The Spider Sapphire Mystery (6 page)

At three A.M. New York time the voices of the stewardesses could be heard saying, “Good morning! Would you care for some orange juice?”

The Emersonians blinked open one eye, confused for the moment as to where they were. But presently they sat up and drank the juice. Rolls, scrambled eggs, and a beverage followed.

“I’m still confused and sleepy,” said Bess. “What time is it?”

George giggled. “Which country will you have it in? In London where we’re heading it’s eight A.M.”

Nancy told Bess there would be time for a nap later. The safari schedule included a day’s stop at a motel near the airport. “You can sleep for a few hours, Bess.”

Ned’s group arranged to meet in the lobby at lunchtime. Nancy arrived ahead of the others and decided to put a question to the desk clerk.

“I’m sure you have many Indians from Africa stopping at your motel, but the group I’m with is looking for two special gentlemen. I wonder if by any chance they may have stopped here.”

“What are their names?” the man asked.

“Jahan and Dhan.”

The clerk consulted his list of recent guests, then shook his head. “No men by those names have been here.”

Nancy was about to walk off when it occurred to her that if the men were using passports with fictitious names, they naturally would have had to use these.

She said to the clerk, “The men may be traveling incognito,” and gave a full description of the father and son.

The clerk smiled. “I believe your friends have been here, but they’ve gone.”

“To Nairobi?” Nancy queried.

The man at the desk shrugged. “Or possibly Mombasa,” he said. “At least that is where the Prasads are from.”

Nancy thanked him for the information and walked off. “So Prasad is the name Jahan and Dhan used on their passports!” she thought.

Soon her friends came downstairs.

“Boy, did I sleep!” Burt burst out.

Everyone admitted having slept well and all had ravenous appetites. In the dining room they were seated at a table for six. Bess ordered two kinds of fruit, soup, baked fish, and a whipped cream dessert.

“If all you do is sit in a plane and sleep and eat, they’re going to charge you for being overweight,” George teased her.

Bess endeavored to defend herself and finally told the waitress she would skip dessert.

As dusk came on, Professor and Mrs. Stanley gathered the members of the safari and engaged taxis to take them to the airport. Although the group was as merry as on the previous evening’s flight, the gaiety did not last so long. By ten-thirty everyone was sound asleep.

Nancy did not know how much later it was when she was suddenly awakened by all the lights being turned on brightly.

In a moment the captain’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Please fasten your seat belts! Turbulence ahead! I repeat, please fasten your seat belts immediately!”

The sleepy students did so almost automatically. They wondered why the order had been given because the plane seemed to be rushing through the night without trouble.

The stillness was abruptly shattered by Gwen Taylor exclaiming, “I hate seat belts! They make me positively ill! I’m not going to put mine on!”

She was defiantly standing in the aisle when the plane made a sickening drop. Gwen grabbed the back of the seat and eased herself down.

A few moments later the plane began to roll sharply to left and right. The craft sank again as if it had suddenly lost all of its lift. This time the plane seemed to be going completely out of control. Tensely the passengers clutched the armrests of their seats.

ALTHOUGH everyone became more alarmed as the plane continued to lose altitude, they all managed to remain quiet except Gwen Taylor.

Again she stood up in the aisle. Her friend Hal Harper tried his best to make her sit down but she refused.

“If I’m going to be killed,” she exclaimed, “it’s going to be standing up, not tied to a seat!”

She pitched forward and almost fell. Hal grabbed her and pushed the hysterical girl into her own seat.

At the same moment the pilot’s voice came clearly over the loudspeaker. “Will the young lady who is standing up please stay in her seat and put on her belt? This is an order from your captain.”

Gwen did not adjust the seat belt, but she was quiet for several seconds. Then suddenly she got up again and lurched forward. “I’m going to have my father sue this airline!” she cried out.

Within seconds she had yanked open the door to the pilot’s compartment, bolted inside, and slammed the door. Hal Harper unfastened his own belt and started after her.

From the rear of the cabin the steward yelled frantically, “Sit down! Put on your belt!”

As Hal obeyed, there came a scream from the pilot’s compartment. The next moment the plane went into a dive!

Those in the cabin held their breath, but the pilot seemed to be a magician. No matter how violently his craft was tossed about, he seemed able to get it back under control.

The plane climbed rapidly and in a few moments leveled out in smooth air. Everyone uttered groans of relief, then turned their eyes toward the door of the pilot’s cabin. What was going on inside?

Presently the door flew open. Gwen came out, looking very disheveled. Her wig was awry, giving her a comical look.

As Gwen half stumbled toward her own seat, Bess called out, “What made you scream, Gwen?”

The unruly girl stopped short and said haughtily, “If you must know, the flight engineer grabbed me.”

Bess’s eyes lighted up. “How exciting!”

“Well—uh—I screamed because I didn’t think this was quite fair to Hal,” Gwen said lamely,

George burst into laughter. “Better straighten your wig, Gwen, or Hal won’t love you any more.”

In disdain Gwen quickly pulled her false hair into place and went to her seat.

“For Pete’s sake,” said Hal, “what were you up to?”

“I was trying to put some sense into that pilot’s head,” Gwen answered defiantly.

Nancy, Bess, and George exchanged glances and George remarked, “Do we have to put up with that pain on this whole trip?”

Nancy grinned. “How would you like to try changing her?”

“No thanks. I’ll leave that to you and Bess. You’re better at that sort of thing than I am.”

Aunt Millie Stanley came forward and stood beside Gwen. “I’m terribly sorry you were so frightened,” she said. “I guess everyone was. Do you feel all right now?”

“Yes, thank you. I lost my head. Sorry.”

The Emerson students and their friends went back to sleep. A few hours later the pilot announced that they were approaching Nairobi.

When the group entered the airport building, Nancy looked around to see if Jahan and Dhan might be spying on them. As she and Ned waited in line to go through Immigration and Customs, she said, “I have a feeling we’re being followed.”

Ned grinned. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you.” Then he said seriously, “I guess you and I had better be on our guard at all times.”

There was no sign of the two Indians here or at the attractive hotel where the group was to stay. The Stanleys announced that they were all to meet in an hour for a bus tour of the city.

Nancy found the trip fascinating. The Emerson group was divided among three buses that were painted with black and white zebra-like stripes. The buses were camouflaged so that when traveling in wild animal country, from a distance they would look like a small herd of zebras.

The bustling city of three hundred and fifteen thousand inhabitants was international in character. There were white people, blacks, coloreds—which were a combination of black and some other race—Arabs, and Indians.

“Don’t you love the Indians’ native dress?” Bess asked Dave.

“They sure are colorful,” he replied, “but I’d just as soon wear American-type clothes.”

The men wore white turbans and a fringe of beard, but English business suits. The women’s saris were made of several layers of veil-thin pastel materials. Scarfs covered their hair. Some of the women had a jewel embedded in their foreheads.

In contrast the Arab women were somberly swathed in black. Some had the lower part of their faces covered.

Professor Stanley, who was seated in the front of the bus, arose from time to time and gave statistics about the city. He said that the Arabs and Indians spoke their own languages and English. The blacks spoke Swahili.

“Some of them have learned English and for this reason are able to obtain better jobs.”

The bus stopped in front of a Moslem mosque. To reach it one had to cross a long flagstone pavement. A guard told the group that they must remove their shoes before walking on it.

George exclaimed, “Ouch! These stones are boiling hot!”

Nancy grinned. “Don’t forget we’re not far from the equator.”

The inside of the building was like a large lobby with niches and a place for the priest to stand. In one corner a man lay asleep on the floor. When Burt expressed surprise at this, a guard said that all Moslems were welcome to come in out of the midday heat and take a nap.

Back in the bus again, Professor Stanley told the students, “It is believed that the Arabs were the first foreigners to set foot on African soil. They went pretty far inland and became traders. It is through them that African art was brought to the outside world.”

After a restful lunch and a short stroll, the young tourists were ready to start on a trip to Nairobi National Park, a wildlife game preserve.

Professor Stanley announced, “All the animals roam loose. The park covers forty-four square miles and has twenty miles of roads.”

The buses had barely entered the vast stretches of grassland when Bess exclaimed, “I see a giraffe! Wow, is he tall!” The animal stood higher than the tree from which it was eating the top leaves. “I’ve seen giraffes in zoos but never one that tall.”

Burt laughed. “Maybe they come bigger in the open.”

As they rode along, Nancy and her friends saw graceful eland, sturdy hartebeest, dignified mari bou storks and ostriches. All the animals seemed friendly and unafraid. Several of them came close to the buses. The drivers turned off the road and started through a bumpy field.

“Oh, this is horrible!” Bess cried out. She was swaying from side to side and banged her elbow hard against the window. Dave put an arm around Bess to keep her steady.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Professor Stanley turned around in his seat and called back, “Our driver has spotted some lions. It is against the rules to get out of the bus and should one of the beasts start toward us, close your windows immediately. Lions do not attack unless provoked, but one never knows what may provoke them.”

George said in a low voice, “I wonder how Gwen likes all this.”

The driver pulled around a small dump of high bushes near a tiny stream and stopped. He spoke to Professor Stanley, who in turn called out in a loud whisper, “It is advisable that we do not talk. It might disturb the lions. If you will look ahead in a grassy depression near the water you will see a lion family. Papa is stretched out asleep. By the way, Papa sleeps seventeen out of the twenty-four hours every day.”

Ned grinned. “No time to be the aggressor.”

Professor Stanley smiled. “Not normally. The lioness does the killing for food and drags the antelope or gazelle back to Papa. He is the first to eat. After he has gorged himself, Mama eats her share. The cubs take what is left.”

By this time everyone was standing up and training their eyes hard on the area Professor Stanley had indicated. Presently the lion raised his head and looked sleepily at the bus.

“What a regal creature he is!” Nancy whispered.

The others agreed. Suddenly they saw something moving a little nearer the water.

“The cubs!” Nancy said.

The next moment she spotted their mother, who also seemed to be sleeping. Professor Stanley said that no doubt the whole family had just finished a big good meal.

The other two buses pulled in nearby. Gwen Taylor poked her head and shoulders far out of a window and pointed her camera at the beasts. The lion raised its head again and this time gave a loud roar. The noise unnerved Gwen and she dropped her camera.

“Oh!” she screamed. “Somebody get my camera!”

Professor Stanley called across to her, “It’s against the rules for anyone to get out of the bus in lion country.”

Gwen became petulant. “That camera is very special. It cost a great deal of money. I’m going to get it back.”

“Stay where you are!” the professor said sternly.

The driver of the bus Gwen was in refused to open the door. The girl protested so loudly that the commotion disturbed the animals. Both the lion and lioness stood up and looked balefully at the visitors.

“We’d better leave,” Professor Stanley told their driver. He called across to the other two drivers to do the same.

Mrs. Stanley, who was in the bus with Gwen, said she would try to rescue the camera. She had brought along an umbrella with a curved handle. With it she reached out the window and caught a leather strap attached to the camera. In moments she retrieved Gwen’s property. The buses backed up, turned around, and went on to other sections of the park.

George was extremely annoyed by Gwen’s actions. “If I were running this tour, I’d make her go home.”

“Oh, she’ll probably change,” Bess prophesied.

When the buses reached the hotel, Professor Stanley announced that the Emerson safari had been invited to supper at the home of an American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Northrup. Everyone was to be ready to leave at six o‘clock.

The Northrup home was situated on the outskirts of the city. It was a large English-type house, set in a beautiful tiered garden. Huge poinsettia plants, two stories high, grew against the walls. All the other flowers in the garden were of massive size. An attractive swimming pool was ringed with bright-red and white hibiscus.