Cover art
THE BUNDER ABBAS COMES UPON A LARGE ARAB DHOW IN THE VERY ACT OF LANDING GUNS. Page [105]
Gunboat and
Gun-runner
A Tale of the Persian Gulf
BY
SURGEON REAR-ADMIRAL T. T. JEANS,
C.M.G., R.N.
Author of "John Graham, Sub-Lieutenant R.N."
"On Foreign Service" "Ford of H.M.S. Vigilant"
&c.
Illustrated by C. M. Padday
BLACKIE & SON LIMITED
LONDON AND GLASGOW
1914
BLACKIE & SON LIMITED
50 Old Bailey, London
17 Stanhope Street, Glasgow
Warwick House, Fort Street, Bombay
1118 Bay Street, Toronto
Printed in Great Britain by Blackie & Son, Ltd., Glasgow
Preface
For many years the fierce, unruly tribes beyond the north-west frontier of India have only been able to obtain rifles from the Arabian coast. Arab dhows bring them across the Persian Gulf and adjacent waters, and caravans of camels convey them to their destination through the mountain passes of Baluchistan.
Ships of the Royal Navy and the Royal Indian Marine, armed launches manned by officers and men lent from the Royal Navy, and ships' armed cutters cruise and patrol these waters from one year's end to another, overhauling dhows, landing men to search villages suspected of concealing arms, and ceaselessly striving to put a stop to this trade.
My story describes the conditions of service in one of these armed launches, and is based on actual occurrences which took place some ten years ago. Most of the incidents have been described to me by participators in them. The proof-sheets have also been revised by officers who have themselves taken part, during more recent years, in the suppression of "gun-running".
As a result, the story is, I trust, free from errors and improbabilities.
T. T. JEANS,
Surgeon Rear-Admiral, Royal Navy.
Contents
CHAP.
- [A Splendid Appointment]
- [The Story of the "Twin Death"]
- [Skipper of the "Bunder Abbas"]
- [Adrift in a Dhow]
- [My First Capture]
- [The Edge of Civilization]
- [The Battle of the Paraffin Can]
- [Ugly Rumours]
- [Trapping a Caravan]
- [The Fight in the "Coffee-Cup"]
- [The Cobra Bracelet Again]
- [Mr. Scarlett Bares his Arm]
- [Rounding up a Prodigal]
- [We Deal with Jassim]
- [A Tragedy of the Telegraph]
- [The Siege of Jask]
- [Jassim Takes his Revenge]
- [To the Rescue]
- [The Grey-Eyed Lady Decides]
Illustrations
[The "Bunder Abbas" comes upon a large Arab dhow in the very act of landing guns] . . . Frontispiece
[The four of us tried to haul the yard and sail on board, hauling for all we were worth]
[Looking through my loophole I saw a tall, fine-looking Arab peering into the chasm beneath]
GUNBOAT AND GUN-RUNNER
CHAPTER I
A Splendid Appointment
At the time this yarn commences I was a lieutenant of four years' seniority, a "watchkeeper" aboard H.M.S. Russell, longing earnestly to see the world, but with no probable prospect of my desires being realized.
I had been serving in the Channel and Atlantic Fleets, continuously, for seven years—appointed from one ship to another, from a battleship to a destroyer, from a destroyer to an armoured cruiser, and from her to the Russell. In fact, I began to wonder whether my whole naval career was to be spent plodding round the British Islands, and the limits of my world were to be bounded by an occasional view of the coast of France, and a still more infrequent sight of the rugged headlands of Spain.
Then, by a lucky stroke of good fortune, my chance did at last come.
I happened to be on forty-eight hours' leave in London, and at my club, the "Junior", met a captain under whom I had served a year or two previously.
We talked about our former ship, and I told him how tired I was of sticking at home, and how anxious I was to see some foreign service. He jerked out, in the abrupt way he had: "Why, man, clear out!—get along to the Admiralty!—full speed!—off you go! I was talking to the Second Sea Lord not half an hour ago, and he'd just heard that a lieutenant was wanted for the Persian Gulf. Give him my card. Why, bless my rags, I haven't one!" and he scribbled his name on the back of a club envelope and hustled me out.
I found myself jumping into a hansom (there were no taxis available then as now) and driving to the Admiralty before I fully realized what I was about to do.
"No, the Second Sea Lord won't see nobody," a porter at the Admiralty told me; adding, mysteriously: "The First Lord 'as just a-been an' sent for him. You 'ad better see Mr. Copeland, 'is sec-re-tary."
I always feel overawed at the Admiralty—merely being in the same building with their "Lordships" is enough to overawe any humble lieutenant—so I meekly followed the porter into a waiting-room, pacing up and down restlessly till he came back again, beckoning me with a confidential air. "'E'll see you, if you step this way. 'E is in a middling good temper this morning—ain't 'ad many to worry 'im."
My interview with Mr. Copeland was short and sharp.
"What do you want?" he said curtly, more or less as if I was a pickpocket or a beggar asking for a penny.
"I hear there's a vacancy for a lieutenant in the Persian Gulf. I'm Martin—Paul Reginald Martin of the Russell, four years' seniority next May—and I want to go there. My late captain gave me this for the Second Sea Lord;" and I handed him the envelope with the pencil note: "Give this chap the job if you can", and his signature.
The secretary glanced at it, threw it on his desk, and looked at me suspiciously. "Yes, yes! I don't know how he came to hear of it. Collingwood, of the Bunder Abbas, has died of sunstroke. Quite right! quite right! I'll put your name down for her—if you wish."
"Please!" I said.
"Do you know what the job is?" he asked, as if, did I know, I should not be so keen to go.
"Not in the least," I answered; "and I don't mind, so long as I can get abroad and out of the Channel Fleet."
He smiled unpleasantly. "It's a patrolling job, and a lonely one."
He said this as though—officially—he ought to warn me, though—individually—he didn't care a button whether I went or not.
That gave me some idea of the job.
"The gunner's gone mad too. We'll have to send another out, I suppose—confound him!"
I could not help smiling at the idea of a mad gunner being left there.
He cut my smile short with a sharp: "I'll put your name down. Good morning!"
I backed clumsily out of the door.
"What's the Bunder Abbas?" I asked the porter outside.
"The Bunder Habbas!" he corrected me, repeating the name to give himself time to think.
"Something in the Persian Gulf?" I said, to aid his memory.
But he didn't know—none of the other porters knew; so he rang up some mysterious individual on the telephone.
"There's a gen'l'man 'ere wants to know what the Bunder Habbas his. Habbas—Bunder Habbas—hout in the Persian Gulf."
He had a slight argument about pronunciation and spelling, and then turned to me triumphantly. "She's a harmed launch, sir, that's what she his, a-looking out to stop them Arabs a-gun-running," and hastened to answer a bell, pocketing the half-crown I gave him.
I hurried away down the corridor, and was so excited that I did not notice my former captain until he tapped me on the shoulder.
"I've just come round," he said; "will see the Second Sea Lord myself—put in a word for you—thought I might fix it up at once—good luck to you if you get it."
"Thank you very much, sir," I said gratefully, and hurried out into Whitehall.
"Armed launch! Skipper of an armed launch—Collingwood dead of sunstroke—gunner gone mad," and I grinned to myself and walked along like a bird.
"Fancy getting away from all this!" I thought, and looked round at the babel of traffic and the throngs of people. Fancy getting away from the Channel Fleet for a time! I thought of my ship, the Russell, lying under Portland Bill, with other huge grey monsters; and thought of the tense readiness for war aboard them, and the strain of it, month after month. In a few weeks, with luck, I might be three thousand miles away, patrolling the Persian Gulf—free as air—with a good launch under me, and probably a 4.7-inch gun in her bows, ready to tackle any gun-running Arab dhow which came along. Prize money, too—there'd be a chance of that as well.
It was grand.
Collingwood, poor old Collingwood—I'd known him in the Britannia—dead of sunstroke, and the gunner gone mad! That didn't sound as if the job was exactly a bed of roses. But Copeland had put my name down—the die was cast; I didn't mind if the whole crew had died of sunstroke and plague combined. I rather hoped that they had, and that any other chap who applied for the Bunder Abbas would—well—feel a little less keen about her when he heard.
I didn't notice the rain or the mud splashed on my trousers from the roadway. I could have whooped with joy.
All these silly clothes my tailor bothered to make tight here or loose there, to show more or show less of the waistcoat, as silly fashion changed—why, with luck, in a month's time, a pair of flannel trousers and a cricket shirt would be all the wardrobe I should want. I'd be my own skipper, with a dozen blue-jackets, and a stout launch under us; that 4.7-inch gun—or perhaps it would be a twelve-pounder—shining in the bows under the awning. Wouldn't it shine, too! There'd be nothing much else to do but burnish it, and burnished it should be till I could shave by it.
All that afternoon I waited patiently at the club for the evening paper, and directly the waiter brought it into the smoking-room I pounced on it.
Sure enough, under "Naval Appointments" was my name—"Paul R. Martin appointed Intrepid" (she was one of the cruisers on the East Indies Station) "for armed launch Bunder Abbas".
I gave a shout of delight, which rather startled some old fogies there; and a man sitting near—a naval doctor whom I knew slightly—laughed at me, wanting to know what was the matter.
I pointed out the appointment.
"Look at that! Isn't that grand?"
"Bunder Abbas," he said, as we lay back in the luxurious chairs—they really did feel comfortable now that I was going out to the waste parts of the world. "That was Collingwood's launch. What's become of him?"
"Died of sunstroke," I told him.
"Really, now?" the doctor went on; "he's only been there three months. I knew him slightly; he relieved a chap who had beri-beri, or one of those funny tropical diseases—sometimes you swell, sometimes you do the other thing. I forget now which he did before he was invalided home. I did hear; it was quite interesting. So you're off there? Well, good luck! Are the 'footer' results in that paper?
"D'you want any tips for the Persian Gulf?" he asked presently, when he had finished reading the football news. "Whatever you like to eat, don't eat it. (You can't get it, so you needn't bother to remember that tip.) And if you want gin or whisky, or any comforts like that, chuck them over the side: they may kill the sharks; they won't kill you. In fact, my dear chap, whatever you like doing and want to do, there's only one tip to remember if you want to keep fit—don't do it!
"If you get beri-beri," he called after me as I fled, "you might let me know whether you swell or do the other thing."
I packed my bag, not in the least disturbed by anyone's gloomy remarks, and went back to my ship at Portland.
My orders came next day.
I was to take passage in a P. & O. mail steamer, sailing in twelve days' time (a luxury I never expected), and join the Intrepid at Aden, where further orders would be given me.
A fortnight later I was tumbling and churning through the "Bay" in the P. & O. Java, as happy as a king, without a care in the world.
A lieutenant named Anderson shared my cabin. He was going out to join the Intrepid as one of her watchkeepers. As, but for him, I should probably never have survived to write the account of what happened to us later on, I will give an idea of what kind of chap he was. First of all, he was known to his chums as "The Baron" or as "Baron Popple Opstein", though why these nicknames ever stuck to him I don't know.
He was a great lumbering, clumsy giant, with a long red face, a big hooked nose, and a large mouth, always smiling, and showing the whitest set of teeth I have ever seen. He had laughing blue eyes, which saw everything except people's faults, and a mop of yellow, silk-coloured hair which grew down his great red forehead in a quaint triangular patch pointing to his nose. His whole face beamed good humour and kindliness; he was the simplest, happiest soul alive—one of those men with whom it is good to live. He never did much talking, and never wanted anyone to talk much to him; but would sit smoking his old, disgracefully charred pipe, and beam by the hour, just happy to have the dancing sea under his feet and the fresh salt air in his lungs. He really was a splendid-looking fellow, but by some odd twist in his mind imagined he was ugly. This made him rather retiring and bashful. He would sooner try to stop a mad dog than be introduced to a lady. "My dear old chap," he would say, if I wanted to introduce him to one of the lady passengers, "what on earth can I talk to her about? She doesn't want to hear about scrubbing hammocks, or the gunnery manual. I can't think of anything else to talk about."
The result was that we both kept pretty much to ourselves, and amused ourselves watching the others.
There was a major on board going out to India—a fussy, conceited individual who imagined that all the ladies must be head over heels in love with him. He tried to patronize us, but we gave him the cold shoulder, and so did a little pale-faced, rather nice-looking girl about twenty-two, with hair the very same shade as the Baron's. She was not English—I could tell that by the way she talked—and she kept almost entirely to herself. I never spoke to her during the voyage, but once I overheard her snub the major in broken English, in the most deliberate, delightful manner, and as he went away, with a silly expression on his face, our eyes met. There was such an irresistibly humorous twinkle in hers that I smiled too—I really could not help it. At that her smile died away, as if ashamed of itself, her pale face flushed, and I followed the major, feeling like a naughty boy who had been caught prying.
At Port Said we picked up Mr. Thomas Scarlett—Gunner, R.N.—serving in the Jason, which was doing guardship there.
I had seen his appointment to the Bunder Abbas in the newspapers, and, as we should have to live together for the next two years, I was anxious to know what manner of man he was.
He certainly looked a queer chap, tall and thin, with stooping shoulders, bushy black eyebrows meeting across his forehead, two piercing black eyes deeply sunk beneath them, a beaked nose over very thin tight lips, and the blackest of hair, moustache, and pointed beard. He looked very much like a vulture, with his long thin neck stretching out from a low collar, much too large for him. When he talked, the words tumbled out, one after the other, so quickly that, until one became used to him, it was difficult to understand what he said.
We soon found out that he had been in the Persian Gulf many times in the course of the last few years, so Baron Popple Opstein and I used to take him along to our special corner on deck, and ask him questions. He gave us the impression that he did not wish to go out there again, and whenever he talked of the Persian Gulf and of his former experiences there he seemed nervous and very ill at ease. But, once we made him talk, his stories of pirates, pearl-fishers, slavers, and gun-runners were as absorbing as one could wish. Old Popple Opstein's face would grow purple with excitement. Mr. Scarlett, too, would often work himself into a great pitch of vehemence as he told some especially thrilling yarn.
"You might be an Arab yourself," I said one night, when he had brought a story to a climax, leaving us breathless and fascinated with his glowing, fiery description.
"I am almost, sir," he said. "My father was the constable of the Residency at Bushire, and my mother was half-Arab."
That explained his dark complexion, and why, in the middle of a yarn, he would often slide off his chair and sit Moorish fashion—cross-legged. He could always talk more easily in that attitude.
Ever since he had joined the Navy he had served, off and on, in the East, his knowledge of all the languages and different dialects of those parts, picked up when he was a boy, being so useful.
One night, four days out from Suez, we were making him tell us all he knew about gun-running. It was very warm, damp, and unpleasant, so he took off his coat. In doing so he happened to pull the shirtsleeve of his left arm above his elbow. By the light of a lantern overhead we saw something glittering round his arm. My chum peered forward to look at it, but the gunner hastily pulled his sleeve down.
"What the dickens is that?" we both asked.
First glancing fore and aft, to see that no one was near, he very reluctantly pulled up his sleeve.
He held his arm so that the lantern light fell upon it, and we saw that the thing round his arm was a small snake, marvellously enamelled—a cobra it was. The joints, even each separate scale, seemed flexible, and as he worked his muscles underneath it the snake seemed to cling more tightly to his skin, in the most horribly realistic fashion. Two greenish-tinged opal eyes blinked at us as the light overhead flickered in them.
The Baron leant forward to touch it, but Mr. Scarlett, with a sudden look of horror, shot out his right hand and clutched the Baron's hand so violently that he cried out.
"Don't touch it, sir! For God's sake, don't touch it. There's poison enough in that thing to kill a dozen men!" he gasped fiercely.
"What is it—what do you mean? Tell us!" we cried.
Some passengers coming along the deck, he instantly covered it with his sleeve.
"I generally wear a bandage over it," he said nervously. "The night was so hot that I took it off."
"Well, tell us about it," we urged him. "Where did you get it?"
"Jassim gave it to me," Mr. Scarlett answered, his black eyes burning strangely as he looked round to see that no one could overhear him. "I'll tell you when and how that snake came here. It's a long story—and a sad one. When you have heard it you will know why I do not want to go back to the Persian Gulf. But, for God's sake, sirs, don't ever mention it to a soul!"
We promised—we would have promised anything to learn its story.
CHAPTER II
The Story of the "Twin Death"
"It was nearly thirty years ago when I first saw that bracelet," Mr. Scarlett began in a strained voice. "I was only a boy then. It was brought to my father's house, at Bushire, by a Banyan jeweller—a friend of his—who showed it to him as one of the most marvellous and curious pieces of workmanship in the East. I remember how frightened I was to hear the stories he told of it, and to see them examining it.
"When the jeweller had gone, my father, who knew its history, told me that, when it was pulled off the arm which wore it, it would writhe and strike with the poisoned fangs in its head, and kill both the wearer and the person who tore it off.
"There is an Arab song, nearly two hundred years old, which sings of it. The song is about the woman who first wore it. She was the favourite wife of a murdered Sultan of Khamia, and fell alive into the hands of his Persian conqueror. He wanted to marry her because she was so beautiful, and she dared him, if he would win her, to tear the bracelet off her arm—dared him in front of his Court—and he was so mad with love that he did so, although he knew what would happen. The snake struck them both, and they died. In that Arab song she is supposed to sing several verses after the fangs struck her, but," Mr. Scarlett's voice trembled hoarsely, "I know that she had not time."
"You don't mean to tell us that this is the same one?" the Baron asked breathlessly.
"It is, sir. I wish it wasn't."
"But how did you get it?" he asked again.
"Let the gunner spin his yarn," I told him impatiently.
"Well," he went on, "it has always been worn by the chief wife of the Sultan of Khamia. It is her privilege to be the only wife who follows her husband at his death. She had to kill herself by tearing it off her own arm, and if her courage failed her a slave stood by to do it, and the two would die. The slave was not likely to fail her, for to die by 'the twin death' was supposed to be a sure way of attaining Paradise, and not many slaves ever thought that they would have the chance to get there.
"Some of this my father told me, and the rest, and many other things besides, I learnt afterwards from the Arabs up and down the coast.
"I saw it next eight or nine years afterwards. I was an ordinary seaman in a gunboat lying off Muscat, and, happening to be ashore one afternoon, with nothing to do, I noticed that there was quite a crowd of natives gathered on the shore.
"They told me that the Sultan of Khamia was just going to embark on his way to Mecca, so I stopped to see him, knowing that he was the worst brigand and pirate in the whole of the Gulf, and wishing to see what kind of chap he was.
"Presently he came down with a crowd of attendants to guard him—a fine-looking fellow he was—and after him followed some hooded cages or palanquins. Inside these, hidden from view, were, I knew, his favourite wives, accompanying him as far as Jeddah. Out of the first stretched a beautiful arm, and on it was that snake bracelet.
"I half expected to see it, and recognized it at once. You should have seen that crowd of natives give way and fall back. Everyone knew what it was, and what it meant. They edged away as if it was the devil himself.
"The closed cages were taken on board a lighter; the lighter was towed out to a little steamer rolling in the mouth of the harbour between the two old Portuguese forts, and I soon forgot all about the bracelet.
"Five years afterwards fate brought me to the Gulf again. I was a petty officer in the gunboat Pigeon then, and everywhere we went we heard the name of Jassim, the now Khan of Khamia—the absolute despot of the south-western part of the Persian Gulf, the head of the Jowassim tribes of slavers and pirates, and the terror of the seas. Not a dhow dared leave any port without first paying tribute to him, and the tales of his atrocities made our blood boil with rage; because he was not satisfied with being master of the Gulf, but he'd swoop down on coast towns, demand tribute from them, and, if there was any resistance—even hesitation in paying—he would kill every man, woman, and child in ways so callously brutal that you could not imagine a human being capable of inventing them.
"His latest exploit had been to capture the whole fleet of pearl-fishing dhows and trading baggalows[#] inside Muscat harbour. He filled them with his rascally followers—Bedouins chiefly—and thought himself strong enough to tackle the English.
[#] Baggalow=large ocean-going dhow.
"We soon heard that he was preparing to seize the pearl-fishing dhows which were then fitting out at Bahrein—under the English flag and the English guns of the fort there—to sail for the pearl banks, down south.
"The Pigeon and the old Sphinx were therefore ordered to search for Mr. Jassim and teach him a lesson.
"Well, after dodging in and out of the bays in that rocky coast, shoving our nose in, finding nothing, and shunting out again, we found him, one morning, anchored at the head of a shallow bay with all his fleet.
"Four hundred and twenty-two dhows we counted, their sloping masts and yards showing up like a forest against the shore. Every one of them was flaunting the red flag with a white border, the flag of the Jowassims. The whole place was a-flutter with them.
"At the top of the bay Jassim had built himself a fort, and lived there, we found out afterwards, in great style, with his harem, sheikhs' sons to wait on him, gold plates to eat off, and everything simply tiptop.
"Four hundred odd dhows were there, manned for the most part by dare-devil Bedouins, with a fair sprinkling of Beni Ghazril, Ballash, and Ahmed tribes—all low-caste tribes not too keen on fighting. Armed they were with old smooth bores—nine-pounders, there or thereabouts—and the little Pigeon was equal to taking on the lot if she could only have fetched in close enough; which she couldn't, as she drew too much water. We had to anchor five miles away from these dhows—five miles if a yard.
"Out came a sheikh or a khan—some big swell—to say that Jassim was only waiting for a change of wind to come out and eat us up. As it was blowing a steady shamel (you two gentlemen will know what that is before you've been out here long), blowing right into the bay, and not likely to ease down for two or three days, we didn't trouble about them trying to escape. Well, the skipper sent that sheikh chap back with a flea in his ear, and presently Jassim himself came along in a grand barge, flying the Turkish flag—like his cheek!—and as cool as anything comes up the side and gives our skipper two hours to clear out of it.
"The cheek of the man amused the skipper, who merely took him aft into his cabin, kept him there for two hours, talking and drinking coffee, showed him his watch and that the two hours had gone by, told him he would have hanged him had he not been flying the Turkish flag, and sent him back to his fleet.
"The tide rising presently, we chanced our luck and moved in a bit closer. Directly we moved, those dhows, hundreds of them, let rip at us with their old pop-guns, the shot plunking into the water half-way, and not even the 'ricos' reaching us.
"That was just what the skipper was waiting for. He opened fire with our four-inch guns, keeping it up from four o'clock that afternoon till six, and setting a good many of the dhows on fire. Just before the sun went down, along came the old Sphinx, paddling furiously, and chipped in with her old-fashioned guns, till neither of us could see a thing to aim at, except flames occasionally. The whole bay was a mass of smoke from the dhows we had set on fire with our shells.
"It was a fine sight as the sun set behind the great mountains inshore, and the dark shadows of them came racing across the plain and the harbour, showing up the flames still more brightly.
"If you ever cruise along that coast don't miss that sight—the sight of those shadows as the sun sinks behind the mountains," Mr. Scarlett interrupted his yarn to tell us.
"Well, all that night we and the Sphinx fired occasionally to keep the Arabs' nerves on edge, and made all ready to send in every boat we possessed, at daybreak, to see what we could do.
"That was the longest day's work I ever did, and the worst—the worst," Mr. Scarlett hissed out, apparently waking up and altering his voice, as if he had been somebody else telling the yarn before, or as if he had suddenly turned over a fresh page in a book he was reading, remembered the terrible ending, and wanted to shut it up.
The Baron and I almost jumped out of our chairs.
"Yes, the worst. My God! it was the worst." He jumped to his feet, looked ashamed of himself, sat down, and went on to tell us in a strained voice, as though the ending was too terrible, how the crews of the Pigeon and Sphinx had pulled ashore in their boats, like midges round a horde of elephants. He said that two of the bigger dhows, placed end on end, would be nearly as big as the Victory.
We did not believe him.
He told us how, as one boat would clap alongside a huge towering dhow, her demoralized crew would clamber down the other side to their boats or jump overboard. The bluejackets had brought tins of paraffin, with which they set on fire each dhow they boarded, adding still further to the terror and disorder, until the crews of all those four hundred odd junks abandoned them and clustered at the edge of the shore, behind the walls of Jassim's fort, shouting bravely and shooting off their crazy rifles in defiance.
So the bluejackets left off their work of destruction, the boats pulled ashore together, the men wading as soon as their keels grated on the beach, whilst the Nordenfeldts and Gardner guns in their bows fired point-blank into the demoralized crowd of Arab scum. There must have been fifteen thousand of them on the beach; but panic broke out among them, and they melted away from the shore and from the fort, scurrying away inland in front of that handful of bluejackets until they had taken refuge in the defiles and crevasses of those barren mountains, where (as Mr. Scarlett told us) you could hardly believe it possible for a goat to live, but where they sought shelter like frightened sheep.
When he had come to this point Mr. Scarlett paused a little, as if he was reluctant to go on. Then he started again hurriedly:
"And we came back, very slowly back, panting, our feet red-hot and our tongues swollen with thirst, the blazing sun on our backs. And we found Jassim squatting on his prayer mat on the sloping shore, his back turned to the sea and his burning ships, his face turned to the sun.
"A woman crouched at his feet.
"These two were alone, the only living things there; no other human being had stayed with him; she alone of all his harem and his people remained to share his fate. I was sent for to act as interpreter; and our skipper—a tender-hearted man—had pity on Jassim now that his power was absolutely broken, and gave him the choice of coming on board or staying where he was. Jassim chose to stay, answering proudly and defiantly, as though he was still lord of a powerful fleet, or as though his spirit was not broken. Then it was that I saw this hateful snake for the third time—it was on that woman's arm."
Mr. Scarlett's voice began to tremble, and as he coiled cross-legged on the deck, and put his hands to his forehead, we could see his dark, burning eyes gazing outboard, across the deck and the deck rails, to where the sea and the blackness of the night sky met each other, a dark rim beyond the moonlit sea surrounding the ship. His face was haggard and drawn, as if he saw what he was about to tell us.
"Yes, he was there! Jassim was there, his head bowed beneath a coarse burnous[#]; and whilst the rest of us went away to loot the fort and destroy the guns, a seaman and myself were left as guard on those two.
[#] Burnous = loose Arab cloak.
"I spoke to him in his own tongue, told him to cheer up, that his luck was 'out' now, but that it was fate, and a better time would come. He seemed not to hear; he just sat gazing at the sun as it sank lower and lower towards the rim of the mountains, where all his men had disappeared; and his wife crouched moaning before him, putting a hand out now and again to touch him, just to remind him that she was there and suffering too. Presently she bared her left arm, and moaned to him not to allow himself to fall into the hands of the infidel, but to seek Paradise and take her with him, holding out her arm with the snake coiled round it, imploring him to pull it off and set them both free.
"Jassim never answered her, never looked down at her, never moved a muscle of his face, and never looked at that bracelet.
"But the sight of it was too much for the seaman left on guard. Poor fool! he thought it would be a fine curio, and before I could stop him he strode forward, bent down, and seized it.
"The woman gave one shriek of agony as he pulled it from her arm, and with an oath I saw him throw it down in the white sand, where it coiled and writhed, whilst he looked at the back of his hand and wiped away two tiny spots of blood.
"'Suck them, for God's sake, suck them! The thing's poisoned!' I yelled, and, springing to the woman, bent down and sucked two little marks on her arm just below the shoulder.
"Jassim never moved an eyelash.
"The woman jerked herself from me as if the touch of an infidel defiled her, and as if she courted death. She had scarcely dragged herself again to her knees before she began to writhe with pain, and her arm became a dusky swollen purple, spreading upwards over her shoulder as I watched.
"The seaman, cursing, was staggering down to the sea, but swayed and fell half-way, rolling convulsively, clawing at the sand and jerking himself towards the edge of the water.
"I could do nothing for either, and I could not take my eyes from that woman. She was appealing to Jassim to make the snake kill him, so that they should not be separated, and she implored him to hold her, so that she could die in his arms. Never a muscle did he move; and she cried piteously for him to look at her, just one look. But Jassim would not look at her. Her face was dusky now, her swollen tongue came out of her mouth, and in her agony her pride was broken, and she asked me for water. It was the last word she spoke, poor soul! I had some in my water bottle, so knelt down and held it to her lips. But she could not drink, so I poured a little into her mouth and over her face. Her dark eyes, dark as velvet they were, gave me one dumb look of gratitude; then the life went out of them and she was dead.
"As I knelt, Jassim must have stooped down and picked up the gold snake, for he suddenly flicked it round my arm, saying in a deep guttural voice: 'Blessed is the giver of water—above all men. Allah, the great, the compassionate, gave water to those that burned in Hell, even as thou gavest! Thy reward shall be great; only become a true believer, for this is the key of Paradise.'
"I jumped to my feet, half-dazed, and dared not touch the thing as it clung to me, snuggling tightly round my arm.
"The woman was dead. I ran to the sea; the bluejacket's body was moving gently as the tiny waves rolled in. I knew that he was dead, and I turned to implore Jassim to take it off if he knew how to do so without killing me.
"As I turned, the lower edge of the sun touched the top of those awful mountains, and Jassim, crouching on his prayer carpet, a little patch of red on the sloping white beach, with the dead woman in front of him, suddenly raised himself to his knees, held wide his hands, and called: 'Allah ho Akhbar', as though summoning the faithful to prayer and his contemptible followers back to him.
"Then he prostrated himself, and, raising himself again, commenced: 'Bismillahi! Rahmanni! Raheem!' whilst I stood awed as he recited the prayer, till the upper rim of the sun disappeared, and those dark shadows came again down the sides of the mountains and along the waste of sands, rushing like evil spirits towards us....
"The first lieutenant was at my side shaking me. He had his hand on the snake, as if to take it.
"'What the devil do you mean by looting?' he said; but I gave a shriek, and sprang away, striking up his hand.
"As I retreated backwards, step by step, I told him what had happened. He did not believe me; he thought me mad—that I had a 'touch of the sun'. But he let me be, presently, and I covered that thing up with the sleeve of my flannel as best I could—and found myself back again on board the Pigeon. Perhaps I was mad, for I could never remember how I did get aboard, and I was on the sick list for many days, lying in a cot, covering the snake with my free hand, and moaning for people to let it be—so they told me afterwards."
The gunner stopped talking, breathed heavily, and wiped his forehead.
He began speaking in his ordinary composed way:
"Since then, thirteen years ago—aye, thirteen years it is next June—an unlucky year—that thing has coiled round my arm and never left it."
My chum's eye had been gradually starting more and more out of his head.
Now he gasped out:
"Never! Do you really mean it?"
"No, never," Mr. Scarlett groaned.
"But, man, a pair of long pincers seizing the head and neck and sliding a sleeve of thin tin or something like that underneath—next your skin—why, there are heaps of ways you could get it off—safe ways—if you really wanted to do so."
"Don't you think I've been tempted, sir; dozens of different ways have been suggested. All seemed safe, but there was just the chance that the thing would strike somewhere—and—and—I'd seen those two die, and put off trying for another day, till now I'm almost used to it.
"Look," the gunner said, pulling up his shirt sleeve and holding out his arm so that the moonlight showed the snake. "Watch its head!" and he very softly began to push one finger underneath a coil. As he did so, the head began to raise itself from his skin, and a tiny dark line, not visible before, showed across the end where the mouth was.
"Stop!" we both cried, perspiration pouring from me and running down my back, the Baron's mouth wide open with fear. "Take your finger away." And he uttered a hoarse, gasping laugh as he knew that at last we were convinced. He drew back his finger, and the head lay back again.
"Now you can guess why I don't want to come back to the Gulf. This bracelet is known to every Arab there. The Sultan of Khamia is certain to find out, sooner or later, that I have it, and then there will be an end to me. Why, sirs, he would give half his wealth to get it back, and once it becomes known that I have it he will get it somehow or other. Getting it, I must die."
"Man alive," the Baron cried, "why don't you try? A thin sheet of tin or something pushed under it, then seize the head with pincers! Why, man, it simply couldn't bite you! There'd be no risk whatsoever."
"But I can't," Mr. Scarlett almost moaned. "I can't face it. If anything did happen—I've seen those two die—remember that. It seems part of me now—thirteen years it has been there—and I've been brought up amongst Arabs—my mother was half an Arab, and there's something in my blood which won't let me try. It's fate—Kismet—and I dare not fly in face of that."
The Baron fell back in his chair hopelessly.
"Then why didn't you back out of coming here? Why didn't you explain?" I asked.
Then his manner changed again. He had come out of his dreams, and began talking hurriedly as if his lips were shaking.
"Truth is, gentlemen, I'm a born coward. I was too frightened to let on that I was frightened of coming out this way again. It's the same thing with many things I do. I'm too frightened to let on as how I'm frightened, and up to now things have gone all right. I'm a coward, sir, and I don't mind telling you," he said, turning to me. "We have to live together for the next two years—if I'm spared—and you'll find that out before you've known me many weeks, so you may as well know now. Feel my hand, sir!"
I felt it. It was cold and clammy and trembling. His dark face looked a ghastly mud colour.
"That's simply because I've been talking about it, and it reminds me of things which have been—and might be again."
"Come down below and have a brandy-and-soda," I said, and we took him down below, rather glad to get into the noisy glare of the smoking saloon, even though it was so hot.
We always slept on deck, the Baron and I, but that night, whether it was the heat or the effects of the gunner's story, precious little sleep did we get; so, after tossing about restlessly for an hour, we gave up trying, and leant over the deck rails and talked.
"I'm sure it would be as easy as winking," my chum said. "One could lash wire or even string round its head, so that the mouth could not open. The fangs couldn't come out then.
"I wonder what became of that man Jassim," he broke in presently. "He's probably dead, so no one could possibly know that the gunner has it. If he keeps it covered up he will be as safe as anything."
He gazed out over the sea, thinking.
"And probably what poison is left in it wouldn't kill a canary now," he burst out again—neither of us could take our minds off the snake. "Thirteen years ago! It must have lost its power by now."
We went to our beds after a time and tried to sleep. Baron Popple Opstein was soon snoring, but presently jumped up, shrieking, and I saw him trying to pull something off his arm.
I shook him until he woke up, very much ashamed of himself. He was perspiring like a drowned rat, and it made me feel queer and shaky. I did not like the mystery of the beastly thing. I had to live with the gunner and it. If he was going to fill me up with many more such stories, I should soon be frightened of my own shadow.
CHAPTER III
Skipper of the "Bunder Abbas"
Two days later we arrived at Aden, and found the Intrepid anchored close to Steamer Point, looking cool and comfortable under her white awnings and white paint. The officer of the "guard", coming across for her mails, took the Baron and myself back with him.
As skipper of the Bunder Abbas I felt a somewhat important personage, but Commander Duckworth, the captain of the Intrepid, a short, red-faced, wiry man, full of energy, soon disabused me about that.
It was terrifically hot in his cabin, and he was not in any mood for talking.
"Eh, yes, Martin—you are Martin, are you?—so you've come to take poor Collingwood's job. I won't shake hands—too hot. Well, passages have been booked for you and your gunner in that steamer," pointing to a disreputable little steamer I could see through the gun port. "She leaves to-morrow morning at daylight. You will go aboard her to-night. We lent Wilson, one of our fellows, to the Bunder Abbas, until you came. You'll find him at Jask—only too anxious to see you, I expect. You'll take her over from him, and the boss at the telegraph station—a kind of political agent—will pass on any orders to you. You are, more or less, lent to the Indian Government, you know."
I did not know, but that was nothing.
His letters were brought in then, and he nodded for me to leave. However, I was so fearfully keen to learn more that I blurted out:
"Any chance of picking up a dhow or anything like that, sir?"
"Of course there is always a chance," he said energetically. "Wilson will tell you all about everything: good morning!"
I went away to the ward-room, hoping to get more information there; but the place was a litter of newspapers, and everybody was busy reading letters and paid little attention to me.
"Bunder Abbas. What size is she?"
"Oh, about as big as that table!" was all that I could get out of them.
The Baron and I parted company that afternoon, when I went aboard the little steamer—the Ras-al-Musat. I found the gunner already there, and also that solitary little lady, with the yellow hair and humorous grey eyes—the little lady who had snubbed the fussy major—and me. She also was bound for Jask, of all places in the world, and, as at meal times she sat on the captain's right and I on his left hand, we had to talk. However, she was much more interested in Mr. Scarlett and his stories of Arabian life than in me.
At daybreak of the fifth morning we dropped anchor two miles off Jask, and I strained my eyes to catch a first glimpse of the Bunder Abbas, though in the hazy light I could not distinguish her amongst a cluster of dhows, anchored close inshore. All I could see was a wide sweep of yellow sand and a low-lying peninsula, jutting out into the sea, with some glaring white square buildings at its end.
The place—if it really was an inhabited place—seemed absolutely asleep, until, presently, some small, crazy lighters, full of jabbering natives, came slowly off to unload whatever cargo we had for them.
Half an hour later I spied a tiny little tub of a dinghy pulling our way. As she drew closer I saw that Wilson was in it. I had known him when he was a sub-lieutenant, and I met him at the gangway.
"Jolly glad to see you," he burst out. "Everything's all right aboard the B.A. I've ordered a chunk of goat for your breakfast—couldn't get anything else. I told the political chap, up at the telegraph station, that you'll be coming to see him. He will tell you anything you want to know. Here's the 'signal book' and the 'cruising order book'. Sign your 'tally' there. There are no more confidential books to hand over."
I signed the receipt for them.
"Now you're the skipper of the B.A. I've finished with her, thank Heaven! Griffiths, in the dinghy, can take you back now."
Having so satisfactorily (?) concluded the formalities of handing over command, Wilson took some letters which I had brought for him, and went off to read them. I presumed that he was going to Karachi to catch a steamer back to Aden, but did not take the trouble to ask him before the gunner and myself left the Ras-al-Musat.
If you had seen us being pulled inshore in that tiny dinghy to join my first command you would have laughed. The dinghy's stern was nearly level with the water, and her bows so cocked up in the air that Mr. Scarlett had to creep for'ard to "trim the dish".
As we gradually drew nearer the shore, I noticed a weird odour in the air.
"What's that?" I asked the bluejacket, sniffing it in.
"All them Arab or Persh'un places smell like that, sir," he said. "You'll not notice it in a week's time."
I sucked it in through my nose. At last I had come to the edge of things, and cut myself adrift from civilization. It was grand, and I felt as happy as a bird—and looked like one, too, I expect, perched as I was on the top of my two cases.
"That's 'er, sir," the bluejacket said presently, jerking his chin over his shoulder. Then I saw the Bunder Abbas for the first time. She and I were to have many exciting experiences together during the next few months.
As I saw her then she looked draggled to a degree. Her sides were a positive disgrace—paint off in large patches; her awnings were dirty and badly spread on bent, crazy-looking stanchions; and her rusty unpainted cable hung drearily out of a most disreputable hawse-pipe.
In her bows, under the awning, there was a gun, in a dirty canvas cover—a six-pounder I guessed—and aft two Maxims were cocked up at different angles, in the most slovenly manner. Their water-jackets, which should have been so bright, were painted a beastly mud colour, and from the muzzle of one dangled a bunch of green bananas.
"Your own mother won't know you in a week's time, my sweetheart," I chuckled to myself, as the bluejacket tugged at one oar and twisted the dinghy alongside.
I swung myself aboard, to be met by a bearded petty officer with a shifty, crafty face, who saluted me about a dozen times in the first two minutes. Five or six disreputable-looking sailors peered round the corner of the engine-room casings to take stock of me, and some lascars sitting jabbering round a stew-pot took no notice whatever.
I looked round. The deck was littered with rubbish; men's clothes were stretched on it everywhere—to dry; burnt matches and cigarette ends lay in every corner.
"We ain't scrubbed decks yet," the petty officer said, following my eye, his hand bobbing up and down to his forehead all the time. "Wouldn't you like to see the orficer's cabin, sir?" he added hastily, to distract my anger, and led me up a ladder, through an opening in the fore awning, to a platform round the mast and funnel. On this platform deck, for'ard of the mast, were the steering-wheel, compass, and engine-room telegraphs, also a tiny little signal-locker; aft of the funnel was a diminutive deck-house, about half the size of a railway compartment. It had a low bunk on each side, with scarcely room to stand between them, a few shelves, lockers under the bunks, and a cracked looking-glass. Overhead the paintwork was blackened by an oil lamp which swung from the roof and looked as if it had not been cleaned or trimmed for years.
Outside the cabin there was just enough deck space for a small folding table and a couple of canvas folding chairs.
"Them chairs belonged to Mr. Collingwood, what died of sunstroke, and the gunner, what went off 'un 'is 'ead," the petty officer explained.
I made a grimace.
"You'll 'ave a cup of corfee?" he asked, rubbing his hands together and smiling ingratiatingly as a dirty unkempt Indian boy (a Tamil I found out afterwards) brought two cups of horrid-looking coffee and a tin of condensed milk with milk congealed down one side of it. "Mr. Wilson 'as ordered your breakfast, and this 'ere boy—Percy we calls 'im—looks arter you two orficers."
Nothing seemed to stop his talking machine.
I snorted—it was the only way I could express my feelings—and looked round to see what had become of Mr. Scarlett, who had disappeared.
"What's your routine on board?" I asked, going down the ladder again to that six-pounder in the bows.
"We ain't exactly got none," the petty officer answered. "Mr. Collingwood, 'im what died of sunstroke, 'e didn't 'ave no regular routine—an' Mr. Wilson didn't alter nothing."
He said this in a half-fawning, half-defiant manner, as much as to say: "Don't you come making trouble."
Mr. Scarlett joined us, his black eyes gleaming, stepping through the little crowd of lascars and scattering them.
"They won't hang any more bananas on my guns," he chuckled.
I had heard a splash, so guessed what had happened, and smiled until that petty officer, hanging round to join in the conversation, explained that "They were a bunch Mr. Wilson bought yesterday, off a Karachi dhow, and 'ung 'em up there to get a bit ripe for you two orficers." He looked so cunningly pleased that I told him sharply to clear out of it and I'd send for him when I wanted him.
I smothered my anger, went up to the little cabin, and began to stow away as much of my belongings as I could cram into the two shallow drawers under the bunk, kicking out "Percy", who wanted to help. He did not seem to mind, and was back again in a minute. If he was dirty, he had a cheerful little face and a pair of big dog-like eyes. He pleaded with them so hard to be allowed to stay and help that I had not the heart to kick him out again.
That "chunk" of goat soon disappeared, once Mr. Scarlett and I settled down to breakfast. Whilst we were busy with it a European-built boat pulled past us from the steamer, with our little yellow-haired friend under the awnings. I almost felt inclined to wave to her, but, not wanting another snub, did not do so.
"I expect she's going to live at the telegraph station. She won't find many comforts in this place," Mr. Scarlett said grimly, pointing to the various square, white-faced buildings at the end of Jask peninsula.
Down on the low ground, where the peninsula joined the coast line, there was a neglected-looking red-brick building among some palm trees (Mr. Scarlett said it was a fort), and another, larger and more imposing, some little way inshore. With the exception of these there was precious little to see except sand-hills, a few scattered palm trees, and perhaps a hundred native huts dotted among them. We could see the track which led inland to the town of old Jask, though the town itself was not visible. On the horizon the misty outlines of barren mountains rose high into the burning sky. Even at this hour the sun was very fierce.
Presently that European boat came pulling off to the Bunder Abbas with a note for me from the Englishman in charge of the telegraph station—the acting political agent—asking me to breakfast with him and not to bother with formalities.
"Off you skip, sir," Mr. Scarlett advised me. "They calls their lunch 'breakfast'. I'd like to have a few kind words with the men whilst you are away." So on shore I went, landing on a broad, sandy beach, where crowds of Arabs or Persians, and niggers of sorts—every sort, I should fancy—were unloading those wretched lighters and some large dhows lying half out of water. Donkeys, as patient as donkeys are all the world over, and camels, as supercilious and discontented as they, too, always are, were being laden with bales of merchandise.
One of the boat's crew—a Zanzibar nigger he was—led me through them, away from the shore and the native huts, through a small grove of palm trees, where that old fort stood, and across an open cultivated space, sloping gently upwards towards the telegraph station. At the top of this was a double line of wire entanglements extending from side to side.
I opened my eyes as I saw these, and still more when he led me through some roughly-designed earthworks, evidently meant for protection. Then we came to the big barrack-like telegraph buildings themselves, with a line of iron telegraph posts running from them down the peninsula and then along the edge of the shore to the east'ard as far as my eye could see. My guide led me to a building surrounded by a strong stone wall, with loopholes through it, and at the entrance a short cheery man with a round red face and a scrubby, yellow moustache was waiting to welcome me.
He was the political agent—Fisher by name. He introduced me to his wife, who came out to join us—a tired-looking little woman—and on the veranda, in the shade, which we hurriedly sought, was my little lady friend from the steamer, talking to a tall, good-looking chap. The political agent explained that this was Borsen, his right-hand man, the only other European there, and that she, his sister, had come out to keep house for him and be some company for Mrs. Fisher.
"They are the only two women here, and it is very noble of them to come to such a place as this," he said, speaking as though it might be jolly unselfish of them but that he wished they were not there.
"What do you think of your new ship?" he asked, smiling.
"You won't know her in a month's time," I smiled back.
"Shan't have the chance," he answered. "I have a very pretty job for you along the coast—keep you busy for the next three months."
I brightened up and wanted to hear more; but the head "boy"—a "perfect" old chap in a yellow silk turban—announced breakfast, and until we had finished there was no chance of my learning.
Then Mr. Fisher took me into his work-room, brought out charts, and explained things to me.
"Look," he said, pointing to the Arabian coast at a place called Jeb, some forty miles to the north'ard of Muscat. "I have information that several thousand rifles have been brought down there. The Arabs will be bringing them across at the first opportunity, and it was only yesterday that I heard that camels are being collected in two villages not far from here. It is fairly certain that somewhere between those two villages they mean to land them. You see that headland jutting out—look—close to Kuh-i-Mubarak—thirty miles to the west'ard. There are two creeks; one just to the south'ard of it, the other about eleven miles to the north'ard. They are favourite places for landing arms, and those camels—a hundred or more—are somewhere close by.
"The chart does not show it properly. I'll draw you a rough sketch-map."
He drew a sketch and explained it. A hill named Sheikh Hill (there was a sheikh's house or fort on its summit) and the cliffs opposite it made an anchorage safe from any wind, but the creek leading from a little inlet past the village of Bungi (where half those camels had been collected) was very shallow indeed.
South of Sheikh Hill—eleven miles south—there was deep water right up to the shore under Kuh-i-Mubarak, and the creek there was deep, winding among sand-hills until it opened out into a "khor" or basin, with the village of Sudab on its edge. Here was the remainder of the camels.
The two creeks—the shallow one to the north and the deep one to the south—were connected up at the back of the sand-hills and behind the two villages by a channel some thirty yards broad, but so shallow that only at high water could even the native boats use it.
Behind all, some eleven miles inland, the Persian mountains towered up, and passes between them led to the desert table-lands behind.
"The track to Baluchistan and the north-west frontier of India lies across those table-lands," Mr. Fisher said, making a groove with his finger nail. "I want you to patrol from one creek to another, examining every dhow which comes along. I hope you will have luck. Remember that if a 'shamel' blows, the dhows will probably be driven south and make for the deep creek at the base of Mubarak.
"Gun-running has been very brisk lately. A caravan of rifles actually passed last month within sight of the old town of Jask, on its way to the Indian frontier."
Then he told me more about this trade: how the restless tribes on the north-west frontier of India will give almost any price for a military rifle; that they live by brigandage, looting peaceful villages on the British side of the frontier, or, when not so employed, fighting among themselves. They cannot get rifles from India except by creeping up to a British picket—natives or white men—shooting or stabbing, and stealing rifles in that way; so the Arabs ship them across the Gulf, and take them up on camels through the Baluchistan deserts. So many rifles are now captured by our cruisers, gunboats, and steam-launches that the demand is always greater than the supply; and as, directly they have been run safely into Baluchistan, rifles which originally cost three pounds are worth thirty to thirty-five each, the temptation to deal in arms is enormous.
"But who sells the Arabs these rifles?" I asked. The business was quite a mystery to me.
The political agent shrugged his shoulders.
"You'd better not ask. We both of us have to obey orders, and neither of us had better ask questions. Get away as soon as you like. The Intrepid is coming from Aden in a week's time, and will meet you off the coast, but I want you there as soon as possible."
"I'll go back at once," I said eagerly.
He nodded approvingly, and took me to wish the ladies good-bye.
"Do be careful," his wife said earnestly. "It was terrible about poor Mr. Collingwood and his gunner; everyone was so upset."
"I nearly waved to you when you passed the Bunder Abbas this morning," I told Miss Borsen, "but was afraid you'd think me forward—think me like that fussy major."
She laughed merrily.
"You were quite right. You never wished me good-bye when you left the steamer, so I should not have waved back."
The political agent accompanied me part of the way.
"That looks as if you expected to be attacked," I remarked, pointing to the earthworks, breastworks, and lines of wire entanglement.
"That's all over for the present. Some wandering brigand tribe did make it unpleasant for us once, but that's ancient history now. Good-bye! Look! my wife and Miss Borsen are waving good-bye."
I waved my helmet, and strode down the path feeling quite a hero, my head full of my new job.
As my boat ran alongside the Bunder Abbas Mr. Scarlett, with a grim smile, received me, whilst Moore (the petty officer), looking as sulky as a bear, "piped" me over the side, and the crew, lascars as well, stood to attention.
"I've had a few words with 'em. Told 'em the Bunder Abbas wasn't a Plymouth ash-boat but a man-of-war, and they'd behave as such," Mr. Scarlett chuckled.
"We have to get up steam and start hunting dhows as soon as ever we can," I burst out enthusiastically, telling him what were my orders.
I expected him to be as pleased as I was; but his face fell and he would not look me in the eyes. I did not understand him yet—not in the least. However, there were many difficulties in the way of sailing immediately—chiefly due to the shortage of fresh water for the tanks and boilers. Moore did not know where to get any on shore. He said sullenly that it wasn't any use trying during the hot hours of the day, that everyone on shore slept then, and that the crew, too, generally slept. "It was a-working in the 'eat of the day what killed Mr. Collingwood, 'im what died of sunstroke," he muttered, reminding me of the latter's fate for about the tenth time since coming on board.
I told him to "Get out of it and go to Jericho!"
Fortunately there was a splendid fellow on board, Webster, the corporal of marines, who knew how to get water on shore. He, the Persian interpreter (a stolid, aristocratic individual in spotless white clothes and a black fez), and myself went ashore in the dinghy and made ourselves extremely unpopular, disturbing an Arab contractor and waking half the village (if you could call it a village). But we got our water alongside in a couple of hours and on board half an hour later. Oh, my head was hot! On shore the sun seemed to strike right through my helmet, glaring at me from the dusty, sandy ground and hitting me from every white mud wall. I had never been so hot in my life.
At last everything was ready. We hove up our rusty cable and slipped out through the cluster of dhows anchored near us. The sun was low, and as I set my course from a tall signal-mast at one corner of the telegraph buildings, the white walls were tinged a rosy red. At the foot of the flagstaff I thought I saw the figures of two women. Risking another snub from the little lady with the yellow hair and grey eyes, I waved my helmet. Sure enough, two white handkerchiefs fluttered for a moment. I smiled, pleased that she had forgiven me.
Then the sun sank in a glory of red gold, and off we steamed, whilst I smoked my pipe and watched the lonely telegraph buildings and the sand-hills behind them gradually sink below the horizon.
I was so happy that I would not have changed places with all the kings of England from William I—1066—that I could remember.
For the first few hours, as we jogged along, a half-moon gave plenty of light; but it set by midnight, and the night was dark, with hardly a breath of wind.
Several times dhows glided by noiselessly and mysteriously, with a phosphorescent glow along their water-lines, and each time one passed I felt as excited as a child. I was much too excited to sleep; kept Mr. Scarlett's watch, and gradually edged to the eastward so as to be about halfway between those two creeks, and five miles or so off the land, at sunrise.
That first sunrise—the flood of marvellously changing shades of delicate colours, spreading upwards from behind the Persian mountains—was magical. Even though my thoughts were full of other things, I almost held my breath as I watched it. Away inshore, to the south-east, was the little headland of Kuh-i-Mubarak, with a peculiar-shaped rock (marked on the chart) on its top; and to the north-east was Sheikh Hill and the cliffs which the political agent had sketched for me. Between them the shore and the low sand-hills were, as yet, invisible, and not a sail was in sight.
"Well, here we are, Mr. Scarlett," I said with satisfaction, as he came to relieve me after a sound night's sleep. "We're just where I wanted to be. We'll go and have a look at that creek leading to Bungi."
In half an hour we had shoved the Bunder Abbas within a few hundred yards of the foot of Sheikh Hill, with its old dilapidated fort perched on top, and some white-robed figures squatting on the rocks outside it. I went right in, almost under the high cliffs on the opposite side of the little bay, until the mouth of the creek came in view, with a number of native boats drawn up on the sand, and, far inland, the tops of a few palm trees.
Mr. Scarlett, looking nervous and anxious, spotted a dirty-looking chap looking down at us from the tops of those cliffs. "He has a rifle," I said, handing him my glasses, and had hardly spoken before a spurt of water jumped up under our bows with a "flop", and a bullet, smacking against the anchor, squealed past us. I saw Mr. Scarlett's face turn grey, and his hand shook as he hurriedly gave back the glasses.
"He's an Afghan," he said; "an Arab would not fire without some excuse. We'd better get out of it, sir."
The man had flung himself down among the rocks at the top of those cliffs, almost over our heads. We could not have hit him with rifle, Maxim, or six-pounder; so, as I had seen all that was to be seen, I turned the Bunder Abbas round and went to sea again. The Afghan, or whoever he was, fired once or twice after us, but he was a wretchedly bad shot.
"Queer beggars, them Afghans," Mr. Scarlett said, recovering his equanimity when we were out of rifle range. "It don't matter where they are, but they'll take a pot-shot at a white man, even if they know they'll be scuppered the very next moment. You may bet your life, sir, that as there are some of them hanging round here, here they mean to land them rifles."
There was not a breath of wind to be felt, and no dhow could possibly run in for the next few hours, so I sauntered down to look at the creek near Kuh-i-Mubarak, eleven miles to the south. Here the water was very deep right up to the shore, and in the creek. I steamed up it for a mile and a half, winding between bare sand-hills, which concealed any view behind them, until it widened suddenly into a great basin or "khor" that shoaled rapidly.
"There won't be any water for us," Mr. Scarlett said, fidgeting.
Bother the water! I wanted to see all I could, so pushed on. I had not seen a single living thing or sign of habitation, so crept along, sounding as I went, until the sand-hills opened out and showed a wide plain dotted with palm trees, a few huts close to the water, and many boats drawn up in front of them.
"Look!" I shouted. "Look! Look at all those things under the trees—camels, as sure as ninepence!" Through my telescope I could see fifty or sixty yellowish-brown things kneeling, like lumps of mud, under the shade of those palms, moving their long necks, and some human beings were walking about among them. At any rate I had seen one lot of camels. I was quite satisfied, backed the Bunder Abbas out until there was room to turn her round, and put to sea.
All the rest of that day, the next night, and for three more days and nights we patrolled up and down from one creek to another, and not a sign of dhow did we see.
Those days were busy enough. Mr. Scarlett and I between us had "shaken up" the crew with a vengeance. Moore wished he'd never been born. I had the whole crew "fallen in" and said a few words to them, letting them know that I was going to stand no nonsense, and that until the Bunder Abbas was clean above and below, inside and out, bright work polished and paintwork clean, nobody would have any afternoon sleep whatever.
The trouble of it all was that there were so few of them that either they were on watch or standing off.
The whole crew consisted of only ten white men, besides myself and the gunner: Moore, the petty officer; Dobson, a quiet, determined-looking leading seaman; four able seamen—Andrews, Jackson, Wiggins, and Griffiths; a signalman named Hartley—the laziest man on board; and three marines—Webster, the corporal, and Jones and Gamble, privates. Picked men they were, I knew, though they had been allowed to get "out of hand". Webster, the corporal, was, as far as I could judge, the best man among them. He did the duties of ship's corporal, steward, sick-berth steward, and writer—and did them well too.
In addition to these there was Jaffa, the Persian interpreter, silent and dignified, always spotlessly clean—a good-looking fellow if he had not had a cataract in one eye. Jaffa was far and away ahead of all the other natives. He gave you the impression that he was the descendant of Persian emperors, brooding over the deserted grandeur and humbled state of his country at the present time. In fact, I treated him with the greatest respect from the very first day.
There were three lascar drivers and nine lascar firemen to look after the boilers and engine, their own lascar "bundari" or cook, another cook of some unknown nationality, and his boy, to cook for the rest of the crew. These two were the most depressed, dirty-looking objects I had ever seen. One or the other, generally both, could be seen at any hour of the day—or night, I believe—crouched on the deck, outside the little galley, swishing a dirty cloth round the middle of a saucepan or dish, gazing dejectedly across the sea, and looking as if they longed to jump into it and finish all their worries. Last but one was a snuff-coloured Goanese carpenter; and, last of all, Sinamuran, our Tamil boy from Trincomalee, who "did" for Mr. Scarlett and myself, and soon began to look quite respectable. We never had to call "Percy" a second time, day or night, before he had glided, silent as a ghost, to our elbows, looking with solemn black eyes to see what was wanted.
This was the strangely-assorted crew collected in the little Bunder Abbas—thirty in all, and speaking half a dozen languages. The white crew lived aft and the coloured men for'ard.
The bluejackets' uniform consisted of white, mushroom-shaped helmets or topees, white-coloured singlets, and duck "shorts". At night they wore their ordinary ship's caps, flannel jumpers, and duck trousers. I don't believe there was a yard of blue serge in the launch; so the "bluejackets" were not anything like the bluejackets one sees in England. The armament of the Bunder Abbas consisted of that six-pounder in the bows, the two Maxims in the stern, ten rifles and sword-bayonets, ten cutlasses, and twelve revolvers. We had plenty of ammunition. So now, perhaps, it is possible for anyone to picture us as we patrolled slowly up and down that coast, keeping well away from shore in the sweltering daytime and creeping closer during the comparatively cool nights.
For four days and nights there was scarcely a puff of wind to ruffle the surface of the sea—certainly not enough to move a dhow; so we saw nothing. But on the evening of that fourth day a fair breeze sprang up, only to die down again before midnight. Just before daybreak Mr. Scarlett woke me. As I jumped to my feet he pointed seawards, and there, sure enough, even in the indistinct light, was a dhow, about four miles off, crawling inshore with a fitful breeze behind her.
"That's no proper trader," Mr. Scarlett whispered hoarsely, his voice shaking a little. "Look what a wretched thing she is! The Arabs never run arms in a new or big dhow: the risk of capture is too great. See that signal?"
I looked ashore to where he was pointing. We were abreast Sheikh Hill, and on it we could see a red light being moved about.
"It's a warning signal," Mr. Scarlett said, "and she hasn't seen it yet."
"Off we go!" I chuckled, my heart thumping with excitement. "Get the guns cleared away."
"Aye, aye, sir," Mr. Scarlett answered bravely, but his voice trembled and his face turned that muddy colour again. He would not catch my eye, and went down on deck. I bit my lip with vexation. If I could not depend upon him at a pinch, what was I to do?
Percy brought me a cup of coffee, smiling, and looking at the dhow. I drank it at a gulp. Extraordinarily thirsty I was, and the air had a peculiar "dry feeling".
Griffiths happened to be at the wheel. I nodded, and he turned the launch towards the dhow, whilst I called down the voice-pipe to the engine-room and ordered more steam.
CHAPTER IV
Adrift in a Dhow
The crew of that dhow sighted us long before the puffs of black smoke from our funnel showed that the lascars down in the stokehold were pitching on more coal. The queer-looking craft turned up into the breeze, hung there for a moment, as if hesitating what to do, and then paid off, turning to the south'ard.
Off we went after her, gathering speed—Griffiths at the helm, I standing by him, and the others down below, under the awnings, round their guns. I noticed that there was no dew on the awnings or decks—usually it was very heavy; the air, too, was extraordinarily dry, and a splash of water which fell on the deck as Percy brought my shaving water to the cabin dried in no time.
Griffiths was sniffing to wind'ard. "A 'shamel's' coming, sir, that's what it is—a big one, I fancy; the air's allus like this a 'our or two before they comes."
A "shamel"! I had read about a shamel—the Sailing Directions for the station was full of it: a changeable, boisterous gale from the north-west, coming when least expected, sometimes blowing with terrific force, and often lasting for five or six days; but I was too excited just then to worry about it, even when Mr. Scarlett, putting his head up through the gap in the awning, called out huskily: "Bad weather from the north-west, I fear, sir."
The sun shot up from behind the Persian mountains, its face blurred and hazy.
"Aye, it's a shamel all right, afore long!" I heard Griffiths mutter.
Well, if it came, it came; I did not care what happened, so long as I got alongside that dhow.
In half an hour we were close enough to see that she was of about eighty tons, high in the poop, low in the bows, and very ill found. She had her big sail drawing full, and was streaking through the water. Presently she began to haul it farther and farther aft, still keeping on her course.
"Ah! the breeze is backing," Griffiths muttered; "that's another sign we're in for it all right, sir. It's going to be a tidy one too."
We were now about a thousand yards from the dhow, and were rapidly closing. I ordered Mr. Scarlett to fire a six-pounder shell ahead of her.
The little cloud of smoke spurted out from beneath the awning, and the shell burst fifty or sixty yards in front of her bows. She took not the least notice, except to ease away the big sail again, still keeping on her course to the south'ard.
"The shamel's coming, sure enough; she's reckoning on that," Griffiths muttered under his breath. "When it comes, those chaps will carry on till they lose their mast. They have rifles, or they'd have lowered their sail. If they're caught, it means six months' 'chokey' for them, besides losing the dhow, so they're going to have a run for their money. That's what they're going to do."
I was so excited that I could hear my heart drumming in my ears.
The hardly ruffled surface of the sea now began to lose its clearness, and a little spray sprinkled the fo'c'sle, drying almost as it fell.
I called down to the fo'c'sle, and Mr. Scarlett fired a second gun, whereupon the crew evidently thought it wiser to haul down their big sail. Down it came, and, as we ran alongside, a little cur of a dog, running backwards and forwards, kept jumping up on the gunwale and barking at us. We could not help laughing at its absurd fury.
"Any fight in them?" I asked Griffiths.
"Not by a jugful, sir. They'll be as quiet as lambs. You'll 'ave to be mighty 'nippy' a-searching of 'er, sir; the shamel's coming."
As our sides grated together I clambered on board her, Jaffa, the interpreter, Dobson, the leading seaman, Jackson and Wiggins following me. The little dog snapped at us, then went howling aft to where the crew of the dhow—nine or ten of them—were squatting, glaring at us. There were two big hatches, one for'ard and the other aft of the mast, both covered with several layers of timber planks, securely lashed down. Beneath them were my rifles. I felt sure that she must be full of rifles, and that they were mine already. As Jaffa followed me aft, the others began to make the launch fast alongside with ropes thrown to them.
"Tell the nakhoda[#] to show his papers; tell him to get his hatches uncovered," I told Jaffa; and he, perfectly accustomed to this job, began jabbering to a saturnine, bearded old villain who sat on the raised poop-deck between the tiller ropes.
[#] Nakhoda = captain.
The dog snarled and barked from beneath the poop, but the nakhoda and the rest of the crew sat there absolutely silent, not moving a muscle, just looking steadily at us.
I cursed them, but the only effect was to make the old villain smile—a curious smile, which I could not understand.
"Send everyone you can spare to clear away the hatches," I shouted to Mr. Scarlett. "They won't show their papers, and won't do anything."
Three lascars and the Goanese carpenter (yellow with fright) climbed on board with axes, and all my people began hacking at the ropes and hauling away the balks of timber on top of the main-hatch cover.
I yelled myself hoarse to make the Arabs come and lend a hand; Jaffa, too, was trying to persuade them. I pulled out my revolver and flourished it. Still no one budged an inch, except the nakhoda, who kept turning his head to the north-west.
It was half an hour's work to clear the main-hatch cover of all that timber, and we were about to start knocking out the securing wedges when I looked towards the land. Sheikh Hill was now six miles to the north; its outline was indistinct, and the water under it had a peculiar greyish, muddy appearance.
I caught the nakhoda's eye, and saw that triumphant smile again.
"Hurry up, men! it's coming on to blow," I shouted.
Mr. Scarlett's voice, very shaky, called:
"I shouldn't open those hatches, sir. We're a long way to leeward."
Little I cared how hard it blew. Little you would have cared if you had been in my place, on board my first capture, feeling certain that there were hundreds of rifles and thousands of cartridges under those hatches.
"Dig out, men, dig out for blazes!" I shouted, and then saw Mr. Scarlett lean over the side of the launch and be violently sick—with fright, I presumed—and was madly angry with him.
That line of muddy-grey water was rushing towards us now; Sheikh Hill was shut out in a blurred haze, and as the lascars were hammering at those wedges the "shamel" struck us. It was like a wall of solid wind. With a rush and a roar it swept down upon us, and I should have been blown overboard if I had not been holding on to a shroud. It struck the high poop of the dhow, and swung her and the Bunder Abbas round like a top. Spray whirled in front of the "shamel", and drenched us to the skin. The big sail began lashing furiously from side to side, but not a move did the Arab crew make; the little dog had fled back under the poop, and the nakhoda was laughing in his beard.
Mr. Scarlett shouted for me to cover up the hatch.
Luckily we had not yet opened it.
I yelled to my men to get hold of the sail, to lash it to the yard and to haul taut the main sheets, the big block of which was banging about in the most dangerous manner.
Whilst we were doing this another squall struck us. The dhow's bows paid off before it; the sail partially filled and bore her over until the lee gunwale was awash, then bore her down against the Bunder Abbas, the yard of the big sail tearing away the after awning and crumpling the stanchions. The lascars and the Goanese carpenter, frightened out of their lives, jumped into the Bunder Abbas or were knocked overboard into her. Jackson fell into the sea between the two. I expected him to be crushed, but saw them drag him safely into the launch—waiting their chance. Mr. Scarlett and a couple of "hands" were lowering the hatches over the engine-room and stokehold; others on board her were battening down for'ard, as the seas poured over the bows.
It was marvellous what a sea had risen in such a short time. Waves, striking the side of the dhow, surged up and topped aboard the launch; she was half-buried in them. The Arabs, crouching nearer together under the weather gunwale, pulled their cloaks over their heads to protect themselves, chattering volubly and peering to wind'ard; the nakhoda, clinging to one of the tiller ropes, chuckled to himself.
The dhow fell off again broadside to the wind, seas began washing right over her waist, and one by one those balks of timber were hurled overboard. The launch was to wind'ard, now, banging against her side. I did not know what to do. I could not bring myself to abandon the dhow.
Whilst I was trying to make up my mind, the dhow gave a tremendous lurch, and the strain on the for'ard rope to the launch was too much for it. It rendered, and before another could be secured the dhow had swung away from her. Another wave fell aboard her; the Bunder Abbas was almost hidden in water; the damaged awning stripped and thundered to leeward, and she heeled over so much that for a moment I thought she would capsize. Then the stern rope parted and we drifted away from each other.
I yelled to Mr. Scarlett to come alongside again (my voice hardly reached my own ears), but a cloud of steam rushed hurriedly up from the boiler-room, and I knew what that meant—her fires had been put out, and she was perfectly helpless.
For a moment I wondered whether she could live in that sea. It flashed across my brain that I'd made a fool of myself and lost her; then a wave soaked me to the skin and half-smothered me.
By this time we were a quarter of a mile apart, the dhow with her tall sides and mast drifting to leeward much more rapidly than the Bunder Abbas. As I watched her, wallowing deeply, the after awning tore away completely, whirling and twisting. It was carried up in the air like a dry leaf, and was actually borne right over the dhow before it fell into the sea. I saw the nakhoda still smiling from under his burnous—he knew perfectly well that neither the Bunder Abbas nor her guns mattered now—and I realized that Dobson, Wiggins, and myself were alone with those Arabs in a crazy dhow, with a gale blowing harder every moment, and no possible means of leaving her. I did not count Jaffa, the interpreter; it was not his job to fight, and if it came to a scrap he certainly did not look as if he would be of any use.
"We'll have to take her into Jask, sir," Dobson roared in my ears. "Right to lee'ard it is, sir. This breeze will take us there in next to no time."
What a chap! This "breeze"! Call this tearing, roaring fury of a gale a breeze!
My aunt; so we would! I'd never thought of that. We'd take her into Jask. Yes, we would! But there were those Arabs to be reckoned with, and they might have something to say about that. We should have to master them first and make them help us or the dhow might not weather the gale. We could do that, Dobson, Wiggins and I; we had our revolvers, whilst they seemed to be unarmed.
With something definite to do, and with the relief of not having yet lost my captured rifles, I really minded but little what happened. Those rifles were mine, and sooner than lose them—I'd go down with them. Take her into Jask! Of course we would. But first I must stand by the Bunder Abbas until she had raised steam again and was in safety. She was all right so far—a thousand yards to wind'ard, rolling horribly. Someone began semaphoring, and I read, "Fires washed out—am getting out sea anchor—will follow as soon as possible;" so Mr. Scarlett, or Moore, or somebody, was keeping his head.
"We must try and work her up to wind'ard," I bawled in Dobson's ear, but he shook his head and bawled something back which I could not hear. I meant to try, and the first thing to do was to get control of the helm, though how to do that with all those Arabs squatting there, glaring at us, I didn't know.
"Tell them to get for'ard," I yelled to Jaffa, and saw him crawl aft and shout something at them, gesticulating in a commanding way, though those infernal fellows only smiled and sat still, half a dozen of them holding on to the tiller ropes.
Dobson looked at me and bawled in my ear:
"I'll get hold of the helm tackles—just you shoot if any of them tries any of their tricks."
"No! I'll go," I yelled, ashamed to funk the job.
I waited till the dhow was steady for a moment, worked my way along the weather gunwale, dodging those balks of timber which were being washed about the deck, until I was right in the middle of them. That beastly little dog snapped at my bare feet as I grabbed one of the tiller ropes to steady myself, and I kicked him back under the poop.
I yelled and waved to the crew to get for'ard, staying among them and kicking two of them in the ribs to make them let go of the ropes. They took not the slightest notice. The nakhoda was just behind me, and I feared, every moment, that I should feel a knife in my back.
Jaffa came scrambling to join me—I never thought that he would have the pluck to do so.
"Tell the nakhoda that if the crew don't go for'ard in two minutes I'll shoot him," I roared.
The nakhoda looked impassively to wind'ard whilst I pointed my revolver at his head and held up my wrist watch, so that he could see it, and waited.
A minute went past—Jaffa looked nervously round; the nakhoda folded his burnous more closely round his head. Two minutes went by—not a single one in all that stolid group moved; they still clung to the tiller ropes. I gave him three minutes. Three minutes went by, and that Arab nakhoda knew perfectly well that I would not shoot him in cold blood.
Nor could I. I let go the tiller rope and crawled for'ard again, absolutely not knowing what to do next.
We were driving and twisting, screwing and yawing before the gale like a bit of driftwood, seas toppling over the bows and the waist and washing right across the decks. And that crowd refused to budge—would not have done anything to save their own lives, I believe.
If they had only taken the offensive and attacked us I should have whooped with the joy of fighting—that cargo of rifles down below was worth fighting for—but they would not.
Dobson it was who settled the question.
With a "Look out, sir, I'm going for 'em", he took the opportunity of a moment when the dhow was on a level keel and rushed into the middle of them. He seized the burnous over the nakhoda's head, and before that malignant brute could get his hands free he had hauled the loose folds across his throat, choked him, pulled him off the poop on to the deck, and began hauling him for'ard.
In a trice those Arabs were on their feet, throwing off their upper clothes, and snarling like a lot of dogs. Two of them caught Dobson's foot, and tried to throw him. Wiggins and I were among them in a moment, hitting right and left, until my knuckles were bleeding. In a jumbling, struggling crowd, with that dog barking and biting round us, we were thrown from port to starboard, as the dhow rolled; but somehow or other we managed to get between the Arabs and Dobson, who had never let go of the old man's neck.
A wave washed over us, and for a moment we had a breathing spell, and in that moment I saw the nakhoda free one of his hands. He had a knife in it, so I grabbed his arm, forced his wrist back, and gave him a blow on the back of his head with the butt end of my revolver which knocked him as limp as a rag.
As he fell, the crew, like one man, bent down to the folds round their waists, drawing knives. Two of them had pistols, and before either Wiggins, Dobson, or myself could use our revolvers they had fired, and a bullet had whizzed past my head.
A pistol went off behind me; one of the Arabs—one of the two with pistols—threw up his hands and fell. The others yelled and rushed for us; but we were ready now. I chose the second man with a pistol, fired, and missed him; another shot from behind knocked him over. I saw two more fall. I got a slice over the head, the man who did it being knocked down by Dobson before I knew he had touched me, and the rest had had enough of it, and scrambled for'ard. The dog tried to follow them, but made the mistake of attempting a last snap at Dobson's leg. Before you could wink, that little cur was whirling through the air overboard. In two minutes after Dobson had garrotted their nakhoda, we were masters of that dhow.
I felt rather rocky, and sat down, holding on to a rope, with blood simply pouring over my ear and shoulder.
Then it was that I saw Jaffa. I had forgotten him. He was standing behind me, calmly re-charging a Mauser pistol in the most matter-of-fact way possible, and I realized that it was his shots that had killed the two pistol men. I tried to show that I was grateful. "Well shot, Jaffa!" I shouted. "Tell them to take their dead and wounded for'ard."
Presently the six Arabs still on their legs crawled and slunk aft, and dragged the two dead bodies away, helping the wounded man along the deck, and then sitting in a ring round the foot of the mast, motionless and mute as bats, drawing their cloaks round them to protect them from the seas.
The nakhoda was still unconscious, so we secured him to a ring to prevent him being washed overboard.
Someone lashed a handkerchief round my head and stopped the bleeding. That made me more comfortable, and I was able to take stock of our position.
Kuh-i-Mubarak, that hill near the southern creek, was now abreast us, just visible through the gale. The shamel roared down on us more fiercely than ever, driving in front of it a wild, jumping, short sea, twenty feet high, with boiling crests. That such waves could have been whipped up in such a short time seemed incredible.
Every now and then the launch's white side and her yellow funnel and mast showed up against the dark sky to wind'ard; so she was still safe. But we were more than two thousand yards to leeward of her, and how I was going to beat up against that wind and sea in this crazy dhow I didn't know.
However, I was not going to leave the launch helpless; I knew that she could not raise steam for a long time, and determined to make the attempt.
"I'm going to hoist that sail—part way up—see if we can work to wind'ard," I bawled to Dobson.
He shouted back: "She'll never do it, sir; not in this sea."
We should have to try anyway; so we rolled up and lashed the foot of that huge sail as firmly as we could, and, having done that, all four of us clapped on to the main-halyard purchase and slowly raised the big yard about three feet. What canvas was now free lashed about ferociously, giving us stern way.
"Stand by your main sheets," I yelled. "Stand by to ease and haul your tiller hard a-starboard."
Dobson and Wiggins dashed aft to obey, and, as the rudder was put over, our bows began to pay off from the gale, and, doing so, the full force of it broke on the beam; that scrap of sail filled, and bore us over until our bows were buried in the sea.
"Midships the helm!" I shouted, and watched to see how the dhow would behave. A squall struck her, and a wave of great height, leaping over us, surged on board—solid water. The dhow heeled over till we could not stand, and those lashings round the foot of the sail gave way like pistol shots, one after the other; the whole of that huge sail shot out like a balloon, and we gave a tremendous lurch.
Where the bows had been was now a churning mass of water; the lee gunwale and the foot of the lee shrouds were out of sight; I was up to my waist in water; one of the Arabs was washed overboard, and the nakhoda would have been had he not been lashed to that ringbolt.
I struggled to the main sheet, yelling to Dobson to ease it, but it was under water and had jammed; no one could get at it.
I thought that unless the mast carried away we must capsize.
"Cut it, for God's sake, cut it!" I roared, and Dobson hacked away at one of the thick ropes. Whilst he was sawing away—his knife was blunt and would not cut—Jaffa, quick as lightning, pulled out his Mauser pistol, put the muzzle up against the rope, and fired in quick succession.
With a leap and a shriek the rope gave way, the running parts lashed through the sheaves of the "purchase", the sail flew out to leeward, and the dhow began to right herself, shaking the water from her like a dog.
Thank God we had not opened the hatch cover! If we had done so we should have sunk like a stone.
As it was, we were in a bad enough plight. The huge sail was beating madly, one second half-buried in the sea, the next whirled as high as the masthead, and cracking with a noise like thunder, the big block on the standing part of the main sheet attached to the sail being hurled about like a stone on the end of a rope. This block kept on sweeping over the stern, where we were taking shelter, splintering the railings like matchwood, and it was all we could do to dodge it. If it had struck anyone, that would have been the last of him.
Perhaps, for most of the time, the sail, or the lower part, was in the water, and the dhow could not lift it out or herself on an even keel; like a huge bird, with one wing broken, we went rolling and reeling to leeward, waiting for the mast to carry away.
To have attempted to drag the sail on board and smother it would have been sheer lunacy, even if we had twenty men to do it. It would have been as easy to try to stop a wounded elephant tearing up trees round him by lassoing his trunk with twine.
To add to our troubles, the seas were beating against the rudder, which was wrestling with the tiller ropes and trying to shake itself free.
Jask! I wasn't thinking of Jask then, or of Mr. Scarlett and the Bunder Abbas. What was to happen in the next half-minute was quite enough for me. We could not stand without clinging to something, the dhow was lurching too much, and sea after sea, four or five feet deep, in foaming cataracts, poured over the dhow's waist.
We had to do something: we tried to lower the big yard, struggling waist-deep in the sea to reach the foot of the mast, where those poor wretches of Arabs, in the last stage of fright, were clinging for dear life. We could not move it or its clumsy rope "sleeve", securing it to the mast, and Wiggins was banged against the mast by a wave—flattened against it like a fly on a wall. It was all we could do to prevent his being washed overboard. He broke two ribs, though we did not know that until afterwards.
As we scrambled back to the poop we saw the rudder head wrench itself free from the tiller ropes, and to the noise of the gale and the thundering of that mad sail now came the grinding noise of the rudder breaking itself to pieces under the stern. Thank goodness, it broke away before it had knocked a hole in our bottom, floating up and threatening to come inboard on the top of the next wave. However, we drifted away from it like a feather from a piece of seaweed, and had soon left it out of sight.
Why that mast did not go over the side I cannot think. The strain on it and the weather shrouds must have been enormous.
If it had broken we should have been perfectly helpless, and the end—well, as I said before, we were too busy with each succeeding half-minute to worry about anything beyond that.
We were drifting to leeward at a tremendous rate; Kuh-i-Mubarak was below the horizon, and the gale showed no signs of lessening.
"If this goes on much longer we'll find ourselves blown a hundred miles out to sea," Dobson roared in my ear. "We'd best cut away the mast. She'll ride more easy and won't drift so quick."
I looked to wind'ard. Even though the gale howled as fiercely as ever, the sky showed signs of clearing; the line of the horizon was certainly clearer than it had been the last time I looked. I knew that these gales often died down as quickly as they rose; the fiercer they were the quicker over, and I still hoped to sail into Jask. I even began to think how best to rig a "jury" rudder.
So I shook my head at Dobson, and determined to keep the mast unless things became worse, and we hung on, dodging the waves and the block on that main sheet.
Presently the sail began to give way, great rents showing in it when it lifted, spreading and ripping, and flying to leeward in long streamers, which one by one tore themselves clear and spun madly down wind.
As each strip parted it eased the strain, until, after a time, the dhow came on a more even keel, and in the hollows of the seas wallowed less deeply.
Somehow or other we felt that the worst was over, and began to look round us and shift into more comfortable positions. The old nakhoda—half-drowned he was—began to recover consciousness, and the Arabs ventured a little farther aft, crouching for shelter under the weather gunwale.
There was now no sign whatever of the Bunder Abbas—we had drifted out of sight of her long ago—but the sky overhead was clearing; large blue patches showed between the clouds, and though the gale still shrieked down on us with unabated violence, our spirits rose considerably.
The edge of civilization! Yes, I was there, with a vengeance! What an extraordinary change seven weeks had made, after my long seven years in home waters! I could not help picturing the Channel Squadron anchored, as I last saw it, under Portland Bill, and wondered whether it was still there, thanking Heaven that I was not keeping a monotonous day "on".
To make things still more comfortable for us, that big wooden block, in a last furious endeavour to dash our brains out, banged itself to pieces against a big wooden bollard on the poop, so we had no longer to dodge it. But to level up things we began to realize how horribly thirsty we were. We found some water, or rather Jaffa found some, under the poop, in an old kerosene tin. It tasted horrid, and was so brackish that it did little to quench our thirst. My head, too, now that I had not so much to think about, began to throb and ache. Wiggins began to complain of his side.
"We've got to stick it out, that's all," I called to them; and Dobson smiled cheerily, shouting back that he thought "this 'ere shamel wouldn't last long; it was too blooming strong at the start."
He talked about a shamel as if it was an old acquaintance—sometimes in a good, but now in a very bad temper.
I began to feel that the wind was not so strong; waves were certainly not breaking over the dhow so frequently nor with so much force. The lee gunwale was well clear of the sea.
I thought that now it might be possible to capture the remnants of that sail, so, making a rope fast round my waist, and telling Dobson to come with me, I scrambled to the foot of the mast. Whilst he stood by to "pay out" I chose a moment when the big yard over my head was still, climbed on to it, swung myself across it, and, holding on with arms and legs, worked my way along it slowly. It tried to shake me off every half-minute. Once it managed to get rid of my knees, whilst I clung like grim death, my legs dangling almost in the water. Then it tossed me like a feather, and I caught it again with my knees, waiting a moment till it was possible to wriggle along still farther. I managed to crawl almost twenty feet from the mast. That was far enough for my purpose. I wanted to secure my rope to it there—the rope round my waist—but that was the trouble; directly I let go with one hand, off I was jerked, just as if the beastly sail and yard were waiting their opportunity.
For a second I hung by one arm, my body actually in the water, then the sail, billowing up, lifted me with it, and I clung to that yard like a fly. There was a gap just below me, beneath the yard, where the sail had torn itself away from its lashing. I wriggled through it and over the yard again, the rope of course coming along after me, and by waiting my opportunity I managed another wriggle round the yard. There I was, with a turn of the rope round it and myself, secured to it like a pig lashed to a pole. However, I could not be jerked off and could use one hand. Looking down I saw Dobson yelling encouragement; the Arabs were looking at me with frightened faces.
Dobson paid out the rope very handsomely, and in a couple of minutes I managed to take another turn round the yard, secure it, and unlash myself. Then, shinning and clinging like a limpet as the yard waved about, wriggling backwards when it was quiet, I managed to reach the mast and clambered down on deck.
"That's done 'im in the eye right enough!" Dobson shouted enthusiastically, as he grabbed me by the feet. '"Im" was the shamel.
Together we led that rope aft, passed it through a block under the lee gunwale, took a turn round a cleat, and the four of us tried to haul the yard on board, hauling for all we were worth.
THE FOUR OF US TRIED TO HAUL THE YARD AND SAIL ON BOARD, HAULING FOR ALL WE WERE WORTH.
We won a few inches at a time, between squalls, and another turn round the cleat would prevent the yard dragging them out again. Slowly, inch by inch, the end of it came closer to us, and at every inch the dhow would heel over a little more. However, I knew how much she would stand by now, so cared not a jot.
However, at last the yard and sail beat us. It was all we could do to hold in what we had won; not another inch could we gain. Then, to our intense delight, the six Arabs came aft and clapped on too.
"Go it, lads!" I yelled, and, working like one man, we pulled the yard towards us until the peak of it was close to the railings round the stern.
Dobson scrambled up with a coil of rope, lassoed it, and captured it for good and all.
It was grand.
"Now lower it!" I yelled, and we scrambled for'ard to the mast, Arabs and all, slacked off the main halyards, and down it slid.
The remnant of the sail made a last attempt to escape, then draggled over the lee side, hanging down in the water—beaten.
No one wanted an order; Dobson, Wiggins, Jaffa, and myself, and every one of those Arabs, flung ourselves on to it to prevent it filling again, clutching and pulling till, in a minute or two, it was all on board, lashed to the yard, and as harmless as a handkerchief.
The dhow now came on a level keel, and, her stern paying off before the wind, our bows pointed into the sea. You can imagine what a relief this was after we had been rolling over on our beam-ends for so long.
However, she could not face the seas, and we were soon being spun round and round again.
"A sea-anchor; that's what she wants!" Dobson shouted. "That'll steady her, sir; she'll be like a cradle when she's got one."
There was plenty of timber on the fore hatch, so we unlashed it, and, making half a dozen long balks fast to a big grass hawser we found in the bows, we tipped them overboard, or allowed the seas to wash them overboard—whichever happened first—one after the other. As the dhow drifted to leeward so much faster than they did, the hawser soon tautened out, and brought our bows round into the wind.
Jolly proud we all were of that sea-anchor. It sounds easy enough to make, but if you had seen us trying to prevent those planks and balks of timber taking "charge" whilst we were passing the grass hawser round each one singly, leaping away as they tore themselves out of our hands and tried to break our legs, you would realize that it was not the simple matter it sounds.
We must have been struggling with it for at least an hour, up to our waists in water most of that time, and were thoroughly exhausted by the time we had paid out the whole of the hawser.
But we were now riding head to sea, our decks were not washed by the waves, and when we gathered on the poop to rest after our exhausting work we were as comfortable, as Dobson said, "as fleas in a blanket".
CHAPTER V
My First Capture
With that sea-anchor keeping our bows up to wind'ard, the worst of our troubles seemed to be over. My wrist watch had been broken in that first mêlée, so we did not know what time it was. From the height of the sun we guessed it to be nearly noon.
I climbed to the mast head. Not a sign of the Bunder Abbas could I see; in fact, the whole circle of the horizon was empty but for ourselves, and as there was absolutely nothing to be done (for it would have been madness to hoist a scrap of sail, and as for trying to make a jury-rudder, we simply could not have done it whilst we were pitching and tossing so violently) we four sat comfortably on the poop, dried ourselves, and watched the Arabs squatting close to the foot of the mast. They had asked Jaffa's permission to search for food, and had found some dried dates. They seemed to enjoy them, and the sight of food of any sort made us remember that we had not had any that day, and that we were as hungry as hunters.
Jaffa found a large store of these dates under the poop, and, though they looked unappetizing to a degree, we enjoyed them hugely, washing them down with another drink out of that kerosene tin.
I was so hungry that I could have eaten a cat.
The sun was now blazing down on us. Unfortunately we had not brought our helmets or topees, having left the Bunder Abbas at daybreak. Our caps were little, if any, protection from it, in spite of our constantly dipping them into the sea, and my head was burning and throbbing. Salt water got into that wound, and I did not dare to take off the handkerchief for fear of it bleeding again. Wiggins complained a good deal of his ribs.
The nakhoda, too, recovered consciousness, and begged for water, sitting up and moaning when he saw all the wreckage round him. He had such a cruel, cunning face that I could not trust him for'ard with the crew, but kept him aft with us. He looked as if it would have given him a great deal of joy to cut our throats, and no doubt it would.
Every half-hour or so Dobson or I would go for'ard to see that the hawser to the sea-anchor was not chafing in the "fairway," taking stock of the weather at the same time. Every time I said: "I think it's easing off," Dobson would shake his head; "'E ain't finished with 'is tantrums yet, sir."
However, at last I felt sure that the gale was moderating. There were not such high waves, they did not boil down on us so furiously, they were longer too, not so steep, and we were certainly riding more easily. Dobson at last agreed: "'E's in a good 'umour, I do believe."
The nakhoda's wicked old face was a good enough barometer. As the wind and the sea fell, so did his face look more glum, until at last, when there was no manner of doubt that the gale was fast dying down, he scowled angrily. What idea he had in his cunning old head, I did not know.
"We'll be able to start rigging a jury-rudder soon," I told Dobson, "hoist a bit of sail, and bear away towards Jask."
I had given up any possibility of beating up to the Bunder Abbas. If I could get into Jask the political agent would soon charter me a dhow to go back and look for her.
Well, we made that jury-rudder. It took us two hard-working hours, and without the help of the Arab crew we could not have made it. A clumsy thing it was; a triangle made of balks of timber, with one long projecting plank at each corner for the steering ropes. We also managed to secure the lower after end of what remained of the sail, binding a rope round it to act, later on, as a sheet.
There were still six able-bodied Arabs, not counting the nakhoda. The wounded man (the one who could not walk) had been washed overboard by the first big sea which struck us. The wounds of the others were not worth troubling about. As far as I remember, Dobson's fists had made them; certainly they had not been struck with bullets, because Jaffa was the only one on board who had shown himself able to hit a haystack at ten yards.
Having completed the jury-rudder we rested until the falling wind and sea allowed us to use it. We took it "turn and turn about" to keep watch, Jaffa and I, Dobson and Wiggins—nothing to do and two to do it. The only thing we had to do was to keep an eye on the treacherous old nakhoda.
The afternoon slipped by; the sun began to set in all its grandeur, and only a few gloriously-tinted clouds, scudding across the sky, were left to remind us that nature had been in such an angry mood. The wind and the sea seemed to sink to rest with the sun; only an occasional sobbing gust moaned through the rigging, and, rising from the sea, a huge full moon, like a burnished silver plate, set deep in a dark indigo sky, flooded us with light.
It was now possible to try to bring the dhow under control; so, first of all, overboard went the jury-rudder, with two hawsers lashed to those projecting planks, and led to either side of the poop. Then we hoisted a little of our tattered sail, cut away the grass hawser to the sea-anchor, and, the breeze—it was only a breeze now—blowing steadily and softly from the north-west, filling the sail gently, we squared the yard and let her "rip".
But the jury-rudder would not act as a rudder. It was too clumsy, and the ropes attached to it too heavy. Twenty men on each would have been scarcely sufficient to work it. However, it kept our stern to the wind—acting as a drag on the dhow—and we scudded merrily away to the south-east at about three knots. I imagined that we were about eighty miles to the south-west of Jask, and hoped that as the breeze backed, as it generally did for some time after a shamel, we should be presently blown away to the east.
Up to now the Arab crew had been helping quite willingly: but whilst they were working aft with the jury-rudder I noticed that the sly old nakhoda took every opportunity of speaking to them, and that afterwards, though they still worked, they worked sullenly and unwillingly.
I had thought of allowing him to go for'ard with them, but after this, and after Jaffa had warned me not to do so ("He only make a mischief," he said), I kept him aft where he was, much as I disliked his company.
I rather fancy that that knock on the head had made me sleepy. I could hardly keep my eyes open during my first turn of watch-keeping. It was beautifully cool, the "shamel" was now nothing more than a respectable breeze, and the long subsiding swell made a most heavenly sight in the moonlight. Jaffa and I talked—it was the only way we could keep awake—he telling me more about the peculiarities of the winds which blew in this region. Then he went on to tell me some of the experiences he had had during the nine years he had served in the British service as an interpreter. Though they were very interesting I was more interested in him and in his quiet aristocratic method of telling them. After the wonderfully cool way he had handled his Mauser pistol that morning he was not to me the same Jaffa who had boarded the dhow with us.
Dobson and Wiggins relieved us presently. "The jury-rudder is keeping our stern into the wind well enough," I told Dobson; "the sea is nearly smooth, the wind mostly gone, and the Arabs are all sound asleep—the nakhoda under the poop, the rest for'ard."
Then I slept like a log until Dobson called me for another spell of watch, and Jaffa and I were again on duty.
It was as wonderful, enchanting a sight as I have ever seen. Above us the great, dazzling, silent moon; around us the sea, a rippling surface of silvery white, stretching away to the circle of the horizon. The little dhow, with her white deck and black shadows, was the centre of it, her sail a great patch of white, casting its clear-cut shadow to starboard over the bows and over the water under them, as sharply cut where it fell on the water as across the deck.
In the bows, beyond the foot of the sail, the sleeping Arabs lay in its dark shadow; in the stern, in the shadow of the poop, Dobson and Wiggins were soon fast asleep—the nakhoda had crawled under the poop and slept there.
It was all so silent and so beautiful—the embodiment of all that is lovely and peaceful and good in nature—that the perils and tragedies of the day before seemed almost unreal, and it seemed impossible to realize that, unless we kept wideawake and alert for the first suspicious movement, we might have our throats cut at any moment.
What we could realize—only too painfully—was that we were very hungry.
Probably that helped to keep us awake more than anything else.
At any rate we did keep awake until I thought that two hours had gone by, when I woke Dobson, coiled down on deck again, and was asleep in a second.
Something touched me. I woke up. Dobson was bending over me. "There's summat going on for'ard, sir. I don't like the sound of it. I've been for'ard under the foot of that 'ere sail twice in the past 'arf-'our, and those noises leave off. I find them Arabs a-lying there as quiet as mice in a nest, and I don't understand it."
I rubbed my eyes, sat up, and rose to my feet—very stiff I was.
The sea was absolutely calm now; the moonlight flooded our decks. Every seam and knot in the planks was distinct; every stitch and ragged tear showed out clearly in the drooping sail, whose shadow swallowed up the whole of the bows.
"Listen, sir!" Dobson whispered, pointing for'ard.
I heard a soft rasping sound, as if pieces of rough wood were being drawn across each another. I crept for'ard close to the gunwale, and had not taken two paces before the noise ceased.
Dobson joined me. "It always leaves off directly I start to go for'ard, sir."
"Come along," I said, and we both walked along the deck, and, lifting the foot of the sail, peered underneath. When our eyes were accustomed to the darkness we could see the figures of Arabs huddled up close together on top of the fore hatch. We waited for several minutes, but no one stirred.
We crept back again.
"Where's Wiggins?" I asked, and Dobson pointed under the poop. "He felt so bad with his ribs, sir, that I told him to go and lie down."
"See if the nakhoda is under there," I told him, and he crept in.
He came back again, white in the face. "'E's not there, sir."
I crawled under myself, crawled all over the beastly place. He certainly was not there.
"I never saw 'im go, sir!" Dobson whispered apologetically.
However, he was gone; there could be no doubt about that. He was certain to have crept for'ard among his men, and it was as certain that mischief would be brewing.
"We'll turn 'em out and see what it is," I said, pulling my revolver from its holster and opening the breech to see that it was loaded.
We went for'ard again, and as we bent down under the sail, our revolvers in our hands, there was a rush of bare feet and the whole crowd of them leapt at us. Three or four were clinging to me, throttling me round the neck, clutching my arms to my sides, and pulling my legs from under me. In spite of all my struggles I was thrown to the deck on my face; someone bent back my wrist to wrench the revolver away, but before it was dragged out of my hand I managed to get my finger on the trigger and pulled it. As my head whirled with the choking of those iron fingers round my throat I did not know whether I had actually fired it or not. I was banged on the deck, twisted round and round under a heap of grunting Arabs; something was forced into my mouth; I nearly lost consciousness, but when the grasp on my throat was relaxed I managed to draw a breath of air and found myself next to Dobson, both of us lashed up like mummies, lying on our backs on some coils of rope.
We were both gagged, unable to speak, much less able to shout and wake Jaffa and Wiggins—lying perfectly helpless.
Two Arabs were squatting on their haunches on either side of us. Like a fool I tried to struggle, and the one near me bent down and drew something across my forehead—a knife; I felt its edge jag along the bone and the blood running down the side of my temples and matting on my eyebrows.
I lay still, terrified lest the next time I moved that knife would be across my throat. I really was horror-struck.
I saw the remainder of those brutes stealing aft noiselessly, under the sail into the moonlight, and had an awful fear that in our struggles we had made so little noise that Wiggins and Jaffa would not have waked, and that they, too, would be caught unawares. I did not know whether my revolver had fired or not. I tried to imagine that it had, but everything was too horribly blurred for me to be sure.
Then my heart gave a great bound of relief, for, as the last of those Arabs had stooped down and shown himself in the moonlight, I saw a flash and heard Jaffa's Mauser pistol—and a louder one, Wiggins firing too. Shots banged out close to us, from the foot of the sail. An Arab gave a yell of pain, and the others came stampeding into the shadow again.
Thank Heaven! They had not caught them asleep.
Two of the Arabs—two with revolvers, mine and Dobson's I imagined—knelt down by us and hunted for more ammunition, pressing the muzzles against our foreheads to keep us quiet. The muzzle slipped into that gash; how it did pain! I had no more cartridges—none, thank God! Dobson had an unopened packet of twelve rounds, and we saw them carefully dividing these between each other. A cartridge dropped between us, and they hunted for it among the coils of rope, pulling us away roughly. An Arab pounced on it with a hiss of delight. I saw the Arab with a revolver take it and place it in his chamber, so I knew that they only had twelve rounds between them. Then these two armed men crept along, one on each side, to the edge of the shadow of the sail, stooping down to see under it, whilst the others, with knives in their hands, lay flat down on the deck between them.
I was half-dazed and mad with mortification and rage. I would have given my life to have known what Jaffa and Wiggins were doing at the other end of the dhow. There was a dark shadow under the poop platform, I knew, and trusted with all my heart that they had retreated there. But not a sound came from aft; they might both have been hit for all I knew. And not a sound did the Arabs make either. The only noise was the creaking of the yard against the mast and its huge sleeve of rope. The sail drooped down absolutely motionless, blotting out the moon.
How long this silence lasted I have not the least idea. It seemed ages.
"They have only twelve cartridges," was the only thing I could think of, and waited to count the shots, holding my breath for fear the thudding of my heart would prevent my hearing them.
The dark figures of those Arabs suddenly seemed to stiffen, and then, from either gunwale, where the shadows were darkest, the revolvers flashed and banged, twice on my right, three times on my left.
"Seven cartridges now, only seven," I thought joyfully, and each flash had been answered by more flashes from aft, and bullets ripped along the deck close to where Dobson and I lay.
An Arab gave a low sob, and I heard a revolver clatter to the deck on my left. A dark arm stretched out to pick it up, where it lay in the moonlight, and as the dark hand seized it and hurriedly drew back into the shadow a bullet splintered the deck where it had been.
A long period of silence followed. Except for an occasional groan from one of the Arabs, and the creaking of the yard above us, no sound came to relieve the extreme tension of my ears.
Seven more they had. How many had Jaffa and Wiggins? That was all I could think about. Wiggins would probably have very few, but Jaffa—I knew nothing about him. My ears were throbbing with the strain of listening to count pistol shots which never came. Then they crept aft again. I thought they were going to kill us. They dragged us aft until we lay among them, just in the edge of the shadow of the sail, and one of them began calling out. Though there was no reply from aft, I knew well enough that they were telling Jaffa that he would probably hit us if he fired any more.
So long as these Arabs did not recapture the dhow, I did not care in the least whether I was hit or not.
The answer came with a single pistol shot from aft. As it flashed, both the Arab revolvers went off. Probably they were waiting for this, and fired at the flash. I was too dazed to count the number of shots. Was it two or three? Had they five or four cartridges still? My brain was whirling and numb. I could not be sure.
They were probably as bad shots as ourselves, and appeared to be getting nervous.
There was a hurried consultation among them; they drew back farther into the shadow, and all of a sudden began stripping off their loose cloaks, five of them, two with revolvers, the others with knives, and I could make out the figure and beard of the nakhoda as he gesticulated and encouraged them.
I knew that they were standing by to make a rush aft, when suddenly they gave a hoarse cry and stiffened where they stood, pointing over the sea. They stood like dark statues for a moment, and then the whole darkness disappeared. They stood out in the glare of a searchlight, naked to the waist, their eyes glittering, their lips drawn back in fear, showing their white teeth, and their shadows thrown against the now lighted sail.
In another moment the searchlight—for it was a searchlight—had passed and it was dark again. Jaffa and Wiggins fired half a dozen rounds very rapidly; the bullets did not come for'ard, so probably they were firing in the air; they yelled, too, and back the searchlight swept and remained, whilst a small shell, bursting with a roar close to the bows, threw up a column of fire and water. In a second those Arabs had dropped on their knees, crouching below the gunwales and hiding from the glare of the light—all except the nakhoda, who, yelling something like "Allah", rushed at me with a long knife.
He would have stuck it into me had not the others thrown themselves on him and pulled him to the deck.
As they did so Jaffa and Wiggins, shouting and cursing, rushed forward.
In a minute I was free, Dobson was free. Wiggins had cut the ropes, whilst Jaffa stood guard over the Arabs, and as I staggered to the deck, bleeding like a pig again, a boat rasped alongside, and Popple Opstein's great red face appeared as he climbed over the gunwale, followed by half a dozen men.
"Four more! They've got four more—or is it three?" was all I could think of to say as he came for'ard. I had to sit down to prevent my legs giving way.
"Thank God you came along in time!" I said, as he shook some sense into me and gave me something to drink.
I was all right again in a few minutes, and whilst the Arabs were being securely tied up, to prevent any unpleasant mistakes, I was able to tell him what had happened.
"What about your edge of civilization, Martin, old chap?" he laughed. "You nearly toppled over the edge of it that time, eh? We spotted you in the moonlight, and saw the revolver flashes, so knew something was wrong. We never thought it was you."
"Man, she's full of rifles. I'm dead certain she is," I burst out, "and I haven't been out here ten days! Isn't it splendid?"
"You don't look very splendid," my chum smiled grimly. "The sooner you get on board to our doctor the better."
I really felt almost intoxicated. I could not stop talking. "Look at that one-eyed interpreter of mine," I babbled, turning to Jaffa, who was leaning up against the gunwale cleaning his Mauser pistol. "Look at him! He saved the whole show. He's simply grand with that pistol of his. Aren't you, Jaffa?"
He smiled his inscrutable, dignified smile.
"You saved all our lives. We should not have pulled through without you," I went on, and for the life of me I do not know whether he looked pleased or not.
The Intrepid's men were going round collecting the knives which the Arabs had dropped on deck. Dobson and I found our revolvers.
For the life of me I could not keep silent.
"How many cartridges are there in yours?" I asked him, opening my breech. "There are only two in mine."
"Not a blessed one, sir!" he grinned; so, after all, I had miscounted.
"How many have you?" I asked Wiggins.
"Not a blessed one either, sir! I did have two, but fired 'em when we sighted the Intrepid—that 'ere Pershun told me to!"
Commander Duckworth of the Intrepid now came on board the dhow, and I had to tell him the yarn all over again. In spite of feeling absolutely "played out", I talked as if I should never stop, telling him detail after detail, imploring him to go right away and hunt for the Bunder Abbas. I rather fancy I suggested that he should leave us in the dhow to sail into Jask.
However, I found myself, Dobson, Wiggins, and Jaffa climbing down into his boat and being pulled across to the Intrepid. I know that I talked to them all the time, and to Nicholson, the staff surgeon of the Intrepid, whilst he was probing and stitching those wounds of mine. When he had finished these he stuck the needle of a syringe into my arm. "That'll send you to sleep all right," he said, looking at me curiously.
When I went aft he was commencing work on three wounded Arabs who had been brought over. The rest of them were in the battery surrounded by inquisitive bluejackets. The old nakhoda squatted on deck by himself, covered up in his burnous, with only his eyes showing. He did not even deign to look at me. The Intrepid was already steaming ahead, her boats hoisted, and the dhow ("My dhow, old chap," I said, slapping old Popple Opstein on the back) was safely towing astern; I could see her mast.
"Rifles, my dear chap! She's simply chock-full of them!" I laughed.
I was famished—starvingly hungry—and they got food for me down in the ward-room, although Nicholson tried to make me lie down. The ward-room chaps, in their pyjamas, sat round me as I talked to them. I could not leave off talking, and I found that I didn't like anything they had on the table, so could not eat.
Nicholson took hold of my wrist and shoved another beastly syringe needle into my arm. He made the fellows go away too, although I had not told them nearly all that had happened, and in a little while I did let Nicholson take me to a cabin—just to humour him. That is the last I remember—I certainly don't remember undressing—but I woke in broad daylight to find myself in pyjamas belonging to somebody else, feeling rather shaky, my head covered in bandages, and Nicholson standing over me with a satisfied smile on his fat face.
My aunt! how hungry I was!
"Food, Nicholson, that's what I want," I said. "I haven't had anything worth speaking about for twenty-four hours."
He felt my pulse, smiled, and went away. I called him back. "How about the Bunder Abbas? Have you found her yet?"
"She's been alongside us for the last forty hours or more," he said. "We are anchored off Sheikh Hill. She's all right."
I looked puzzled. I had not noticed that the engines were not working.
"My dear chap, you've slept solidly for nearly three days. I've seen to that."
Popple Opstein came in, looking anxious, until Nicholson told him that I was as "right as rain". "Man, you are lucky!" he cried, his face growing violet with excitement; "she had nearly four hundred rifles on board. Look! I've brought you one," and he held up a brand-new Mauser rifle.
I handled it lovingly—my first capture. "You won't 'pot' at any poor wretched sentry on the Indian frontier, my beauty," I thought.
"How did you find the B.A.?" I asked; and my chum explained that the Intrepid had taken my dhow in tow, steaming to the north'ard; that at daybreak the launch had been sighted, and though she had raised steam again she could not use her engines as something had fouled her propeller, below the waterline of course, where Mr. Scarlett could not get at it.
"The result was," old Popple Opstein went on to tell me, "that we had to tow her as well, and when we anchored here sent our divers down to clear it."
Later on Nicholson allowed me to dress, Percy smiling out of his great eyes when he brought me some clean clothes. Afterwards I went aboard the Bunder Abbas to hear Mr. Scarlett's account of what had happened and to see what repairs were still necessary. I found people from the Intrepid busily straightening the bent stanchions and fitting a new after-awning cut from an old awning belonging to the cruiser.
"She'll look all right in a couple of days," Mr. Scarlett said, as he and I watched the last few boxes of ammunition being hoisted up through the dhow's hatches and transferred to the Intrepid's battery deck. It was a most comforting sight.
"Thought I'd seen the last of you, sir, when that big squall struck the dhow, and thought you'd seen the last of the Bunder Abbas when she half-filled herself with water, her fires had been put out, and that hawser coiled itself round the screw.
"My, sir, but I was being sick every few minutes with pure fright—I was that frightened that I wanted to jump overboard and get the drowning over quietly, without a lot of lascars howling and clawing round me—as I was waiting for 'em to do when she did sink. We made some kind of a sea-anchor with what was left of that awning and some spars, got her head to the wind, and baled her out with buckets—with buckets, sir! Three mortal hours that took, and another six to raise steam again, the lascars all preferring to drown up on deck, so not a blessed one would go below.
"We never noticed that hawser round her screw till we let the steam in her engines, wound a few more turns round her screw, and brought them up all standing. Thank God! we hadn't cast off our sea-anchor, or we'd have had all the making of another over again—and dead tired, tired as dogs, we all were."
There was this to say for Mr. Scarlett—I never doubted him. Whenever he told me of anything, I felt perfectly sure that he had told me all. However, I was inquisitive to know how he himself had actually behaved, so could not help asking Corporal Webster later on what kind of a time they had had, hoping that he might have something to say about him.
"Awful weren't the word for it, sir; the worst time I've ever had in my life. We none of us thought she'd float, and she wouldn't have but for the gunner—sick one moment, working like half a dozen men the next. Why, sir, when we steadied her into the wind, an' baled her out, he laid the fires in the boilers himself, no one else knowing how to do it, them lascar chaps funking going below, and we chipping up a mess table (the only dry bit of wood on board) and passing the bits down to him."
I learnt still more of that extraordinary man by watching Percy, the Tamil boy. His eyes showed the most unbounded admiration for the gunner. He simply slaved for him all day long, and seemed to be perfectly happy so long as he was doing something for him: pipeclaying his helmet, or washing out his vests—anything, in fact.
I don't pretend to be a judge of character—luckily—and he certainly puzzled me. That gale had told me more about Mr. Scarlett, Dobson, and Jaffa than I should have learnt in six months of ordinary cruising.
CHAPTER VI
The Edge of Civilization
For two more days the Intrepid remained at anchor, three miles off Sheikh Hill, within sight of the open shallow creek running up to Bungi village and of those cliffs from which the Afghan, a week before, had wasted ammunition on the Bunder Abbas. The launch remained alongside of her and the dhow astern. Why we were thus delayed I am not certain, but from the many curious and inquisitive questions Nicholson continually asked me, and from the many times I caught him watching me, I imagine that it was principally on my account, and that Commander Duckworth would not send me away cruising by myself until Nicholson had reported favourably.
At the end of this time both the Bunder Abbas and I were in first-class condition: the bandage which covered my wounds had been replaced by what Nicholson called a collodion dressing, and the Bunder Abbas showed no signs whatever of her recent hard usage. I was ordered to tow my empty dhow out to sea, set her on fire, and sink her. This I did with very great regret, for, although she was old and rotten, she was my first capture, and I wanted her to be condemned and sold properly by a prize court. However, it was not to be; so she was burnt to the water's edge, and her stone ballast quickly sank her.
We all knew that her cargo of arms and ammunition represented not a tenth of the great number reported to have been brought down to Jeb for shipment to the Makran coast, and everybody felt certain that sooner or later—probably sooner—more dhows would endeavour to run across.
We were therefore very grateful when we did at last receive orders for patrolling between the two inlets.
Two cutters belonging to the Intrepid, with a Maxim gun in the bows of each, had to patrol the creeks, keeping out of rifle shot from shore during the day and running close in at night. My chum, Baron Popple Opstein, commanded No. 1; and Evans, a little rat of a lieutenant, full of "go", but all nerves, No. 2.
I was ordered to patrol from one to the other, backwards and forwards, on a line about six miles from the shore, during the daytime, and to close to within a mile of the shore at sunset. I was also ordered to communicate with both cutters each morning, as soon after daylight as possible, to receive reports of any happenings during the preceding night. Still farther out to sea the Intrepid herself would patrol a line twenty miles long, also closing at dusk to within sighting distance of a Very's light, should we want to communicate with her by firing one.
All being ready, Evans, Popple Opstein, and I went aboard the cruiser, fully expecting that Commander Duckworth would give us a great deal of unnecessary advice, as though we were a lot of babies, not to be trusted a hundred yards from him; instead of which he simply asked us if we understood his written orders, and when we answered that we did, merely said: "Right you are! You can get away as soon as you like. Good night!"
"He's a splendid chap to serve under," Evans said in his nervous, hurried way of talking. "He's always just like that."
It was grand to be sent away entirely on one's own, without being tied down this way and that before ever the conditions which might conceivably happen had happened.
"Imagine anything like this in the good old Home Fleet!" my chum said as we parted. "We should be fathered and mothered day and night."
So, an hour before the sun set, I took the two cutters in tow, dropped Intrepid No. 1 close under Sheikh Hill, and steamed down to Kuh-i-Mubarak with No. 2, leaving her there in the mouth of the deep creek running up to Sudab, the village where I had seen the camels.
"Good night and good luck!" I shouted, as I steamed off to sea to commence my own job.
No one expected a dhow to slip across during those first days, because there were so few hours of darkness; but the moon, of course, was rising later each night, and every twenty-four hours increased our chances.
However, nothing came in sight, and on the seventh day—a Thursday it was—according to my orders, I fetched Intrepid No. 2 back to the anchorage off Sheikh Hill, and found the Intrepid herself anchored there, with my chum's boat already alongside.
I made fast to her, and immediately began the job of filling up with coal, water, and provisions; whilst the crews of the two cutters went inboard in order to get a good meal and a comfortable sleep whilst their boats were being revictualled. Sleep in a cutter crammed with gear is not a success. It does not matter how comfortable you try to make yourself, there is always something sticking into your back; and a chum's foot in your face, though quite an unimportant detail, does not induce slumber, especially if the owner happens to be restless.
I went aboard to have my wounds dressed. Nicholson took out the stitches, and said that both gashes were healing well. I wanted him to let me take Wiggins back again. I had had to leave him behind with his broken ribs (very much against his wish), but he was not yet well enough to rejoin.
Then my chum came aboard the Bunder Abbas and smoked his dirty old pipe with me on the little platform deck outside my cabin. We sat in those two easy canvas chairs under the awning and had a good time.
"Enjoyed the week?" I asked.
"Splendid," he said, beaming and showing his white teeth. "Splendid."
"Did that Afghan chap have a shot at you?"
"Once or twice," he nodded. "He's a rattling poor shot."
"Shoot back?"
"Once or twice; never hit him."
He was on board for three hours, and I don't believe he said another word (as a matter of fact he slept most of the time); but as he was going away he wanted to know whether I had seen Mr. Scarlett's snake again.
I had not. He kept a bandage round it now. If he did uncover it, he did so at night.
Popple Opstein was evidently still very interested in it.
"I wish he'd let me try that dodge of a pair of pincers and a bit of tin slipped under it, or wiring its head or something," he said.
I shook my head, and told him that it was useless to suggest that again.
Just before sunset I towed both cutters back to their positions, leaving them there.
Nothing happened during that week, although the darkness was very favourable for any dhow to try to creep in. At sunrise every morning I waited inshore to see that the two cutters were safe and had nothing to report, then pushed farther out to sea to steam slowly up and down, whilst the men not on duty scrubbed decks, cleaned guns, or washed and mended their clothes.
It was fearfully hot all this time, and I learnt that Moore was right after all, and that one could hardly keep awake in the afternoon. From noon until four o'clock the heat, even under the awnings, was at times almost unbearable. I could not keep awake myself, so had to let the men sleep too, and Moore did not hide his satisfaction at my first defeat. The crew was so small, and, what with men on watch and those wanting extra sleep after a night's watch, there were seldom more than three or four "hands" to employ at odd jobs, so precious little cleaning was done either, and I even began to wonder whether it would not be wiser to paint the water jackets of the Maxims, and even the six-pounder, as they were so difficult to keep bright.
"There is either too much wind or not enough" is a sailor's saying about the Persian Gulf; and although we were actually outside the Gulf itself, yet the saying held true enough here. Hardly a puff of wind ruffled the glassy, glaring surface of the sea for those first fourteen or fifteen days: the sun blazed at us all day from an absolutely silent, monotonous, burnished sky. I began to curse it when it rose, and when it did set, and give me a chance to cool down, to dread its reappearance and the heat of the next day.
Mr. Scarlett told me that I should soon become accustomed to it. He himself simply revelled in it. He advised me to drink as little fluid as possible, if I did not want to be covered with prickly heat, and I did my best to follow his advice, although the desire for liquid was sometimes almost unbearable.
Another Thursday we spent alongside the Intrepid, my chum coming aboard me to sleep and smoke, and occasionally make some contented remark. Then back we went to our stations for another week of patient watching.
On Sunday morning I edged in as usual, to see whether the Baron had anything to report.
It was about half-past four, still dark, but the darkness rapidly disappearing, when he flashed a signal lantern, and I answered him.
In ten minutes he was alongside. He had a sick man whom he wanted me to take on board, so we hoisted him in and put him down below.
"It's only a touch of the sun," the Baron said; "but we can't make him comfortable here. You can give him back to-morrow."
This occupied perhaps ten minutes. It had become appreciably lighter, and I could see the sheikh's house or fort looming above our heads as I started off to go along to Evans.
We had not steamed a mile before we heard a Maxim firing very rapidly. Looking inshore I could see the cutter pulling in under those cliffs from which that Afghan had fired at us.
"Put your helm over and wake up the engine-room people," I ordered, and round we swung. The cutter had now disappeared round the base of the cliffs, but as we hurried after her we could still hear the Maxim firing.
We all were grandly excited—all except Mr. Scarlett. As he went down to see that our guns were ready I saw that his face was a muddy, grey colour. He would not look me in the face, and his hand was shaking as he steadied himself by the rail. My former feeling of contempt for his cowardice came back.
Percy came up with two cups of cocoa and some biscuits, grinning delightfully; but his face fell when Mr. Scarlett refused any—he thought that he had not made it properly.
It was quite light now, and I steered wide of the cliffs, in order to be able to look up the creek more quickly and to be able sooner to help the Baron if he was "busy".
Then, as the mouth of the creek opened out, there was a shout from for'ard of "Look, sir; look there!" and I was astonished to see a large dhow—a very large dhow—lying half in, half out of the water on the beach, two thousand yards away. A red flag was trailing down from her ensign staff, and her bows were surrounded by a great crowd of camels and natives. The cutter was about nine hundred yards away—between us and the dhow; pulling like mad her men were, and tut-tut-tut-tut went the Maxim in her bows. I could see the line of bullet splashes, first in the water, then in the sand among the camels, then in the water again. They were making bad shooting—a Maxim is always a troublesome weapon in a moving boat.
"Give them a shell!" I yelled down to Mr. Scarlett. The little six-pounder barked, and its first shell burst in the water, but the second sent up a cloud of smoke and sand right among a tangled mass of camels and men. We saw some camels struggling on the ground, and broke into cheers as the rest of them were driven frantically up the beach and the sand-hills, to disappear behind them.
A few chaps, their loose cloaks flapping about, scampered after the others, until not a single living thing was left in sight.
"She's a fine dhow that," Mr. Scarlett said, coming up the ladder to me, his voice very shaky. "We shall have to be very careful, sir."
"Careful!" I shouted. "Why, man alive, they've run away! There's not a soul to stop us. Look at the cutter, man; they're almost up to her."
Mr. Scarlett looked and shivered.
I saw that the cutter had taken the ground. Her bluejackets, with their rifles in their hands, were jumping into the water and wading ashore, racing ashore, my chum struggling to get ahead of them.
"Go it, Popple Opstein!" I yelled, unable to control myself, and wished that the old "B.A." would go faster, so that I could be alongside him.
My aunt! What luck! Two dhows in less than a fortnight!
"We shall be millionaires in no time," I said, turning to Mr. Scarlett, to cheer him up; but he had gone down on deck again.
Then I had to stop my engines. I dared not go in any closer; there was not a foot of water under my keel.
I shouted for the dinghy to be lowered.
The Baron and his men—eight of them—were on the firm sand now, running along towards the dhow, cheering and whooping, when suddenly I heard rifle-firing—rifles from behind the tops of those sand-dunes, rifles from the tops of those beastly cliffs, and saw the sand spurting up all round them as they ran. Through my glasses I could see heads peering over the sand-dunes and rifles firing over them. I yelled to the men to leave the dinghy and open fire again with the six-pounder.
Then two of those running figures fell; one rose and went on, the other lay where he fell.
"Lie down and shoot back, or you'll all be killed," I shouted, like a fool, as if they could hear me eight hundred yards away.
Then I realized that if they could reach the dhow they would obtain some shelter from the fire.
I saw my chum fall, sprawling, and get up again, stoop to pick up his revolver—he never would put the lanyard round his neck—and go on again, slowly, limping. Two men stopped to help him, but I saw him waving them to leave him, and they dashed to the side of the dhow, flung themselves flat down, half in, half out of the water, and commenced shooting. My Maxims were busy now, and keeping down the fire a little; but for a couple of seconds poor old Popple Opstein was alone on the beach, with bullet-spirts jumping up all round him. Those two seconds seemed like ages, till, with a gasp of relief, I saw him gain the shelter of the dhow and throw himself down among the others.
Thank goodness! he could not be very badly wounded.
But the dhow only gave shelter from the men behind the sand-hills; my chum and his people were still entirely exposed to a dropping, long-range fire from the tops of those cliffs, and bullets still splashed and spurted all round the dhow.
The six-pounder shells were bursting well along the tops of the sand-hills, and three men, left behind in the stranded cutter, were also peppering them with their Maxim. These two guns kept the people on the beach fairly quiet, so I cocked up my two Maxims and opened fire on the cliff, the people up there immediately paying attention to us. A bullet splintered the deck close to where I was standing, several whistled through the awnings, others flattened themselves against the funnel. Griffiths and I were standing there by the wheel and compass absolutely exposed. I do not know how I looked, but I do know that I was chiefly frightened lest I should look as frightened as I felt. I wondered what Mr. Scarlett was doing. He was under the awning, so I could not see him. A bullet smashed Percy's coffee-cup and broke it to atoms—bullets were flying all round us. There was nothing for me to do; that was the worst of it. To relieve the strain of being idle, I sent Griffiths to bring up a rifle and some ammunition, and took the wheel myself.
Before he came back I saw the figures close to the dhow rise up and dash into the water, wade round her stern, and disappear from view. Seven figures I counted; that little white heap halfway along the sand only made eight; so another must have been badly hit. But now they were safe for a time, entirely sheltered by the dhow.
The natives, Afghans, Baluchis, whatever they were, thereupon turned more rifles on to us and that stranded cutter—both from the sand-hills and from the cliffs. The range from the sand-hills was well over twelve hundred yards, and most of the firing was very wild; but one of our chaps, Jones, a marine, working one of the Maxims, was shot through the arm about this time. However, our high gunwales kept off most of the bullets.
It was very different with that stranded cutter. She was not more than six hundred yards away from the sand-hills, closer still to the foot of the cliffs, and almost immediately one of the three men still working her Maxim fell and was pushed aside or crawled away—I couldn't see which.
Griffiths came up with his rifle. "Go on, fire yourself!" I shouted, and he lay down and began potting at the people on the cliff, over our heads. The shooting now slackened from there, and I quickly understood why, for I saw fifty or sixty natives scampering down a cliff path and wading through the shallow mouth of the creek. By the time I had ordered a Maxim to swing round on them most of these had joined the others behind the sand-hills. We bagged two or three, however.
I knew that we were in a horrid mess, and didn't want Mr. Scarlett to come up to me—absolutely yellow in the face—and tell me so. Just as he was blurting and stuttering out something about a falling tide and getting that cutter afloat, people down below began shouting: "Look! Look!"
Griffiths, peering over his shoulder with frightened eyes, pointed, and I saw a regular horde of Afghans pouring over the tops of those sand-hills and racing down the beach, straight for the stranded cutter. I looked at her. Only one man was now working that Maxim, or trying to do so, and making a bad job of it. Something had gone wrong with the belt. He tried desperately to jerk it clear, failed, then gave it up, caught sight of the yelling Afghans charging down on him, and hid under the gunwale.
The six-pounder fired as rapidly as it could, and must have killed many, but one of our Maxims had jammed and the other would not bear. Mr. Scarlett's piercing voice was shrieking for me to turn the Bunder Abbas round so that he could use the second Maxim. I gave the wheel a turn and rang down to the engine-room. Before I was able to turn her side farther towards the beach that fierce rush had reached the water's edge. Scores of wild Afghans were splashing through the sea. We could hear them yelling as they waded knee-deep—waist-deep—towards the cutter. Then we saw the two men still alive in her peer over the gunwale, and one seized a rifle and began firing, but the other crawled across the thwarts, let himself down over the stern, and commenced to swim towards the Bunder Abbas.
A six-pounder will not stop a rush: its shells are not deadly enough. I thought the Maxim would never fire. Looking at the dhow to see whether our people were safe, I saw rifles sticking out from under her poop railings, so knew that Popple Opstein and his men had climbed on board. They, too, were firing on the Afghans charging through the water. On these came; they were not thirty yards from the cutter; the man inside it had his face turned appealingly to us.
Then Mr. Scarlett started the Maxim. He found the range in a twinkling—he only had to follow the splash of the bullets till they fell amongst the natives, and then wobble the gun—and it was impossible to miss. Their shouts of triumph changed to wild shrieks of terror. It was just as if a scythe had swept over them. They subsided under the water—they disappeared—only a few, crouching till their heads hardly showed above the surface, regained the beach and the protection of the sand-hills.
There was no time for thinking of this sickening slaughter; my chum and his men had to be brought off, his cutter had to be refloated, and that dhow had still to be destroyed.
"Land and help him!" The thought did come into my head for a second, but it would have been idiotic. We should only be putting our heads into the same trap that he was in.
The Afghans had had such a terrible lesson that for a short time only a few ventured to the edge of the sand-hills to fire on us. The fire from the cliffs, whilst our Maxims were no longer keeping it down, became somewhat more vigorous, and I knew that now was my chum's chance to rush back along that beach and regain the cutter.
I shouted to the signal-man to semaphore across to him, but he must have also realized that this was his opportunity, for almost immediately we saw the bluejackets sliding down the dhow's side—two had to be helped down—and then they all—seven of them— came back along the water's edge. Very slowly they came, for one man was being carried and my pal was limping badly, though managing without assistance. Only a few Afghans were firing at them, and these we stopped by mowing the edges of the sand-hills with Maxim bullets wherever a head showed.
They seemed to be taking hours. I found myself yelling to them to try to go faster. They kept on stopping to fire at the sand-hills. Then, at last, they began wading out, and we cheered as we saw them climb aboard the boat without further loss, get out their oars, and try to push off. Our joy died down when we saw that they could not move her. The tide had fallen, and the cutter was on top of a sandbank with not a foot of water covering it. They jumped out again into the shallows and strained and heaved, but not an inch could they shift her.
All this time the Afghans on the cliff were firing at them. They clambered back into the boat and replied to this fire with rifles: something had evidently gone wrong with their Maxim. Afghans now appeared over the sand-hills immediately behind the cutter, where we dare not fire for fear of hitting my chum's people. These, too, opened fire on the cutter, and the water all round it was alive with bullet splashes. Another man fell down in the boat and his rifle overboard.
Unless something was done very quickly they would all be killed. I yelled for volunteers to pull the dinghy across and take them a rope. Dobson, the leading seaman, and Webster, the corporal of marines, jumped into her first. "Take the wheel and don't go farther inshore," I called to Griffiths, and rushed down on deck to supervise the rope being passed into the dinghy and coiled down in her stern-sheets. On my way I saw Jaffa, standing at the foot of the ladder, aiming at the top of the cliffs with a rifle. He was as calm as ever.
The dinghy was on our shore side, away from the cliffs and sheltered from fire. We coiled all the ropes we had into her stern, bending one to the end of the next. I rushed back to the wheel and moved the Bunder Abbas in towards the cutter until my bows touched the sand. Then I gave the word to Dobson and Webster and they shot ahead of the bows, the rope uncoiling and paying out as they pulled.
Directly they had cleared our bows the whole of the rifle fire was turned on them, and they had not taken fifty strokes before Dobson was hit. He dropped his oar, but grabbed it again, pulling with one hand. A moment later he was struck a second time and fell forward.
Webster seized his oar and went on, but I shouted to him to come back, and with a brilliant thought he made fast the rope and we hauled him back. As the dinghy came near I saw that Dobson was dead. We lifted him out and Mr. Scarlett jumped in.
"I'm going, sir," he said, and I was so astonished that I could say nothing.
We laid Dobson on deck and jumped back to work our guns, whilst Mr. Scarlett and Webster pulled madly towards the cutter, paying out the rope and steering wildly. We yelled with delight when they reached the cutter and passed the rope inboard.
In a moment the cutter's crew had clambered into the water again to lighten the boat. They held up their hands to signal my rope made fast.
I gave the "B.A." a touch astern and stopped her engines, the rope tautened, the cutter's crew shoved and pushed and yelled that she was moving. In half a minute we had her afloat, her men scrambling in as she slid into deep water; in ten minutes we were out of range, and in half an hour she and the dinghy were both alongside, and I had dropped anchor two miles from the cliffs and out of sight of the dhow. The cutter was peppered with bullet holes, her gunwales, sides, and oars splintered and grooved in a hundred places. She leaked like a sieve, and water filled her to her thwarts.
She had one dead man on board—one of those left as boat-keepers—the one I had seen shot when working the Maxim; one man shot through the chest and leg; four others wounded (one with three bullet wounds through soft parts), besides Popple Opstein.
"It went clean through my calf muscles," he told me. "It's nothing."
Not until then did anyone remember the man who had started to swim back towards the Bunder Abbas when those Afghans charged down. He had not been seen since, and must have been drowned, or perhaps killed by a bullet in the head. Two of the cutter's crew had been left on shore dead, so these made the cutter's total casualties three killed, one missing, and five wounded. Only four had escaped untouched.
The dead man and the wounded were all brought aboard the Bunder Abbas: the dead who might only have been wounded, the wounded who so easily might have been dead. A turn of the head, and a bullet which would have only grazed your ear blows out your brains; you drop a cartridge, stoop to pick it up, and a bullet which would have gone through your heart wings on its way without your knowing that it had ever come and gone.
Whenever one sees dead and wounded brought back by the untouched men who have been fighting alongside them, one cannot help thinking queer thoughts, and casting enquiring glances at the survivors to see what qualities they have which spared them. I must admit that I have never yet noticed anything particularly noble about those who have escaped. Since those gun-running days I have seen much fighting and many killed and wounded, and the untouched have generally been cursing something or somebody, giving relief to the strain on their nerves by cursing hard. Thoughts take longer to write than to think, so they don't, in actual practice, waste much time.
We were obliged to take every heavy weight out of the cutter to prevent her sinking, and then tried to stop the bullet holes below the water line.
Webster, the corporal of marines, was as handy with the medicine chest and its bandages as he was with anything else I ever saw him try his hands on. In half an hour he had made the wounded chaps as comfortable as it was possible for them to be. Percy, too, was in his element bringing them water, tinned milk, and coffee. He was like a dog in his admiration for white men. If he had had a tail he would have wagged it off that morning.
Until that cutter was safe I did not care how many rifles the Afghans took out of the dhow in our absence; but directly she was fairly watertight I left her at anchor with the dinghy, Moore, the timid Goanese carpenter, and a couple of hands, to carry on repairs, and steamed inshore again.
I kept wide of the cliffs (from which a terrific fire burst out) until the beach and the dhow herself came in full view.
The shore was again alive with Afghans and their camels. Through my glasses I could see sacks of rifles being thrown from the dhow on to the sand, snatched up by eager men, and rapidly packed on the camels' backs. A long string of heavily-laden camels was already disappearing behind the sand-hills.
But I was not going to worry about them or Afghans. I was going to set that dhow on fire with my shells.
At twelve hundred yards I opened fire.
"At the dhow!" I shouted to Mr. Scarlett. "Don't worry about people."
Her woodwork began flying, and I knew that the shells were bursting inside her. It was only a question of time—the people aboard and close to her had vanished at the first shell—and presently smoke began to pour from her hatches. We cheered at this—those of us on deck working the gun, Griffiths at the wheel, and poor old Popple Opstein supporting himself against the deck rails. The rest I had sent down below under cover.
We kept on firing at her, and soon there was a rush of black smoke, small explosions took place aboard her, her stern blew out, her masts came tumbling down, and she took fire fore and aft. Every other minute some ammunition must have exploded, scattering fragments of wood and broken rifles round her on the sand. It was courting death to go near her; but, even so, some Afghans now and then rushed towards her, seized a rifle, and rushed back again. What plucky fellows they were!
By half-past ten o'clock there was no doubt that not a round of ammunition remained in her, nor a rifle that was not entirely useless; so, with a parting shot dropped behind the sand-hills, I went back to the cutter and dinghy, running the gauntlet of the cliffs without receiving any damage.
Hoisting in the dinghy, and taking the empty, waterlogged cutter in tow, I steamed very slowly seawards to find the Intrepid and Nicholson.
Four men killed, one missing, and five wounded among the cutter's crew, one man killed and one wounded aboard the Bunder Abbas, was the price of that Sunday morning's work.
As we left Sheikh Hill behind us reaction set in, and we were very depressed.
The edge of civilization! I could not help thinking of that. At home people were just getting out of bed, wondering what Sunday clothes they should wear. I wished that some of them could have seen how we had spent that morning. If only I could have got hold of the people, English, French, or Germans—I didn't know and I didn't care—who had manufactured those rifles or sent them out there, I should have enjoyed torturing them.
Poor old Popple Opstein sat moodily outside my cabin under the awning, with his elbows on the table and his face buried in his hands. If I had been in his place I know that I should have done exactly as he had done; but, poor old chap, he knew as well as I did that he had bungled the whole affair, that we might have destroyed the dhow and the rifles without landing or losing a single man. He was suffering the tortures of the damned.
I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. Nothing I could say would do him any good, and nothing did either of us say.
I dared not ask him if he was certain that those two men who had been left on the beach were actually killed; the thought of them having fallen alive into the hands of the Afghans was too horrible. Instead, I asked one of his men, and, thank God! he was certain that they were both dead. The one who had dropped halfway along the beach had been shot through the head, and the other, the one shot whilst lying half in the water under the dhow's stern, had been lying next to him, and his head was under the water all the time they were there.
The only touch of humour about the whole tragic business came from Percy. Dressed in his best, and looking very important, he had come up to me as we were in the middle of destroying that dhow and asked, pointing to my chum: "Master have guest to breakfast?" I had laughed like a fool, till I hurt myself.
As we were eating the food he had prepared for us—on the way back to the Intrepid that was—I turned to the gunner. "Mr. Scarlett," I said, "if you are a coward you are the bravest coward I have ever heard of."
"I do things like that just to try and beat it down, sir," he mumbled; "but it's just as bad when the next show comes along. I can't help it, sir; I really can't. I know I look frightened; but I don't look half as frightened as I really am."
Percy looked upon him as a demigod—that was very evident.
CHAPTER VII
The Battle of the Paraffin Can
We were only able to tow that waterlogged cutter very slowly, so we did not sight the Intrepid until three o'clock that afternoon. Half an hour later we crawled alongside, and my chum and I went on board to report. He looked as if he was going to his execution, and though I did my best to make him "buck up", and tried to hammer it into his head that we had done our best, and could do no more, he seemed more "down in the mouth" than ever.
Commander Duckworth made us tell him all that had happened, and I thought afterwards that if only people at home—just coming out of church they should have been at that hour—could have peered down into that luxuriously-furnished cabin of the Intrepid in the middle of the Straits of Ormuz, could have heard the story which my chum told, and seen the agony in his face as he told it, how it would have impressed them!
Cool, grey-green silk curtains kept out the glare from the port-holes and skylight; green-silk lampshades on the tables fluttered in the grateful breeze from the electric fans; pictures of English scenery, old naval prints, photographs of beautiful women in evening and Court dress, and photograph groups of polo teams and their ponies covered the white bulkheads. From photographs in silver frames, standing on the tables between silver cups and trinkets, more delicate women looked out with smiling sympathetic eyes, whilst backwards and forwards past them paced the commander in his spotless white uniform. The Baron and I were sitting on a dainty, silk-covered sofa, digging our bare feet and toes into a soft Persian rug. We had no clothes on except dirty, open cotton shirts (the sleeves rolled up), and a pair of dirty duck "shorts" halfway up our thighs. Our bare legs and knees, our sunburnt chests and arms, looked very much out of place among the luxurious surroundings. Tied below his left knee Popple Opstein had a blood-stained handkerchief, and on my head and forehead was the dressing which Nicholson had put there three days ago.
My chum still wore his revolver belt and holster, and, for once, the dirty lanyard was round his neck.
"I made a fool of myself, sir," he blurted out; "I'd never had a chance before, and I went straight for her." His face was drawn with pain and shame at his want of discretion.
"You both want a brandy-and-soda," was all Commander Duckworth said when he had heard our tale.
He made us drink one—it was iced, and it was grand—and said not a word of reproof for our foolhardiness. If he had stormed and cursed us, I do not know what we should have done.
I dreaded terribly that my chum would not be allowed to take his cutter away again on account of his wound—if for no other reason—but I think that the commander realized his distressed state of mind, and I breathed freely when he quietly told us to repair all damages, that fresh men would be sent to replace casualties (my chum winced), and that we were to report as soon as we were ready to return to our stations.
I saw Popple Opstein's face flush with gratitude. He said, tremblingly: "Thank you, sir!" and limped out.
Commander Duckworth stopped me. "I don't know whether I am doing wisely or not in allowing him to go away again. Just have a look at him every daybreak, and, if that wound goes wrong, bring him back. Tell Nicholson to report to me what he thinks of it before he does go, and—and—just let him know how things stand."
"Very good, sir. Thank you, sir, very much! He's rather a strange old chap, fearfully sensitive, and he'd break his heart if you stopped him going."
The cutter was hoisted to the davits, and, whilst all the carpenters and ship-wrights in the ship were repairing her, the Intrepid slowly steamed inshore, towing my launch astern. Nicholson found time to look at the wounds in my scalp and forehead. He told me that they had healed splendidly; but when I saw them in a looking-glass—a great red line across my forehead and another on the side of my head across a patch of half-grown hair—I could not help making a grimace.
"It won't show in a month's time," he said, laughing. "Don't you worry about your beauty being spoilt; the girls will like you all the better for it."
Strangely enough, I did happen to be thinking that perhaps if that little, yellow-haired lady saw me now, her mocking grey eyes might look a little serious—for once. At any rate she could not possibly treat me as an infant. I grew quite red—though that I should have done so was perfectly absurd, because I scarcely knew her, had only spoken to her once or twice, and then she had treated me as if I were a midshipman or a mere child.
Nicholson read my thoughts—or thought he did—and chaffed me till I grew more red than ever, and wanted to kick him.
Five miles off Sheikh Hill the Intrepid lowered the repaired cutter, the Bunder Abbas came alongside for me and to take in more ammunition, my chum and an entirely fresh crew manned his boat, and I towed him back to his old billet. He looked so sad and "rigid" as the cliffs opened out and he saw the blackened mass of woodwork, all that remained of the dhow which had caused that tragedy of the morning, that I felt very nervous to leave him alone for the night. It was quite dark when I yelled "good night" to him and steamed away down the coast to Kuh-i-Mubarak, to try to find Evans.
We found him surely enough—or rather he found us. He mistook the "B.A." in the darkness for a dhow, and fired twenty or thirty rounds from his Maxim before he saw my flashing lamp.
He was awfully apologetic; though, as no damage had been done, it did not matter. He had not seen a suspicion of a dhow, nor had he heard the noise of our firing, so went nearly "off his head" with excitement when I told him what had happened.
Having found that he was safe and sound, I went back to my patrolling line.
For several weeks everything went on extremely quietly. Every morning I would hail old Popple Opstein, and find how things were going with him; sometimes, when there was no hurry, he even came aboard for a cup of coffee. Every morning I visited Evans, and these two events were about the only excitement we had; except, of course, the weekly Thursday afternoon alongside the Intrepid.
The weather was monotonously fine, and it really was monotonous work. Neither was Mr. Scarlett exactly the type of man I should have chosen to live with. We agreed very well, indeed, but he was of a morbid disposition, never laughed except cynically, and seldom talked much unless something or other stimulated his rather brooding, sluggish mind. Then, as you already know, it was difficult to make him stop.
I liked talking at meals—he didn't; and, as a matter of actual fact, I, being a cheerful kind of chap, found him rather a "damper".
Wiggins had returned to the Bunder Abbas, and a leading seaman named Ellis, a sturdy, hard-working, little man, rather opinionated and fond of "gassing", had taken Dobson's place. He and Moore, the petty officer, did not "get on" at all well together. Moore was jealous of him, and was for ever coming to me complaining that "that 'ere Ellis took too much on 'isself."
Several times Moore brought him up to my platform deck (which we used as a quarter-deck) and reported him for disrespect. Precious little sympathy did he get from me, however. Still, in such a tiny little ship it was unpleasant to know that they were not on friendly terms. The jealousy first started, I fancy, when we had a "sing-song" one night. Both of them had sung songs, and Ellis had been more often "encored" than Moore. The reason seems perfectly inane, but full-grown men, under conditions such as these were, often behave in the most childish way possible.
During these first weeks Mr. Scarlett and Jaffa, between them, put me up to all the tricks of the gun-running business. What one didn't know of the Arabs' dodges for concealing rifles the other did; so I became quite an expert, theoretically.
One evening when it was fairly cool—after a regular furnace of a day—Mr. Scarlett became communicative. We had been speaking of boarding suspected dhows.
"Now take the case, sir, of a dhow flying the Turkish flag. You steam up to her; down goes her sail; over you bob to her in the dinghy with Jaffa, and tell the nakhoda to show his papers. You dare not board until you have seen them. He hands them down to you. You look through them—written in Turkish, English, and Hindustani; all three probably—and so long as they are in order, whether you know for certain that she's brim-full of rifles or whether you only suspect that she is, you dare not board and search her.
"I remember," he said, "running up against a fine dhow one morning—I was away in the old Pigeon's cutter then—a long time since. We ran her down, headed her off till she couldn't get away, felt sure that she was going to be a fair prize, and yelled "Hallib! Hallib!" until she lowered her sails. And that reminds me, sir; never go alongside any dhow until she's lowered her sail. They Arabs have a nasty trick of waiting for you to come alongside, and then lowering the sail so that it and its big yard drops into the boat and smothers it. I've known 'em carry away a cutter's mast that way. Whilst you are helpless under the sail they pot at you, hoist it up again, and sail away. I've been 'had' like that myself once.
"Just you see that sail properly lowered and then make them hold up the halyards to show you that they are 'unbent', because they are as nippy as sharks a-hoisting it again.
"Well, as I was saying, we were as keen as mosquitoes over that 'ere dhow, but, as we caught hold of her with our boat-hooks, she hoisted Turkish colours and we dared not board her. The nakhoda, grinning at us, leant over her side and handed down his papers. These were in perfect order, so we no more dared board her than we dared stop the mail-steamer. What riled us chiefly was the brazen-faced way they did things. The cargo was put down as one hundred cases of champagne, consigned to a dirty little Persian village of about twenty miserable fishing-huts. We knew it well, we did, before—and after. We felt jolly well 'had'. We were as certain as 'eggs is eggs' that she was chock-full of rifles and ammunition, but they were as safe where they were as if they'd been on top of the Eiffel Tower.
"The lieutenant in charge of us cursed the Arab nakhoda, and called his ancestors dogs and sons of dogs, hoping he knew enough Hindustani to understand. Then off we had to shove.
"Our only chance was to catch those rifles on their way to the beach whilst the dhow was unloading, or when they once got there. All we could do was to pull off again and follow her, and it was about all we could do to keep up with her until she reached her blessed village just before dark.
"We'd been there a week before—for water—so we knew what it was like. If there had been thirty half-starved fishermen then I'd be overshooting the mark; now the beach was crowded with rascally Afghans and their camels, and no sooner did the dhow drop her anchor, close in to the beach, than those cases of champagne—about five feet long they were, each holding a dozen fat rifles we felt sure—were bundled into boats.
"We had a Gardner machine-gun in our bows, and opened fire with that and our old Martin Henrys; but there must have been a couple of hundred Afghans letting rip at us, so we had to pull out of range and watch those cases of champagne being lashed on the camels' backs until it was too dark to see anything more. At any rate, all those rifles got ashore, and you can guess what they were used for later on—for potting at British Tommies trying to keep order on the Indian frontier.
"Don't you go away with the idea that we English don't have a hand in the game," Mr. Scarlett continued gloomily. "Why, sir, many's the time I've seen captured rifles with the old 'Tower' mark on them, showing that they'd been made in England—old-fashioned Army rifles some of them, others not. And the tricks they're up to! My word, they are as artful as a bagful of monkeys! I've helped search a couple of hundred dhows or more in my time, and that's taught me a thing or two."
"The first dodge as I remember bowling out—and the simplest of 'em," Mr. Scarlett told me another evening, as he sipped his tot of rum—for it was not until Percy had brought along his rum and he had taken several "sips", when the crew had "piped down" and everything was quiet, that he generally started his "talking machine"—"they built double bottoms in their dhows, made 'em so cleverly that we used to think they were the real inner skin. But we happened to have emptied one of her cargo, and walking about inside her she sounded hollow under our feet, so we ripped up a board and found a snug little collection of rifles lying there. Of course the nakhoda swore he knew nothing about them; he and his crew called upon Allah and most of the minor prophets to testify to that, but it didn't prevent them doing their five months 'chokey' or losing their dhow. A nice little haul that was, and the word was passed along to 'sound' the bottoms of all the dhows we overhauled. We used to bang 'em with the butts of our rifles. They gave up that dodge after a while and invented something 'cuter' still. They'd fasten ten or twelve long ropes to the keel, outside her, bringing them over the side on deck, and they'd lash the free ends to sacks of rifles. If they sighted a gunboat or a launch, or any of our people, and there was a risk of being caught and searched, they'd simply drop them overboard and let them hang down in the water suspended from the keel. Along we would come, and find nothing wrong; search her high and low, and let her go, with our blessing or the other thing. Then one of our launches happened to come upon a dhow unexpectedly, and caught them doing it, heaving the sacks of rifles overboard—took her by surprise—and that game was 'up'. Never you leave a dhow, sir, till you've 'underrun' her.[#] You'd be surprised how many rifles we picked up that way.
[#] Underrun = drop a bight or loop of rope over the bows and haul it along under her keel.
"Then there's another dodge they have round about these coasts. All along the Arabian side there are plenty of mangrove trees, and a great trade in firewood is carried on with the Persian coast. So what was easier for a dhow than to stow a dozen or more rifles at the bottom of the hold and fill up with firewood on the top of them? They'd chance us getting tired of unloading them; a cutter cruising by herself couldn't do it, because you daren't throw any of the stuff overboard, and there wasn't room on the dhow's deck for all the wood stowed below. Why, sir, I've seen the whole of the Pigeon's upper deck on both sides full up to the level of the 'nettings' with chunks of firewood. Just imagine the amount of work that meant—five or six hours in the horrid heat—every chap feeling as limp as putty with the climate and the monotony. A cutter cruising by herself either had to let her go or stand by the dhow, wasting perhaps three or four days, till her gunboat came along to victual her.
"However, we did search them, and we did find rifles, which meant 'Good-bye' for that dhow and 'chokey' for her crew. They found that trick not worth the risk, these people being generally law-abiding people (more or less), simply tempted every now and then to make a larger profit by carrying a few rifles. They weren't what you might call reg'lar hands at the business.
"And there's another thing they do, sir; on top of the firewood they often load a small cargo of their dried fish, thinking the British sailor won't stomach the smell of it. Ugh! the stink from some of those dhows! Why, we sometimes never got rid of the smell of it for weeks.
"You never heard about the mail-steamers—the Royal British Mail—carrying rifles themselves, I suppose, sir?" he asked, a little less gloomily as the incongruity of it appealed to him. "Why, sir, for one whole six months the mail-steamer brought up regular consignments of sugar from Karachi to Bushire and landed them there for a respectable firm of merchants. One fine day a careless chap at a winch, who was lowering a cask of sugar into a lighter, let it drop. The cask was stove in, and instead of sugar they found half a dozen rifles stowed in pieces, packed in saw-dust. That was an eye-opener, I can tell you. The mail-steamers don't carry so many casks of sugar now as they did then," Mr. Scarlett finished, smiling sardonically.
Another night he became talkative and began:
"You remember that chap who fired at us—the first time we shoved our nose under the cliffs at Sheikh Hill? I told you for certain he was an Afghan and couldn't possibly help firing his rifle at a white man. Well, sir, they often send one or two of these fellows across to the Arabian coast in the empty dhows, just to see that the rifles are brought to the proper place. You can always tell if there's one of these chaps aboard a dhow when you come along to search her, because he'll fire at you for a dead 'cert'. What we did was to make the crew line the side nearest us, after they'd lowered the sail and unbent the halyards. Our sportsman, the Afghan (or Afghans) dar'n't fire then for fear of hitting his friends, or had to climb up where we could see him, which didn't give him much of a chance, we being standing by waiting for him. Still, he didn't mind being riddled with bullets so long as he got in a shot at us English, more especially if he'd hit any of us.
"The only thing in this world he does fear and does mind is the sea. If there's a bit of a lop running you may bet your life that Mr. Afghan is as sea-sick as a dog, and you'll find him coiled up like a cat somewhere under the poop, without a kick left in him. He'd give anyone, white man or no white man, all he possessed, if he'd only kill him right out—that's when he's sea-sick.
"He's a terrible bad sailor, is the Afghan!" Mr. Scarlett said reflectively; "that's the only good point about him except being such a born fighter."
Mr. Scarlett, as you know, would talk about gun-running occasionally, but never once in those weeks did he mention that bracelet snake of his. It was covered with a bandage which he used to replace very carefully every morning; sometimes I happened to catch him doing this and saw it, but as he never referred to it neither did I.
Percy, I am sure, was very inquisitive to know what was the matter with his arm, because, as I said before, everything about Mr. Scarlett was of absorbing interest to him; though, after he had been kicked out of the cabin once or twice when Mr. Scarlett was dressing, he never ventured near it again until he was called.
Things went on like this for three weeks—three weeks of calm, intensely hot weather. Popple Opstein's wound had healed without anything going wrong with it; my scars were becoming less marked. Jones, the private of marines, was well—as were all the other wounded. Popple Opstein was quite himself again, and in fact everything was going on very comfortably if monotonously. It certainly was monotonous, because during all that time we never sighted one single dhow, and although the Intrepid had stopped and searched a few farther out at sea she had not found a single rifle over and above the proper number a dhow is allowed to carry for her own protection.
Then, to vary the tedium, it began to blow. A shamel got up very quickly, and blew steadily for eight or nine days. It was not so bad that the Bunder Abbas couldn't keep the sea and do her patrolling, but the two cutters had to hug tight at anchor in their two little creeks.
However, Evans grew restless after the third day, and put to sea one morning, leaving the shelter of Kuh-i-Mubarak and beating into the shamel long after he ought to have run back again. A squall carried away his foremast when he was already to leeward of it, and he rapidly began to drift farther to the south. Fortunately I happened to sight him, went down to help him, and took him in tow. Towing him back into shelter against a heavy head sea strained some of the planks in the bows, below the water-lines, and the boat began leaking badly. We had only left the Intrepid four days previously, so that she would not be coming inshore to revictual us for another three; and, as it would have been foolish to attempt to tow the cutter right out to sea to find her and repair damages, we decided to beach her, do a little amateur caulking, and try to repair the foremast if that was possible.
There was a jolly little sandy beach about half a mile up the creek, so we beached her there after Evans had transferred his Maxim, ammunition, and stores to the Bunder Abbas. I anchored close by, in case he was attacked. There was little chance of that, however, because the village of Sudab lay more than three miles away behind the sand-hills, not a single living soul was in sight, and none could approach without being seen for at least a mile.
His men were soon busy working and skylarking, stretching their legs on the strip of sand, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. Not a sign of an Arab or an Afghan, not even of a miserable Baluchi, did we see all that day. In fact, things seemed so safe and pleasant that I landed most of my fellows too, and we got up a cricket match, with an empty paraffin tin for a wicket, a ball made of "spun yarn", and a bat made out of a broken oar. We equalized numbers with my lascars, and had a most exciting game, the Bunder Abbas winning the championship of Kuh-i-Mubarak just before the "spun-yarn" ball was worn out completely.
The work on the boat had been finished, the seams recaulked, and the mast repaired; but Evans decided, as it was going to be a perfect moonlight night, to stay there until next morning, in order that his men might have a change from the cramped cutter and get a good night's sleep.
At sunset I took all my people back to the Bunder Abbas, leaving the cutter's crew playing football with that paraffin tin, with their bare feet, until they grew tired of that, and kicked it into the edge of the sea. They then made themselves snug for the night, lying down on the crest of the beach with their rifles by their sides, in case they were attacked, and with one man doing "sentry go", to give warning if necessary.
When the moon rose I could see them all lying comfortably there, one sleepy-looking figure sitting up among them, and some way along the sand the cutter, with the sea—it was just about high water—lapping against her stern-post. Having seen my own "look-out" man "standing by" with a loaded belt in the Maxim, in case he was needed, I lay down on the deck, outside my cabin, and slept gloriously.
I was awakened by a rifle shot, and jumped up. More rifle shots spluttered out. I looked ashore and saw the cutter's crew lying flat on their chests firing along the strip of beach—showing up in the moonlight as clearly as if it was daytime—and heard Evans shouting out excited orders by the dozen. (I told you what a "nervy" chap he was.) One of his men came crawling down towards us, yelling to us to open fire. It did not want his shouts to alarm us; my fellows were already on deck, looking wildly up and down the creek to see who was attacking. Not a sign of an enemy could I see, and it was light enough to see half a mile; but the hummocks of sand stretching inland and along the beach cast such very dark shadows that whoever was attacking could lie there absolutely hidden.
To judge by the amount of ammunition the cutter's crew were expending, Evans was evidently certain of his enemy. Spurts of sand were flying up just in front of his men, although I could not see any flashes coming from out of those dark shadows. I admit that I felt considerably flustered; Mr. Scarlett's face looked ghastly in the moonlight, and I wished with all my heart that I had not allowed Evans to sleep ashore. I could not help thinking of how Popple Opstein had been caught, and was very fearful that something of the same kind was going to happen again.
If we could only have seen something to fire at it would have been less frightening, but there was nothing.
Then Evans himself came rushing down to where the cutter lay, and yelled to me to open fire whilst his men shoved her off.
I thought he could not possibly have made a mistake, so banged away with a Maxim at those shadows. "There, sir, there! Look there, sir!" Moore suddenly rushed at me, pointing excitedly to a dark object apparently crawling along just by the water's edge not a hundred yards away.
The cutter's crew had seen it too, their bullets were spurting close to it, but Evans shrieked for them to come down and shove off the cutter, so I started the Maxim. We saw our bullets splashing all round, ceased fire, and waited for anything else to appear. Whatever that was, it never moved again.
By this time Evans had got the cutter afloat, and had come alongside the Bunder Abbas.
"Arabs crawling along the beach!" he shouted. "The sentry saw them first, fired at them—we've all fired at them—we've not seen any more since."
"Were they firing at you?" I called down, when he left off shouting at me.
He didn't know—he was not certain of anything except that his fellows had managed to kill at least one man.
At any rate, whatever had happened, no one was attacking us now. I stopped the Maxim, and together we waited on the qui vive all night, in case we were attacked again.
When the moon sank, an hour and a half before the sun was due to take her place, it became extremely dark, which made it most trying and nervous work waiting for daylight. Instead of the good night's sleep we had all promised ourselves, not a soul among us so much as closed his eyes after the alarm.
At daybreak not a sign of any living thing could be seen on those desolate sand-hills or on the beach, so we ventured ashore to pick up the cutter's masts and sails, which had been left behind in the panic.
I went too, to have a look at the chap we had shot, and guess what we found—fifty yards along the beach—that paraffin tin! just where we had thought we had seen the enemy crawling along to attack us—simply riddled with bullets. It was like a nutmeg grater, and the sand all round it was scored and tossed about by hundreds more.
I simply sat down and laughed and laughed till I thought something would crack. The whole thing was so obvious. It was high water when the men went to sleep; as the tide fell it left that tin high and dry: the sentry, suddenly catching sight of it and its shadow, lost his head, thought it was someone crawling along the beach, let off his rifle at it, woke the others, and in their excitement they fired at every shadow they saw.
"You killed him, sure enough," I roared, holding up the perforated tin; "the attack was repulsed with great slaughter."
It was not until we had walked behind the sand-hills, and found not a single trace of footsteps, that Evans would allow that the whole thing had been a false alarm.
"Your Maxim fired at it too," he said angrily. "You've made a fool of yourself as well."
Evans never heard the last of his paraffin tin, nor did his boat's crew; and, later on, when the yarn (with additions) spread aboard the Intrepid, we all came in for a great deal of chaff. For months afterwards, a messmate hankering after a black eye had only to ask a man belonging to that cutter's crew, or to the Bunder Abbas, what kind of an Afghan a paraffin tin was most like, and he got one.
However, we had made the cutter watertight and mended the foremast (after a fashion), though it was not strong enough to "look at" the shamel still blowing; so, leaving Evans to wait until it had blown itself out, I struggled up to wind'ard to have a look at Popple Opstein and find out how he had fared.
I found him snugly anchored under the lee of Sheikh Hill. He was so close inshore that when I poked in to have a yarn, the "B.A." could not get within half a mile of his cutter.
I pulled across in the dinghy.
"Has no one fired at you?" I asked him, seeing that he was within easy range of the shore and even of those high cliffs.
"Not a soul," he told me. "I've not seen a man, woman, or child these five days. Just look at those palm trees!" pointing in the direction where Bungi village lay. "They seem to have changed colour: they're browner than they were; and we cannot see anyone moving about among the sand-hills, not even from the top of the mast. I can't make it out."
I had to tell him the yarn of last night's brilliant little battle with the paraffin tin, and left him and his crew intensely amused.
When I went back to the Bunder Abbas I climbed her mast (much higher it was than the cutter's masts), and through my glasses very carefully searched the flats behind those sand-hills. Not a single living, moving thing did I see, although I watched for quite a quarter of an hour.
I sent Jaffa up to the masthead, and he came down puzzled, wanting me to land him so that he could find out what had happened.
He smiled when I suggested danger. "You wait, sir," he said, and disappeared down below.
My chum began making a signal to me, asking if I could spare any matches, so I forgot about Jaffa until, going back to the cabin, I came across him rigged out as a coast Persian or Baluchi—I didn't know anything of the different tribes, and I don't now—a regular low-caste, unkempt, miserable creature, dirtier than the dirtiest. The only thing remaining of the immaculate Jaffa was his dignified smile.
"You send me shore, sir, when dark comes. I go Bungi; find out things; come back to-morrow night—same time."
Mr. Scarlett told me that no self-respecting Afghan would waste a cartridge or blunt a knife on him in that rig, and that he would run very little risk; so, after sunset, and before the moon rose, I took him ashore myself in the dinghy, feeling rather ashamed to let him disappear behind the sand-hills alone, and promising to be there for him the next night.
At sunrise next morning, just as we were preparing to go to sea for the day, he was seen strolling calmly over the sand-hills, not even deigning to wave his arms to attract attention. One thing was certain: he could not be in any danger.
I stopped heaving in the cable, lowered the dinghy, and pulled ashore myself, jolly glad to get some exercise.
"What's the news?" I called out, as the dinghy took the ground.
"Bungi all gone—houses burnt—men and old women lying all round—killed—no one else there—no young women—no children—only dogs and some goats—no Baluchis—no camels—no Afghans—all nothing."
"What's the meaning of that?" I asked in horror and astonishment.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Afghan take revenge—lose many fighting men—cannot have rifles so take young women and children—take them to mountains—come and see."
I was only too keen to go, and followed him over those same sand-hills from behind which the Afghans had fired at Popple Opstein that horrid Sunday morning. We walked nearly a mile across the sandy wastes—very hot they were to my bare feet—and as we neared the clumps of palm trees which showed where Bungi had stood I saw why they had changed their colour—nearly all had been scorched by the heat from the burning thatched roofs. Their big leaves, red and yellow and black, hung low, mournfully.
The whole village was destroyed and the scene was too horrible to describe, but I saw enough to know that Jaffa was right.
Some half-jackal half-wolf dogs went yelping away when we disturbed them; nothing else lived.
The cruel Afghans had not even been satisfied with this. It was plain that they had driven their herd of camels up and down the patches of cultivated ground until not a trace of them existed. Jaffa explained this, and pointed out the innumerable hoof-marks.
The one well was heaped with dead bodies.
He said, in his quaint way, that that was a proof that "the Afghans had been very angry"!
Then he took me out of the village and showed me the broad track of camel marks leading across the ford towards the mountains.
The sooner the captain of the Intrepid knew of this the better; so back to the dinghy and the Bunder Abbas we went. I signalled across to tell Popple Opstein (we now knew why he had not been fired at) and went to sea, steaming down to Kuh-i-Mubarak. The shamel was still blowing strongly, so Evans was taking shelter in the creek close to the site of the "battle of the paraffin can". As we passed him I shouted out to tell him the news, and that I was going to find out whether Sudab had met the same fate.
I steamed up until the lagoon opened out and the water became too shallow to go farther. Then, landing with Jaffa, Webster, the corporal of marines, and two privates, all armed, we advanced very cautiously inland towards those palm trees under which I had seen the camels many weeks ago. Long before we reached them we knew by the burnt leaves and the sickening smell which pervaded everything that Sudab had met the same fate as Bungi. Even the fishing-boats had been smashed or burnt. We were very glad to get away from it, tramping back through the hot sand, and meeting Evans on his way to explore on his own account. I tried to dissuade him from going, but he was too excited to listen.
"I'm going along to find the Intrepid" I shouted after him.
"I'll come along too, directly the shamel has finished," he called back.
In an hour the little "B.A." was plunging and burying herself into a head sea, making two knots, over the land. We went at it all the rest of that day and all that night, sighting the Intrepid next morning.
I signalled across my news, and was immediately ordered to close. It was too rough to go alongside. I was ordered to steam to Jask with telegrams for the Admiral and to find out if the telegraph people had any news.
Of course, it was evident to everyone that the Afghans had given up any idea of landing more rifles at either of these two places, so the sooner the Admiral knew of this and the sooner we found out what fresh schemes were under way, the better.
But I was short of coal, and it took nearly two hours to fill up from the Intrepid, making fast with a hawser to her stern, and passing small bags from her poop to our bows along a running whip—no light job with such a nasty sea running. Then I was off again for Jask.
I looked at myself in the cracked glass inside our cabin. That scar across my forehead still showed very plainly, and for the life of me I could not help wondering what that little yellow-haired lady would say when she saw it.
CHAPTER VIII
Ugly Rumours
At daybreak next morning we were off Jask Point, with its square white telegraph buildings and its low sand-hills jutting out into the sea. As the shamel was still blowing hard from the north-west I anchored to the east'ard of the point, close to some rocks, and among a number of dhows sheltering there.
Percy pipeclayed my shoes and helmet, laid out my last clean white suit of uniform, and, having made myself look as smart as I could, I landed close to the old ruined fort (or sheikh's house) and walked up towards the telegraph buildings, meeting the political agent, in pyjamas, smoking a cigar and looking critically at the earth breastwork and the line of wire entanglements.
"Hallo!" he called out cheerily; "they told me you were coming in. You people have made it hot for everybody along the coast, and no mistake!"
He did not want me to give him any news. He had already heard of the capture of one dhow and the destruction of the other, of the terrible losses of the Afghans, of our men being killed, and that Bungi and Sudab had been destroyed. The Afghans had got the idea into their heads that the poor, wretched Persian villagers had given the "show" away, so had taken this ghastly revenge.
"You can't keep anything secret in this country," he said; "the way news travels is simply marvellous. I even heard that an officer had been wounded.
"Was that you?" he asked, looking at my forehead. "I heard that one of you had been seen to fall whilst running along the beach."
I shook my head. "I did not land. It was my chum. Shot through the calf he was. He's all right now."
"Those Afghans came along this way before they went home," he continued; "camped round the new fort, halfway to old Jask; hanged a couple of Persian customs people who lived in it; hanged them from the top of the wall to show their contempt for the Persian Governor; looted it and went away next morning with their camels and the women and children captured in those villages. They had a great number of wounded, those you had wounded—poor wretches!—and threatened to come along and cut our throats later on. A few of them did actually ride up here and fire their rifles—but that was nothing. They put down their losses—they had more than sixty killed—and their ill luck with the gun-running business to the telegraph cable—about right they are too—and would do anything to destroy it and us. Before they went away they cut the land line running along the coast to Karachi, just to give us the trouble of repairing it."
"Aren't you rather nervous?" I asked him.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"We have twenty fellows here who can handle rifles—Eurasians and people like that—besides Borsen and myself. The governor of Jask, too, has fifty or sixty border police, Bedouins, whom the Afghans hate more than they hate us, so we could rely upon them at a pinch!"
"I suppose they will not attempt to run more rifles into Bungi or Sudab?" I said enquiringly.
"No, no! they've had enough of those two places. They'll get news across to the Arabian coast and lie quiet for some months. Come along and have 'chota-hazri'," he said, changing the subject. "You needn't say anything about those Afghans or about them coming along here. My wife knows nothing about it, nor does Miss Borsen; I don't want them to know."
He took me up to his house and sent off the telegrams for the Admiral. The old head boy brought us tea, bread and butter, and fruit, and I quite enjoyed myself, except that the old gentleman was wearing a yellow-silk turban, and every time he came out on the veranda it caught my eye, and I thought he was Miss Borsen.
However, I might have spared myself the trouble of constantly turning my head and expecting to see her, because she was not even living in that house, but with her brother.
Afterwards, on my way down to the beach, I saw her there, a slim little figure on the shore, dressed all in white, with a big white helmet almost covering her yellow hair, looking strangely out of place among a motley crowd of Arabs, Persians, and Zanzibaris, loading and unloading the dhows.
"Her brother ought not to let her come down alone," I thought angrily.
She had a camera with her, and was taking pictures of the natives and their camels. She smiled when she saw me, and every mortal thing I had in my head seemed to go out of it. I couldn't think of any blessed thing to say except that it was a fine morning.
Then she laughed until I grew red and uncomfortable. It was a relief to shout across to the "B.A." for the dinghy, but whilst it was coming she made me pose for my photograph.
"I have a snapshot of your little steamboat (boat!—mind you); I must have one of its captain too," she said, as if it was a great compliment to be photographed by her.
If there is one thing I hate more than another it is having my photograph taken. Especially did I hate this, because she arranged me and rearranged me, with Griffiths in the dinghy for a background, and all the time he was grinning at me till I felt the idiot I looked. She never mentioned the scar on my forehead, so I took my helmet off so that she must see it, and then all she said was: "Do put your hat on again, and turn side face; that nasty scratch quite spoils the picture."
Hat! Nasty scratch! Spoils her picture! My word, what irritating things girls are! I'd gone ashore wanting her to see the wound, perhaps to say something nice about it, and hoping that she would treat me, for once, as though I were a man; and she'd made me cover it up in order not to spoil her picture, and made me stand there, like a baby, whilst she took the snapshot.
I felt very irritated, and when she said: "Let me come aboard and photograph that dear Mr. Scarlett," I felt more annoyed than ever. At that time of the morning the Bunder Abbas wasn't clean and tidy, so I answered rather cuttingly that I'd send the gunner ashore to be photographed, and suggested that perhaps she'd better wait until her brother or the political agent's wife could bring her on board some other time.
She smiled again her mocking smile, and, curtsying derisively, watched me clambering clumsily into the dinghy, trying not to wet my feet. With her eyes on me I felt like an elephant trying to get into a canoe, and one of my feet slipped and went into the water. That buckskin shoe was pretty well spoiled.
When Griffiths shoved off—still grinning the brute was—I looked back to salute; but she was already walking away from the beach and did not turn her head.
"She's offended now," I thought. "Serve her jolly well right! Fancy asking herself aboard like that; no English girl would have dreamt of doing such a thing!"
However, I was not really in the least pleased, and Mr. Scarlett soon found out that I was in a pretty bad temper.
Commander Duckworth had ordered me to lie at Jask until replies to his telegrams had been received from the Admiral, so there I had to stay—possibly for days.
The morning went by very slowly. I was in a thoroughly bad temper, and didn't care a "buttered biscuit" whether the six-pounder's recoil springs wanted adjusting or not; and when the lascar first-driver reported that the packing in the high-pressure piston-rod gland was not as tight as it should be, dragging me down below to see it, I cursed him till he salaamed a hundred times a minute to appease me. Moore, too, reported Ellis again for giving him "lip", and went away "with a flea in his ear".
I could not get the idea out of my head that those Afghans would come back and attack the place. Those wire entanglements and earthworks looked such puny things to keep back those fierce chaps who had faced our Maxims and six-pounder near Bungi, that if they really meant business, fifty rifles would not keep them out.
It was such hard luck on those two women. The political agent and Borsen did not count. They'd gone into the job with their eyes open, but the women—well, that was different. They should never have been allowed to come to this desolate, exposed, out-of-the-way spot, on the very edge of civilization.
Those mountains, too, were only twenty miles away; the Afghans could swoop down from them in a night, appear as unexpectedly as a vulture, get between the telegraph station and old Jask, with its fifty Bedouin border police, and cut it off entirely.
I sent for Jaffa and asked him what kind of fellows these border police were. He shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that they were useless, and volunteered to go to Jask and find out, in the bazaars, what news there was. I let him go, and he borrowed a camel from a friend on the beach and rode away inland, his black lambskin fez disappearing among the palms surrounding the ruined sheikh's house.
That afternoon Mr. Scarlett and I enjoyed the luxury of a thoroughly good sleep, lying back in our canvas chairs under the awning outside our cabin until Percy woke us for afternoon tea—tinned milk, bread (stale) buttered with liquid tinned butter, rancid at that.
There was a little sandy cove among the rocks close alongside, so I sent the whole crew ashore there, natives and all. They were soon enjoying themselves to their hearts' content, bathing and skylarking, scrubbing their clothes, drying them on the hot sand, and having a thoroughly good time.
"I'm hanged if I'm going to land at Jask again," I said to myself; but I did go, bawling ashore for someone to bring off the dinghy, and wearing my one respectable flannel suit of "plain clothes"—the very first time I had worn "plain clothes" since joining the Bunder Abbas.
I left Mr. Scarlett in charge; he never wanted to go ashore. He said, quite openly, that he was afraid of meeting Jassim, and felt sure that he would do so sooner or later. He was not a man one could argue with. Once he had made up his mind that something gloomy was going to happen he'd stick to it, and when it didn't happen he would be more certain that something worse still would take its place. This silly business about Jassim and the bracelet was, of course, at the bottom of it all. It seemed so absolutely childish for him to imagine that he would meet the man, or that anyone would remember the beastly thing, after all these years, to say nothing of the fact that whatever poison was left in the fangs after they had bitten those two could not possibly have retained its powers, that I lost patience with him.
I landed, but never intended going near the telegraph station, not by a long chalk. I did not want to be treated like a child by Miss Borsen—you bet I did not—so I wandered off to explore the ruins of that sheikh's house or fort among the palm trees.
It was a great square building with a tower at one corner, built up of red sandy bricks, all rounded by age, and the mortar, or whatever it was which bound them together, so friable and crumbling that I could loosen a brick with the end of a stick in no time. An entrance under the tower (from which the door had long since disappeared) led into a courtyard covered with rubbish, and all round it were the remains of dwelling-rooms, storehouses, and stables. Some still had roofs to them. A great high wall with crumbling battlements and platforms seemed to shut out every trace of breeze and shut in every ray of heat. The place was like an enormous oven. I climbed up some rough brick steps leading towards the battlements and base of the tower and had a good view over the surrounding country.
Beyond a few miserable palm trees was the open narrow piece of flat ground forming the neck of the peninsula. It gradually rose towards the telegraph buildings, and about halfway between—something like three hundred yards from where I stood—-were the line of wire entanglements and the earth breastwork, stretching right across from the rocks under which the Bunder Abbas was anchored to the shore on the other side, where the shamel was still driving white breakers up the beach with a continuous roar.
Still higher was that strong, loopholed wall surrounding the buildings themselves.
Away to the east'ard ran the telegraph line on its bare steel poles: the line which ran along the coast to Karachi, and which the Afghans had cut only a few days ago. I could follow the line of telegraph posts till they dwindled into "nothing", and felt very thankful that it was not my job to go along that appallingly lonely coast to repair damages.
I suppose I was seen from the telegraph station, for a servant came running down the peninsula, came into the middle of the courtyard, and I'm hanged if I didn't get an invitation to tea with the political agent's wife.
I climbed down and followed him, pretending that I was unwilling to go, and grumbling to myself that if I did meet Miss Borsen we should probably have a row. In half an hour I found myself playing tennis with a borrowed racket and borrowed shoes, which flopped about like canoes on my feet, with Miss Borsen playing opposite me, and beating me time after time with her low drives along the side lines. She seemed to take a positive joy in seeing me falling over my own feet in my attempts to return balls much too good for me. I hate being beaten at any game, especially by a woman, so that did not improve my temper.
"What about your gunner?" the political agent said, when at last I was allowed to "cool off" out of range of that little torturer's eyes. "Doesn't he ever come ashore?"
This made me think of Jassim, the bracelet, and of snake poisons.
"Do you know anything about poisons?" I asked. "How long do you suppose a cobra's poison would remain deadly?"
"In a dead cobra, do you mean? I don't know; but I should not care to keep a dried one without having his poison gland removed."
"No," I said. "If you extracted the poison and kept it in a—a bottle, for instance."
"Not for long, I should imagine," he answered; and then I was fairly startled, for he began to tell me the story of the very cobra bracelet on Mr. Scarlett's arm. I did my best to appear as if this was all quite unknown to me, for fear he should guess that I knew something about it, and drag more information from me than Mr. Scarlett would care I should tell.
"I've never seen it," he went on, quite unsuspiciously; "but an old friend of mine, skipper of a tramp steamer doing a queer business in the Gulf many years ago, saw it once, and told me that he'd never seen such a beautiful piece of workmanship. It will turn up some day at Christie's or at some other curio dealer's in London, I expect, and I'm rather sorry for whoever buys it. If he is known to possess it the news will come along out here, and I don't mind saying that it will disappear again within six months. The present Khan of Khamia, the real owner, is not the wealthy chap some of the former khans were, but he offers a reward every three months in the bazaars of every town on both sides of the Gulf—a reward of thirty thousand rupees—to whoever brings back the 'twin death', as it is called. That's two thousand pounds, and there's not an Arab born yet who wouldn't give his body to earn that, to say nothing about his being certain of Paradise if he helped to restore it to its rightful owners."
I mopped my perspiring face often enough to prevent him noticing how his confirmation of Mr. Scarlett's yarn had stirred me, and was quite glad to be called away to play tennis.
I played worse than ever, and Miss Borsen grew more provokingly successful.
After all my determination never to go near her again, I found myself weakly consenting to stay to dinner. The political agent rigged me out in clothes of his own, and the meal was a most delightful change after "pigging it" on board the "B.A." for six weeks on tinned grub, with only the gunner's black-bearded, morose face in front of me. After such fare as we had had this dinner was luxury, but still more of a luxury than the food was the daintily decorated table with its soft candlelight.
It would have been absolutely enjoyable if Miss Borsen had not been there too. She had a most irritating effect on me. Whether she intended it or not she always seemed to be "pulling my leg", and I instinctively "bristled up" and wanted to get the upper hand, and put her in her proper place as a very dainty little lady who should listen, very respectfully, whilst I talked.
I tried to tell them about being carried away to sea in that dhow; but when I came to the part where I climbed along the struggling yard, instead of looking impressed, she merely giggled: "I wish I'd been there; you must have looked like a frog." This put me "off" telling any more yarns, and made me so annoyed with her that I disagreed with everything she said.
Every time I did so she came off best in the argument, in spite of not speaking English very fluently.
By the end of that dinner I felt that I wanted to pick her up—I could have done so with one hand—and give her a thoroughly good shaking, just to make her realize how strong I was, and that though she could defeat me with her clever little tongue, she was, at any rate, helpless physically.
It was a most gloriously cool night, with millions of stars shining, and they all walked down to the beach to see me go aboard. We came to a dark patch close to the beach, where the tide sometimes washed across, and when the political agent called out: "Be careful of your feet; it's swampy," the temptation was too great. I whisked little Miss Borsen off her feet, and, before she had time to make more than an angry protest, had carried her twenty paces across it and set her down on the dry sand.
She never spoke a single word after that, and I chuckled to think that, at last, I had stopped her tormenting little tongue. I would try that dodge again if necessary.
I hailed the "B.A."; the dinghy came ashore for me, and off to my launch I went, shouting good-night to them all. My little tormentor's voice was not among the chorus of "good-nights" shouted back. She still had her tongue tied.
Mr. Scarlett was waiting up for me, looking more saturnine than ever. His dark eyes gleamed maliciously when I came into the light of the lamp, because a little blue-velvet bow had caught in a button of my coat. It was one she had worn, and I got red, looked an ass, and untwisted it. I kept it, too, as a trophy of the first victory I had won.
"Brute force is better than brains—sometimes," I chuckled to myself.
"Jaffa come back?" I asked.
Mr. Scarlett shook his head, and I felt rather nervous about him, although that was quite unnecessary, because he arrived next morning, safe and sound, but with very little definite information. The townspeople in Old Jask were in a state of alarm at the threats of the hill tribes, and the Khan or Mir had called in the border police from outlying villages. He had actually served out ammunition to them—a thing he did not often do for fear that they themselves would plunder Jask. I went up to see the political agent to tell him of this. He knew it already, but it was a good enough excuse to go, for I wanted to know if I had offended Miss Borsen and apologize if I had done so.
However, I did not see her; and although the replies to those telegrams did not come from the Admiral for another four days, and I went there every day, I never did see her. There was always some excuse: that she had a headache, or was resting; but it was plain enough that I had mortally offended her, and my victory seemed much more like a defeat.
So it was quite a relief when the cipher telegrams did arrive, and when the "B.A." steamed away north-west again, to look for the Intrepid.
These telegrams ordered Commander Duckworth to proceed immediately to Muscat. He wasted no time in picking up the two cutters and departing, leaving me to cruise up and down that same strip of coast for another fortnight, without seeing a sail—until, in fact, I had to run across to Muscat myself, for coal and water.
I found the Intrepid there anchored under the black cliffs and the old fort, and hoped to get ashore, but was ordered to fill up as quickly as possible and to cruise off a place called Jeb, about forty miles to the north'ard, where those rifles were originally reported to have been stowed. A miserable native chap, with a grudge to repay, had come along from there to say that a dhow was filling up with rifles for the Makran coast. So off I had to go.
This coast was entirely different from the one I had just left. Stupendous barren mountains towered up to the sky; their ridges and shoulders, sweeping down to the sea, ended abruptly in stupendous cliffs whose feet were eaten away by the continual beating of the south-west monsoon waves, until they looked as if they must soon topple over. Forbidding-looking inlets here and there made very comfortable shelter to lie in for a few hours, though I could not stay in them for long without being "sniped". My orders were not to go within five hundred yards of any inhabited place, because the people along the coast were so well armed, and even in these desolate inlets they would discover me, after a very short time, and compel me to go out into the heavy seas again.
Thank goodness, they were execrable shots!
Luck was not in our way, for when we returned to Muscat we found that the Intrepid herself had captured that dhow, and all we had to do was to tow it out and burn it—not a very heroic task.
The next fortnight was spent still farther to the north'ard. Sixty miles of coast we had to examine, and we started from the farthest point, gradually working along towards Muscat. Wherever there was a gap in the cliffs, or a valley running down to the sea, in we would go and be sure to find a village, perhaps a dozen huts, perhaps fifty, nestling under a few date-palm trees or along the banks of a stream. The natives (fishermen, for the most part, owning perhaps a few sheep or goats, which they guarded day and night from wolves and jackals) were an inoffensive, absolutely ignorant lot of people. Even Jaffa could make very little out of them except that they lived in perpetual fear of Bedouins or other raiding Arab tribes and of wild animals. They did not want money—they did not seem to know the use of it—and for a few dates and a few pounds of rice—especially rice—we could get enough fish for the whole crew.
I had to search all these villages for concealed arms. It was supposed that the Arabs—Bedouins or whoever they were—knowing that it was useless to try to send any more rifles away from Jeb, would take them farther up the coast in caravans, distributing them in small numbers among these villages and compelling the natives to store them in their huts, until dhows should come along and take them away.
However, we found nothing whatever except a few old muzzle-loaders, dating from the year "one".
There was such an entire absence of danger that whilst a couple of bluejackets or marines, under Moore, Ellis, or Webster, went from hut to hut, searching, I would take the head man of the village away up the slopes of the mountains and try to get a shot at a wild goat. I managed to bag one or two, and when, one day, at some wretched place which I don't believe possessed a name, I shot a leopard (I had only a shotgun with me), breaking its hindlegs so that it could not get away and the natives could surround it and beat it to death, I was looked upon as the saviour of the village. They filled the dinghy with fish, and actually brought along a sheep. Jaffa and Mr. Scarlett said it was a sheep; I thought it was a goat; and I'm hanged if it was possible to tell, by eating it, which it was.
The news of my shooting the leopard spread along the coast, and whereas, previously, the villagers had been half-frightened out of their lives when the "B.A." appeared, flying hurriedly with their women and children, goats and sheep, to the mountains, now, when we anchored off a village, the beach would often be lined with people to welcome us and implore me to go and shoot leopards or jackals.
On the last day of this cruise, the last morning before we had to return to Muscat for more coal and food, I took the Bunder Abbas into a most marvellous gorge in the cliffs. Just imagine enormous, perpendicular, sea-worn cliffs, eight hundred feet high, with the south-west monsoon swell roaring at their feet, and a cleft, not fifty yards across, cut straight down through them, as by some enormous knife.
Into this the "B.A." shoved her nose, twisted and turned, with those huge walls on either side, until long after the sea had disappeared and the booming of the breaking swell had ceased. Gradually the walls trended downwards, until a last turn disclosed an inland basin, quite a mile long and nearly as broad. Mangrove trees came down all round it nearly to the water's edge; what looked like rich grass-land ran up the slopes of the mountains until it faded among the gaunt bare rock; and at one place, where a little stream opened, there was quite a large cluster of huts, with many fishing-boats drawn up on the beach in front of them. I anchored in front of this village—marked on the chart as Kalat al Abeid—lowered the dinghy, and pulled ashore, with Jaffa to interpret, and the three marines (armed with rifles) to do the usual searching.
I took my shot-gun, but the head-man—a tall, wizened, old chap with a scarlet sash round his waist and a scarlet turban on his head—as soon as he saw it, shook his head, patted one of the marine's rifles, and jabbered away excitedly to Jaffa, pointing up to the mountains.
Jaffa interpreted: "He say plenty leopard in mountain—come down every night—kill sheep and goats—two nights ago killed a woman. Want you get rifle from ship—go shoot them—want all men go—kill many leopard—he show you where they sleep in daytime."
"Right oh, old cock!" I said, sent the dinghy back for another rifle, and hurried away the marines and Jaffa to get their searching done.
The villagers were so eager for us to go shooting that they had actually stripped their huts of everything movable, bringing the things outside, so that all we had to do was to stoop down through the low doorway, see that the floor was bare and had not been disturbed lately (no rifles buried there), then back out again and search the next.
It was the quaintest sight in the world to see the excited children—little brown naked urchins—staggering out with big clay cooking utensils and brass cooking pots as big as themselves, as happy as the day was long at this new kind of game.
One or two huts were so dark inside that we could not see; but the natives tore away some of the palm-leaf roof to let in light, in order that nothing should delay us.
Griffiths came back with the dinghy and my rifle, bringing a spare one on the chance that I would let him have a day's sport too. I let him come, and away inland we started, the head-man, Jaffa (with my shot-gun), and myself leading, followed by Webster, his two marines, and Griffiths, surrounded by a dirty, happy mob of natives, armed with short, clumsy hunting spears, some only with boat's paddles. Innumerable children followed, shrieking with delight, and a dozen or more women, hooded so that we could only see their eyes, bearing vessels of water—big earthenware chatties—on their heads, brought up the rear of the expedition.
If I had had any idea whatever of treachery the fact of the women coming along would have dispelled that. We were just as safe as if we had been going shooting among a lot of country people in England.
Directly we had reached the limits of cultivation the children were sent back very quickly. No leopard could have slept comfortably within a mile of the noise they made. Then we commenced to wind up a track towards the mountains themselves, and the nearer we came to them the more rugged and barren they looked. Very nearly black they were in places; great rents split whole shoulders from the main ridge; huge masses of rock were poised on each other like vast columns, looking as though a bird perching on them would upset them. Indeed the slope we were ascending was so strewn with gigantic blocks of black rock that one knew that they, at one time, must have fallen from just such columns.
The head-man began talking volubly to Jaffa, and he, turning to me, said: "Leopards there—come down at night—go back sleep close by."
I told Jaffa that whatever happened I must be back by sunset.
The old man understood and nodded—so we pushed on. It was very hot work scrambling up that vast, debris-strewn slope, over smooth rocks which gave scarcely any foothold, twisting round great boulders or half-wading through loose sand, worn from the face of some steep, precipitous part by countless years of exposure—everything too hot to put one's hands on comfortably, and the sun always scorching on one's back. I called a halt long before the old head-man had begun to show the slightest sign of fatigue.
I looked back. My three marines and Griffiths were some way below us, among the admiring villagers, wiping their perspiring faces. Lower down was the little group of women crouching together, with their water chatties in front of them; a thousand feet below, beyond the dark, green fringe of mangrove trees, the Bunder Abbas lay in that inland basin, and, winding out like a dark snake, the channel wriggled through the cliffs to the sea. The blazing sun poured down relentlessly from a cloudless sky.
Jaffa touched my arm, pointing out to sea and to a faintly-showing trail of smoke. Unslinging my glasses, I followed the line of smoke till I saw a steamer. It was the Intrepid, evidently making for this same harbour.
"Why the dickens is she coming here?" I thought, and would have stayed; but the head-man was impatient, so we shoved on again, though I kept turning back to watch her until she disappeared under the shore-line. In half an hour Jaffa, whose one eye seemed better than my two, swung me round to see her emerge from the channel into the basin itself.
Well, the old "B.A." was safe enough now. It did not matter how late we got back; when he heard about the leopards Commander Duckworth would be too good a sportsman to be annoyed that I was not there. I felt quite at ease.
So on we scrambled, in Indian file, higher and higher, until a turn of the track round a shoulder of the rocks shut out the sight of the sea, and also, thank goodness, gave us shelter from the sun. It was like going from brilliant sunlight into a darkened room.
We now found ourselves in an extraordinary hollow, more like being at the bottom of a huge well or cup—a coffee-cup with a crack in it, the crack the ravine through which we had just entered—its bottom strewn with a jumble of rocks which had fallen in the course of ages from the precipitous walls which shut out the sky. It was very gloomy and silent but delightfully cool.
Craning our necks backwards we looked up through the rim of our coffee-cup to the burning sky overhead. That rim must have been a thousand or twelve hundred feet above our heads if it was an inch, and at one point, immediately opposite us, there was an extraordinary gap in it. Just as the cleft in the cliffs through which the Bunder Abbas had steamed three hours before looked as though some giant had chipped it out with an enormous axe, so this gap looked as though the same giant, on his way to the sea, had pinched a piece out of the edge as he swung himself across it.
Strangely enough, Jaffa discovered afterwards that there was a local tradition something to that effect.
The villagers began to crowd round us, jabbering excitedly. The old head-man drove them away, whacking them with his long stick. Then he began talking to Jaffa.
"Villagers stay here," Jaffa explained. "Head-man take you and us up to gap—leopards lie among rocks all about here—when we climb up to top villagers make noise—leopards try escape through gap—you shoot."
What a grand idea! I would have gone anywhere with the sporting old chap, although I had not the faintest idea how we were to get up there without wings.
"Right oh! Lead on!" I cried, and the old fellow began leading us farther into the gloomy bottom of the "cup", clambering round the boulders, Jaffa, myself, the three marines, and Griffiths following him. Then he began to ascend the precipitous wall itself by a path—if you could call it a path—so steep and so narrow in places that it was as much as I could do to keep my feet or climb up it. It zigzagged up that wall in twenty or more zigzags; looking down from the upper ones we could see those below; looking upwards we could see no trace of any foothold, nothing whatever but rocks rising sheer above us. At one or two of the worst places the edge of the track actually overhung, and small stones dislodged by my feet fell plumb down until I dare not watch them far for fear of feeling dizzy.
Presently we had scaled the rocks sufficiently high to come to the edge of the shadow cast by the eastern rim of the "cup". Here I called a halt, perhaps three hundred feet below the gap, and we leant back against the rocks and rested. I felt like a fly on a wall, and only wished that I had suckers on my hands and feet, or were a goat.
"This isn't a proper track, is it?" I asked Jaffa.
He smiled, and at the time I didn't believe him when he said: "The only way out of the valley—only way inland from the village—for men or camels!"
"Camels! What nonsense!" I thought.
The old head-man was much too energetic for me. Off he went again, and led us into the full blaze of the sun.
Great snakes! In a minute or two I was dripping with perspiration, and when we did at last reach that gap, and I threw myself down on some rocks there, I don't think that I had ever felt so hot in my life.
However, a grand current of air whistled through the gap, as though this, too, was the only way the sea-breezes could pour inland. I soon cooled down.
"What a climb!" I said to Webster, as we looked down at the extraordinary chasm beneath our feet—the "coffee-cup", as I have called it—and tried to trace the zigzag path up which we had climbed. It must have taken us an hour at least to ascend, and I confess that, as I looked down, I did not in the least relish the idea of having to crawl down again.
At the bottom it was dark and gloomy and silent; not a trace of villagers could we see among the rocks there, nor could we get a view of the Intrepid or the sea beyond, because the crack in the "coffee-cup" was shut in by another shoulder of the mountains.
The gap was about five yards wide, its sides about twenty feet high, and I took twelve paces before I looked down into the valleys on the far side. Deep and misty they were, and beyond them stupendous ranges of barren, naked mountains lost themselves in the distance.
The old man made us take up positions on the crest on either side of the gap, myself, himself, Jaffa, and Griffiths on one side, the three marines on the other; and was just going to give the signal to the men below to commence their drive—a leopard drive, mind you; think of it, and think how happy and excited we were—when, turning to look down the far side, his face became a muddy-yellow colour—just as Mr. Scarlett's often did. All the life seemed to die out of it, and he gasped out: "Bedouin!"
We all turned, and through my glasses I saw what at first looked like some huge snake winding up the valley towards us. Then I saw that it was an apparently endless caravan of heavily-laden camels, wearily trailing one after the other. Among them were many horsemen—a hundred or more, although it was impossible to count them.
Then I knew why the Intrepid had turned up so unexpectedly. These were the very fellows we had been hunting for, bringing their rifles from Jeb to hide them in the village at our feet, until dhows could be sent to take them away. And they must pass through this gap, on either side of which we were lying, in order to get there. Some wretched brute must have taken the news to Muscat, and given away the scheme (there were always plenty of these fellows mean enough to sell their own fathers for a few rupees).
The old head-man, half-paralysed with fear, was worming himself down into the gap. I clutched him.
"Ask him how long before they reach here!" I told Jaffa.
The old chap could hardly speak, he was so frightened.
"In two hours!" Jaffa told me.
My brain was hot with the fluster of wondering what I ought to do.
Webster, the corporal of marines, came scrambling down across the gap and up to me, his eyes gleaming. He was bursting to suggest something.
"Out with it!" I said.
"Beg pardon, sir, but the five of us could hold this here gap against a whole regiment, and we'd drive these chaps off like winking. They can't outflank us, they must come along in single file. It would be grand if we could stop 'em."
I could see that for myself; but at the first shot back would go the whole caravan, and if those camels were laden with rifles and ammunition not one should we capture. A better plan rushed through my head—to let them get through and then prevent them getting back!
I would send the head-man to tell Commander Duckworth. He would come along with every man he could land, and do the whole business whilst we stopped their retreat. It would be the grandest haul that had ever been made. Instead of the villagers driving leopards up to us, the Intrepid should drive these Bedouins and their camels; instead of getting a few mangled leopard skins, we would bag the whole caravan and its rifles.
I told Webster. He grinned with delight.
"How many rounds of ammunition have we?" I asked.
We had nearly six hundred between us; that was enough.
Hurriedly I explained to Jaffa what we intended doing. I tore a leaf from his note-book, and with his pencil wrote a message to Commander Duckworth.
"Give it to the old man! Tell him to take it to the Intrepid as quickly as he can; tell him to take his villagers and the women back with him."
Jaffa's eyes sparkled as he passed the orders to the trembling head-man and gave him the note.
I let go of his cloak, and he slid down the rocks like an eel, and was off down the dizzy zigzag path, like a goat, to where his people lay hid.
Then Webster, with a grin on his face, went back to his side of the gap with orders to conceal himself and his two men farther along the edge, not to expose themselves on the sky-line for a single moment, and on no account to fire until I fired.
I knew that I could trust Webster.
Jaffa drew out his beloved Mauser pistol to see that it was loaded, and we had nothing to do but wait whilst those weary camels and their escort wound their way up towards the gap.
CHAPTER IX
Trapping a Caravan
From where I lay, sprawling on my stomach, on the very edge of that vast ridge, like a fly clinging to the rim of a cup—my "coffee-cup"—I could look down on both sides. Inland, the sides of the ridge fell away steeply but not precipitously; the track from the gap did not zigzag down, as it did on my other side, but wound and sloped at an easy angle until I could trace it no farther. The leading horseman of the caravan was, possibly, two miles away, and perhaps a thousand or fifteen hundred feet below me—one could not judge heights or distances with any accuracy—the middle portion of the winding caravan was hidden by a swelling of the mountain slope, and the tail end, indistinct, lost itself in the stifling haze which filled the valleys below. I watched those first few mounted men. They kept on halting and waiting, going on again and stopping, as though the camels could not keep pace with them.
I turned my head the other way, and looked down the precipitous curtain of rocks which fell almost sheer into the extraordinary hollow below me. The red turban and flowing white cloak of the old villager showed up—a bright spot against the dark rocks—as he scrambled hastily to join his people, tiny little dots moving about between the boulders which strewed the bottom of the "coffee-cup". I could not see the crack through which we had entered the hollow, because the huge walls surrounding it overlapped there, but I marvelled how we had managed to climb the path without slipping and being dashed to pieces below. I really did not believe it possible for a camel to negotiate it in safety.
"Surely a camel cannot go there?" I asked Jaffa.
"Yes, camel go down, safe; horse cannot; Bedouin leave horses behind them."
"Will they bring them up to the gap?"
Jaffa did not think they would, and I devoutly hoped that they would not.
I thought how old Popple Opstein's face would have beamed, and his yellow hair stood up, if only he had been here with me on that edge of rocks. Yes, here I was literally on the edge of civilization, where all my life I had longed to be. How my chum would have chaffed me about that if he saw me now! Perhaps in a few hours, if he had the luck to be landed, he would see me.
And, thinking of yellow hair, perhaps little Miss Borsen, if she too could see me and could realize what might soon happen, would treat me as a man. More likely than not she would only have smiled in her tantalizing, irritating way, and told me how uncomfortable I looked.
Jaffa touched me. "Bedouin see very far; very good sight; see us soon."
What an ass I was! I had ordered Webster and his fellows to conceal themselves below the crest, and here I was still sprawling on the sky-line myself.
I crawled lower down; so did Jaffa and Griffiths.
Until I had left the ridge it never occurred to me that probably the advance party of Bedouins would scale the sides of the gap and scatter along the edge. If they did that they would certainly see us; so it was necessary to hide much farther away from it and take no such risk.
I whistled softly to Webster, and he came crawling across to me, keeping well below the sky-line.
"Take your men a hundred yards along the ridge," I told him; "hide among those rocks there, below the edge, and for Heaven's sake don't show yourselves, not until the last Arab and the last camel have gone halfway down the zigzag, and not until you see me move."
"I understand, sir," he answered grimly, and presently I saw him and his two men scramble to a cluster of detached rocks much farther along.
When they were safely hidden, Jaffa, Griffiths, and myself crawled in the opposite direction, away from the gap, behind some more boulders. We shifted about among them until we found a position from which we could see that gap, and also look down the zigzag path. We were about one hundred and fifty yards from the gap, and practically on a level with it. Of course we could see nothing of the approaching horses and camels, but I trusted to my ears to hear them.
Lying there under these conditions was an extraordinary trial to my nerves, and I thanked my stars that Webster had come ashore with me that morning and not Moore. Moore would have made a hopeless muddle of his job, and could not have controlled his own nerves, let alone those of his men. As it was, I presently found the strain of waiting and listening so great that I had to hang on to those rocks, like a maniac, to prevent my legs making me crawl up to the sky-line, twenty feet above us, to have one more look at the caravan.
I do not believe that if I lived a thousand years I could be more excited or "jumpy".
I breathed more freely when I saw the head-man reach the bottom of the "coffee-cup", gather his villagers together, and disappear with them, like a lot of white ants, out of sight round that projecting corner of rock which marked the huge crack or rent giving exit to the path. I relied upon the old sportsman hurrying down to the village as quickly as he could, and hoped that in another hour Commander Duckworth would receive my note. In another forty or fifty minutes afterwards he might be able to land his men, and in another hour and a half they might reach the entrance to the "coffee-cup".
Then the fun would begin.
My wrist watch was, of course, still smashed—there had been no chance of having it repaired—so I could only judge by the height of the sun that the time was about eleven o'clock. At the earliest the Intrepids could not reach the bottom of the zigzag path for another three hours; and, if the head-man had been accurate, the head of the caravan would be at the gap an hour and a half before they arrived.
The only thing that troubled me then was whether the leading Arabs would have descended it, turned the corner, and sighted the Intrepid, and perhaps the advancing bluejackets, before the rear of the caravan had passed through the gap and had begun the perilous descent.
Once the rear-guard was below us I felt that we could prevent them climbing back; but if it should happen that the Intrepids were sighted and the alarm given when only a part of the caravan had passed us, then our position would be perilous.
If they searched the ridge before even commencing to send their camels down I knew that we should be discovered, and in that case there would be nothing for it except to sell our lives as dearly as possible. But I did not think they would take the trouble to do this, nor did Jaffa, and the chief danger lay in the alarm being given before all the camels and Arabs had passed through the gap.
If this happened, I made up my mind to shoot as many camels as possible, to prevent the Arabs getting away with all their rifles; and I told Jaffa that if anything went wrong, I relied upon him and his Mauser pistol to prevent either Griffiths or myself falling alive into their hands.
Somehow or other I could rely upon Jaffa, and it was a comfort. Webster would have to look after himself and his two men; I knew that he would not fail.
Writing this now, the fact that I really thought this ending possible, or prepared for it, seems almost unreal. Time has quickly blurred the remembrance of the extraordinary peril of our position at that time, and only left vivid recollections of the wonderful feeling of exhilaration which took hold of us as we lay there feeling almost like wild beasts waiting for our prey, and listening for the first sound of their approaching feet.
A large bird appeared above us, circling with motionless wings. Suddenly he came gliding downwards, disappearing behind the crest. Looking up again into the burning sky I saw more specks coming from all directions. Soon there were ten or twelve of the ugly brutes circling round. So close to us did they come that I could see their heads and their naked necks stretched towards the ground. They were vultures, and one by one they slid downwards in huge spirals and disappeared.
Jaffa whispered: "A camel or a horse has dropped; they must be driving them hard."
He told me that the speed of a camel caravan was about two and a half miles an hour. As the crow flies, Jeb was probably thirty miles away from the spot where we lay. It was inside the mark to add another fifteen for the turns and twists of the track through the mountains and valleys; this would bring the probable march to forty-five miles, and if the camels had been pressed forward day and night, as Jaffa imagined likely, the poor beasts must be very weary.
Jaffa had noticed when he first looked through my glasses at them that their necks were very straight. He now explained to me that the halter of one camel is secured to the one next in front, and that, as the leading camels of a gang were always the best, when the others tire they tend to be dragged along, and the ropes stretch their necks until they are almost straight and not curved.
"They were very straight," he said.
This waiting was a tremendous strain. To know that the caravan was approaching on the other side of that ridge, behind and above us, made the longing to climb up and look over simply maddening.
To pass the time we made little loopholes between the rocks, through which we could fire towards the gap and down the zigzag path without being seen ourselves. Griffiths asked me, under his breath, if he could smoke his pipe. He asked simply to hear himself speak. He knew that I would refuse, but it was a comfort for him to whisper and a comfort for me to whisper back that the blue smoke might show—a fact he knew well enough.
Then a horrid thought struck me. When we had first reached the gap I had lighted a cigarette, and the burnt match and the end of the cigarette must be lying somewhere there still. If either of them were seen the alarm would be given at once. My whole mind became tortured with picturing them lying there on the bare stones, and I would have given anything in the world to be able to crawl across and try to find them. I did not fear that our tracks would be found: the rocks were quite bare; what loose stones there were between them would not leave a foot-mark; but even now, as the scene comes back to me, I remember that the fear of the burnt match and cigarette end being discovered was horrible at the time.
Just as the strain became almost unbearable, and the impulse to crawl to the gap almost more than I could resist—I had actually risen to my hands and knees—Jaffa gave a low sound, and pressed me down.
Looking through my loophole I saw a tall, fine-looking Arab standing erect at our side of the gap, with a rifle in his hand, turning his head from side to side and then peering below into the chasm beneath.
LOOKING THROUGH MY LOOPHOLE I SAW A TALL, FINE-LOOKING ARAB PEERING INTO THE CHASM BENEATH.
I felt certain that the white cigarette end must be lying there at his feet, and that in another second he must see it. My heart seemed to stop beating and my ears buzzed. He turned and looked intently at the very heap of boulders behind which we lay. I could have sworn that our eyes met. I had to put my hand to my mouth to prevent me giving way to the frantic desire to yell. Then he disappeared back into the gap, and I breathed more freely.
"He tell others—all safe—see nothing—camels come presently," Jaffa whispered.
In two or three minutes more Arabs—ten, then twenty—crowded through the gap, their rifles held ready and their fierce eyes scanning every rock.
Thank goodness! The towering sides of the "coffee-cup" hid the Intrepid from view.
They moved stiffly, as though tired, talking quietly and squatting on the rocks for a few minutes, until they suddenly stood up, looked back through the gap, slung their rifles over their shoulders, and commenced to scramble down the zigzag path.
They had hardly left the gap when, with a light scraping noise, the ugly head and neck of a camel appeared. He hesitated as he saw the steepness of the path below him, but the camel leader beat him about his head and lips until he condescended to move out of the gap, and with hesitating paces, putting down his huge feet with very great care, started the descent. As his body came into view we saw long sacks or bundles of matting—containing rifles, we felt sure—strapped one on either side of him.
From his quarters stretched taut the halter of the camel "next astern", and another supercilious, scornful, ugly head appeared. Camel after camel (all with their bundles), Arab after Arab (some armed, others simply leading camels) squeezed after each other through the gap in the crest and started down the zigzag path.
I was thankful to notice that the advance-guard seemed in no hurry to reach the bottom, but would go on for a hundred yards, wait for the leading camel to overtake them, and go on again. The longer the time which elapsed before they sighted the Intrepid, the more chance would there be that the end of the caravan had already passed through the gap before the alarm was given.
Fifty camels I counted; sixty; sixty-two—three; but as the sixty-fourth head emerged into sight it sank down to the rocks. The wretched brute had fallen on his knees, his neck stretched quite straight as his halter to the camel ahead took the strain. He was dragged bodily forward for a few inches on the smooth rock, then the halter "parted", and his neck curved again.
Another ugly camel's head appeared over his back, but there was no room to pass—the gap was too narrow—and he stopped, swaying his head angrily from side to side.
The Arabs called shrilly one to another—-half-dazed they seemed to be, probably from fatigue—and a dozen of them, surrounding the kneeling camel, tried to make him rise to his feet. They prodded him with their rifles and spears, howling execrations, hauled on the broken halter, and beat him on the nose and face. They actually fired rifles close to his face; but he took not the slightest notice. He never even moved his head, holding it up quite motionless, with that extraordinary sarcastic, supercilious look which camels always have, and appeared to be quite unaware of the cruel treatment.
"Camel—finish—much tired—never get up—stay to die," Jaffa whispered.
Two vultures—appearing from nowhere—perched silently on the rocks behind which lay Webster and his two men, saw them, and flapped across to another rock. The Arabs were too busy to notice this or they might have been suspicious.
Then a fine-looking, very richly dressed Arab, with a flowing red[#] patriarchal beard and a green turban pushed past the camel and began to give orders. The ropes securing the bundles were unlashed, the bundles were dragged aside and propped up against the projecting rocks, and then, hauling on those ropes (they passed under the camel's belly), shouting and yelling as though hell had broken loose, the Arabs tried to hoist him to his feet.
[#] The sheikh must have visited Mecca three times, as only after three such pilgrimages are beards dyed red.
The sheikh, or whoever he was, climbed to the top of the gap, the better to superintend operations. A grand-looking chap he was, with a fine "fighting" face, beetling eyebrows, and a great hooked nose.
For a moment I thought again of that cigarette end, and grew sick with fear lest it was there and he should see it. But he was too much interested in the camel to see anything else. Although his men heaved with all their might they only raised the poor beast a few inches, and down it would sink again.
Then the sheikh gave more orders. Men began calling down to those on the paths of the zigzag, immediately underneath the helpless camel, and I saw these hurriedly making large gaps in the line of camels. Two men took hold of the poor brute's halter and hauled the head round until it was touching the hind quarters; the others, gathering at the side of the camel farther from the precipice below, using their rifles as levers and also pressing against his lean flanks, shoved "all together"; the men on the head-rope tugged the head still farther round, and the helpless brute toppled over the edge. Rolling and falling, sliding through the gaps in the lines beneath, bounding from boulder to boulder, he at last "fetched up", two hundred feet below, against a rock, and lay there a shapeless mass of broken back and neck and legs.
The two vultures hopped about excitedly and flapped a little farther down, eyeing the remains with twisted heads.
At another order from the sheikh those bundles were torn open, and I simply "thrilled" to see at least two dozen rifles—brand-new rifles—hauled out. Each man, taking one or two of them as he passed, started off again along the zigzag path after the rest of the camels. The sheikh, clambering down to the path, followed them slowly, and that procession of camels commenced afresh through the gap, camel after camel, until I had counted eighty-three. After the eighty-third came many more, pace by pace, with weary feet, but these were loaded with boxes of ammunition. No attempts had been made to conceal that fact; the boxes were just as they had left the manufacturers, slung in great nets across the camels' backs.
One hundred and thirty-four passed through, counting both those with rifles and those with ammunition; and, last of all, led by two men, a magnificent camel, splendidly caparisoned, with a scarlet, silver-embroidered cloth and with silver-mounted harness, stalked angrily through, followed by two smaller ones with unwieldy burdens. These three were doubtless the sheikh's own camels, his riding camel and the two which carried his tent and the cooking gear and food which he might want on the march.
No more camels came.
I could hardly believe our good fortune. Everything had turned out as we had planned. Looking down into the "coffee-cup" I could see the zigzag of painfully-descending camels; and still farther below them the white figures of the advance-guard, not yet near the bottom or that corner beyond which they would be able to see the Intrepid. Not one of those Bedouin Arabs suspected that we six were lying there above them, or that the Intrepids were—possibly—hurrying up to drive them back to us. I would have given much to know what was happening beyond the mountain screen, whether the Intrepids had actually landed, and, if they had landed, how near they were. I reckoned that, by now, if all had happened as I hoped, they would be about halfway up from the village, and in another quarter of an hour, or less, the first of those Arabs would have scrambled out of the bottom of the "coffee-cup" and should see them.
What the time was, or how long it had taken those one hundred and thirty-seven camels to pass through the gap, I had no idea; but the sun was already slanting downwards in the west and was no longer lighting the rocks at the bottom of the "coffee-cup". In fact they had disappeared for some time in the shadow cast by the ridge on which we were hidden, and as the sun gradually sank, so did the sharply-outlined shadow of the ridge and the gap, rising upwards along the opposite face of the chasm, gradually shade the zigzag path higher and higher.
We were fearfully thirsty, but we still dared not shift our cramped positions to get at our water-bottles and make ourselves more comfortable. We simply lay where we were, peering through our loopholes between the rocks at the caravan crawling down the path. Vultures, perched on the rocks around us, craned their bare necks downwards and watched too. It looked like some huge centipede or caterpillar, as each camel carefully felt for his next foothold and swung his long ungainly legs stiffly and cautiously forward. I caught sight of one, the third in a gang or string of five, evidently making very "heavy weather" of it. Whenever the path was sufficiently broad I noticed that an Arab would take hold of his halter to steady him. I pointed out this camel to Jaffa, and scarcely had he whispered: "He fall—soon," when the poor brute stumbled, tried to recover his feet, and fell on one knee, the other leg sprawling over the edge, violently pawing space. The Arab guiding him sprang away, clinging to the rocks, and in a moment the camel had toppled over. I heard wild cries of alarm; the camel leaders on the zigzag below tried desperately to make a gap in their line as they saw what was happening over their heads; but too late. The camel fell; the two camels behind were dragged after him, and the three slid like an avalanche down the rocks, sweeping more camels and one or two Arabs from the narrow zigzags below, bursting their bundles and scattering rifles until they disappeared in the gloom beneath.
It was a horrid sight, and for two or three minutes there was the utmost confusion. The frightened drivers pulled the camels' heads this way and that, and how the poor stupid creatures could keep their foothold at all was marvellous, especially as in many places the path was so narrow that, even from where I was, I could see the "inner" bundles of rifles scraping against the rocks.
We were so intent on watching this that we never turned our heads; but when I did again look across the gap to see whether Webster and his men were still hidden, I had a terrible fright.
Squatting right in the mouth of the gap, and on both edges of it, were a score or more of Arabs, their rifles slung over their shoulders. Jaffa saw them; Griffiths saw them. If they were as frightened as I was they did not show it.
We hardly dared to breathe. There they were, the nearest of them not fifty yards away. They evidently meant to stay, for they had brought firewood, and some of them were trying to set light to it, whilst others were pouring water from a skin into a brass cooking pot.
That anything such as this should happen had never entered my head. I never thought that they would have taken the precaution of leaving a rearguard to protect their line of retreat, and to have done so entirely altered the whole situation and upset all my calculations.
If they took to wandering along that ridge we should be discovered, and if they simply remained where they were we could not fire on the caravan without exposing ourselves to this new force. At the very first shot they would take cover, find out where we lay, and then crawl to the rocks overhead and shoot down. In those first few moments my whole idea was to kill as many as possible before being killed myself.
We watched them with straining eyes. If they had scattered and come near us I should have opened fire. My fingers clutched my rifle to draw it to me, and then loosened again, because they all collected round that cooking pot; the blue smoke came curling up among them, and they evidently had no other thought than to rest and make coffee. They never even troubled to look down to see whether their comrades and the camels were recovering from their disorder, but huddled close together, sheltering their heads from the sun with their dirty cloaks.
There was no immediate danger, so I turned to watch the caravan. Down at the gloomy bottom of the "coffee-cup" I could just distinguish little white figures moving among the boulders—-the advance party had at last reached the gorge which led them out into the open. Three or four disappeared round the shoulder of the rocks which shut out my view of the gorge, and I knew that in a moment or two they would sight the Intrepid lying at anchor—and perhaps her advancing men.