Secret of the Sands

Chapter Four

Zena has never seen the sea before and it takes her by surprise. The Indian Ocean is a startling blue, and the unrelenting African sunshine plays on its surface so that, for all the world, the water could be studded with diamonds or, perhaps, stars. It is the sound that is most striking though – the movement of the waves as they roll onto the sand is like the voice of a great god. The slavers allow the group to stop a moment and the slaves turn towards what Zena calls in her mind, the Giant Blue. She is so stunned by the majesty of it that she is almost glad they have brought her here and stares rapt at the water as goosebumps rise down her arm at the great booming rush of the waves.

It is undeniably beautiful, though some of the others are afraid and one or two let out a scream. The slavers stare openly at the faces of their cargo. This feels like a ritual – something they know to do and the group spends a moment in silence as, after the initial fear, an air of reverent awe descends upon the villagers. These people worship rainclouds and sunshine, they give offerings to the god of thunder, but the phenomenon before them now is so huge that it is almost beyond comprehension. It is as if they have been brought to the very edge of the world. The slavers have stolen the youngest of each tribe and, apart from Zena, who at seventeen summers is one of the older captives, not one child in the party has even heard of the sea.

I had no idea it was so, so … The words trail in her mind for she cannot decide which ones to use to describe the shimmering vision before her. As she grasps for an adjective, one of the boys breaks away from the group, free from his bonds since that morning when the slavers clearly decided they had broken enough spirits to simply herd the villagers without having to slow the party by keeping them tied. They watch him whooping with joy as he runs, long-limbed, into the water, falling face down on the bounty for they have been dry-mouthed for days. Water has been in short supply since they left the village. The boy realises, too late, that the sea is salt. Two of the slavers trudge wearily into the surf and pull him out. Laughing, they slap him soundly and he folds on the sand so you’d hardly believe he’d bounced so elegantly into the water.

‘It will poison you, you fool.’

Zena is perturbed. The sea is so beautiful it is strange it should be deadly – no one has ever mentioned that before. But then she is learning that in life, away from all she has known, things generally are not what they seem. Not so far.

Kasim and Ibn Mohammed wave the party on. Zena hears Kasim say, ‘I always wonder which one will be the brave child.’

Ibn Mohammed only stares. ‘The foolish child, surely. That boy will be dead before the trip is done.’

The men agree on this as if it is a simple matter of fact, something they have seen many times before. Zena wonders if curiosity in these circumstances is always fatal? Or is it the boy’s propensity for action – the very fact that he tried to help himself that will doom him? She shudders in the sunshine. What on earth are they walking towards? What do these men in dark robes have in mind? Now the ropes are untied, she is not sure what it is that is stopping her from running back into the undergrowth and making for home, where those left behind will surely have buried her uncle, resurrected what was left of the village and, in the sensible way of her family, got on with their lives. She is afraid and yet something here is fascinating – she likes the water. She is enticed by the prospect of seeing the wider world – a place she has already been privileged to hear about but has never visited. Zena glances inland despite herself and then focuses on the movement of her feet. The slavers are watching all the time. They sleep in shifts and can smell dissention, or perhaps courage. You need only pitch in the wrong direction or trip and they will flog you. Kasim’s eyes sparkle and Ibn Mohammed, for the most part, maintains his cold outward appearance. She has never met people so removed from those around them. The whole party is cowed and the Arabs need only give an order for everyone to jump to action. The men’s authority is impressive.

I will stay, she decides, feeling sick in the pit of her belly. It is important to Zena to pretend she has a choice.

Chapter Five

To the east, on the ocean, the atmosphere aboard the Palinurus has become intolerable on more than one count since the departure of Dr Jessop and First Lieutenant Jones from the complement of officers. If only the damn malaria had taken Wellsted instead of any of the others, Captain Haines curses to himself. However much Haines hates losing good men to the fever, even as he is damning his only surviving lieutenant’s good health, he feels a wave of shame. He does not admit that the reason he is so angry is because he wanted to achieve what Wellsted has done and write a memoir of their trip so far. Instead, he blusters that the lieutenant is an upstart who has behaved abominably. Still, the captain has to grudgingly allow that perhaps to wish Wellsted dead is too harsh.

The mortalities were unexpected, of course – if Haines had known that a fever was about to break out, he would never have sent Jessop onto the jabel. Choosing him for the mission, Haines can’t help thinking, was an unfortunate mistake. Had he been aboard, the doctor might have been able to save at least some of the crew from the sickness. But the man was keen and how was Haines to know what was going to happen? Generally, this side of Africa, if a chap survives his first weeks in Bombay, he tends to be fine. The dead men, of course, wherever their souls may be, probably don’t believe that anymore. In only a few days, over half the Palinurus’ officers and a third of the crew have died. However, despite the losses and the weather, the Palinurus is still making progress along the coast, the chart is coming along, the soundings are accurate and the brig has so far not run into a single French vessel. Nonetheless, the captain has a strong sense of duty for his men’s welfare, the stricken cadavers buried at sea weigh on his mind and he blames himself. Still, rather than think on it too deeply, he diverts his inner invective towards his only remaining senior officer.

It was only a few days before the malaria outbreak that the captain found by chance the package that contained Wellsted’s memoir while he was checking the mail going off the vessel. Damn cheek! Now he wishes he had stopped its dispatch, but at the time he felt so wounded at what the lieutenant had written, so terribly shocked at the man’s blatant use of other officers’ experiences and discoveries that he went into some kind of shock and simply parcelled up the damn thing again and sent it on its way, for his overwhelming emotion, at first, was that he wanted rid of it.

The book Haines intended to write about the trip would have used, of course, much the same material, but as captain he considers that his right. Haines envisioned reporting to the Royal Society as the head of the expedition and doling out credit where it was due to his talented officers whose dedication, he had decided on wording it, was a credit to both the expedition and the Bombay Marine. He’d have credited Wellsted, of course. However, the lieutenant’s manuscript has squarely put paid to any such grandiose dreams and Haines wishes he could recall the parcel, which by now will no doubt have cleared the Red Sea and, safe aboard a company ship, be dispatched westwards to London. What rankles the captain most is that Wellsted did not dedicate the tome to him. In an unheard of lapse of etiquette, the lieutenant barely mentioned any of the other men on board, least of all the illustrious Haines. Worst of all, he is entirely unapologetic, which only makes Haines even more furious. When the hell did the man find the time to write a damn book, anyway?

A knock on the cabin door interrupts Haines’ furious train of thought. Three midshipmen hover in the doorway, boys of eleven, twelve and thirteen years of age, dressed in pale breeches and smart, brass-buttoned, navy jackets. Their hair is uniformly the colour of wet sand and they look so alike that they could be brothers, though really they are only brothers in arms. Haines notes to himself that they have been through a great deal, these boys and they are good lads. They have seen, between them, too many cadavers the last few days. As the captain motions them into the room, by far the largest on the ship, the boys seem suddenly taller as if growing into the space. Each of them silently hopes that one day he will be man enough to be called captain.

‘Ah. Dinner. Yes,’ says Haines.

Jardine, the captain’s portly, Scottish steward follows the deputation, closing the door behind him with an unexpectedly deft flick of the ankle. The man’s face is like a craggy cliff of pink chalk, fallen away slightly on one side, as if the steward’s very person is as old as time and disappearing gradually into the sea. There was, during the time of the fever, no expectation that Jardine might succumb; he is an indestructible kind of fellow. Now in one hand he holds a decanter of brandy and in the other a flacon of red wine, which he lays on the table.

‘What is it tonight, Jardine?’

‘Mutton, sir. Stewed,’ he replies, lopsided in the mouth.

They last resupplied far south of Makkah and bought a flock of small, dark-coated sheep from an unwilling tribe of Wahabi for a small fortune. Supplies further along the coast have proved limited. Many of the Musselmen refuse to trade with the English at all although some tribes are easier than others. This coast – to the east of the Red Sea – is proving particularly troublesome. Islam, in this area, appears to be taken to extremes and is most unforgiving in its tenets – quite a contrast to the more laissez-faire Ibadis who populate the other side of the Peninsula and to the south. In this neck of the woods the mere sight of white skin often provokes an apoplexy of virulent hatred. The landing parties have been spat upon, screamed at and chased off at knife point by wild-eyed, pale-robed assailants spewing a torrent of abuse, which upon later translation, turned out to mean ‘Eat pig, pig-eaters!’ and the like. At one port a merchant even pissed into a sack of flour rather than sell it to the infidel ship to be eaten by unbelievers. ‘Die empty-bellied, kafir,’ the man sneered. No amount of money or attempt at goodwill seems to make the long-bearded zealots change their minds. The holy cities are closed to foreigners so it has been mutton for some weeks now, supplemented with thin dates, ship’s tack, sheep’s milk, coffee, a small amount of cornbread and any decent-sized fish the younger members of the crew can scoop out of the water.

‘Well, lads, you did not join up, I trust, in the hope of feasting at the expense of the Bombay Marine?’

Haines pours his officers a glass each.

‘A toast, shall we?’ he says with largesse.

That very morning the last of the dead was buried at sea – an Irish seadog from Belfast called Johnny Mullins, who fought the malaria like a trouper but lost in the end. All members of the crew who caught the sickness are either dead or cured now. The worst has passed and Haines holds up his glass.

‘We survivors, gentlemen. May our poor fellows rest in peace.’

The boys shift uneasily. Protocol demands that they do not start the proceedings of dinner without all the invited officers present. They may be young, but they know the form.

‘Come now,’ says the captain testily, imposing his authority.

Slowly, the boys concur. Uneasily, they pick up their glasses and down the wine.

‘Jardine!’ the captain calls for service.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Mutton stew is it?’

‘Yes, sir. With seaweeds. But …’

‘If Lieutenant Wellsted cannot be troubled to join us on time, then I see no reason why we should wait on his pleasure.’

Haines turns back to the little group.

‘Now,’ he says. ‘The soundings you took today, young Ormsby. I checked over your work and I was most impressed. Heaving the lead all afternoon like that and collating your measurements with excellent accuracy – why, you are a regular Maudsley man, are you not? We’ll have you in charge of this survey yet!’

Ormsby’s grin could illuminate London Bridge. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he says as Jardine shuffles in with a pewter casserole dish, steam emanating from the open lid, and starts to serve the officers their dinner.

Chapter Six

Jessop and Jones are coming to realise that the Dhofaris have a very different sense of time. Or, as the lieutenant puts it, ‘You cannot trust a word the buggers say.’ It has been another day or two to the emir’s camp for almost a week now, and no manner of earnest enquiry elicits any other response from the men, than occasionally, a wry shrug of the shoulders. Jessop restricts Jones from becoming too insistent.

‘We are not in such a rush, old man,’ he points out.

It is long enough till the men’s rendezvous with the Palinurus that they have time to lag behind their schedule.

Apart from their inability to keep to a timetable, Jessop finds the Dhofaris very pleasant. They are endlessly patient with his attempts to map the route, which is proving extremely difficult. For a start, for most of the day, the brass instruments the doctor brought for the job are far too hot to touch.

‘Sort of thing you don’t realise in Southampton,’ he smiles.

Jones does not find this kind of thing amusing. The tasks are as much his as the doctor’s to complete but the lieutenant constantly gives up, the doctor considers, a mite too easily for an English officer who is charged with what is, after all, the fairly routine, if inconvenient, mission of checking the lie of the land. The Dhofaris bind their hands in cloth and try their best to assist.

At night, by the panorama of low-slung stars with which the region is blessed, the instruments provide better results. The sand dunes, however, are tricky to render. The wind will move them long before the next British mission comes inland, making that element of the map all but useless. There is no landscape on earth as changeable as the desert, Jessop muses. While the Northumberland hills where he grew up have remained largely the same for thousands of years, the features of the desert landscape might last no more than a few weeks. The doctor does not give up, though. He merely notates all his thoughts and as much detail as he can manage, down to the fact that the thin goats the Dhofaris have brought have shorter carcasses than their European cousins and are surprisingly tasty. A chap never knows what might prove a useful piece of information – which shrub will turn out to hold a priceless secret that can be used in British industry, or the understanding of which local custom will endear a later British delegation to an emir or a caliph and secure a lucrative trade agreement. Dr Jessop, unlike Lieutenant Jones, is focussed clearly on what the East India Company requires of him. He notes each twenty-four hours the mileage they have managed to cover and estimates that a thirsty camel can drink twenty gallons in less than three minutes.

As they make camp in the middle of the morning and settle down to sleep for the hottest part of the day under a hastily erected tent that provides shade probably only a degree or two cooler than the baking sand adjacent to it, the doctor dresses a burn on the older Dhofari’s hand. The wound was acquired in the service of the British Empire, after all. He daubs lavender ointment across the skin. Kindness, the doctor always thinks, is terribly important to a patient. When he first qualified, many of his patients healed all the quicker, he’s sure, for his attention, rather than simply his medical knowledge.

‘I don’t know why you bother, old chap,’ Jones mumbles sleepily to his companion.

‘I have the ointment with me, it costs me nothing,’ the doctor points out.

Jones turns over. ‘Night night,’ he murmurs like a child rather than one of His Majesty’s finest.

Jessop burrows himself an indent in the sand. It is really very telling, he muses. Jones didn’t seem – he angles for the right word – so very ungentlemanly when they were aboard ship. He glances at the blinding orb that is reaching its height. The doctor prefers travelling by the stars. Night in the desert is quite the most extraordinary spectacle.

‘Good night,’ he returns, rather more formally, and settles down to sleep for a few hours before they get on their way.

Chapter Seven

It feels to Zena as if she has walked into a nightmare. In the low-ceilinged hold of the Arab dhow there are eighty prisoners shackled. Seventy-one of them are still alive though the shit swills around their chapped ankles and all still living are so faint from hunger and thirst that they scarcely feel it sting. Most have never before seen so many people as they are now crammed up against and for all it is an abomination not to bury the dead before sundown. They have been eleven days on board the mashua. It is this that worries her most. The majority of the slaves are ignorant of the geography both of where they came from and where they might be going, but Zena lived for six years with her grandmother, high in the cool, emerald hills of northern Abyssinia, less than two hundred miles from the cosmopolitan and bustling trading town of Bussaba. The old lady was respected and her house was a prosperous staging post of some renown for travelling caravans and pilgrims. Within its compound, Zena’s grandmother’s rules were simple and absolute: no weapons, no theft of either person or property.

It was in that place of safety that Zena learnt about faraway lands and the limits of the slave routes. She heard tell of a variety of gods and legends – all of which seemed merely curious to her, for her grandmother believed in nothing except, she always said, the goodness of people as long as you were firm. The travellers talked about where they had been and where they were going to and, though Zena has never seen a map, it is as a result of these many conversations that it is clear to her that eleven days on a ship is further than these men really need to go simply to sell her.

At the port she was separated from everyone she knew and marched aboard another vessel with strangers hand-picked from other slave raids, for it seems, though the slavers clearly prefer the young, the different quality of human cargo merits different destinations. At least that is her best guess, for as far as she can tell, the ships are not sailing together and Zena knows no one aboard. There will be, she has come to realise, no getting away. Simply to survive the crossing will be a feat.

Sitting well-fed beside her grandmother’s fire, the names of the foreign climes sounded exotic – Muscat and Sur, Constantinople and Zanzibar, Bombay and Calicut. The strange tone of the men’s skin seemed benign, somehow, as they talked wistfully of their homeland or their religious devotions. There were Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Animists and Jews and they came in all shades of brown – Nubian princes, Wahabi emirs, minor Persian noblemen, Turkish traders, the dusky emissaries of caliphs and sultans, Semitic merchants, Indian warriors, Somali pirates and Abyssinian bishops. Each and every one of the strangers was tattooed and pierced with the markings of their individual tribe – some shaven and some with long beards, some bare-headed and others with ornate headdresses or brightly coloured turbans. They dressed differently too – in white flowing robes, or embroidered jubbahs, or animal-skin capes adorned in ostrich feathers or sometimes simply in a hessian winding cloth. Under her grandmother’s watchful eye, Zena served platters of food to all of them – spiced couscous and succulent lamb piled high with melted butter poured on top till it dripped from the edge of the plate. Roasted chicken stuffed with fruit and nuts and gleaming with basting juices. Spicy wot, stewed till it almost melted into the hot injera bread. Latterly, she danced for the strangers to the beat held by Yari, her grandmother’s fat, Anatolian eunuch who played the drums. When they found out she was not a mere servant (one of many) or indeed a slave girl (even more), but a favoured grandchild, many of the visitors paid her attention and left her gifts – a phial of perfume or a length of silk. There are no gifts now.

After the third day aboard, in the darkness of the hold, she can see this new ship is following the coast to the south and, between the intermittent keening of the other women and the praying of the men, silent tears stream down her face. There can be no going back now, she mouths. All she can think of is returning to the village, and what might be there if she does. So much loss. A grave. Her mother, always surly. A marriage Zena never sought for herself, now long overdue. It should not have happened like this, she thinks. In the darkness, it is safe to mourn so she cries for a long time.

On the sixth day, after silence and exhaustion finally prevail below deck and all surrender themselves to the stifling crush, Zena notices through a tiny strip of light in the bulwark above her head that the land is on the wrong side of the ship and she knows they have turned eastwards. These territories are strange to her – she retains in her memory only some names and meagre scraps of information, but it is enough to realise the scale of the distance she now lies from home and the impossibility of an easy return.

Her grandmother’s death sent her back to the village only a few weeks before – back to her parents who had hoped for better for her. The stone compound was inherited by her mother’s elder brother who arrived a week after the burial with several camels, a horse or two and a cold-eyed wife in full burquah. He took stock of his new home, ordered an ox to be killed and cooked in celebration and banished Zena at the first opportunity.

‘Go home and get married, child,’ he commanded. ‘There is nothing for you here.’

Her presence had always been unorthodox and so, as he was fully entitled, he sent her, with only one servant and one camel, back to the shamble of huts where she was born. She travelled light with just one small wooden box of trinkets and baubles and a few lengths of dark cotton. At the time, she thought the old lady’s passing was the saddest thing that would ever happen – Zena loved her grandmother. She had nursed Baba devotedly through her short illness. When death finally came, Zena washed the old woman’s naked body and wrapped it in a white linen shroud. The servants buried the corpse and then Zena cried for three days without sleeping. Yari fed her yoghurt and honey though she scarcely tasted it.

Above Zena’s head, the hold opens suddenly and those in the way pull back from the bright stream of blinding light that beams down. A bucket of brackish water is lowered on a rope and two more of scraps – rancid fat, raw fish and rock-hard khubz. The slaves fall upon it, tearing at each other to secure a cupped handful of water and a mouthful of food. A sound that Zena identifies as laughter floats down from the white square above her head as she eats the mush between her fingers and tries not to retch. Then the light is obliterated.

The following day, a ladder is lowered and two men climb into the darkness. Each has a cloth tied round his mouth and nose, for the stench is foul. Together, they roughly remove the dead, hacking the chains and hoisting the stiff bodies over their backs. When the hatch closes behind them once more, they throw the cadavers into the sea from above, like a fishwife emptying a pan of trash – a shudder runs through the cabin as the survivors hear the splash, though all are relieved the rotting corpses are finally gone.

The night after, the ship arrives in Muscat, rolls up its sail and the slaves are marched onto the deck by the light of the moon to be doused in sea water under the careful, still gaze of Asaf Ibn Mohammed. As the sky lightens and the Muslim call to prayer echoes over the city from minarets dotted along the shoreline of the sapphire bay, Zena catches sight of Kasim in the shadows, feeding scraps to a small guenon monkey he must have captured in the forest – a white-lipped tamarin. The little beast is tethered to him on a string but the animal is cleaner and better cared for than any of the dhow’s human cargo. Zena is not sure, but thinks that she can make out that it is eating fruit of some kind. Gently, the man who less than a month ago beat Zena’s uncle to death sets the animal to one side with a small, metal cup of water so he can watch the slaves disembarking. He does not move into the light as three huge negroes, six feet tall, bound in muscles, their veins standing out like vines over sculpted stone and their eyes like the eyes of statues, bundle the new shipment ashore into a rickety warehouse. Everyone is so afraid and so glad to be on land again that not one single protest is raised. It would make no matter, in any case, for the handlers are in possession of both whips and the strength of lions. They are deliberately only dressed in indigo loincloths so that every rock-hard muscle is on show. What starving, enfeebled fool is going to try to make his case in the face of such strength? Who would dare even ask a question? These men can slice the weakest of them right down the middle and drink their blood, if they wish it, and no one will say a thing.

Locked inside the warehouse, Zena knows what to expect. She’s heard of this. Her skin will be oiled for the marketplace, which is surely close by. She can hear it, smell it. She feels sick with apprehension and hunger as she squats and waits. No one says a word, though two boys, not more than twelve and probably brothers, if Zena guesses correctly, hold hands. Wafting from a distance, they hear the waves of communal prayer that accompany the dawn. The haunting words of the Salat sung by a mullah with a strong, clear voice: ‘You alone we worship. You alone we ask for help.’

I should have run, she berates herself, thinking of the proximity of the undergrowth near the beach. She knows she is confused. One moment one thing, one moment another. But right now running seems as if it would have been easy, certainly easier than the long days on the dhow. I might have made it, she thinks. At least I would have tried.

As the dawn rises, the fiery orange gradually fades from the sky and through the slats of the locked door Zena catches bare glimpses of the harbour, slices of Muscat life in the bright morning light. It is unexpectedly beautiful. She has never seen anything like this place – a huge bay bordered by high, green hills. It is a big city, she realises – larger than any settlement she has ever known. The dockside is properly paved and the houses and businesses built of a pale mud crammed between the date palms. The newer constructions are whitewashed so they dazzle when the sun hits them, and over time the older ones have muted to a dun brown. Along the dock there is a castle of some kind – a fortification set back from the water’s edge, with huge, dark guns pointing out to sea over its battlements.

The dock is already busy – a sure sign of a profitable trading port – with forty ships or more at anchor. Outside, the morning’s trade has started – a man with birds in a wicker cage is setting up his stall next to a hawker in a dazzling white jubbah with a litter of prayer mats. The men are boiling water over a small fire and are set to brew mint tea with a sliver of cinnamon and some honey which they will sip from delicate, etched-glass cups. Three dirty goats are tethered between the stalls. A toothless beggar with only one leg and one eye struggles past, arrayed in a filthy swathe of rags, his sole possession a calabash from which he stops intermittently to drink. One of the traders hastens to beat him away. ‘Son of a dog!’ the man shouts, waving his arms as if batting off a fly, the tone of his protestation furious. ‘Away with you!’ Ibn al-kalb. Imshi. Imshi.

‘They will eat us,’ one of the other girls bursts out suddenly as the angry words filter through. Her voice is trembling. ‘No one ever comes back when they are taken. They will eat us all.’

She begins to cry, huge sobs wracking her angular, bony frame. The rest of the group remain absolutely silent though a few shoulders round in fear. Zena ignores the hysteric – she knows she will be sold here, not devoured. Besides, seeing Muscat waking up has somehow heartened her. It is not as alien as she might have expected. The city is prosperous, clearly, and if the call to prayer is anything to go by, there are a lot of mosques so perhaps it is also devout. She knows it is unlikely she will get away now, for apart from anything else, where can she run to? But this is a large and cosmopolitan place, she knows more about it than anyone else she is locked up with and the worst, surely, is over. She turns her head towards the light and thinks she must, at least, try to remain hopeful. Someone kind will buy me, she thinks as she clutches her empty stomach and assures herself that she will eat soon, perhaps within the hour.