Elephant Honey

An adventure for Mombasa PCs, working for Hassan’s Emporium.

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.