Hashish: A Smuggler's Tale (22 page)

‘I believe in dreams, too; the mind conceives them outside all the rules of reason and logic, which are fundamental bases for life on earth, but which are no earthly use for trying to penetrate into the beyond.’

I sat listening to this giant with the narrow forehead putting forth ideas I had often had myself since I had been tackling life single-handed. A girl, his niece, brought in refreshments. There was no mistaking that she was the daughter of the fat woman with the ivory-pale face. Like her mother and her uncle, she was enormous. Two others, her younger sisters, came and shook hands with me. All three were dressed in black like their mother. This was the family of Stavro’s eldest brother. When he died, leaving a wife and four children, these three girls and a boy, Stavro was only eighteen. He nevertheless assumed the responsibility of his entire family, as well as the charge of an older invalid sister. Although his education had been fairly complete (he had attended the lycée at Cairo until he was sixteen), he had had to give up all ambition, and start work immediately as a common sailor in order to earn their daily bread. He had never married, in order to be able to keep the promise he had made to his brother on his death-bed. Since then he had lived like an old bachelor, devoted to his nieces, his ailing sister and his sister-in-law, who in return managed his house. These women dressed in mourning, with the black handkerchiefs of widows on their heads, glided about silently through the shadowy, white-washed rooms and gave this smuggler’s house an atmosphere of serenity and peace, like the smell of cold incense.

Alexandros sat silent in his comer, evoking in my mind the shady cafés where he seemed so entirely in his element. I thought how different this smuggler and his house were from anything I had expected. I thought of Stavro, of Petros in his farm at Steno, and then of good old
Papamanoli, and I felt that they were of a very different kidney from Alexandros and his like.

Now we began to talk business: we discussed prices, and Stavro changed completely, becoming the keen, grasping, shrewd fellow he had to show himself in order to succeed in his dangerous profession. I knew very well that I was at his mercy, and was only too pleased to accept the price he offered. I made a deal for the small quantity I had left in the old iron barrel.

‘You must deliver the goods to me in town, for I can’t undertake to send someone out to sea to fetch them. In two days the whole native town would know what you had come for, and the police would keep an eye on you. Your great advantage is that nobody dreams that you have any connection with hashish, and you must contrive to avoid losing this trump card. You have seen the French consul, who will introduce people, acquaintance with whom will help to keep you free from suspicion, for the French element of society here is considered incapable of any fraud. They are looked upon as imbeciles who are too idiotic to extract profit from anything, and you must do everything possible to make yourself appear the stupidest of the lot. As for Spiro, he is a gem of a fellow; I see him sometimes at the barber’s, and we speak Greek together. We are very good friends, and he may be useful to us, for one can discuss anything with him.’

‘What! He would accept a present?’

‘Oh, heavens, no! Never on this earth! Don’t go and suggest any such thing to him, or he will die of terror at the idea of compromising himself. I only meant that by nature he loves to be of service. He has a timid admiration for me; he knows very well I am a smuggler, though he never says a word about it. This idea gives him little thrills of terror which he finds rather agreeable since the danger is imaginary; in that he is like all fearful and effeminate creatures. So he is quite fond of me, and without seeming to, he often gives me precious hints. Besides, I only see him at the barber’s; in the street we don’t know each other. I occasionally send him a basket of choice fruits, just as a friendly attention, that’s all.’

At this moment, the door opened and a young Arab came in. He was dressed in a blue
guellabia
which had faded from repeated washings and which was much patched, but very clean. He was barefooted, and wore a tight, white turban. He had a very attractive little face, deeply bronzed by the sea air, with the features hard and sharp as if they were carved out
of teak. He was not an Egyptian, but a mountaineer from the Hedjaz. When he came up to shake hands with me, I noticed that he had only one eye.

‘This is Djebeli,’ said Stavro; ‘if everybody had what they deserved he would be a king, for not one man in ten thousand has a heart like his. I once saved his life; he knows it, and would think it the most natural thing in the world to lay it down for me, if need be. I’ll tell you his story one day. I asked him to come tonight so that tomorrow you would be able to recognize him. You will hand over the goods to him.

‘Alexandros will go away. If you were to be seen with him in the cafés he frequents, all would be lost. Tomorrow morning you will see Djebeli basking in the sun near the station. He will see you without your having made the slightest signal to him. You will follow him at a distance, and he will lead you to the spot at which you must land with the merchandise. It is at the sea-wall which is being built; he will sit down for a moment at the place. Observe him from a distance; don’t go near the wall yourself. Only make good note of the spot, for after dark it isn’t easy to find. In a street near by is a little eating-house for coolies, kept by a Greek. There you can safely speak to Djebeli and make your arrangements. The landlord is in my pay, so you have nothing to fear.’

As I looked at this serious and reserved little Arab I thought of my Abdi; there was a sort of kinship between those two whole-heartedly devoted beings, who attached themselves by instinct. I said good night to all the family and took my leave, for Alexandros had already been gone for some time. As he was about to open the door, Stavro stopped to give me the final instructions.

‘Be very careful of the sentinel who may be on the sea-wall. He must not see you coming, for on the water you will be clearly visible, while he will be in the shadow of the rocks. Besides, these brutes are very quick to fire a shot, since their heads have been stuffed with tales of submarines.’

‘I know,’ I replied; ‘don’t bother about that; I’m well accustomed to dodging such people.’

‘All right, then, I shan’t worry. God be with you.’

The fat woman in black murmured a few words in Greek, perhaps to tell me she would pray for me before the icon. As I left I saw the three pale-faced girls gazing at me anxiously. The noiseless door opened upon the night, then closed behind me. I was alone in the silence, as if all I had just left were only a dream. The mirror-like lagoon was still there, but the
level of the water had gone down a little. I thought that the sea, having shown she was there, faithful and reliable, was now going away.

I went back to Port Tewfik by the last train, thinking over that last warning: ‘Be very careful of the sentinel.’ Bah! Since luck was on my side, why hesitate? Perhaps Stavro was right, everything is written. And in that case –

I had arranged with Djebeli to be at the sea-wall at ten o’clock in the evening, when the moon set. I had allowed plenty of time so as not to have to hurry. The place where the hashish was hidden in the barrel was more than six miles away, and if the weather was calm, all would go well. I could be there and back in four hours. During the day I had minutely inspected this wall – a long rampart of huge rocks thrown in great numbers across the roads, in view of future constructions at present held up by the war. I had to engrave every detail on my memory, for in the darkness I should not be able to distinguish anything clearly.

At five o’clock I embarked in the
pirogue
with Abdi, Ali Omar and a Dankali to go and fetch the twelve sample sacks. We gradually worked away from the
Fat-el-Rahman
, pretending to be fishing, so as not to attract attention. The north wind blew more strongly, and when we were far enough off to be invisible from Port Tewfik, we dropped all pretence, and made straight for our objective. The
houri
, driven by three paddles, flew before the wind. Little by little the sea got rough, but as we were going with the swell that did not bother us. Night came down too quickly for my taste, for I should have liked to arrive in the neighbourhood of the barrel before it was completely dark. I was afraid I might have some trouble finding it on this monotonous stretch of sand.

The outside lighthouse of Port Tewfik was my first guiding-mark for approaching the coast near our warehouse. The rising tide took us much
farther in than the last time, but at last the keel of the
pirogue
scraped against the sand. We left her there and set off on foot up to mid-thighs in water. The moon was almost new, and shone faintly, casting light shadows before us. The sandy desert stretched as far as the eye could reach. I recognized the nature of the soil in which I had left my sacks, but I could see nothing which resembled a barrel. Ali Omar, who, like most natives, had an instinctive sense of direction, assured me we were much too far south, so we returned towards Suez along the edge of the water. Suddenly Abdi stopped, dropped on all fours and calling to us, pointed out fresh footprints in the moist sand. When one is engaged in this sort of nocturnal excursion, the least thing assumes an alarming importance, and immediately my imagination was off at the gallop. These were not footprints left by us on the former occasion, for we had never walked in this direction. I concluded that fishers came here. After all, what more natural? We were no longer in deserted regions far from the habitations of men. A footprint on the sand was nothing to worry about.

The sight of a black object looming up before us made us drop sharply flat on our faces. We watched for a minute. It looked like a man crouching, absolutely still. It was probably the barrel, and I was tempted to spring up and make sure, but I was kept back by fear of the consequences if it were a man. If it were a local fisherman and he saw us, he would recognize us as strangers, and our nocturnal excursion would become a subject for gossip in the native cafés and we should fall under suspicion. So I left my men lying there, and walked openly along the shore so as to pass within about twenty yards of the black object. I should thus see what it was: if a man hailed me, I should answer his greeting and walk calmly on. I soon saw how unnecessary and ridiculous all our alarm was. It was simply the barrel, which looked odd in the moonlight, because of the curious shadows cast by the faint glow.

We ran up. Nothing moved; everything was as we had left it, but the mysterious footprints stopped there. I broke into a cold sweat; I was convinced for twenty seconds that we had been seen from the lighthouse, and that someone had searched for and found our hiding-place. When my groping hands encountered the little sacks, I felt that a miracle had taken place, so sure had I been that they were gone. I had put them almost openly into the barrel, barely covered with a thin layer of sand. This was what had been the saving of them, for it was obvious that someone had come and
searched all the sand round about; the traces were very clear. How true it is that the most obvious hiding-places are the best.

I drew out the sacks; there were only ten. In vain I ran my fingers through the sand in the barrel. I was sure I had put in twelve, and Ali Omar declared that he had counted them also, and that there had been a dozen. So the hiding-place was not so good after all; it had been found, but the thief had only taken two sacks, doubtless meaning to come back for the rest. I was very upset. This discovery depressed me to an unreasonable extent. Ali Omar was wrong, perhaps, but it was not the moment for conjectures. We put the flat cakes into three india-rubber bags which Djebeli had given me to protect the hashish against the risks of a nocturnal transport in a small boat, then with a certain satisfaction we got into the
pirogue
and faded into the night.

There was a head wind now, and as we were going against the swell it was not so pleasant. We had to collect in the stern so as not to ship water. In spite of this precaution, I had to bale all the time. I blessed the india-rubber bags. However, as we got into the middle of the roads, the waves became higher and the wind more violent. For a ship of ordinary size it would have been just a ripple, but for our slender
pirogue
, overloaded as she was, it was worse than really bad weather. The Dankali in front of me had to stop paddling to help me to bale. In spite of our efforts, the
houri
was half-full of water, and of course the heavier she got the more water she shipped. We should never arrive, I thought despairingly.

Twice a wave broke over the prow and filled the
pirogue
. We all jumped into the sea in order to empty it by swinging it to and fro. The india-rubber sacks had been washed overboard; luckily they floated, but they were already some distance off when Abdi managed to seize them. We re-embarked, all except Abdi.

‘Go without me,’ he said; ‘I’ll swim back: the
pirogue
is overloaded as it is.’

So saying, he gave us an energetic push off, and dived to prevent any argument. He vanished into the darkness. For a time we could hear him singing what I called Abdi’s song, the only one he knew and which he carolled in the most critical situations with the carefree joy of a house-painter sitting on his scaffolding. Then his voice was lost in the growl of the sea roused to fury by the wind. The
pirogue
, being lighter now, kept on her way more steadily. We shipped less water, and the red lantern of
the lighthouse grew farther away from our stern, while the first steamers loomed up under the double stars of their harbour lights.