Hashish: A Smuggler's Tale (16 page)

When we entered the reception room, which had a large bay window, we could see nothing but clouds of smoke coming from behind
The Times
. There were comfortable arm-chairs, whisky, soda, pipes, and a prevailing smell of Virginian tobacco. Presently
The Times
was lowered, and the commander deigned to realize that we were in the room. There was nothing English about his appearance, though his blazer bore the coat of arms of an Oxford college on the pocket. He was swarthy and oily as a Bolivian, and though he was carefully shaved, his face was blue right up to his cheek-bones. He had bushy eyebrows, jet-black eyes, and a vast nose with wide, hairy nostrils, from which I could not tear my fascinated gaze. He spoke Italian in the coppery voice of a southerner. My mind instantly flew to the insolent gondoliers of his native island.

When we had entered the room, across the perfume of Virginian tobacco I could detect an odour which reminded me of the scene at the farm at Steno, when Petros Caramanos burned something under my nose. Almost at once, too, a servant dressed like the ‘boys’ of the real Englishmen at Aden, came in to remove a superb narghile. H’m, I had little doubt about the sort of tobacco this Maltese smoked when he was alone. My companion immediately put him at his ease by begging him to go on smoking his narghile. The commander laid down his meerschaum - from a famous London maker, I noticed – which he had probably lit when he heard us coming, and replaced between his lips the jade mouthpiece of his water pipe. Once again we had to eat oily fried dainties with our fingers, and I started to speak of pearl fishing, of divers, of sharks, and so on. They asked me to bring in my Somalis, whom I had left at the door. The commander examined them in an odd fashion, dilating his nostrils as if he could sniff mysterious effluvia. He was so astonished thats
he resumed his Oriental form, and belched loudly after the radishes. This involuntary sound, so very un-English, recalled him to realities, and he tried to cover it by a fit of coughing. For a few minutes he was again the stiff Englishman. Then he started the inevitable gramophone, and when I was leaving I presented him with a pearl.

During the dinner at the house of the Chief of Customs, we spoke of trade and business.

‘You should have brought a cargo of coffee up from Abyssinia. It is worth here three times what it fetches in Djibouti, and I should have helped you to get out of paying the duty of five francs the kilo. Just think, what a profitable deal…’ And so on, and so on.

And for two hours we spoke of trading, but the word ‘hshish’ was never mentioned. It was a word which was taboo, right enough. Obviously he looked on me as an idiot who did not know the first thing about this precious commodity. Besides, hashish could only come from the north, and could only be had from Greeks, in whose hands was the monopoly. It would have been ridiculous to speak about it to a Frenchman.

Before I left he gave me a letter for a friend of his in the customs at Suez, to whom he recommended me warmly. And next day I joyously set sail my papers duly stamped to show I had gone through the customs. During this stay I had been able to renew my stores and fill my water-barrels with distilled water, for there was no other at Kosseir. What I had specially appreciated was the green vegetables, which were brought by camel from the interior. They came from regions watered by the Nile, by a road which stretched for a hundred kilometres, for Kosseir was the point on the coast nearest to this generous river.

The wind was more manageable now, and I was able to make a long tack with the helm set due north, but during the night the weather changed again, the wind became violent and the sea got very rough. I swerved and tacked towards the land. For three days we battled against a raging wind. At times the sea was untenable and nearly swallowed us up bodily. We only just managed to keep heading north, and in two days we only advanced a few poor little miles. I began to wonder if I should ever be able to enter the Gulf of Suez by the strait of Jubal. It seemed nearly as bad as the Bab-el-Mandeb. But on my chart I saw the great archipelagos and the labyrinths of reefs in the Bay of Gimsa, to the west of the strait. I thought it would be safer to pass through them than to affront the choppy and dangerous waves raised by the north-west wind between the island of Chadwin and the coast of Arabia. It really seemed useless to continue this exhausting struggle, so I decided to give up for the night and seek shelter behind the island of Safadja, in the large bay which stretches at the foot of a picturesque mountain and is sheltered from all the winds. The mountains were still of the same nature, so tortured and bare that they looked like the skeletons of mountains, with giddily soaring needles and deep, narrow ravines down which rivers of gravel streamed towards the sea.

Low buildings and wooden huts clustered round a tall factory chimney. There was a mine of some sort there, for I could make out the wagons of an aerial railway suspended above the chaos. The island was deserted, in spite of the scaffoldings of oil wells which rose on all sides. These were doubtless borings for petrol, for we were now in the region under which flowed the deep layer which extends as far as the Farzan Islands. Bad weather forced me to stay in this shelter for two days, and we took this opportunity to repair the rigging, and do the thousand and one tedious little jobs which are always put off on some pretext or other. These scenes had one beauty before, that of solitude, but that has been for ever destroyed by those hideous factories, and an indescribable melancholy now hangs over them. Nevertheless,. the colourings remain splendid, and every evening I was forced
to marvel afresh at the exquisite and unreal tones, so fanciful that no name exists for them, and which are only to be seen here on these northern shores of the Red Sea.

As the wind continued to blow as violently as ever, I was forced to conclude that this was its normal speed, and to make the best of a bad job. I could only navigate by day in the labyrinth of reefs into which I was about to venture, but the comparative calm of those inland seas and the frequency of the land breezes would make up for the time lost by the nightly halt. There is no use describing the days which followed, spent in the delicate manoeuvring of the ship through the narrow channels strewn with coral rocks.

One morning the cabin-boy, having gone as usual to pump water out of the hold, reported that there was much more than usual, which rather alarmed me. But this water proved to be brackish, so it couldn’t all have come from the sea. I then discovered that the hoops of two more barrels had burst, eaten away by rust like the other one. This was a disaster, for in this region there was not the smallest watering-place; all water had to be distilled from sea-water. And there was no hope of getting water before Suez. I bound the staves of the remaining barrels with tightly twisted ropes. Here I was once more faced with this terrible water problem. There was only one thing I could do, and that seemed to me quite natural; namely, go and get water from one of the numerous encampments round the wells.

In order to get to the nearest one we had to sail dead against the wind up a channel barely three cables’ length wide and more than two miles long, between reefs which could be clearly seen through the transparent water. Our rigging obliged us to wear, so the short tacks we had to make did not get us very far, for at each change we lost about as much headway as we had just gained. We took more than three hours to clear the three miles, and we had tacked more than a hundred and fifty times. This was a very tiresome manoeuvre because of the lateen yard, which had to be changed over each time, and also because of the sheet on the front of the mast, which whipped furiously in the wind as soon as the sail sagged. It took the whole crew to master it and pull the sail taut. If it had contrived to escape during this manoeuvre, not only would the men have risked being stunned while trying to get hold of it, but during this time the ship would have drifted and we should have been on the rocks.
At last we got safely to the open sea, but the hands of all the crew were raw and bleeding.

Soon we reached Abou Mingar, and I saw metal tanks on the beach, reservoirs for the petroleum, I supposed. There was a whole litter of machinery lying there in the open; enormous black pipes ran over the sand and disappeared underground, and a horrible smell of naphthalene filled the air. We anchored right in at a little landing-stage. Nobody on shore seemed to pay much attention to us; the long-shirted coolies went on pushing the little wagons slowly along, singing the while to keep themselves awake. At last a European, a workman in khaki shirt and blue trousers, signed to us to go elsewhere. A little farther away two other men in sun-helmets and shorts, obviously Englishmen, watched to see that their order was obeyed.

What could I do? I changed to another anchorage, and immediately went ashore, intending to speak to the two indifferent Englishmen. But the workman who had signed to us to move intercepted me. He was a sort of foreman, of the classic type of worker in the Egyptian ports, speaking all the Mediterranean tongues. It was difficult to tell whether he was Maltese, Greek or Italian. His accent was a mixture of the accents of all these tongues, no matter which he spoke. One might call it the Egyptian accent.

‘What do you want?’ he asked me in a surly tone.

‘First of all to see the man who is in charge here.’

‘The manager isn’t here; he is inland at the extraction well. It’s about five miles from here, an hour by the little tram.’

‘But who are these gentlemen over there?’

‘They are English engineers.’

When I said I needed provisions, he explained with satisfaction that I could get nothing at all here, but only at the mine, where there was a canteen where one could buy all sorts of things. Only it was necessary to get a permit to go there.

I introduced myself to the two Englishmen. They looked at me with withering scorn, and the bored suspicion with which you might regard an unfortunate commercial traveller who came to your door trying to sell you something. Once in my adventurous life I had hawked coffee, and all the horrible memories of that time rose in my mind. I told them that I was French, that I had come from Djibouti, and I explained the
accident that had left me without water. They listened to my story with perfectly expressionless faces. Then one of them deigned to remove his pipe from his mouth and answer in painfully correct French:

‘No visitors are allowed on the concession, and I can’t take the responsibility of allowing you to go to the mine. You must send an application to Cairo.’

I pleaded for water at least, since there was none on the coast, and in no country in the world does one refuse water, even to a dog.

‘Quite impossible,’ he replied briefly.

And to indicate he had said quite enough, he replaced his pipe in his mouth as if he were locking a door, and turned his back on me. I treated him to a few choice insults in order to cool my helpless wrath, but he had ceased to understand French. Tranquilly he resumed his study of a map which his colleague was holding open on the back of a Negro commandeered as desk.

As I returned to the quay I saw a small steamer come in. She was a very old tug which went the rounds of the different boring wells and concessions in the Bay of Gimsa. The captain was also one of those men of indefinite and interchangeable nationality, but he was a sailor. He gave me water, potatoes and even a loaf.

The smell of oil, the factory noises, and the sight of this machinery tended by grimy-faced men disgusted me. For more than a month I had been living with the desert and the sea in absolute freedom, and it was very disagreeable to have the spell broken by the presence of my fellow-creatures. The landscape remained the same, but the divine character with which my imagination had invested it had gone. While I was alone in the midst of these solitudes, I had felt myself right in the middle of this vast universe, in which some mysterious instinct urged me to lose myself. Woe to the man who has once experienced the bliss of this divine communion with nature: every time he is compelled to return to the herd he will suffer from an awful solitude. I now turned the helm towards Arabia. The coast of Asia was still mercifully free from industries, there was no fear of seeing other factories there, or of encountering unfriendly English engineers.

But in less than two hours it would be dark. I should never have time to reach it and find an anchorage; it would be better to try to get
through the Strait of Jubal during the night. Perhaps for once the wind would have lulled a little. But such hopes are snares: the reality is always very different. It was already almost night when we got round the southern point of Shadwan Island.

This big, mountainous island guards the entrance to the Gulf of Suez as Perim guards the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. It consists of a chain of reddish hills separated by deep ravines. The rock is absolutely bare, without the faintest trace of vegetation, and these mountains descend to the sea in a vertical wall, forming sheer cliffs which spring from the water without shore or coastal reef. This wall lies in the axis of the strait, like a ship riding at anchor. A lighthouse with red lamps has been built on the most southerly point, facing the open sea, to indicate the strait to ships entering the gulf. The coast on either side is hidden behind the horizon; all one sees are the vast reefs which stretch out into the water for over six miles. During the day the great mass of the Sinai Mountains can be seen to the east, and very far to the west the ragged peaks of the Egyptian mountains. The island of Shadwan is clearly visible in the daytime, and a ship has only to enter the strait boldly, leaving the island to port; but by night everything is obscure, and nothing indicates this deep channel which is ten miles wide, and one has only to drift a little to lose sight of the island entirely. Ships then risk being ripped open on the rocks which lie under the water. You can see how important the lighthouse is.