'Then it is great nonsense using a line. Iron cask-slings would deal with them in no time. Let us go up and fetch a pair. We will put this on the bench and carry it with us.'

Once again the bell rose up and swung inboard: once again the people cheered, and louder than before. Bonden and Davis, two strong men, carried the heavy little chest to the middle of the quarterdeck.

'Make a lane, there,' cried the bosun, pushing at the intensely expectant, happy, tight-packed crowd of Surprises, Turks and Lascars. The carpenter came through the lane, bearing his tools. He knelt to the chest, drew three nails, and levered back the lid.

The expectant, happy faces, even more crowded now, looked taken aback, puzzled. The more literate slowly read Merde a celui qui le lit painted in white upon a dull grey block of metal.

'What does this mean, Doctor?' asked Jack.

'Roughly whoever reads this is a fool.'

'It's a fucking pig of lead,' cried Davis, catching up the block with frightful force and dancing as he stood, holding it high over his head, his mouth white with spittle and his face black with rage.

'Give me t'other end,' said Jack kindly, patting him on the shoulder, 'and we'll toss it overboard.'

'Sir,' said Rowan hesitantly, 'should we like to buy some fish?'

'I can imagine nothing that would give me more pleasure, Mr Rowan,' said Jack. 'Pray, why do you ask?'

'There is a boat alongside, sir, and the man is holding up something like a skate with red spots; but he has been here quite a while, and I am afraid he will shove off if we don't attend to him.'

'Buy all he has and bring him aboard,' said Jack. 'Doctor, be so good as to question him about the situation on the island with Mr Hassan. That will enable the Turks to decide about their landing, and it will tell us how we stand.'

He walked into his cabin, and it was there that Stephen found him in the torrid late afternoon. 'Listen, Jack,' he said, 'the position is clear. The French have been here for a month and four days; they have repaired the fortifications and they have set up batteries wherever they are needed. There is no possibility of landing. For the last week they have been sending this galley down the south channel in the night and bringing it up again in the day. The fishermen were firmly persuaded that it had great quantities of silver aboard, and I imagine the original cases were kept aboard to keep the notion alive, so that if we met any casual dhow or felucca we should still hear of treasure and be lured in.'

'We have been done brown,' said Jack. 'What flats we must look.'

'Perhaps one should look for such a result when an expedition has been so much talked of as this was,' said Stephen. 'But even so I am surprised at the precision of their intelligence.'

CHAPTER SEVEN

During the Niobe's return to Suez the usual northerly breezes blew with scarcely a pause; she had to beat up all the way, often tacking two or three times in a watch, and the cry of 'All hands about ship' was even more frequent than that for sweepers, seeing that it came by night as well as by day. And by now her bottom was very foul, especially where her copper had been ripped off: this not only caused her to miss stays more often than was agreeable but it also made her dreadfully slow, a point of some importance in a crowded ship that had relied on getting rid of her Turks at Mubara and on completing her water there. The people were put on short allowance, and the scuttle-butt, which ordinarily stood on deck for anyone to drink from, was now deprived of its dipper: those who wished to drink had to suck the water up through a dismounted musket-barrel; and so that no man should do so wantonly the barrel was kept in the maintop, since only great thirst would make the climb worth while in such overwhelming heat. This was felt to be unjust by the Turks, who said that neither their fathers nor their mothers were apes, and that climbing did not come naturally to them, whatever might be the case with others: the seamen retorted that as the Turks did not work, and as they fouled the heads so horrid, they had no right to be thirsty; but the argument carried no conviction and there might have been serious trouble if the Niobe had not put into Kosseir, where water was to be had in abundance, although the wells were awkwardly placed for the boats and the ship had to lie far offshore.

It would in any case have taken a considerable time to fill all the casks and get them aboard, but now it took longer than usual. In the ordinary course of events the air over the Red Sea was so extremely humid that the sun did not burn but only boiled those exposed to its rays and the hands went about stripped to the waist, most of them still quite pale after weeks of it. But on a Friday- still another Friday - the breeze came right off the land, the air grew parching dry, biscuit, charts and books became crisp against from one watch to the other, and the seamen burnt brick-red or purple. An order to the effect that no hands who were not already black, brown, or yellow were any longer to be indulged in the liberty of going shirtless came too late, and although Stephen lavished sweet-oil on their tender backs the burns were so deep that it had little effect. Watering was therefore painful as well as slow; and while it was running its tedious course the Bimbashi, who had never forgiven Jack for having been misled, very carefully and at great length showed him the scene of another of the Royal Navy's failures- the little five-gun fort defending Kosseir roads, which had been bombarded by two thirty-two-gun frigates, Daedalus and Fox, for two days and a night, when it was in the hands of the French. They fired six thousand rounds, said the Bimbashi, writing it down so that there should be no mistake, six thousand rounds, but they failed to take the fort and their attack was repelled with the loss of a gun and of course a great many casualties.

'Pray tell the Bimbashi how deeply I am obliged to him for his information,' said Jack to Stephen, 'and how highly I value it as an example of his politeness.' This necessarily had to pass through Hassan, a man of delicate breeding who had been uneasy throughout the Bimbashi's account and who now looked uneasier still.

Yet Hassan's farewell was as cold as the Bimbashi's when they took leave of Jack in Suez, the Turk to take his men to Ma'an and the Arab to return to his wilderness.

'That was an odd way to say good-bye,' said Jack, looking after him with a certain regret and some slight shade of indignation. 'I always did the civil thing by him; we always got along perfectly well, I cannot imagine what made him so chuff."

'Can you not?' said Stephen. 'Surely it is that he expected you to come down on him for the seven hundred and fifty purses he promised you to bilk the Egyptian. As he saw it you had fulfilled your part of the bargain while he was unable to produce a single purse at the moment of parting, let alone several hundred: he felt that you must scorn him, which is enough to make any man stiff and proud.'

'I never agreed to his monstrous proposal for a moment - gave it no countenance whatsoever.'

'Of course you did not, but he thought you did, which is what matters. He is not at all a bad horse, however: I spent much of the forenoon with him, while you were breaming the ship, together with a French-speaking Coptic physician he had known since his childhood, a gentleman who will act for us if we have any further dealings with the Egyptian governor, a gentleman, moreover, with wide connections among the Greek and Armenian merchants of these parts, and an insatiable appetite for information. Will I call for another pot of this admirable sherbet, the only cool thing in creation, perhaps, and tell you what I learnt?'

'If you please.'

They were sitting in the loggia over the gatehouse of the caravanserai in which Stephen had left his personal troop of camels and which was now given up to Captain Aubrey's party. Most of the Surprises were to be seen under the shaded arcades that surrounded its central square, reposing after their morning's labour and contemplating the camels, which lay in the full sun, not far from their future burdens, the dismantled bell and the many, many boxes of coral, shells and natural wonders collected by Stephen and Martin. Some had adopted members of the tribe of half-wild dogs that roamed the streets of Suez, and Davis was bargaining with the leader of a female Syrian bear for her cub. They all had a pleasant, drowsy, peaceable air, but at the far end there stood pyramids of muskets, piled in the naval manner; and it was perhaps these weapons as much as Jack's chelengk that made the Egyptian governor so much more obliging than he had been before. All his own troops had been drawn off for Mehemet Ali's campaign, and although he still mentioned harbour-dues he did not dwell on the matter, just as his customs-officers did not insist when told that the boxes contained not merchandise but personal property and could not be opened.