Hashish: A Smuggler's Tale (9 page)

‘Oh, all right, all right… I just thought… But let us go for a drive.’

The rickety old carriage with its doddering horse and tarboosh-crowned coachman was admirably adapted for a private conversation. We went along a road which wound through the Arab quarters of the town, a part of Port Said unknown to tourists. Sometimes, as we passed the end of a narrow street swarming with natives, we got a whiff of the now familiar odour which I had first smelt when Petros burnt his sample. Hashish is smoked in all the Arab cafés, by the native policemen as well as by the coolies from the docks. The proprietor has only to pay a small back-hander, and discreetly denounce one of his suppliers now and then: in return he is left alone.

We stopped before a café which was very crowded, but where most of the customers seemed to take nothing but a glass of water: They sat in little groups; some of them seemed to be discussing business, while
others watched the world go by in silent depression, having nothing better to do. Only on some tables were cups of Turkish coffee, but on all were narghiles which were kept stoked up by native waiters. Such cafés are to be found in every Egyptian town frequented by Greeks; they serve as Labour Exchanges for all sorts of mysterious transactions. If you want to do business with a Greek, it is here you must look for him, for the Greeks of Egypt live in the cafés from midday to midnight.

We went in and sat down at a table. My companion uttered familiar greetings all round, then asked for a narghile. He seemed to fall into a brown study as he sat there inhaling the smoke and fingering his amber-beaded rosary. He blended into his surroundings, becoming exactly like all the other people there, while I was acutely uncomfortable, with the agonizing self-consciousness of someone trying very unsuccessfully to appear at his ease. Of course there was not the slightest smell of hashish here, any more than in an Arab
boui-boui.
If anyone had even had the bad taste to pronounce the forbidden word, I believe that they would all have turned into pillars of salt. All the same, every single one of them got his living from trafficking in hashish, either as a retail seller, or as a small-scale smuggler who haunted the liners; they expended prodigious quantities of complicated ideas in order to obtain a very modest result. In a word, they were people who were too lazy, cowardly or sensual to do a regular job of work, preferring to live in this precarious fashion. One good deal brought them enough to live a lotus-eating life for several weeks on the terrace of their favourite café, taking no thought for the morrow.

Alexandros seemed to me to be this type of man. All the same, if I had been told to come to him, and if he had any connexion with those busy active people I had seen in Greece, he must be worth more than those outcasts of society who exhibited their laziness and uselessness before my eyes. I was much amused at the contemptuous way he spoke of them, for he resembled them as one pea resembles another. He warned me of the danger of confiding the smallest deal to any of them, for they were all police spies, when it was worth their while. In a word, I mustn’t speak of my affairs to anybody except himself, and he would put me in touch with serious buyers. It was agreed that we should meet at Suez when I came back with my cargo on the 18th August. I showed a certain nerve in fixing this date, for how could I tell how long it would take me
to come up the twelve hundred and sixty miles of the Red Sea against the north-west winds in a twelve-ton sailing ship?

The liner had resumed her voyage towards the south, and steamed slowly between the deserted banks of the canal. At the end of my table at meals sat a badly-dressed fellow; taciturn and gloomy as if he were a new passenger who knew nobody. He must have come on at Port Said, for I had never seen him before, yet he did not look like a passenger either, for he always had his suitcase beside him. He was the electrician who was to take charge of the spotlight in the bows of the ship. I began speaking to this depressed-looking creature, and he answered me readily enough with his mouth full, cutting his bread with a pocket-knife the while. He was an old Italian, rather like Victor Emmanuel in the face, and he had been ‘doing the canal’ the last fifteen years. It is always interesting to talk to old people, and I was sure I could learn many things from him. After dinner I gave him a cigar, and invited him to have a drink with me. When the atmosphere was sufficiently warm and friendly I sent a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling and said, falsely casual:

‘What is hashish worth at the moment?’

He started violently and looked wildly round, but calmed down when he saw there was nobody near us. His eyes sparkled; he supposed I was in the business, for if I had been a police spy he would have known me.

‘That depends on the quality,’ he replied.

And he began a long dissertation on this subject, his tongue loosened by a succession of drinks. In one hour I had learned that everybody in the canal, electricians, pilots, and so on, did a little clandestine trading in hashish on the side. The method was simple and always the same. An oiled packet was thrown from a liner at an agreed point, and picked up by somebody in the know, generally the captain of a dredger. It was then passed on to one or other of the rapscallion Greeks I had seen in the cafés. The projectors are also useful for this sort of business, and there are a thousand other little tricks known to all smugglers in all countries in the world. But smuggling went on also on the high seas. This was on a much bigger scale, and the coastguards or the lighthouse-keepers were in on it fifty-fifty. The rotundities of the great sea-buoys marking the neighbourhood of the roads cried out for employment, and the coasting captains, customers of Caravan and his fellows, had not been long in finding a use for them. The Greek ship arriving from the Piraeus has only to stop at night at the buoy chosen beforehand. Half-way up the conical wall there is a little oval door, closing what is called the man-hole. This door is generally bolted and screwed down, but this particular one is held by carefully greased screw-nuts which can be unscrewed in a twinkling. Two hundred and fifty or three hundred kilograms of hashish can then be put in this floating warehouse, and nothing indicates its presence. When the ship has deposited her precious cargo, she can enter the harbour with a clear conscience.

The next morning would happen to be the day when certain buoys were brought into the dockyard to be examined and overhauled. This one, you may be sure, would be included. It would be taken in tow and trailed majestically across the harbour. The waves churned up by its passage caused boats crowded with customs officers to dance on the water. It would be taken to the dockyard where metal parts were repaired, and there in private its precious contents would be removed. I began to understand why the buoys round about Port Said were continually being repainted. All these stories of smuggling interested me from one point of view only, inasmuch as they showed that all the hashish smuggled into Egypt came in from the north. So I had had a good idea in planning to bring it in from the south, for this had never been done.

Although I had nothing to fear legally, I began to be assailed by qualms, as the ship neared Djibouti, that there would be some hitch in transhipping my cases. As soon as I landed I went to see the manager of the customs and explained my difficulty. I told him that this liemp blossom’ might as well be called hashish, for that was what it was.

‘Yes, I know,’ he replied. ‘You have the right to transship this merchandise. I am not here as a moral censor, but simply to see that the regulations are carried out. All the same, if this hashish was to be
smuggled into the colony and consumed here, I could not take the responsibility of letting such a cargo pass.’

‘As far as that goes,’ I replied, ‘I give my word of honour that not a single ounce of it will remain in Somaliland.’

‘All right, make your declaration, and you will be given an escort as far as the frontier, but once you are out of French waters, you can only re-enter them at your own risk.’

I left the chief’s office with a light heart, leaving all my worries behind me. Of all the ships I had had, only the faithful
Fat-el-Rahman
was left. She was a stout vessel who had weathered more than one storm, and I backed her with confidence to fight through the thirteen hundred miles against the wind which were in store for us. It was now the beginning of June, the hottest and most disagreeable month because of the damp, and the most dangerous because of the sudden tempests produced by the accumulation of storm-clouds in the mountains. I had the entire ship overhauled and the rigging renewed, since the nature of our cargo would prevent us from putting in at any port during this long voyage. I increased the number of my crew to twelve, in case of illness or other unexpected trouble. Abdi, Mohammed Moussa, Ali Omar, Aden, Salah and Firan, now grown-up, formed half of it; the other six were Dankalis I had had with me on previous voyages. The eight cases were stowed in the bottom of the hold; I had passed the customs and complied with all the other formalities; we were ready to start. The first half of my scheme had been carried through successfully.

The hot, moist night seemed to be crushing the sea under its heavy torpor. The deck and tackle were dripping with dew, a sticky, salt-saturated dew. The men fell limply on the deck with sprawling limbs, and slept naked where they lay. They looked like a heap of corpses, so utterly still were the twisted bodies. The air was like steam. I lay, just as exhausted, on the quarter-deck, but was unable to close an eye. The physical anguish induced by this stifling climate was partly responsible for this, but it was chiefly the thought of the adventure before me that kept me awake. I reflected that I had not had very much difficulty in arriving at the point of having six hundred kilos of hashish in my hold, and that all the danger and difficulty were yet to come. And yet on that day at Port Vendres when I had crossed the narrow plank to go on board the little Greek steamer, if anyone had told me that in so short a time I
should be on board the
Fat-el-Rahman
with these eight cases safely stowed in the hold, I should have been in the seventh heaven. Instead of which I was more worried than ever. I dared not congratulate myself; I felt that any demonstrations of joy on my part might irritate the powers of evil. I dared not be happy, for all my life I have had to pay with sorrow for every bit of happiness I have known. That is a fundamental law of the destiny of men, but happy are those who do not know it. To take thought for the morrow is to renounce all joy, for it is to foresee misfortune. One can plan the happiness of others, never one’s own.

Shortly before dawn, a warm breeze rose from the west; this was the
saba,
the local wind corresponding to the great south-west monsoon in the Indian Ocean. It starts in the depths of the Gulf of Tajura, and throws itself with extreme violence over the Gulf of Aden as far as Cape Gardafui. Greenish shivers ran through the phosphorescence of the sleeping sea under the caress of this burning wind. It was time to be off if we wanted to be out of the roads before the sea got too stormy. As the first pulls on the halyard tackle were awaking creaking groans from the badly oiled pulleys, a man hailed us from the jetty. He was a native soldier in uniform, and I thought it was for some tiresome, last-minute formality, so I sent the
pirogue
ashore to see what he wanted. He returned in it.

‘What do you want? Have you a paper for me?’ I asked.

‘No; I simply want to go as far as Obock with you.’

He was a Somali of about twenty-five, so ugly that it hurt to look at him. In addition, he had strange, unseeing eyes like those of a madman, which gave one the creeps. I was on the point of having him sent back ashore, or more simply of having him thrown overboard, since all Somalis swim like fishes, when it occurred to me that by taking him I might be rendering a service to the captain of the military post at Obock, with whom I wanted to keep on good terms. He immediately collapsed in a corner and remained motionless. I was too busy directing the manoeuvres to give him another thought until we were just entering the roads of Obock. I had decided to remain there two days, to finish the overhauling of my vessel, and make a complete new set of sails.

The post of Obock was commanded by a Captain Benoit. He was an insignificant little fellow, barely forty, but fat and pursy. He might have been a country lawyer or a tax-collector, or even a stationmaster. He always looked as if he had put on his uniform for a fancy-dress ball. I
don’t remember his wife very well. She had the reputation of being a lady with an abnormally large heart, but that is probably a calumny, in any case it is not very interesting.

Two lieutenants completed the staff. One was a certain Aublin, who had risen from the ranks like so many others during the war. He was a man of humble origin, simple and very proud of his rank, and as fond of showing off as a child. A good fellow, all the same, who would not have harmed a fly, and who would really have been more at home pushing a coster’s barrow than following a martial destiny. After three years in the trenches, he had been thankful when the formation of this Somali battalion by Lieutenant Depuis gave him a nice cushy job at Obock, far from shot and shell.

The other was Lieutenant Voiron. Tall, well-built and good-looking, he was obviously a man of birth and breeding. Everything about him proclaimed it, yet there was something lacking, all the same. One felt he had not received the education suitable for a man of his class. He had enlisted in the colonial army at the age of nineteen. Violent, enthusiastic and madly courageous, he had not found an outlet in a tame garrison life for these dangerous qualities. As a result, wine and women had already worked ravages, both moral and physical, but he was still an attractive fellow; one felt an instinctive liking for him. One sensed the struggle that went on in this nature which had so much that was fine and even noble in it, but which was too weak to resist the evil influences of the circumstances in which he found himself.