unfamiliar story of the times: a young man of 'middle breeding' entering the Colonial Service, spending a number of years in a distant outpost, only to return to England far richer than when he left.
Sufficiently rich to be able to buy heavily into the Exchange during the last decade of the nineteenth century. A propitious time; the source of the current Fowler wealth.
One part of the answer.
Jeremy Fowler had made his connection in the Colonial Service.
Walter Piersall returned to Jamaica to look for the second part.
He studied, day by day, week by week, the recorded history of Jamaica for the year 1883. It was laborious.
And then he found it. 25 May, 1883.
A disappearance that was not given much attention insofar as small groups of Englishmen - hunting parties - were constantly getting lost in the Blue Mountains and tropic jungles, usually to be found by scouting parties of blacks led by other Englishmen.
As this lone man had been found.
Her Majesty's Recorder, Jeremy Fowler.
Not a clerk, but the official Crown Recorder.
Which was why his absence justified the space in the papers. The Crown Recorder was not insignificant. Not landed gentry, of course, but a person.
The ancient newspaper accounts were short, imprecise, and strange.
A Mr Fowler had last been observed in his government office on the evening of 25 May, a Saturday. He did not return on Monday and was not seen for the rest of the work week. Nor had his quarters been slept in.
Six days later, Mr Fowler turned up in the garrison of Fleetcourse, south of the impenetrable Cock Pit, escorted by several Maroon Negroes. He had gone on horseback... alone... for a Sunday ride. His horse had bolted him; he had got lost and wandered for days until found by the Maroons.
It was illogical. In those years, Walter Piersall knew, men did not ride alone into such territories. And if one did, a man who was sufficiently intelligent to be Her Majesty's Recorder would certainly know enough to take a left angle from the sun and reach the south coast in a matter of hours, at best a day.
And one week later Jeremy Fowler stole the Middlejohn papers from the archives. The documents concerning a sect led by a Coromanteen chieftain named Acquaba... that had disappeared into the mountains 144 years before.
And six months later he left the Foreign - Colonial - Service and returned to England a very, very wealthy man.
He had discovered the Tribe of Acquaba.
It was the only logical answer. And if that were so, there was a second, logical speculation: Was the Tribe of Acquaba... the Halidon?
Piersall was convinced it was. He needed only current proof.
Proof that there was substance to the whispers of the incredibly wealthy sect high in the Cock Pit mountains. An isolated community that sent its members out into the world, into Kingston, to exert influence.
Piersall tested five men in the Kingston government, all in positions of trust, all with obscure backgrounds. Did any of them belong to the Halidon?
He went to each, telling each that he alone was the recipient of his startling information: the Tribe of Acquaba.
The Halidon,
Three of the five were fascinated but bewildered. They did not understand.
Two of the five disappeared.
Disappeared in the sense of being removed from Kingston. Piersall was told one man had retired suddenly to an island in the Martinique chain. The other was transferred out of Jamaica to a remote post.
Piersall had his current proof.
The Halidon was the Tribe of Acquaba.
It existed.
If he needed further confirmation, final proof, the growing harassment against him was it. The harassment now included the selected rifling and theft of his files and untraceable university enquiries into his current academic studies. Someone beyond the Kingston government was concentrating on him. These acts were not those of concerned bureaucrats.
The Tribe of Acquaba... Halidon.
What was left was to reach the leaders. A staggeringly difficult thing to do. For throughout the Cock Pit there were scores of insulated sects that kept to themselves; most of them poverty-stricken, scraping an existence off the land. The Halidon would not proclaim its self-sufficiency; which one was it?
The anthropologist returned once again to the volumes of African minutiae?, specifically seventeenth - and eighteenth-century Coromanteen. The key had to be there.
Piersall had found the key; he had not footnoted its source.
Each tribe, each offshoot of a tribe, had a single sound applicable to it only. A whistle, a slap, a word. This symbol was known only within the highest tribal councils, understood by only