The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes

             
Fashions come and go in literature, as in all the other arts. Some leave their mark; some are forgotten, together with the writers who created them. But one thing is certain, whatever else changes. There will always be a welcome for the good, old-style, traditional storyteller, whether he peddles his craft round the campfire, in the banquet hall, through the printing press, the TV tube, the video cassette
—
or with the aid of some technology as yet unborn.

             
One of the major influences on my own writing career was the great Irish fabulist Lord Dunsany. I do not deny
—
indeed, I proudly proclaim—that his ingenious Mr.
Jorkens
was in no small way responsible for my own
Tales from the White Hart.
The characteristics of a good
Jorkens
story are that it should take place in some unusual but vividly described locale, that it should be incapable of disproof—despite frequent attempts by its auditors
—
and that it should cast grave doubts on the commonly accepted view of the universe.

             
Lord Dunsany died in 1957, but a part at least of his mantle has descended upon Sterling Lanier. This is not to say that Sterling's "Brigadier Ffellowes" is a carbon copy of Mr.
Jorkens
(he is in almost every way a much more respectable person) and is always in a position to buy a drink for himself. But when I came upon the Brigadier in the pages of the magazine
Fantasy and Science Fiction,
I felt again a
frisson
of wonder and excitement I had missed for a couple of decades.

             
It is a great pleasure, therefore, to have all these stories collected into one volume, and I look forward to reading them again. However, 1 do not propose to do so when I am alone in an isolated house on a stormy night, when the low-hanging moon is intermittently obscured by what may, or may not, be clouds ...

             
So don't blame me; you have received fair warning.

Arthur C. Clarke

New York? November 24, 1971

             
Mason Williams was in great form that evening. Or so an admirer would have described him, if he'd had any admirers. A lot of us in the club were still trying to find out how he'd ever been elected in the first place. The election committee, of course, will never say anything, but we were pretty sure they had blundered and were now pretending not to notice it.

             
Anyhow, Williams had just come back from Africa. He had bought himself a complete safari while there, the iced champagne and hot bath kind, and gotten himself a lot of stuffed animal heads, also purchased, if our suspicions were correct.

             
"Yes, I went alone," he brayed, so loudly that you could hear him across the library. "Real hunting, just me and the white hunter, two 'pros,' if I do say so."

             
"Since the hunter was being paid, he couldn't refuse to go along, now could he?" said someone in a perfectly audible aside. Williams got red, but refused to take notice. He was going to tell us all about it if it killed him.

             
It was pretty bad. I'm no hunter but I knew enough to know Williams knew absolutely nothing. Bits of his tale filtered through despite my attempts to read a paper.

             
"Used a Bland .470 express at three hundred yards on that baby!
—
Have to watch your step with Kudu—The hunter told me that Grant's would be a near record
—
Slept with loaded guns because lions were prowling around
—
Et cetera, et cetera."

             
On and on it went. No one was really listening but we were all damned if we'd allow Williams to drive us out of the library. Besides being warm and
cosy
there, it was a foggy, November night and the city streets outside were dim and dirty.

             
Brigadier Ffellowes' even voice cut in neatly during one of Williams' infrequent pauses for breath, and we all sat up and felt considerably more cheerful. Our retired English artilleryman had made one of his usual unobtrusive entrances and was toasting himself, back to the big fireplace, a gentle smile on his ruddy face.

             
"I wonder if you glimpsed a place I visited once, Williams?" he said in a musing tone. "A tribe of dark, hawk-faced men lived there in an ancient, ruined city. They were ruled by a white, veiled priestess who made claim to some incredible age. Why, it must have been in the very area you were hunting over."

             
Williams had never read
She,
or much else except market sheets, but this was too raw even for him.

             
"I suppose you know all about Africa," he said furiously. "After all, you British used to practically run the place until the natives got wise and ran you out. Probably you got some great sun and sand African hunting stories, too, General." (He knew Ffellowes hated being called 'General.')

             
"Why not give us one, Pal?" he went on. "A lousy American businessman can't hardly compete with a real pucker say-
hib
, eh
wot
?" Williams is a horrible man, honestly.

             
Ffellowes never batted an eye. Nothing infuriated Williams more than the realization that nothing he could say seemed to bother the Englishman. Now the Brigadier kept his serene smile as he drew himself an armchair and sat down near us. Very tangentially, he somehow managed to make a circle of chairs, so that Williams was left standing outside it and had to wedge himself half under the
mantlepiece
so as to even hear.

             
"I only once ever went on what might be called a safari," he said, "And my chief memory is not of heat, oddly enough. It's of cold, cold and mist, weather not unlike tonight, don't you know. But the mist was both thicker and wetter, as well as cleaner, of course. And the quiet was nothing like the city. Oh, that quiet!"

             
He was silent for a moment. The faint hooting of traffic was the only sound in the room. Suddenly, Ffellowes' gift for dominating a group had started operating again. His precise, level speech resumed abruptly.

             
"I was up in the Aberdares in December of
'39, more because no one else was handy than for any special skill of my own, as will become apparent.

             
"Any of you know them? Well, they are a range of forested hills in Kenya that go quite high in some places and lie about fifty miles west of Mount Kenya itself. There is heavy forest up to eleven thousand feet in many places, and surprising amounts of big game, bongo, some Cape buffalo and even elephant. Leopard, of course, but no lions, unless poor
Gandar
Dowar
was right and an unknown, small, spotted species used to live there.

             
"Into this area I had been sent by His Majesty's Government to look for a missing man. His name was Guido Bruckheller and he had an Austrian name but was an Italian zoologist, a Ph.D. from Bolzano originally, I believe. He apparently had done some excellent work on tropical rodents as disease vectors. Out of my line by miles. But he was in the books as a most dangerous Axis agent. The fellow spoke a dozen African languages and was a real bushman to boot. He had been staying in Nairobi, watched carefully, but as a nominal Italian citizen, no more than that, since Mussolini was technically neutral at this time.

             
"Well, it was the period of the so-called '
phoney
war' in France. Poland was dished and we were simply waiting for the onslaught. I was on my way back from a certain job in India when I got orders to side-track to Nairobi and at once. Bruckheller had vanished and supposedly a trained Intelligence man was wanted to follow up and find him.

             
"I found the local security people dithering all over the map. They had the wind up badly and seemed to feel this chap could start a second Senussi uprising or something unless he was caught up with promptly. Personally, mind you, I thought it all a lot of rubbish. One man is just that, one man, and there had been no reports of any trouble among the tribes in western Kenya. Still, the fellow
had
vanished and he was supposed to be hot stuff. The locals could have handled it
better, I thought.

             
"There was only one clue as to where he had gone. Two white farmers, out hunting about their farms on the Chania River, thought they'd seen a white man and some natives cross a clearing much higher up the slope at dawn three days earlier. Since the colony was now at war and most of the able-bodied whites were gone, they'd reported it to the local police post at Nyeri, whence it had come in to Headquarters Nairobi. This was absolutely the only report from the whole of Kenya of anyone or anything out of place and so we had to assume it was our lead.

             
"Since I didn't know the territory, some local talent was needed. What I got was an elderly major of the local volunteer defense force who'd been with
Meinertzhagen
in Tanganyika during World War I and a middle-aged, one-armed Boer farmer from up north somewhere who said he'd come for the fun of it. Their names were Sizenby and Krock. Krock, the Boer, made very bad jokes, starting with
'I
am a
young
Krock not an English 'old crock,'
neen
?'
We also got six King's African Rifles under a sixty-year-old Kikuyu sergeant named Asoto, who stood five foot six and weighed two hundred pounds, all of it muscle.