Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman

A Letter Arrives from Deepest Africa

It was the spring of 1906. Another warm, hazy Edwardian summer lay just over the horizon. Gone were the harsh winter months with seas of fog so thick a gondola would be of more use on London’s streets than a carriage. In my pocket was a communication posted some six months earlier from the interior of the African Continent. It contained a stupendous invitation to come to the Congo to set up a medical hut among the Pygmies. It was signed by a P. J. Pretorius. I marvelled at the many pairs of feet and forked sticks which brought the letter from the depths of Ruanda to Mombassa in British East Africa and thence by Royal Mail to my consulting rooms in Marylebone. There had been a time in my boyhood when the map of the world was full of blank spaces. Now only the heart of Africa and the Amazon rainforest remained.

I left my premises for the calm of Regent’s Park and found a bench looking out over the boating-lake. Gentlemen of leisure were taking their morning walk. I was gratified to note a few strollers carrying copies of The Return of Sherlock Holmes, a selection of my cases first published in The Strand Magazine with original illustrations by Mr. Paget. Other visitors sat reading magazines on benches along the quiet pathways.

The dramatic invitation to the Congo had arrived at an opportune time. For the first time in decades I was free to control my own fate. My former comrade-in-arms Sherlock Holmes had announced his retirement three years earlier following the débacle of the Dead Boer at Scotney Castle, a taboo never mentioned. Europe’s greatest private consulting detective had simply declared a wish to forego the ‘interesting little problems’ so plentifully presented by the political, financial, and trading capital of the world in favour of spending his remaining years tending bees on a remote farm in the Sussex countryside.

On his retirement Holmes explicitly forbade me to prepare the case-notes on the Dead Boer for publication. Expelled from a world of murder, swamp adders, daring burglaries and ancient rituals, I abandoned the pen for a blunter instrument, the scalpel. My days were now spent at my surgery removing infected tonsils or treating Lord E. for the pox for the umpteenth time. I sorely missed Holmes’s high-pitched blasts on his cab whistle followed by an exhilarating leap into a nimble hansom while he shouted ‘Cabbie, Paddington Railway Station - the slope entrance. Half a sovereign for yourself if you can catch the 9.15’. There had only been one adventure together in the last twelve months, our journey to the Balkans to investigate the mysterious fate of Lieserl, the half-Serbian daughter of a young physicist by the name of Albert Einstein.

Pretorius’s invitation revived an old craving of mine to wander in distant and dangerous lands. I yearned to trek through the great forests where the upper waters of the Congo River rise, so vividly described in Conrad’s wild story Heart of Darkness. ‘The Congo is a mighty big river ... resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land’.

‘Its tail lost in the depths of the land,’ I repeated in wonder.

Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines was another fabulous tale that fired my dreams of Africa: ‘Yes,’ answered Sir Henry, ‘it is far. But there is no journey upon earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is nothing that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are no deserts he may not cross...’

My letter accepting Pretorius’s invitation completed, I went to bed that night in high anticipation. Disease, like crime, is a code waiting to be broken. I would set about my work on the Equator in exactly the way Holmes approached the circumstances, life history and character of suspects in a crime.

The next several days would be filled with frenetic activity. A visit to Thomas Cook and Sons on Oxford Street to check on shipping schedules, followed by the Army & Navy stores for clothing and yards of carbolised bandages, cotton wadding and medicines. I would have to suffer an uncomfortable hour or two at the dentist to ensure my teeth were in the best of health.

Four weeks later, however, matters took an abrupt turn. Rather than the Suez Canal, Swahili and the forest giraffe I was to find myself starting on a thousand details of life at the heart of the Ottoman Empire.

The case of the Sword of Osman started on the very day I left the surgery to walk the two miles or so to St. Mary Axe to reserve my boat-ticket for Africa. I was well into my stride and approaching Madame Tussaud’s when a messenger waving a telegram drew up alongside on a bicycle, like a coracle berthing at a pier. My locum had given the lad directions of my intended route together with a description of my attire. I commended his initiative and sent him on his way with a thrupenny bit and a push.

The telegram was from Holmes. It read, ‘Dear Watson, if you can throw physic to the dogs for an hour or two I would appreciate meeting at the stone cross at Charing Cross railway station tomorrow noon. I have an assignation with a bird-lover at the Stork & Ostrich House in the Regents Park which has excited my curiosity. Yrs. S.H.’

Truly delighted as I was at hearing from Holmes the message left me puzzling. There was nothing to explain why such a humble invitation would excite Holmes’s or anyone else’s curiosity. Perhaps long sterile weeks lay behind him - he hoped against hope there was a fitting object for his special powers. I went back over the words carefully. His curiosity had been excited by an assignation at the Stork & Ostrich House in the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London. My former comrade was a world expert on classical ciphers. Was the telegram in code?

The idea Holmes would agree to an assignation at the Stork & Ostrich House in Regent’s Park was absurd. Did ‘Stork & Ostrich House’ stand for something more sinister - key-words warning me that what immediately preceded or followed was not to be taken at face value? Was there to be a final showdown with the evil Colonel Sebastian Moran in full view of Marabou storks?

I marched on to the shipping agents to order a commodious cabin for the journey to East Africa. I would get them to wangle me a guest room at the Mombassa Club on arrival.

Exactly on time Holmes emerged from the railway station. I had not seen him for almost a year. I regarded my friend as an Old Testament son of Anak, thrusting up through the schists and gneiss of ordinary mankind. A boxer and fencer, light in weight, powerful and enduring. The face was still clear-cut, the complexion ruddier than before, but he looked rather bent as he walked towards me, as though repeated exposure to the South Downs winters was doing him no good. The well-worn footpaths he followed, used for centuries by farmers, tradesmen and locals to get from one hamlet to another were wide open to the blasts of cold air sweeping up from the Seven Sisters. I grasped his hand warmly, saying, ‘I trust you are well?’

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Holmes replied. ‘This horse has pulled a heavy load a long way but I’m well looked after.’

He gave me a questing glance.

‘And your medical practice?’

‘As absorbing as ever.’

‘Ah yes,’ he responded, his grey eyes twinkling. ‘I always liked that about you. You blush when you lie.’

‘Unlike you,’ I reposted.

I realised how pleased I was to see my old friend again.

‘I note you still smoke the Arcadia mixture of your bachelor days!’ he observed. ‘There’s no mistaking that fluffy ash upon your coat.’

‘Is it true we are to visit the Zoological Gardens?’ I asked.

‘It is.’

‘The Stork & Ostrich House?’

‘The very spot,’ he assented, grinning at my perplexed look.

‘I should ask after your bees,’ I resumed. ‘How are the blighters?’

‘The past winter’s ceaseless wind and rain kept them - and me - penned indoors longer than usual,’ came the reply.

He stopped to light a cigarette in his familiar nonchalant manner and resumed, ‘...then one day, a sudden warmth brought out the blossom of the cherry plum. A gap in the rain - and there they were, above the hive, like a puff of smoke.’

I walked him towards a Double Brougham, listening politely to this unusually poetic disquisition. I could scarcely wait to impart my own vastly more exciting news but my comrade went on updating me with life on the Sussex Downs, even how he would label the jars of honey pilfered from the unwilling beasts.

By the time he finished, the cab had carried us almost to the top of Portland Place. Eagerly I told Holmes of my intention to remove myself from a world of fashionable ailments in which my principal advice to well-to-do women was to throw away their swan bill corsets. I would soon be on the High Seas - the Bay of Biscay, the Mediterranean Sea, in convoy through the Suez Canal and the Great and Small Bitter Lakes to the Indian Ocean, steaming southwards to one of the hottest and most humid places in the world. While the cab clattered on its final stretch to Regent’s Park I passed the Pretorius letter to Holmes.

He read the pages carefully without a change of expression.

‘Well, Watson,’ he remarked with no trace of a smile, ‘you wish to replace civilized days at the Gatwick Races and the Junior United Services Club with swamps and deadly scourges? I imagine a clearing in the Congo is one of the most absolutely infernal places of residence for a pair of solitary white men. Nevertheless, my dear friend, if you are intent on going, you must impress the natives. I shall insist that Thomas Cook - at my expense - supply you with at least a score of mules, half a dozen reception tents, kitchens and water-carriers.’

This was followed by a further silence. I prompted, ‘And your visit to the Zoological gardens?’

I was handed a letter on the headed notepaper of the Zoological Society dated the prior week. It began, ‘Dear Mr. Holmes, I beg you to forgive the temerity in writing to you without first a formal introduction. I do so à titre privé as Secretary of the Gardens of the Zoological Society, at the request of a member of the Society who wishes to meet you on a certain matter. He plans to publish a work of ornithology on seasonal visitors’ birdsong - the cuckoo, meadow pipits, spotted flycatcher, redstart, turtle dove and so on. He proposes to enquire into the movements of a rara avis reported on the South Downs. If you can be persuaded to return to London for an hour or two may I suggest a meeting at the Stork & Ostrich House here at the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park this coming Friday, at 2pm? A member of my staff will await you at the North Entrance at the quarter to. We would be greatly honoured if you would accept.’

The letter ended, ‘I am, with great truth and respect, sir, Your Excellency’s most obedient, humble servant, Peter Chalmers Mitchell FRS DSc LLD.’

I passed the letter back, saying ‘Well, Holmes, in all our years at Baker Street I don’t believe I heard you comment on the various squawks and screeches of our avian friends except the once, in Devon, to speculate whether the mallard quacks in regional dialects. Since you entered the life of a hermit you know how often I’ve tried to get you away from your bee-boxes and the solitude of the Downs for a day or two.’

Jokingly I added, ‘What of the interruption to your next opus, The Meadow-flower in Mesolithic Honey Cultures?’

His reply was patient but veering to the condescension of old.

‘Come, come, my dear chap, naturally I accepted. I accepted at once. Did you ever come across anything as ludicrous? Ornithological spies have infiltrated my few acres and heard birdsong scarcely known to mankind, like coming across a Mayan temple on the South Downs or a new element for the Periodic Table. It’s entirely preposterous. I suggest it’s a case which may prove to have something in it or may prove to have nothing, but which at the very least presents outré features as dear to you as they are to me.’

The prospect of an investigation had energised Holmes.

He continued, ‘Consider the words “Shall we say this coming Friday at 2pm?”. Note how he sets a time without offering an alternative.’

‘Setting a time to meet hardly seems outré,’ I retorted. ‘Not offering an alternative choice says what?’

‘That this bird chappie must have serious obligations which he can break for only a short while. The nameless member of the Zoological Society must be a man of consequence, of especial consequence, tied in some unknown way to the Capital. Why else invite me to meet in Regent’s Park - why not meet on my own territory, in the South Downs? Take cognizance of the hour. He suggests 2pm. If we are to be entertained by bird-song, why the afternoon? That’s the very time of day when birds do not sing. The warmer air fails to carry the sound as far or as loud as cooler morning air.’

Holmes turned his familiar deep-set eyes on me.

‘And why the Stork & Ostrich House - are such creatures famed for their contralto singing voices? My curiosity has been piqued. I want to know what lies behind this request.’

‘My dear Holmes,’ I protested. ‘I see you still can’t take anything in this world at face value! Does everything have to come under the scrutiny of a jaundiced eye and a ten-power magnifying glass? This request may be exactly what it says. After all, Sussex faces out on a vast Continent, and birds...’

An impatient wave stopped me in full flight.

‘Watson, old fellow, it may not turn out to have the excitement of the case of the Bulgarian Codex but something is afoot. I ask you, why does the writer of this letter point us to the Zoo’s North Entrance? Look at this!’

He thrust a square of paper at me headed ‘Visitors’ Plan of the Zoological Society’s Gardens’.

‘What of it, Holmes?’ I queried. ‘What am I to look at?’

‘Visitors are urged to follow the dotted line. Where do the dots commence?’

‘At the Main Entrance,’ I replied, perplexed. ‘Where else would they start?’

‘Exactly so!’ Holmes exclaimed triumphantly. ‘It says “Passengers should be dropped from their carriages at the Main Entrance”. I am invited to meet at the North Entrance, even though it’s much further from the Stork & Ostrich House.’

I frowned, still unconvinced.

‘What of the North Entrance?’ I questioned.

‘It can only mean our visitor wishes to remain incognito. The sighting of a rara avis on my bee-farm indeed. It’s equally likely our visitor will prove to be a rare bird too. That particular entrance leads us to the Regent’s Canal which we cross by a bridge and straight away take the tunnel under the Outer Circle. Surely that can only be to avoid photographers who spend their days lying in wait at the Main Entrance for visitors of high importance.

‘Incidentally,’ he added, ‘the suggestion of an opus on the meadow-flower in Mesolithic honey cultures may be a notable example of your pawky wit but one well worth my consideration.’