Disquiet at Albany by N. M. Scott

signs of increased vitality and strength since visiting the island called Sumatra. Am I, a man of science and medicine, to wholly support such unnatural change in a man, else as I suspect some diabolical, un-Christian sorcery may be at work?
    ‘What are we to make of this, Holmes?’ said I, placing my coffee cup back on the tray in a state of continuing puzzlement.
    ‘The evidence mounts up, my dear fellow,’ said Holmes with a frown. ‘It is obvious to me Ethby Sands has given himself over to some dastardly medical experiment. His absence from Albany this last fortnight, the time spent in Norfolk holed up at Foxbury Hall bodes ill.’
    ‘You infer this group of Chinese led by Doctor Wu Xing, the alternative medicine crowd, may have succeeded in producing a viable serum that duplicates in modern terms the effects of the native potion of powdered bone?’
    ‘I do, Watson, I do old man. Come, we must make haste in a cab to the telegraph office. There is a person who above all others can enlighten us further concerning this peculiar case.’

14
    Alfred Russell Wallace
    Less than a week later, I recall as if yesterday, a slender, tall gentleman with a nut-brown complexion, sporting a long bushy beard and round wire-rimmed spectacles entered our rooms at Baker Street. He had been guided up the stairs by Mrs Hudson, who I could see was in complete awe of our visitor, and with good reason, for here in our modest bachelor apartment we now played host to the explorer and naturalist, the author of
The Malay Archipelago
, Alfred Russell Wallace; he who had been a close friend of Darwin and at great cost to his own health and personal finances had single-handedly explored some of the remotest islands on earth.
    It was a rare privilege indeed to receive his Panama hat and brolly and, once he was comfortably seated before a blazing fire in the grate, offer him a cigar from the coal scuttle, while Holmes poured us each a glass of whisky. My colleague had arranged this interview with the great man at very short notice, Wallace being down in London for the opening night of a new light opera at the Wimborne, Drury Lane, written of course by the lyricist Philip Troy and composer Christopher Chymes.
    We had ourselves been invited and were fortunate enough that same evening to attend, sharing a box with Wallace, his wife Annie and their daughter Violet and sons Herbert and William, who had come up from Cornwall specially and were staying for a day or two at the Langham. Once we were all settled, Holmes fastidiously refilled his pipe and, languidly stretching his long legs across the bearskin hearthrug, posed his first question of the evening.
    ‘I recall noting in your autobiography, Wallace, that you went down with a serious fever some time in 1858. You nearly lost your life due to malnutrition and the onset of a severe strain of malaria. You lay on your cot drifting in and out of consciousness for many days and nights in that time, but you received an unusual visitor, a shaman from the Indonesian island of Sumatra.’
    ‘To an explorer in the tropics, as I then was Mr Holmes, the unseen dangers of semi-starvation and disease are always present. I was at the time, you will recall, lying on a cot-bed in a palm-thatched house, dangerously ill, hallucinating, my feeble constitution unable to stave off a virulent bout of yellow fever. I must emphasise, gentlemen, that had it not been for the intervention of this native, an accomplished shaman, I believe I should have died and been lost to hoards of black ants, giant centipedes and carnivorous termites who abound in that region of the interior, and would certainly never have made it back to England alive.’
    ‘A shaman, you say,’ said I, taking notes in my little pocketbook.
    ‘Indeed, Doctor Watson, I had long known the Albverro of Seram, for instance, were renowned and powerful magicians and spirit guides. But it was a bird trader of all people with whom I had been doing business, who