly kidnapped by Ulstermen for criticising the British Empire.

Returned to Chile, penniless. Developed creacionismo - aesthetic philosophy which posits that the artist is divine. Fixates on idea of writing “omega poem” - creating new cosmos through language alone.

Makes bargain with Asmodeus. Has one year to complete greatest poem in Spanish language. Succeed - become God of pocket universe. Fail - Hell claims his soul.

Deadline passed three days ago.

Hell has called in its marker - sending agents to collect.

Teresa Wolff. Poetess.

Pressured by family at a young age to marry rising conservative politician. Tried to hang herself. Cut down in time. Sent to a convent. Rescued by Azaro, who snuck into her window at dead of night.

Become Azaro’s lover. Refused to marry him on feminist grounds. Travelled with him to Paris. Caught by him in one of many affairs. Tried to hang herself again, this time from a tree in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Legally dead for twenty minutes. Talks volubly but not always coherently about what she saw on the Other Side.

Inherited Wolff Castle in Viña del Mar (just north of Valparaiso) from eccentric uncle Gustavo, who died of yellow fever in 1917.

Sprawling seaside manor amusingly fashioned to resemble medieval castle, with spire and turrets. Full of artefacts from Gustavo’s travels - Chinese vases, Javanese shadow puppets, Tlingit totem poles. Builders across street working on Chilean president’s summer palace. Perched on rocky headland. Trembles in storms.

Huge library in squat Norman-style tower, separated from main house by covered bridge across frothing water. Azaro holed up here. Hunched over typewriter. Books all around him - torn apart, strewn across floor. Poem almost completed. Needs a few more days.

Teresa brings him food. Watches door with shotgun. Insists visitors prove all four limbs are in their proper place. Will reward you with money and secret wisdom for helping her boyfriend cheat Asmodeus and become God.

El Caleuche. Legendary ghost ship. Haunts the waters off Chiloe - island of cold rain, potatoes and warlocks in Chile’s far south. Docks at Mocha Island, the Mapuche abode of the dead. Sent north by Asmodeus to claim Azaro’s soul.

Cruises off Valparaiso coast. Burns with eerie flame. Visible at night - blue spark on the horizon. Waterfront gossip subject. Seen by fishermen and hands on cargo steamers. Captain pacing the foredeck. Telescope aimed at land.

Crewed by demons, witches and drowned sailors. Conjures storms and fog. Lures travellers aboard with laughter, music, the smell of roasting meat. Press-gangs them into service. Nobody can quit until they recruit two more souls.

Thomas Doughty. Sailed with Francis Drake. Fell to worshipping the Tehuelche god Setebos in Puerto San Julian in 1578. Sentenced by Drake to death for witchcraft. Jumped ship. Lived for seven years with giants. Found the City of the Caesars in a volcano’s crater beneath the Southern Patagonian Ice Sheet. Defeated its finest gladiators - claimed immortality as his reward.

El Caluche’s captain. Dashing black-bearded pirate. Expert with sword and gun. Thinks he’s funnier than he is. Demands his crew act like they love him. Flogs men to the bone for not having enough fun. Plays the fiddle, badly. Swigs horrible rum. Can only be killed by fire - always prepared to jump into the sea.

El Trauco. First mate. Son of the snake god. Ugly dwarf. No feet. Hobbles around on stumps. Claims to be able to seduce any woman with his hypnotic glare. Declines to demonstrate this power. Married to Fiura, a wrinkled cackling moss-clad hag.

Owen Coffin. Second mate. Eaten by survivors from the wreck of the whaling ship Essex in 1821. Now a cheerful animated skeleton. Bones visibly gnawed. Loves to gamble. Doesn’t blame his crewmates - would have done the same thing in their place.

Alonso Hurtado. Ship’s chaplain. Jesuit missionary. Decapitated by Mapuches at Valdivia during the Destruction of the Seven Cities in 1599. Grumpy. Devout. Carries head under arm. Shakes his fist in protest whenever it’s stolen by sailors as a prank.

El Cuero. Aquatic beast like an outstretched cowhide. Claws around its edge. Bulging red eyes. Circular beak. Envelops its prey. Clings to hull of ship. High-pitched whistling voice. Greedy. Wriggles up over gunwale - demands to be thrown food.

La Sirena. Musical blonde mermaid. Daughter of Millalobo, the Golden Wolf of the Sea. Conjures other monsters - hippocampi, feathered rat basilisks, flying vampire snakes, aquatic bovine unicorns who control time. Wants a boyfriend who won’t drown.

Mateo Coñuecar. King of the Righteous Province - Chiloe warlock consortium that owns El Caleuche. 117 years old. Eats babies. Waistcoat made of human skin. Meets with subjects in cavern near forlorn coastal village of Quicavi, lit by human-fat candles.

Feeds women noxious elixirs. They vomit up bones and organs - become heads attached to vestigial sacks of skin. Sprout feathers. Change into black birds. Spy on his enemies. Carry messages. Deliver curses. Inflict bad luck by screeching. Peck out eyes.

Debaptises stolen babies. Twists their limbs around. Sews one leg to back of neck. Applies magic cream. Raises them on diet of black cat’s milk, goat meat and rotting human flesh stolen from cemeteries. Creates imbunche - slaves bound to his will.

Sending these after Azaro. Wants him dragged back to the ship in chains. Plans on taking him to R’lyeh - impossible futurist city at the Pacific Ocean’s most isolated point. Deliver him up as a bribe from Hell to the nameless octopus god that slumbers below the oceans of the human soul. The oozing presence in all nightmares who commands us in his sleep.

Azaro can impose new standards of poetic order, reverse entropy, manufacture worlds. This makes him delicious. He must be shucked like an oyster - his thoughts eaten raw. Mateo wants him alive.

The ghost of William Doughty, Thomas’ brother, haunts the Cave of the Pirate on a barren promontory in Quintero, north of Valparaiso. Set there by Drake to guard the archangel Uriel - imprisoned in an obsidian Aztec mirror by John Dee. Only permits true heroes of England to enter. Will ask what great deed you have performed in Albion’s name.

Uriel craves freedom. Will grant one boon to anyone who liberates him. Can easily destroy the imbunches and send El Caleuche back to hell.

Then will revive Bogomilist heresy. Awaken the Patagonian giants. Found race of nephilim. Melt the ice caps. Reveal the City of the Caesars. Flood the world below a hundred feet of water so that only the very tall survive.

Visible in mirror as reflection without source. Beautiful. Wise. Fatherly. Peacock-feather robe. Offers advice. Tutors in rhetoric. Reveals secrets of heaven - always holds back the best bit. Explains in detail why it would be a good idea to let him go.

Australian treasure hunter languishing in Paita jail.

North Peru desert port. Yellow adobe houses. Sardine fishermen. Balsa-wood rafts.

Hot dusty plaza. Market stalls. Wide-skirted gossips. Dried fish. Flat bread. Alfajors - almond-honey cakes. Sacks of dried beans loaded onto mules.

Sunburnt brick jailhouse. Wooden-barred cell window. Inhabitant exposed to public view. Sheriff takes siesta - keys dangle from his belt.

Kerosene Jack.

Fish hawker from Queenscliff, Victoria. Real name Giovanni Carasino. Black beard. Mad twinkle in his eyes. Skinny. Weatherbeaten. Missing teeth.

Inherited treasure map from Tasmanian convict Mary Welch. Cryptic. Written in Transitus Fluvii occult alphabet. Unmistakably shows the Galapagos. Mark of Benito Bonito, aka Bennett Graham - early 1800s British officer turned Pacific pirate, who ended his days a prisoner in Van Diemen’s Land.

Reads Sydney Bulletin article about naturalist William Beebe’s forthcoming Galapagos trip. Notes jocular reference to pirate treasure - Beebe adamantly denies it exists.

Tries to contact Beebe. Rebuffed by press agent. Impulsively travels to Panama. Sneaks aboard Beebe’s ship Arcturus as it traverses the canal.

Hides in hold for thirteen days. Overhears Latin chanting. Spies on crew conducting Satanic rituals. Discovers crates in hold stuffed with what appears to be several million American dollars, plus diamonds and gold.

Caught. Map confiscated. Thrown off side of ship somewhere near Isla Floreana. Clings to floating log. Drifts to land.

Caught by Paita police breaking into old seaside cottage of Manuela Sáenz.

Conspirator against Spain. Paramour of Simon Bolivar. “La Libertadora El Libertador.” Exiled to Paita for decades by the government of Ecuador following his death. Lived by selling tobacco and translating letters for Yankee whalers. Befriended Herman Melville and Giuseppi Garibaldi when they passed through the town.

House now occupied by poor fisherman’s family. Jack discovered a small mechanical golden bird, of Inca manufacture, under a loose floorboard. Still has it in his pocket. Convinced Sáenz had some connection to Bonito. Is correct.

Isla Isabela.

Cluster of six shield volcanoes. Barren black lava plains. Thorny scrubland. Alien-looking cacti. Shuffling tortoises. Red-throated frigatebirds. Blue-footed boobies. Salt-crusted marine iguanas. Small black penguins. Lagoon flamingoes. Bright red Sally Lightfoot crabs. Sperm whales calve off the coast.

Only town is Puerto Villamil - convict settlement in shark-infested mangroves by the coast. Bored military officers staking most of their wages on endless poker games. Zero women. Schooner from Guayaquil lands once a month.

Most prosperous settler Antonio Quesada runs Hacienda Santo Tomas in sparsely-forested highlands. Raises cattle. Mines caldera sulphur. Acts as informal mayor. Free with the whip. Maroons rebellious indentured workers on sea stacks with no water. Speaks optimistically of islands’ future.

Lava-tube maze underlies calderas. Magma lakes. Poison fumaroles. Shark pits. Tripwires. Booby traps fashioned from cactus spines. Expanded by human hands. Entrances carefully disguised as hillside crevices. Single ancient moai overlooks Tagus Cove - heavily eroded. Nobody knows when or how it was made.

Mammon, god of greed, dwells in caves under Sierra Negra volcano.

Gigantic slimy maw embedded in gnarled volcanic rock. Tentacles. Rolling yellow eyes. Distended translucent belly full of gleaming gold. Speaks in plummy, upper-crust tones - good Castilian Spanish or the clipped cadence of the English aristocracy. Grants the assistance of minor devils in exchange for money.

Served by imps of darkness - puffing sulphur-crusted lizardmen who view ordinary iguanas as men do monkeys. Emerge at night. Carry spears. Learning to use pistols. Rare specimens are pink - venerated by their comrades.

Tunnels link to Hollow Earth. Exits at Nan Madol, Cahokia, Skull Island, Mount Shasta, Patagonia. Would theoretically be possible to cross the entire Pacific underground.

Tupac Yupanqui, son of Pachacuti, makes tour of Pacific around 1470. Visits Mangareva and Rapa Nui. Donates large quality of Inca gold to Mammon and is blessed with entourage of familiar spirits. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa retraces his voyages with aid of irate bottled imp found in Quito tomb, later confiscated by the Inquisition.

Brief pilgrimage to islands made by Francis Drake in 1579 - demon butler purchased with Cagafuego silver handed over for safekeeping to John Dee, who passed it along to Rudolf II of Prague. Fray Martin Barragan marooned - becomes first in long line of castaway demon worshippers living in dry hills on raw sea lion and tortoise flesh.

Islands become haven for 1600s pirates. William Dampier. Basil Ringrose. Lionel Wafer. Bartholomew Sharp. March across Isthmus of Darien - steal boats on other side. Cruise the Pacific coast, intending to ambush Spanish ships. Mostly fail. Meagre winnings rent only a few paltry lemures. Return home via Cape Horn.

Edward Davis. Captain of the Batchelor’s Delight. Steals jewels and silver from Peruvian ports in company with Ambrose Cowley, Francoise Groginet and Raveneau de Lussan. Liberates slaves. Discovers that Galapagos tortoises can easily be stored in ships’ holds as long-lasting provisions. Sails with William Kidd from Madagascar to Manhattan. Inters his purchased incubi at Nova Scotia’s Oak Island. Dies rich.

Nantucket whalers keep pirate Mammon cult alive, though few have anything to feed him. Sailor Patrick Watkins stranded on Floreana in 1807 - founds tiny slave empire of captive fishermen and deserters. Mad hermit. Blunderbuss. Beard. Overthrown - escapes to Paita. Etches cell walls with Transitus Fluvii graffiti - some of it still there.

Sáenz encounters him as a raving street hermit in Lima in 1819. Already scheming with her girlfriends to overthrow the viceroy and bend the regiments to the cause of independence. Concocts a plan.

The Treasure of Lima. Enormous hoard of gold taken by Francisco Pizarro as ransom from Atahualpa, secretly stored in his tomb under Lima Cathedral. Sáenz persuades archbishop to keep treasure safe from Bolivar and his radicals by shipping it to Mexico aboard the Mary Dear, whose captain William Thompson was Bonito’s first mate.

Ship deliberately steered into pirate ambush. Spanish soldiers massacred. Lima Treasure taken to Galapagos and sacrificed to Mammon.

Dozen infernal legions enter Sáenz’ service. Fight for a decade on Bolivar’s behalf. Grant him the rule of Gran Colombia. Slain in Venezuelan skies by a phalanx of Jesuit-conjured seraphim.

Nation falls apart after Bolivar’s death. Sáenz dies in exile, betrayed by history - a lonely witch, kept company only by a few trivial molochs and malefactors. Almost nobody knows how she bribed Hell for her country’s freedom.

Kent Kane Parrott. “Boss” and secret mayor of Los Angeles. Friendly. Heavy-handed. Great at making people feel needed. Lives in Biltmore Hotel. Close to organised crime. Perpetually promising to clean up vice. Uses police Red Squad as personal thugs.

Discovers etched brass plate left by Francis Drake on beach north of San Francisco. Another Transitus Fluvii inscription. Identifies Mammon’s lair. Beebe helps him decode it. Buys package of Bolivar’s letters from unscrupulous curator at the Liberator Archive in Caracas - decodes these as well. Consults with August Gissler, who wasted twenty years mistakenly searching for the treasure on Cocos Island to the north.

Commissions Beebe to launch Galapagos expedition. Loads boat up with ill-gotten gains - his share of the take from bootlegging, casinos, nightclubs, bribes paid for city contracts. Wants to cut a deal with Mammon. Buy infernal army. Declare war on federal government. Make himself King of independent California.

Tony Cornero. Rum runner. Smuggles Canadian whiskey into Southern California under cover of shrimping business. Recently escaped train taking him to prison - on run from the law. In charge of recruiting sailors who won’t balk at criminal activity - digs them up from worst holes in Central America and the Caribbean.

Albert Marco. Violent fat-faced Tyrolean pimp. Enforcer for Charles Crawford’s City Hall Gang. Runs a dozen brothels. No fear of the law. Freely pistol-whips cops in the middle of the street. Addicted to gambling. Bad luck. Once lost $250,000 at poker in a single night to Nick the Greek. In charge of guarding the money. Mob footsoldiers crucify any sailor who gets sticky hands.

Beebe himself is boisterous, open-minded, subject to brutal fits of depression. Big nose. Groucho Marx moustache. Expert on pheasants. Wife writes romance novels. Casually drops that he has an open relationship.

Flirts with lady assistants. Set designer and live-animal painter Isabel Cooper. Bioluminescence expert Lillian Segal. Eel egg collector Marie Poland Fish.

Pet spider monkey Chiriqui, aka Rasputin the Demon Ape. Insanely evil and vicious. Bites. Screeches. Steals things. Unties important ropes. Smashes valuable equipment. Tortures smaller animals. Everyone seems to think it’s funny and cute.

Arcturus loaded with slimy specimens.

Blobfish. Flying snails. Translucent goblin worms. Living masses of acrobatic salmon jelly. Jars of luminous goo dredged from the Sargasso Sea. Paper nautilus in tank - wafer-thin calcite shell. Glass amulet inexplicably found around albatross’ neck.

Microscopes. Sextants. Plankton nets. Diving helmets. Bathysphere prototype - Beebe certain it will work. Wants everyone to try it. Childishly excited about tropical fish.

Well-stocked library. Typewriter. Desk. Books on marine biology. Albert Barnes’ Notes On The New Testament. Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal. Michael Psellus’ De Operatione Daemonum. Heinrich Agrippa’s Three Books Of Occult Philosophy. Wallace D. Wattle’s The Science Of Getting Rich. Napoleon Hill’s The Law Of Success.

Sections on Mammon circled. Notes in the margins.

Small band of Floreana Satanists control access to Mammon. Beebe and Parrot obliged to work through them. Imps of darkness won’t have it any other way.

Friedrich Ritter. Nietzschean dentist. Vegetarian. Nudist. Refuses all medicine. Believes “sheer intensity of consciousness” can ward off any danger. Wears steel dentures - wore original teeth to stubs by overchewing food.

Dore Strauch. Unhappily married to elderly schoolmaster. Only eats fruit. Meets Ritter in Berlin hospital. Allows him to persuade her that multiple sclerosis is all in the mind. Couple abscond to Galapagos. Settle in stone labyrinth at Floreana’s heart. Recreate Garden of Eden. Re-enact Fall of Man with lizard imp as serpent.

Baroness Eloise von Wagner. Marlene Dietrich accent. Riding crop. Pearl-handed revolver. Known to her acquaintances as “Crazy Panties”. Won’t explain why.

Arrives on Floreana with two gigolos, Robert and Rudolf, in tow. Declares self Galapagos Empress. Occupies rusty Casa Matrix cottage in abandoned Norwegian settlement by Post Office Bay. Announces intention to build Hacienda Parasido luxury hotel. Seduces travelling American yacht millionaires - spies on them for Japan.

Incredibly annoying. Empowered to negotiate on Mammon’s behalf. Demands more money. Parrot already considering where to get it.

Percy Fawcett. Explorer.

Born into aristocratic family of Yorkshire shipping magnates. Theosophical uncle. Mapmaker for the British Secret Service. Friend to Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard, who gives him an Atlantean basalt statue as a birthday present.

First sent to Bolivia by Royal Geographic Society in 1906. Encounters giant spiders and 60’ anacondas. Stumbles across Manuscript 512 - account of a lost city in the Brazilian hinterland, produced by emerald-seeking bandeirantes in 1753.

Stages 1925 expedition to Mato Grosso jungle in pursuit of Lost City of Z. Disappears.

Dean Ivan Lamb. Flying mercenary.

Works for Elmer J. Faucett, co-founder of a small Peruvian airline. Makes weekly air trips to Iquitos - remote rubber-planting settlement in heart of jungle. Inaccessible by foot. Only other ways to get there - travel downriver from Yurimaguas or up from Manaus and the Atlantic.

Flies load of cinema equipment from Lima to Casa de Fierro - planter’s abandoned iron palace that everyone insists, despite a total lack of evidence, was built by Gustave Eiffel. Ceiling girders home to vampire-bat colony. Filmmaker Antonio Wong Rengifo transforming it into Iquitos’ finest picture palace.

Loads plane up with canisters of film at jungle airstrip - Wong’s homemade movies, for distribution across Peru. Realises he’s missing some paperwork. Goes back to Casa de Fierro. Discovers Wong in conversation with Fawcett. Immediately recognises the Englishman - followed the story back in 1925.

Hides. Is not seen. Waits for meeting to finish. Shadows Fawcett to waterfront. Watches him depart upstream on steamship Beatriz - captained by Guillermo Cervantes, disgraced army captain who led an abortive rebellion against the federal government in 1921. Technically wanted for treason. Familiar presence on the Iquitos docks.

Goes back to plane. Flies home. Has some idea of reporting sighting to Fawcett’s family and asking for small reward.

Police waiting for him at the airport.

Now in the lock-up for the distribution of blue movies. Men making tender love to pink river dolphins. Women embraced by anacondas. Fishlike things copulating by firelight - could be actors in rubber suits. Orgies in flooded forest. Stone ruins as backdrop - plazas, bridges, overgrown temple walls.

Cops demanding information. Needs you to get it for him. Sincerely did not know what he was helping to sell.

Julio César Arana. Once an Iquitos rubber magnate. Tortured and enslaved Indians. Atrocities exposed by British consul Roger Casement. Business closed down. Never prosecuted. Became senator for Amazonian province of Loreto.

Now lives quietly in Lima seaside district of Magdalena del Mar. Clifftop hacienda overlooks desolate beach. Children Julia and Luis tend his Rio Putumayo estates, on the disputed border with Colombia - form patriotic juntas to agitate for war.

Handles Lima end of Wong’s dirty-pictures business. Basement porno theatre. Shrunken heads positioned as voyeurs. Silent grey-faced Barbadian butler Henry King. Hosts stag nights for businessmen and politicians - untouchable by law.

Armando Normand. Plantation manager under Arana. Horrific serial killer. Cuts people up with machetes and feeds them to dogs. Suffers from nameless tropical fever that yellows his skin and makes his hands unsteady. Fluent, convincing liar. Escaped Iquitos prison with Rodríguez Brothers (two more of Arana’s murderers) in 1915. Still technically on the run. Wears comical false moustache.

Operates in Lima as Arana’s enforcer. Shrinks heads of unlucky detectives. Still wants revenge on Casement, who was executed in 1916 for high treason against the British Crown.

Lope de Aguirre. Conquistador. Traitor. Fought in Peru’s early civil wars. Followed a judge who sentenced him to public flogging for three years across the country before stabbing him to death.

Joined Pedro de Ursúa’s 1560 expedition down the Amazon in search of El Dorado. Overthrew and killed him somewhere in the jungle. Proclaimed self expedition leader and Prince of Peru. Found the Orinoco via the Casiquiare canal. Laid siege to Isla Margarita, off the Venezuelan coast. Shot. Dismembered. Head exhibited in public square.

Aloha Wanderwell. “First Girl To Drive Around The World.”

Husband mysteriously shot on yacht in Long Beach, California. Returns to Peru to hunt for treasure of Inca general Rumiñawi in Ecuador’s Llanganates Mountains. Discovers golden library etched with Martian hieroglyphs in the Cave of the Oilbirds on the Andes’ eastern slopes.

Manuscript by Aguirre’s daughter Elvira acquired in 1600s by Scottish buccaneer “Redlegs” Greaves. Winds up in collection of adventure author Alpheus Verrill. Wanderwell buys it. Follows its directions to lost city Yu-Atlanchi, sunk in flooded jungle between the Marañón and Ucayali rivers. Relic of Atlantean refugee civilisation.

Huge stone face overlooks plaza. Vines sprout from its mouth. Something like ayahuasca - the liana of the dead. Wanderwell brews it up and sips it under guidance of Jivaro shaman Don Roberto, who imprisons dart demons in his sinuses and can spit them out as invisible disease projectiles on command.

Meets the yacuruna.

River sirens. Machine elves. Catfish-tail mermaids. Miniature policemen. Crystal labyrinths. Squawking blue larvae. Gnomes with mismatched feet. Pink-clad women riding caimans. Snakes as big as steamboats. Outer space spirits who speak computer language - beep boop beep beep boop.

All living in upside-down cities on the other side of the river’s reflection. Eager to teach sorcery. Visible to anyone who cares to look.

Gillmen. Creatures from the Black Lagoon. Not hallucinations. Breed in oxbow lakes and Yu-Atlanchi’s stagnant tunnels. Ride giant electric eels. Worship Carcosa, terminus of ultimate degeneracy, toward which they believe all life is de-evolving from an initial divine state. Wanderwell has married Figueroa, their king - wants to share his holy message of liberation with the world.

Fawcett, protected as holy fool, wanders dazed across Brazil for years. Lives with Xingu in the jungle and as opera house phantom in Manaus. Machine elves dancing at edge of his vision finally lead him to Iquitos.

Rubber boom long over. Few fat latex “biscuits” still stacked in waterfront warehouses - made by drizzling sap onto rotating spit above burning toxic nuts.

Rotting riverside manors.

Broken chandeliers. Shattered skylights. Weed-choked fountains. Mouldy grand pianos. Wrought-iron balconies entangled by vines. Waterstained volumes of Gibbon and Macauley. Morose plantation owners in Panama hats and white linen suits.

Floating shantytowns. Labyrinth of plank walkways and stilt huts. Teetering above the river. Indians in long slender canoes. Boatramps made from logs jammed into mud. Tame parrots, monkeys, capybaras, sloths. Piranha eating food scraps - everyone assures you they only attack when blood is in the water.

Lebanese traders selling machetes, hammocks, canned goods, kerosene, rum. Expensive phonographs. Tattered jaguar furs. Bars. Brothels. Dirty restaurants. Tacacho - mashed plantains with chorizo. Tamales stuffed with turtle and howler-monkey meat.

White-robed Santo Daime preachers. Syncretic religion - part Catholic, part Spiritualist, part vegetalismo. Recruiting orgy participants from among traders, boatmen, ribereños, heirs to lost rubber fortunes. Only the most beautiful subjects get transported by boat upstream to Yu-Atlanchi. Nobody returns.

Fawcett’s sacred task, granted to him by Figueroa, is to oversee the steady growth of the sex-cult. Must keep himself chaste to perform his duty - resists the sirens’ call through judicious use of bullet ants.

Valentin. Dapper linen-suited playboy with dark liquid eyes. Fedora. Gold-tipped cane. Small goatee and moustache. Funny. Elegant. Plays the mandolin. Exquisite dancer - moves like rubber’s in his bones. Appears at parties, brothels, church revival meetings. Nobody knows who is or where he came from. Jokingly claims to be a Hollywood film star, a Cuban sugar millionaire, a Spanish grandee.

Pink dolphin transformed into a human. Can change back and forth at will.

Seduces women. Leads them into the river. Sex is so good they’re never seen again.

Cândido Rondon. Brazilian army engineer. Helped overthrow Pedro II. Famous for building telegraph lines across the jungle. Travelled with Theodore Roosevelt down the River of Doubt in 1914. Roving commission to survey Brazil’s western borders.

Orthodox Positivist. Totally serious about it. Believes in reason’s inevitable triumph. Follower of Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity. Altruism. Order. Progress. Priests required to be married. Holy trinity of Humanity, Destiny and Earth.

Paid by Henry Ford to scout out new locations for utopian industrial rubber colony on model of Fordlandia. Believes it could become seed of Universopolis - ideal world capital of Jose Vasconcelos, running on Atlantean technology, inhabited by hybrid master race. Has studied jungle ruins from lost civilisation of Pebas Mega-Wetland era.

Staying in Iquitos. Investigating cult. Wants Yu-Atlanchi’s secrets for himself.

Star of Wormwood rising over the White City.

Death of a curandero. El Espinoso. Famous witch of Arequipa. Wrinkled old man wrapped in blanket. Born in the Colca Canyon. Kept giant hummingbird as familiar - fed it with sugar water from his cupped hands.

Sought out by Arequipa natives for protection from demons and the evil eye. His recent clients - weavers, stonemasons, railway engineers - all tell the same story. Poisonous green star visible only to them. Burning in the night. Calling them to climb up the volcano Misti and give themselves to whatever waits at the top.

El Espinoso kept a healer’s shop among the close-packed white adobe houses of the Barrio de San Lazaro, above his wife Rosita’s chingana - makeshift tavern selling corn beer and cheap wine.

Dried toads. Snake skins. Owl feathers. Raw eggs. Coca leaves. Guinea pig skins. Dried stillborn llama fetus relaxing on a shelf. Bundled medicinal herbs - chamomile, cat’s claw, Andean mint. Shrines to Rose of Lima and St. Martin de Porres - mirrors, red candles, holy water, double-armed Caravaca cross.

Books under the table. Jonas Sulfurino’s Grimoire of St. Cyprian. Frances Barrett’s Celestial Intelligencer. Johan Georg Hohman’s Long-Lost Friend. The Old Man of the Pyramids’ Black Pullet, dictated to a Grande Armée officer in 1798. The Little Albert. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. Reina Valera Bible dog-eared at Revelations 9.

El Espinoso’s corpse found on the narrow bed where he treated his patients. Crusted with grey fungus. Suffocated on grubs. New variety of insect crawling from his nose and mouth - something halfway between a locust and a wasp.

A few of the grey locusts still infest the house. Rosita can’t get rid of them. Bites raise painful welts and enable you to see the poison star.

Mi-go. Fungal arthropods. Extrasolar parasites. Wasps from outer space.

Yuggoth. Hive-moon of the mi-go. Sapient. Icy plains. Crystal towers. Fungal chasms. Oceans of dark oil. Pulsing grey-matter abscesses like geodes thinking diseased thoughts. Not yet discovered by science. Will be known as Pluto by 2025.

William Henry Pickering. Astronomer. Pointy beard. Bald. Avid mountain climber - one of the first to conquer Yosemite’s Half Dome.

Born to a cadet branch of the ancient and respectable Pickering family of Massachusetts. Puritans. Witches. Illuminati. Mad sea captains. Family mansion in Salem permanently tainted by Satanic practices of Timothy Pickering, Revolution colonel and George Washington’s Secretary of State.

Brother Edward also an astronomer - pioneer in stellar photography and director of the Harvard College University. Employed team of female computers to process astronomical data at minimum wage. Now deceased.

Inherits occult library of distant retired-whaler uncle Hiram around 1881. Discovers lost chronicle by conquistador Pedro Cieza de León, describing Inca practice of qhapaq hucha - leaving drugged children on mountaintops to die as sacrifice to Yuggoth. Fixates on idea of contacting extraterrestrial life.

Gets job from his brother as Harvard astronomy professor. Leads eclipse expeditions to Chile and Grenada. Establishes observatory sites across the Americas. Mount Wilson, California. Flagstaff, Arizona.

Boyden Astronomical Station on Misti’s ash-barren vicuña-haunted slopes. Below sulphurous crater. Atop Inca shrine ruins. In shadow of 20-foot iron cross. Tea garden. Flowers. Balcony with view of Rio Chili’s stony canyon. The Rockefeller Reflector - 16’ Cassegrain telescope protruding from polished dome.

Takes first photographs of Martian canals. Persuades colleague Percival Lowell they’re engineering works that harbour vegetable life.

Discovers Saturn’s ninth moon Phoebe and a secret tenth moon Themis - both captured Kuiper belt objects, the latter of which is a mi-go colony and living Yuggoth fragment. Ropes Lowell into hunt for Planet X - the Solar System’s ninth planet, beyond Neptune’s orbit. Observes lunar insects and pale fungi fields in Eratosthenes Crater.

Compelled to retire from Harvard. Establishes private observatory in Mandeville, Jamaica. Continues to publish.

Returns to Arequipa to control Boyden Station. Converts staff to Yuggoth worship. Nervous Greek overseer John Paraskevopoulos. Almost-deaf detail-fixated human calculator Annie Jump Cannon. Chatty Belgian priest Georges Lemaître, whose Hypothesis of the Primeval Atom prototypes the Big Bang.

Discovers hibernating mi-go larvae in torso cavities of Ampato ice mummies. Revives qhapaq hucha. Lures wasp-bitten victims up to crater. Bashes out their brains. Stores corpses in station ice house - more wasps bred in their guts.

Themis in the sky. Dislodged from Saturn’s orbit. Piloted by Abaddon, bottomless pit angel - exterminating wizard and mi-go faction king. Every sacrifice beckons it closer to Earth.

El Espinoso’s protective magic too effective at helping victims resist call of Wormwood. He had to be stopped.

Butch Cassidy. Cowboy outlaw. Leader of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Fled to Bolivia after a botched train robbery with Pinkertons in hot pursuit. Rumours of his death in San Vicente following a mine payroll holdup have been greatly exaggerated.

Hiding out in a squalid miners’ brothel in La Rinconada. Gold-mining town north of Lake Titicaca. Highest permanently inhabited place on Earth.

Mud. Tin shacks. Garbage. Tarpaulins. Dirty snow. Breathtaking mountains. Glacial lakes bubbling with pale chemical runoff. Thin air - altitude sickness shortens lives. Clay demons stationed at mine entrances - locals say God rules the surface but Satan reigns unchallenged underground.

Didn’t exist ten years ago. Founded by Yuggoth cult around another Inca sky shrine. Butch runs the mines. Workers toil as near-slaves - paid only by the single day they get per month to look for gold themselves. Mi-go queens nest in sprawling fungal caves below the cordillera - subterranean albino Inca descendants tend to their every need.

Butch has made himself a bandit king.

Highwayman squads under his command roam the Titicaca lakefront and the highlands between La Paz and Arequipa. Shake peasants down for their last coin. Deprive priests of their charitable funds and robes of office. Loot silver from mine strongboxes and city-bound mule convoys. Cart prisoners back to La Rinconada for sacrifice - Butch personally breaks their heads.

Aged montoneras who fought under Cáceres, the Warlock of the Andes, in the War of the Pacific, leading bands of desperate men. Armed with mi-go weapons. Electric guns. Ice-mist projectors. Bulletproof slime-web armour - humans don’t produce the right hormones to feed it. Miniature earthquake bombs used to derail trains and trigger landslides to block mountain passes.

Whole town’s in the cult. Butch preaches Revelations at them every Sunday from the pulpit of a cramped tin church. Penitentes parade through the streets, autoflagellating - conical red hats resemble snow formations of the same name.

“El Quemado”. Butch’s second in command. Short. Wide-brimmed hat. Has been struck by lightning seventeen times. Actively seeks it out. Nervous system scrambled. Lichtenberg figures permanently etched in skin. Incredible quick draw. Jumpy. Sees things that aren’t there. Aspiring paqo shaman - cursed by apu mountain spirits.

Harry Longabaugh. The Sundance Kid. Lives with his common-law wife Etta Place on a floating reed island in Lake Titicaca, taken in by friendly Uru Indians. Has repented of his sins. Butch wants them both dead.

Francisco Alcázar. Distinguished Mexican scientist and ethical philosopher. Staunch atheist. Believes in the death of God and the supremacy of Man.

Guillotined in Paris for murdering his wife. Head stolen from basket by Nazi doctors seconds after death. Attached to tubes. Revived. Permanently grafted into cockpit of the LZ-125 zeppelin, nicknamed Valkyrie, which operates as a portable Thule Society research base. Spiritually merged with the ship. Flies it with his mind.

Commander of G.O.O.D. - the Global Organisation for Observation and Deduction. Secular scientific research institute which promotes space travel and biological immortality. Thule cutout. At war with the Soviet biocosmists for control of mankind’s future.

Worships Abaddon as what he calls a “macrobe” - a superhuman form of life. Mi-go have already colonized the Moon. Purified its surface. Driven rebel forces (nude lunar Amazons riding giant ants) back to dark-side verdant valleys. Alcazar would like them to perform the same operation on Earth.

Create a perfectly rational society, liberated from the flesh, without the mess of locomotion or reproduction. A world of brains in jars.

Valkyrie anchored at Llullaillaco. Dormant volcano on the Argentina-Chile border.

Atacama fringes. Brutally arid plateau. Flamingos picking over salt flats. Yareta plants - blobs of chartreuse velvet. Dirt-floor tambo lodging houses. Travellers with mules. Aymara women in bowler hats knitting as they ride. Rhea. Hairy armadillos. Colourful lakes.

No glaciers on the mountain’s peak. Valkyrie visible from below as a tiny silver dot. Lookouts guarding the ascent.

Third and most important of the Inca sky shrines.

Living zeppelin traverses the Andes. Co-ordinates with Butch and Pickering. Collects sacrifice victims with especially powerful souls. Handful of abducted streetsweepers, millionaires and nuns stored in steel brig.

All G.O.O.D. leadership currently aboard.

John Scrounge. Head of Daily Operations. Dreary old bureaucrat. Only speaks in vague jargon and cliches - literally incapable of original thought. Psychic link with Abaddon. Wasp eggs in his brain.

Septimus Winter. Director of Research. Pointy beard. Pince-nez glasses. Idealises precision. Views emotions as curious medical anomalies. Has portable Objective Box in which they can’t exist.

Dr. Antonio Grimaldi. Director of Medicine. Obese Italian eunuch. Sincere Fascist - gleefully anticipates the coming world of machines. Irritating sing-song voice. Skips like a child from place to place.

Reverend Alan Stryker. “The Mad Parson.” Gloomy. Deranged by daughter’s suicide. Believes all use of power is expression of God’s will. Punctuates doom sermons by firing revolvers at the sky.

Florence “Pixie” Shortclock. Head of Security. Chatty. Boastful. Namedrops famous acquaintances, i.e. Mussolini. Subjects criminals to electric therapy. Oversees corps of Women’s Auxiliary Police.

The Miscelánea Antártica.

Compilation of pre-Inca lore by the 16th-century cleric Miguel Cabello de Balboa. Written for the Antarctic Academy, a loose group of historians, priests and poets who chronicled the secrets of viceregal Peru and produced such works as In Defense of Ladies, Araucania Conquered and The Antarctic Parnassus.

Friendly Quechua archaeologist Julio Tello discovers an unabridged edition in the San Marcos university archives. Manuscript expands on the myth of Taycanamo, legendary founder of the lost Chimu Kingdom and the ruined city of Chan Chan on the outskirts of Trujillo, who arrived from the Pacific on a golden raft. Alludes to forbidden valley of “las mujeres grandes rojas” in the cloud forests of the Cordillera Oriental.

Stores it in his office in the Magdalena Palace, which currently houses the ramshackle collection of his Museum of Peruvian Archaeology. Obelisk shards. Bits of mummy. Paracas mantles. Obscene Moche whistling pots with visible erections that give a new meaning to the phrase “blow it out your ass”. Trepanned skulls. Sipan funeral masks. Spondylus shells. Lapis lazuli birdman earrings. Golden tumi - sacrificial knives.

Triple-locked from the inside to deter thieves. Marranito, the museum cat, gets in through a skylight - too small to admit a man.

Rafael Larco Hoyle makes a special trip to Lima from his sugarcane plantation outside the northern city of Trujillo. Wealthy artefact collector. Building a private museum at Hacienda de Chiclin, his estate in the Chichama Valley. Makes Tello a bid for the manuscript. Is refused - it’s far too valuable as a historical artefact to let go.

Manuscript vanishes a few days later. Nothing else disturbed. Office door still locked.

Miniature human corpse on the carpet.

Copper-skinned barbarian warrior in golden loincloth. Few centimetres tall. Gleaming poison-tipped spear. Savaged by the cat - blinded it before he died.

Taycanamo.

Sorcerer of old Lemuria. Also known as Naylamp, Kathulos and B’Moth. Sarcophagus dislodged by earthquake from seafloor around 900 AD. Floated to surface.

Discovered by Moche fishermen off north Peru coast. Took over their culture. Led it into decadent new phase. Finally dislodged by betrayal and rebellion. Worked dark magic to artificially prolong his evil reign.

Yampallec. Squat cyclopean idol of pure gold. Halfway between fish and frog. Fist-sized emerald eye contains a world. City of miniature adobe pyramids. Warriors. Temple maidens. Fighting pits. Skeleton orgies. High priests throwing bloody sacrifices to deformed bacterial beasts.

Taycanamo’s paradise. But he can’t leave.

Locked away by Chan Chan rebels in Huaca de la Luna. Moche shrine to Ai Apaec - the Supreme Decapitator. Larco finds the hidden chamber. Peers into the Eye - enables Taycanamo to make contact with his mind.

Becomes his discipline. Committed to Decapitator worship.

Remaking Chiclin into a workers’ paradise - a eugenic utopia, populated by natural farm slaves whose only wish is to die in their master’s service. Model planned city for President Leguía’s New Peru. Opposed by APRA labour agitator Leopoldo Pita, embedded among the cane workers, and the courageous members of the Alfonso Ugarte football club.

Planning expedition to the Valle de las Mujeres Rojos. Balboa’s manuscript conceals clues to its location.

There is another copy. Tello received a letter from an old shepherd who lives in a shack in the Lomas de Lachey - fog oasis in the desert north of Lima, full of birds and rich wet grass. Claims to be a direct descendent of Balboa.

Old stone well in his backyard. Home to a fog vampire - glittering mist that shifts from grey to pink as it drains you of your blood. Warm, pleasant feeling. Victims left with a thousand tiny puncture wounds and a smile on their face.

Balboa’s notes in his basement. Larco’s boys watching you - could follow you there.

Alpheus Hyatt Verrill. Larco’s right-hand man.

Son of eminent marine biologist. Raised in museums. Scientific illustrator. Specimen collector - worked across Central America and the Caribbean. Dart gun. Butterfly net. Enthusiastic pursuit of nature’s latest wonders.

Author of well over a hundred boys’ adventure books. Shell Collector’s Handbook. Rivers And Their Mysteries. Harper’s Aircraft Book. The Boy’s Book Of Buccaneers. Devours every issue of Amazing Stories. Wife lives in New Haven. Rarely visits home.

Hired in 1915 by George Gustav Haye to collect for the Museum of the American Indian. Studied the Costa Rica petrospheres with Doris Zemurray. Hunted in Colombia for Muisca and Quimbaya gold. Fired in 1926 after his increasingly esoteric theories about the origins of civilisation in the Americas begin to affect the quality of his work.

Travels with two adopted boys.

Tom Verrill. Seventeen years old. Red hair. Freckles. Blue eyes. Always fiddling with his crystal radio set. Believes he can pick up transmissions from outer space. Says “gee willikers” and “shucks”. Lucky. Resourceful. Strong. Carries pocketknife, diary, revolver, X-ray spectacles that actually work. Explosive cigars. Invisible ink pen. Deck of cards for magic tricks. Will fight like a tiger in his brother’s defense.

Frank Verrill. Twelve. Vacant stare. Takes his chewing gum out of his mouth - looks at it, puts it back in. Doesn’t talk much. Listens to his brother - copies everything he says. Prone to sudden fits of rage. Likely to bite if left alone.

Pockets full of tiny Indian warriors from Taycanamo’s crystal world. Seems to like them. Will throw them at your face so they can stab your eyes.

Set fire to sleeping abusive stepfather in Corpus Christi, Texas. Helped by Tom to sneak aboard the first boat south. Jumped ship in the Panama Canal Zone, where they lived as petty thieves and street vagrants until Alpheus picked them up.

Dived for wrecked Spanish treasure ships. Fled Jivaro headhunters. Climbed the slopes of Huscaran. Escaped the Chavín de Huántar snake pits. Fought deadly duels with Eleodoro Benel’s populist bandits in the Inca hot springs at Cajamarca.

Pepper. Hairless street dog. Picked up in Ayacucho during an episode known as The 33 Demons Mystery. Chocolate brown with pink spots. Smooth to the touch. Loves the boys. Hates everyone else. Frank trying to work out if Taycanamo’s warriors can ride him.

El Valle de las Mujeres Rojos.

Somewhere near Chachapoyas in the Amazonian Andes. Enter through a cave above the Lagoon of the Condors. Vertical sarcophagi perched on cliffside ledges - carved bearded faces displaying vacant joy. Dense tropical forest. Toucans. Red howler monkeys. Bald uakari - skull-faced apes shrieking from high branches, demanding you turn back.

Bowl of mountains. Isolated from the outside world.

Scarlet reptile women. Naked. Thirty feet tall. White lacy reptilian crests adorning head and arms. Live in city of hundred-foot basalt spires that tower above the treetops. Balboa fell in love with one - returned to the valley after writing his manuscript, never seen again.

Love the taste of human flesh. Occasionally deploy magnetic super-ray to pluck ships from distant ocean. Eat the crew. Use wasp venom to preserve leftover captives in state of living death. Bodies stacked in central larder. Water wakes them up.

At war with both tribe of lost Vikings and giant intelligent ants. Uneasy stalemate. Queen Vorvula is married to Balboa - wears his almost-indestructable desiccated comatose body on a rope around her neck. Kisses him to sleep in her scrap-metal bed each night.

Only he knows the Lemurian chant that releases Taycanamo from his emerald prison. Must be spoken from inside the gem. Say it backwards and the Eye of Lampallec collapses to the size of a molecule, projecting all inside it to the subatomic realm.

Argument in a necropolis.

The Cerro Colorado on the arid Paracas Peninsula. Shaft tombs cut into the lunar desert. Ancient geoglyphs - the Paracas Candelabra, 2000 years old, cut into a stony hillside overlooking guano-flecked ochre cliffs. Obese burnt-umber sea lions. Evil-eyed brown pelicans with beaks in sunset orange and sky blue.

Bundled mummies of Wari Kayan. Deformed skulls. Wrapped in cloth like sad fat dumplings. Grave goods - shell necklaces, feather fans, ceramic orcas with modeled human heads between their teeth. Bone flutes. Crimson mantles decorated with grids of flying shamans. Hexagonal serpents precisely intertwined. Bodies made from faces. Goofy square grins.

Archaeologist Julio Tello busy excavating the site. Cheerful little Quechua man with round spectacles who expresses childlike wonder at every new find.

Evgeny Yakovlev. Learnt archaeology in Tashkent before the war. Fled to the Americas via Istanbul after the Bolshevik Revolution. Stopped over in Peru on his way to California and discovered it was a digger’s paradise. Got a job with Tello’s museum. Extremely distant cousin of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov. Tall. Thin. Prone to fits of melancholy. Walks with a cane he doesn’t really need.

Falls in love with Rebecca Carrion, Tello’s best student, also present at the dig site, who does not reciprocate his affections. Spends more and more time taking long walks in the desert, brooding alone. Sometimes not seen for days.

Develops a theory that the Paracas people, ancestors to the Nazca, worshipped the whale as Cosmic Father and ancestor of all life. Also persuades himself they were blue-eyed and blonde.

Has a screaming match with Torribio Xesspe, Tello’s other best student (he could never choose just one) over his increasingly esoteric interpretations of Paracas mythology, which he insists are self-evidently correct. Storms off into the night. Disappears.

Six months pass.

Pirates raid the dig site. Swarthy men with pistols. Bandanas. Coarse laughter. Narrow eyes. Stubble. Knife fights over games of dice.

Led by Captain Leo Klaw, a bulky Klaus Kinski-esque German with a blond bowl cut and look of uncomprehending mania in his cold blue eyes. Chews wads of tobacco with slices of mescaline cactus. Jaw always working. Calls his guns by women’s names - polishes them endlessly in the privacy of his cabin.

Steals Tello’s most curious find - fat-faced androgynous doll with a bemused expression, carved from the tooth of an unknown species of whale. Kidnaps Carrion. Drags her onto a fishing boat. Bashes Xesspe over the head - he’ll live.

Take the loot to pirate hideout on Chincha Islands. Old guano dock. Tin sheds. Cantilevered rusty jetty. Bones of Chinese workers. Cormorants shitting everywhere - reconstructing the great excrement cliffs that were once Peru’s most valuable resource.

Like an abandoned quarry - square-cut ledges in the rock-hard guano. Sea stacks. Rocky archways. Penguins lurking in grottoes. Creaking iron staircases and ladders bolted to the stone. Hidden sea-cave shrine to the Chincha jaguar god. Used as a pirate fortress before the guano rush. Carrion, as yet unharmed, shackled to the wall in subterranean dungeon once used by Francis Drake.

3000-year-old whaling station. Polished chrome bones of extraterrestrial leviathan embedded in guano. Pirates making desultory effort to dig it up.

Klaw well known in nearby faded desert port of Pisco. Raids coastal shipping and outlying desert farms. Comes in with his men on Sundays to pick fights with vineyard workers and smash up dockside cantinas. Has paid off the police.

Meets Yakovlev once a month in the Hotel de Gusanos Morados along the waterfront. Provides him with a sack of trophy heads. Taken from captured sailors. Rope handles punched through skulls. Lips pierced with thorns so the spirit can’t escape.

Argues occult philosophy over pisco sours. Plays Wagner on the gramophone. Shoots at shaky-handed bartender’s feet to make him dance.

Yakovlev wants to win Carrion over with true love. Sentimental. Sends her bottles of fancy perfume, fur coats, rapidly-wilting roses. Writes bad poetry in halting Spanish - claims it sounds better in Russian.

Will release her only if she agrees to marry him. Proposes to establish her as Queen of the Universe. So far he’s had no luck.

His clean-cut Nordic thugs sneer at Klaw’s bandits - challenge them to wrestling matches among stray chickens and old bicycles in the hotel’s dusty yard. Lose. Claim the enemy cheated - demand to go again.

Ernest Beaux. Thule Society lieutenant. Head perfumer for Coco Chanel. Designer of Chanel no. 5.

Dream is to create a fragrance that captures the Arctic purity of a concentration camp on the White Sea, where he worked as Allied interrogator of Reds during the Russian Civil War. Dissatisfied with Chanel’s current output. Needs the perfect scent to awaken the white race from their slumber.

Contacted by Yavkolev through Grand Duke Dmitri with the startling information that the Nazca Lines in southern Peru (discovered by Xesspe) are in fact a trap for space whales - the cosmic leviathans who patrol Deep Heaven. Field notes from Max Uhle, stored in Thule archives, confirm this.

Geoglyphs attract the brutes’ attention. Cactus-high shamans bait them down with pipes, drums, automutilation, huge piles of delicious trophy heads. Landing is easy. Taking off is hard. Harpoonists lie in wait. Meat is greasy but delicious. Oil fuels sweet-scented white flames that expose ghosts and lies.

Beaux wants their ambergris for his divine perfume. Thinks anyone who smells it will instantly be able to see through all Bolshevik propaganda. Technically correct.

Encamped near the Cahuachi Pyramids with bored Nazi henchmen and the Sigurdsson Brothers - identical Icelandic harpoonist triplets who rehash endless petty squabbles over gambling debts and women in forgotten Baltic ports.

Has thus far managed to bring down only one small leviathan - the cosmic equivalent of a porpoise. Twenty metres long. Made from crinkled glass. Ridden by a goblin of pure light who sat in the hills all night and sobbed as they cut it apart. Zero ambergris in its guts.

Beaux unhappy with the way things are going. Screams at his underlings. Wants the pirates to fetch him more heads.

Morris Klaw. The Dream Detective.

Little round bald man. Thick Austrian accent. Brown bowler hat. Gold pince-nez. Black silk muffler - holds it to his mouth to avoid the contamination of dry desert air. Impossible to say what colour his eyes are. Short peppery beard.

Spritzes self with lemon verbena water from a small perfume bottle. Treats you like you smell bad - maintains his distance. Apologises. Claims to be highly sensitive to odylic disturbance - unable to bear the physical presence of the morally corrupt.

Leo Klaw’s father. Thule Society agent.

Sleeps on sterilised pillows. Can absorb the energy of crime scenes in his dreams - the muddy tang of violence, the taste of fear and blood. Writing a monograph on “crime cycles” - the idea that evil deeds and degenerate periods recur at regular intervals in history. Sordid acts echo across generations.

Isis Klaw. Morris’ daughter. Leo’s sister. Small. Dark-eyed. Vivacious. Reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian princess. Only wears red. Like a walking flame. Stiletto concealed among her hat’s black ostrich plumes.

You’ll run into them in Pisco or Nazca. Keeping an eye on you. Trying to work out if you’re useful.

2000 years ago the Nazca shamans killed a god and ate its heart. Stole its cosmic power. Brought centuries of darkness down upon the world. We are all haunted to this day by the echoes of its death-song, keening in our souls, seasoning even our greatest pleasures with the bitter taste of ashes and unfulfilled desire.

The Klaws want to do it again.

They have a vision of a perfect lifeless world. A cold black lunar wasteland where bodiless intelligences reproduce via machine. Brooding hives of common maggot-servants handling all the messy essentials, freeing the ruling class to endlessly contemplate their own genius. Led by Adolf Hitler’s preserved head, barking orders from a jar.

They’d do anything to make it real.

Man Immortal. Man Ubiquitous. That’s their dream.

Priests with bulging bellies huddled over an emaciated corpse in a Cusco alleyway. Guts straining their cassocks. Round hats. Gleaming red eyes.

From their mouths protrude squirming lamprey parasites. Maws clamped to the flesh of the unfortunate dead peasant. Sucking out his fat.

Their obese leader Bishop Máximo Farfán lurking in the crypts under Cusco Cathedral. Weeping silent greasy tears. He doesn’t want to be the thing he is.

Maria Angola bell greased with regurgitated human fat. Solemn peal is audible for miles. Induces paroxysms of sourceless grief. Noticeable effect on the city’s mood. People talk about it. Attribute it to a change in the weather or the Devil’s passing shadow.

In squares and covered markets Quechuas in hats and ponchos sell potatoes, fried pork belly, pan flutes, jungle fruit, wooden dolls. Bundles of coca leaves. Guitars made from armadillo shells. Vibrant red alpaca blankets adorned with blocky figures in obscure ritual poses. Copper kettles. Lottery tickets. Roasted guinea pig.

Everyone knows someone who’s disappeared. The chatter is subdued.

Luis Valcárcel. Cuzco’s top intellectual. Writes for half a dozen newspapers. Lectures on anthropology at the Colegio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes. Directs the Inca Museum in the Casa del Almirante colonial mansion.

Passionate progressive reformer. Author of Storm Over the Andes. Contributes to Amauta, the leftist journal of José Mariátegui. Can talk for hours about indigenous rights, the evils of the Spaniards and the coming Inca-led communist revolution.

Doesn’t know what’s going on. Would like you to find out.

At the Sacsayhuamán fortress in the hills above Cusco, aviator J. M. Nightspore is working on his plane. Also greased with human fat. Runs like a dream. He makes daily test flights - sends the priests to fetch him more when his fat supply runs out.

He’s planning a voyage to Arcturus. Upgrading his plane to run on ancient Incan starship technology, purchased by Pachacuti from the mi-go at great expense.

He just got back from Machu Picchu - chief engineer on the second Bingham Expedition. Devout Mormon from Cincinnati. Active in the Explorers’ Club of New York City - carries one of their flags. Intends to plant it as far into deep space as he can manage.

Keeps a wooden crate full of fatworms. Needs them to fuel his schemes for galactic travel. They don’t last long in sunlight - will make it a priority to crawl into your mouth.

Virgins of the Sun.

The most skilled and physically perfect women in the Inca empire. Sent to the Qorichanka solar temple in Cusco, the imperial capital, to act as sacred artisans and high priestesses of the sun god Inti.

Taught to weave. Brew chicha. Entertain guests. Conduct human sacrifices. Feed the holy panthers. Make gold into flowers, corncobs, windup birds. Polish the temple mirrors, used to bathe captured soldiers in radiant sunlight until they go blind and mad. Only those blessed with true hollowness of spirit are initiated as Azathoth devotees.

Flee to Machu Picchu, abandoned mountaintop estate of Pachacuti, after the siege of Cusco and the Spanish conquest. Reproduce through parthenogenesis. Live in solitude, handing down the secrets of Azathoth to their clone daughters, for the next four hundred years.

Led by Yanakilla.

Blind. Wrinkled. Ancient. Impossible to say how old she is. Huddled in a shawl. Dead black liquid eyes. Cobweb-light hair. Sees with her hands. Always knows where you’re standing. Quicker than you expect.

Use the intihuatana ritual stone to open gates to other worlds.

Arcturus, Celeano, Noachian Mars. Starry portals gaping in the sky above the jungle valleys. Changing with the seasons - certain places and moments in time accessible only at the winter solstice or during a lucky conjugation of Jupiter and Mars. Entities squirming through. The Virgins of the Sun adopt them as pets and husbands - create their own private extraterrestrial zoo.

Hiram Bingham III.

Grandson of the first man to introduce Christianity to Hawaii. Born and raised in Honolulu. Joins the Freemasonic Skull-and-Bones Club at Yale - masturbates in a coffin, worships the lawyer goddess Eulogia, prostrates himself before Martin van Buren’s chattering skull in a windowless neo-Gothic tomb.

Becomes professor of Latin American history. Inspired by a Lemurian stone map given to his grandfather by Queen Ka’ahumana to organise the 1911 Yale Peruvian Expedition.

Led to Machu Picchu by fat alcoholic peasant farmer Melchor Arteaga. Meets the Virgins. Falls in love.

Returns to Connecticut. Divorces his wife. Marries Pariwana, daughter of Yanakilla and a Martian sorn with shameful inclinations. Bright eyes. Perpetual smile. Almost-translucent skin. Heirloom cloak of feathers. Introduced as a pure-blooded criollo girl from an old conquistador family to his snooty New Haven friends.

Gets himself elected to the Senate to replace incumbent Frank Brandegee, whose suicide is unexplained. Appointed by Calvin Coolidge to the President’s Aircraft Board. Plans the future of American aviation policy. Oversees the cover-up and salvage for experimental purposes of several New Mexico UFO crashes by J. Edgar Hoover’s Investigation Bureau. Dubbed “the Flying Senator” by the press.

Sent back to Machu Picchu in 192X on behalf of the US government to initiate diplomatic contact with whatever variety of alien life seems most amenable to the promotion of American national interests. Now camped out among the ruins with a detachment of soldiers. Climbs up to Yanakilla’s hut on Huayna Picchu every morning to experiment with portals and pay homage to the sun.

Discovered strange engines in the cavernous Temple of the Moon on the far side of the mountain. Has put army engineers in charge of operating these.

Watchers on the hilltops. Mexican-American Sergeant Rafael Carrasco plays cards with Georgian Zebulon Finn in a guardhouse by the side of the winding road that leads up from Aguas Calientes, the small railway workers’ encampment in the jungle valley of the Urabamba at the bottom of the hill.

Both have been warned in strong terms not to touch the Virgins. Both uneasy. Not sure what goes on up there. Zebulon, who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, thinks the ruins are Satanic - would explode them if he could.

Alien life escapes into the Sacred Valley of the Incas, to the southeast, between Machu Picchu and Cusco. Terrorizing peasants. Preying on stray llamas. Each farmhouse has its oddly-shaped potato - idol of Axomamma, the potato goddess. Muttered prayers for protection. Candles burn before retablos - boxed dioramas of saints.

Polygonal crystal hive minds who communicate through flickering heat rays that etch runes onto your skin. Fungus that hijacks the condor nervous system and turns the bird’s ribcage into a hollow nest of slimy wasps. Lonely white Martian ape haunting the Inca ruins at Ollantaytambo, fed by a small boy who thinks it’s his only friend.

Shards of the impossible colour ulfire lodging in the brains of artists - everything they paint turns to dust. Extra organs looking for a host - neck nodules that make you telepathic, heart-burrowing tendril that increases your capacity for love. Vampiric shivering artichoke gremlins with needles for fingers and leeches for hair. Packs of dogsized kangaroo rats with rotting fleshless faces and wicked backwards teeth who clamp on and don’t let go.

La Uma - the Witch’s Head. Bulging eyes. Teeth too big for her mouth. Vermicelli hair - actually thousands of little tendrils she can walk on. Deterred by cacti - hair catches in the thorns. Harmless. Just wants to scare you. Worshipped by clan of curandera witches who believe she has power they can use. They gather on dark hillsides and in Cusco’s Almudena Cemetery, sacrificing chickens and complaining when she doesn’t show up.

Matai Thang, the Holy Thern. Lord of the Black Martians. Permanently surprised expression on his face - artifact of his biology that in no way expresses his true feelings. Has established a court at Vilcabamba, the Plain of the Spirits, decrepit capital of the neo-Inca state, where Tupac Amaru held out for decades after the Spanish conquest. Worships a round egg. Gathering rebels to his cause.

Master of the Ninth Ray. Brokering a deal where he trades the secret of cosmic teleportation to the US government in exchange for material support. Intends to reactivate Manco Capac’s satellite laser cannons, launched into orbit sometime in the 1200s during an abortive military standoff with the Serpent Men, and hold the world to ransom. Would-be galactic conqueror. The soft world of humanity is made for him to rule.

Julio C. Tello. Quechua anthropologist. Director of the Museum of Peruvian Archaeology, a cluttered and disorganised collection of pre-Columbian artifacts in a few back rooms of the Magdalena Palace. Excavated the Paracas necropolis. Mild-mannered. Collects trepanned and ritually deformed skulls.

Pedro Zulen. Assistant professor of literature at the University of San Marcos. Anarchist. Librarian. Has tuberculosis - haunted by poor health. Painfully shy. Won’t look you in the eye. Students love him. Corresponds with Bertrand Russell. Teaches popular course on psychology and logic.

Invites Tello out for a drink at Morris’ Bar. Wants to show him a cool old book he’s found in the San Marcos library archives.

A theological manuscript by Francisco de la Cruz, former university rector, burnt at the stake for alumbrado heresy during the grand auto-da-fé of 1578. Inspired by the Pistis Sophia and the Borborite Scriptures. Advances the hypothesis that the Inca emperor Pachacuti was heir to the bloodline of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ.

Found a few days later in his office, stabbed to death. Manuscript missing.

Night janitor saw a woman exit the library building. Face concealed by a silk mantle. One eye peeping through. Wrapped from head to toe in fabric. Voluminous skirts. Satin shoes. Holding a bloody dagger. Vanished into the shadows before he could get close.

Zulen’s notes full of references to historical Peruvian lunatic asylums. Pre-Columbian madness treatments - boring holes in skulls to let the demons out.

Jorge Guillermo Leguía. Head of the Faculty of Letters. Oversees Philosophy and Language. Zulen’s boss. President Augusto Leguía’s nephew. Appointed to replace the exiled Christian socialist Victor Belaúnde. Keen to prove his loyalty. Father German (El Tigre) established the El Frontón prison for regime enemies - sent to die in Panama after publicly criticising his brother’s unconstitutional re-election bid.

Archive curator. Grants access only to scholars whose work promotes Peruvian cultural integrity. Has written at length on metaphysical aesthetics. Incessantly quotes Henri Bergson’s theory of the elan vital and his Matter and Memory, which posits that the brain can have absolute knowledge of the spiritual world. Developing a system to scientifically measure Beauty, enabling the creation of a maximally beautiful object.

Pays Tello a special visit to dissuade him from further investigation. Leans on the police - official position is that Zulen’s murder was a theft gone wrong.

Can be followed. Connections to Peruvian criollo aristocracy not hard to track. Regularly visits the Casa de Aliaga - always leaves in a good mood.

Manco Capac. First Inca monarch. Makes contact with the Zeta Reticulans using lost Lemurian technology sometime around 1200. Opens diplomatic relations. Negotiates for a wife - Mama Ocllo, full-blooded grey alien, with whom he founds a powerful dynasty of extraterrestrial hybrids. Masters antigravity. Builds soldiers from living liquid gold.

Pachacuti. First Inca emperor. Convert to old Zeta Reticulan heresy. Self-proclaimed avatar of sun god Inti, whose cult is a front for worship of the living singularity Azathoth. Wise and noble ruler. End goal is the destruction of all life on Earth.

Inca monarchs mummified upon their deaths. Kept in storage bins below the Qorikancha - the Temple of the Sun. Paraded in Cuzco plaza on special occasions. ‘‘It was customary,” wrote the chronicler Pedro Pizarro, “for the dead to visit one another. And they held great dances and debaucheries. And sometimes the dead went to the house of the living. And sometimes the living came to the house of the dead.’’

Spanish magistrate Polo de Ondegardo appointed governor of Cuzco in 1558. Makes telepathic contact with Pachacuti’s mummy.

Carts the mummies back to Lima. Stores them in the morgue of the Hospital Real de San Andrés. Founds Gnostic Illuminati cult devoted to their worship. Recruits acolytes from the Peruvian elite.

Hermilio Valdizán. Psychiatrist. Author of such books as Defend Yourself From Madness!, Sexual Perversions In Primitive Peruvians, Anatomists Of The Colony and Mental Alienation In The Indian Race. Active in the Mental Hygiene Movement. Director of the Victor Larco Herrera National Asylum for the Insane.

Honorio Delgado. Valdizán’s loyal sidekick. Presides over the asylum’s daily operations. Bullies the nurses. Pallid and sickly. Obsessed with cleanliness. Won’t touch an object handled by a stranger until it’s been scrubbed with bleach. Opposed to masturbation - sees its malign influence everywhere he looks.

Both men are Azathoth devotees.

San Andres Hospital long associated with mad anatomists of San Marcos Medical School. Mummies transferred along with lunatics to Cercado Asylum in 1859, then to Herrera in 1918. Cult has been feeding souls of madwomen for centuries to Pachacuti and his royal brethren - transforming them into “grey sisters”, soulless Azathoth servants who instantly shrivel and die if their faces are seen.

Cesar Moro. Surrealist poet. Rigid stare. Author of The Sulphur Spectacles and The Turtle On Horseback. Just got back from Paris. Spends a lot of time at the asylum, teaching art classes to the mentally ill. Writes down the stuff they scrawl on walls. Describes his chosen profession as “repairer of pink machines”.

Tipped Zulen off to the location of the de la Cruz book. Hoping to recruit him. Now trying to cover his tracks. Will be in trouble if the cult leaders find out.

Isabel de Jesus. Holy woman. Lives in a Daughters of Charity convent on the former site of San Andres Hospital. Rarely seen. Views the world only from an enclosed balcony.

Venerated by the Lima poor. Capable of bilocation - manifests at weddings and the bedsides of dying men. Has attained such a high level of divine knowledge that nothing she does can be sinful. Encourages her devotees to mortify their flesh - rolling naked in needles, bathing in freezing water, rubbing hot peppers into their mucous membranes. Sleeps two hours a night. Wears a spiked silver crown.

Travels at night through the Lima catacombs. Leads the other nuns in grotesque orgies with the elderly friars of the Convent of Santo Domingo, who impose obscene penances that she blissfully accepts. Archbishop Emilio Lisson presides over Black Masses with her body as the altar in the Palacio de Torre Tagle, baroque mansion and main headquarters for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Entertains aristocrats. Eugenia de Aliaga, charming society hostess, descended from conquistadors, whose family have lived in the Casa de Aliaga for sixteen generations and still keep its antique torture chamber in good working order. José de la Riva-Agüero y Osma, Marquis of Aulestia, polymath and transvestite who’s trying and failing to start a radical Catholic youth movement in the style of Charles Maurras. Ántero Aspíllaga, elderly sugar millionaire with impeccable manners who hasn’t given up on his dream of being President one day.

Pachacuti’s daughter. Heir to the Inca throne.

Catacombs beneath the asylum full of undead stillbirths, fathered by royal mummies on anonymous lunatics and nuns. Twenty-foot piebald maggot is daughter of La Perrichola, eighteenth-century actress and viceroy’s mistress - Pachacuti visited her as the Lord of Miracles, patron saint of Peru, and convinced her she was blessed.

Once a year the world’s greatest matadors gather at the Acho Bullring to compete for the Golden Scapular of the Lord of Miracles.

The Little Lizard. The Caliph of Cordoba. The Fat Pope. The Salamanca Kid. Playing to the crowd in their golden suits. Preparing to take on the most dangerous fighting bulls in the world.

Isabel has publicly announced she will marry this year’s winner.

Christ told her in a dream that she’s blessed with eternal purity - will remain a virgin no matter how often she has sex. She requires a mortal father for the Negative Messiah. The Black Son of the Black Sun.

Karim Tabbouche. Algerian pimp, forger and confidence man. Drugged in a Marseille brothel - woke up next to a strangled countess with cops knocking on the door. Sentenced to life in Devil’s Island, the notorious prison colony in French Guiana. Built a raft. Escaped. Lived in the jungle as a butterfly collector for six months. Recaptured. Escaped again. Made it to Peru. Still wants the man who framed him dead.

STR 0 - DEX 0 - ACA 0 - TEC 2 - CHA 3 - CON 2

Specialties - con artistry, the criminal underworld.

Bill Motley. Octopus catcher from Holetown, Barbados. Deters sharks with garlic. Came to Peru as a naturalist’s assistant. Only survivor of the Henden Expedition to the Ucayali River, all other party members having variously drowned or been eaten by ants. Good with animals. Kind. Enormous. Convinced the Lost City of Z waits for him somewhere in the jungle. Needs to get the funds together for another trip.

STR 3 - DEX 0 - ACA 2 - TEC 2 - CHA 0 - CON 0

Specialties - life science, wilderness survival.

Expedita da Silva. Cangoceira bandit queen from the thorny hinterlands of Penambuco. Born to followers of the preacher Conselheiro. Parents hacked to death by yellow-eyed mercenary during the Canudos War. Grew up in a Recife orphanage. Turned to a life of crime. Deadly with her Mauser rifle and her long peixeira knife. Lost her gang to a police ambush in Juazeiro do Norte - now on the run.

STR 2 - DEX 3 - ACA 0 - TEC 2 - CHA 0 - CON 0

Specialties - knife fighting, gunplay.

Rafael Belmonte. Retired matador. Nicknamed El Gallito. Developed unique bullfighting techniques, such as the espantada, which consists of simply running away. Fled Madrid in disgrace after an enraged bull, which he failed to control, jumped the stands and killed three spectators during an exhibition match before the King of Spain. Not as nimble as he used to be. Secretly yearns to get back into the ring.

STR 2 - DEX 3 - ACA 0 - TEC 0 - CHA 2 - CON 0

Specialties - evading danger, animal handling.

Fernando Wong. Huaquero - grave robber. Migrant grandfather laboured in coastal guano mines, handed down life lesson - “don’t be poor.” Broke into desert pyramids across northern Peru. Sold a fanged ceramic effigy of the Moche god “Decapitator” to an LA film producer, whose headless corpse was found in a swimming pool three weeks later. Hiding out from studio detectives who want their money back.

STR 0 - DEX 2 - ACA 3 - TEC 0 - CHA 0 - CON 2

Specialities - archaeology, the black market.

Miguel Pardo. Self-proclaimed “gaucho poet”. Studied imaginary languages in Paris with Aleister Crowley and Xul Solar. Expelled from the Florida Group in Buenos Aires for drinking too much wine and insulting Norah Borges. Trapped for six months in the literary catacombs beneath the Illuminated Block, wrangling bookworms to survive. Terrified of labyrinths. Carries a facón fighting knife. Never ridden a horse.

STR 0 - DEX 0 - ACA 3 - TEC 0 - CHA 2 - CON 2

Specialties - language, bohemia.

Born in Salt Lake City to a polygamist Welsh Mormon bishop. Ran a flower shop. Leading Knight in Elks Lodge No. 85. Fled Utah following his brother Burton’s untimely death in a gambling-hall shootout.

Spent a decade working as a railroad payroll manager in Cerro de Pasco, an American copper-mining colony in highland Peru. Founded a gambling saloon with Nebraskan card sharp Nelson Rounsevell (currently operating The Panama Times). Active amateur bullfighter. Joined the ‘Roof of the World’ Masonic Lodge.

Quit under a cloud following the mysterious death of mining engineer John Tinker Glidden, whose battered corpse was found at the bottom of a thirty-foot shaft shortly after his petition to import five hundred Japanese workers was denied by the Peruvian government. Moved to Lima. Started Morris’ Bar.

Locked into a vicious mixologists’ duel with Duncan Nicols, of San Francisco’s Bar Exchange, whose pisco punch is famous among Pacific sailors. Developing an even better cocktail called the “pisco sour” - jealously guards its recipe from Duncan’s spies. Needs one last ingredient (Angostura bitters) to get it right.

Morris’ Bar. 847 Calle Bozo.

In a narrow arcade section of Jirón de la Unión, between the Hotel Bolivar and the intellectual-haunted Palais Concert cafe. South of Government Palace and the Lima Cathedral. North of the Teatro Colón, home to vaudeville and zarzuela light opera, and the Edificio Rimac, a recently completed Second Empire apartment complex occupied by lawyers, doctors, Yankee mining executives and futurist ghosts.

Always cloudy. Never rains. Wrinkled old virgins in black mantillas glare down from ornate balconies. Facades painted dull yellow, brick red, olive green, dirty white. Warm fog stifles lanterns. Melancholy Quechua Indians behind portable grills - stuffed potatoes, skewered cow heart, sweet potato fritters in molasses syrup. Empanadas with aji pepper sauce. Lime-marinated raw shark. Fruit stalls - lucuma, aguaje, custard apple.

Bar’s green door easy to miss. Pedro Ciego sits in the dry gutter with his back to the opposite wall, wrapped in a poncho, leafing through his Bible, rattling a few sols in a skull-shaped ceramic cup. Left arm horribly mangled in some forgotten industrial accident. Toots atonally on his pan pipes. Recites scripture from memory - likes the Book of Isaiah. Battered bowler hat. Not actually blind. Keeps track of who comes in.

Polished wooden bar. Bowls of salted roasted corn. Bottled pisco, aguardiente, mezcal, rum. Inka Cola and chicha morada made from purple corn. Cigarillo smoke. Quiet conversation. Ceiling fan struggles to circulate the air. Creole waltzes play on scratchy gramophone. Live music on weekends - tables cleared to make a dance floor. Mercedes Yoshimoto Y Las Máquinas Rosas on trumpet and guitar.

Shotgun below the bar. Dusty gilt-edged mirror spiderwebbed with cracks. Foggy oil painting of Bolivar on horseback by the lavatory door. Jivaro shrunken head dangling by the hair above the cash drawer to scare off petty thieves. Lips sewn shut. Red hair. Teenage staff affectionately call it Hans - claim it belonged to a Lutheran missionary who spent his life endeavouring to introduce the Indians to Christ.

Gordito. Scarlet macaw. Frequently escapes his cage. Likes to perch atop, and shit all over, an antique wooden globe kept at the bar’s far end. Hates fat people and blondes - spills their drinks and steals their hats. Extensive obscene multilingual vocabulary - screeches “suck my cock” and “concha de tu madre” at passing nuns. Beloved by everyone. Knows a Qhapaq Simi word of power that can instantly shrivel any human soul.

Magda Portal.

Thin. Smokes like a chimney. Wears severe black dresses. Sits at a corner table. Nurses a pisco sour. Sketches customers. Copies La Crónica articles into her gatorskin-bound journal. Angrily strikes out lines that displease her.

Once famously refused to accept the Juegos Florales poetry prize from the hands of strongman president Augusto Leguía. Progressive. Atheistic. Watched by the police. Determined to win a better future for her infant daughter.

Has been waiting for somebody like you to come along.

Victor Haya de la Torre.

Founding member of the Trujillo Bohemians, an elite student literary club also known as El Grupo Norte. Studied occult texts with Surrealist poet César Vallejo, author of Los Heraldos Negros, now living in dire poverty in a Paris slum. Mentored in Lima by Ricardo Palma, the famous “beggar librarian”, who devoted his life to reconstructing the National Library of Peru after it was sacked by the Chilean Army in 1881.

1923. Lima Archbishop Emilio Lisson conducts a rite to officially consecrate the Peruvian Republic to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, sparking student protests in which two people die. De La Torre gets arrested. Sent to El Frontón Prison, on Dead Man’s Island, a waterless dust speck and former pirate haven off Lima’s barren coast. Goes on hunger strike. Never speaks of what he sees among the rabble in its rat-infested cells.

Deported to Panama. Finds his way to Mexico City. Meets Communist mystic and high priest of Atlantis Jose Vasconcelos, paramour of Soviet Ambassador Alexandra Kollontai, author of The Cosmic Race. Encounters Vasconcelos’ radical vision of an Ibero-American hybrid master race, a Hispanic Renaissance based on Atlantean teachings and a Universal City in the Amazon jungle which will liberate the Saxon-governed world.

Controls the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance from his Mexican hideout. Working to replace Leguía’s military government. Convinced Latin America is dominated by an ancient Satanic Templar conspiracy. Potentially right.

Morris’ Bar is an APRA safehouse. Trapdoor below carpet. Secret basement with a printing press, stacks of radical literature, guns. Tunnel to skull-festooned Lima catacombs that link all major historical sites - converging beneath the San Francisco Basilica, allowing secret access to Government Palace. Explorers disappear. Full extent unmapped.

Portal in charge of recruiting intelligence agents. May need you to prove you’re not a cop.

All kinds of people swing by Morris’ Bar. The guestbook records their names.

Richard Halliburton. Globetrotting adventure journalist. Friend to the last Emperor of China. Once swam through the Panama Canal. Planning a biplane flight around the world. Optimistic. Loves taking stupid risks and re-enacting historical exploits - Robinson Crusoe’s island sojourn, Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. Entangled in complex forbidden romance with actor Ramon Navarro. Has an eye for beautiful men.

Alfred Kroeber. Director of Berkeley’s Anthropology Museum. Studied under Franz Boas. Psychoanalysed Ishi, last known Yahi Indian, in attempt to measure the limits of pre-technological consciousness. Working with Quechua archaeologist Julio C. Tello on excavations in Paracas and Nazca. Runs experiments to prove that any human can be converted by physical stimuli to Einstein-level genius.

Carlos Gomez Sanchez. Cerro de Pasco lawyer. Founder of the Pulacayo Mining Corporation. Has been trapped for years in fiendishly intricate legal proceedings with Bolivian tin magnate Simón Patiño, the “Andean Rockefeller”, over the ownership of a mysterious metal object embedded in a mountainside near Potosi. Nervous. Constantly dodging assassins who may exist only in his head.

Felipe Pinglo Alva. Composer of waltzes. Born into Barrios Altos poverty. Plays the guitar backward. Occasional patron of Barrio Chino opium dens. Keeps a pierced stone in his pocket - only remnant of an oracle monolith smashed by Francisco de Ávila in 1610. Found it as a child in the Jirón Ancash gutter. Tasked with musically soothing Pachacámac, Incan creator god who crushes mountains in his sleep.

Clara Philips. “The Tiger Woman”. Texan Hollywood chorus girl. One of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties. Murdered bank teller Alberta Meadows with a 15c claw hammer. Sentenced to life in prison. Escaped with aid of Jesse Carson, journalist who covered her trial. Recaptured in Honduras. Escaped Omoa Castle. Fled south. Half a dozen criminal paramours. Jealous of their affections. Very cute.

Dean Ivan Lamb. Flying mercenary. “The Incurable Filibuster”. Staged history’s first dogfight over Sonora during the Mexican Revolution. Shot down by Red Baron over Arras in 1917. Commanded air squadron in the Paraguayan Civil War of 1922. Obnoxious aviator drinking buddies. Elmer J. Faucett - runs the only commercial flights to Iquitos. Carmela Combe - wrecked three planes, saving up to buy a fourth.

Seiguma Kitsutani. Big man in the Japanese Colony. Oversees the tanomoshi credit union. Lends money to barbers, grocers, cafe owners and radio repairmen. Runs a thriving import business. Lives among diplomats at Chalet No. 3 in the Quinta Hereen apartment block. Pet condor La Pochola eats out of his hand. Working off his debt to the Black Ocean Society by spying on the Reds. No talent for espionage at all.

José Carlos Mariátegui. Greatest Marxist scholar in the Americas. Working on his Seven Interpretive Essays On Peruvian Reality. Wants to destroy the Western individual spirit and revive the Inca command economy, thus guaranteeing prosperity for all. One-legged - uses a wheelchair to get around. Technically supposed to be under house arrest. Runs the Minerva publishing house - puts out endless Red magazines.

Building a time machine in the basement of his Jirón Washington home, with help from his wife Anna Chiappe and Soviet funding. Wants to supply Atahualpa with automatic rifles. Unclear if this could work.