assured him that his specie would reach Napier safely in less than four weeks, but he still looked blue and none too eager to hand over the Embassy passport requesting and requiring H.M. servants, civil and military, to speed me on my way, and a letter for Napier, asking him to give me a warrant and funds for my passage home. I shook hands briskly before he could change his mind, and as we shoved off and the skipper spun the wheel and his crew dragged the sail aloft, damned if he wasn’t here again, running along the mole, waving and hollering:
‘I say, Flash, I forgot to ask you for a receipt!’
I told him to forge my signature if it would make him sleep sounder, and his bleating faded on the warm night air as we stood out from the mole, the little vessel heeling over suddenly as the wind cracked in her sail; the skipper bawled commands as the hands scampered barefoot to tail on to the lines, and I looked back at the great brightly lit crescent of the Trieste waterfront and felt a mighty relief, thinking, well, Flashy my boy, that’s another town you’re glad to say goodbye to on short acquaintance, and here’s to a jolly holiday cruise to a new horizon and an old friend, and then hey! for a swift passage home, and Elspeth waiting. Strange, little Gertrude was fading from memory already, but I found myself reflecting that thanks to my tuition her princeling husband would be either delighted or scandalised on his wedding night – possibly both, the lucky fellow.
You gather from this that I was in a tranquil, optimistic mood as I set off on my Abyssinian odyssey, ass that I was. You’d ha’ thought, after all I’d seen and suffered in my time, that I’d have remembered all the occasions when I’d set off carefree and unsuspecting along some seemingly primrose path only to go head first into the pit of damnation at t’other end. But you never can tell.
I couldn’t foresee, as I stood content in the bow, watching the green fire foaming up from the forefoot, feeling the soft Adriatic breeze on my face, hearing the oaths and laughter of the Jollies and the strangled wailing of some frenzied tenor in the crew – I couldn’t foresee the screaming charge of long-haired warriors swinging their hideous sickle-blades against the Sikh bayonets, or the huge mound of rotting corpses under the precipice at Islamgee, or the ghastly forest of crucifixes at Gondar, or feel the agonising bite of steel bars against my body as I swung caged in the freezing gale above a yawning void, or imagine the ghastly transformation of an urbane, cultivated monarch into a murderous tyrant shrieking with hysterical glee as he slashed and hacked at his bound victims.
No, I foresaw none of those horrors, or that amazing unknown country, Prester John’s fabled land of inaccessible mountain barriers and bottomless chasms, and wild, war-loving beautiful folk, into which Napier was to lead such an expedition as had not been seen since Cortes and Pisarro (so Henty says), through impossible hazards and hopeless odds – and somehow lead it out again. A land of mystery and terror and cruelty, and the loveliest women in all Africa … a smiling golden nymph in her little leather tunic, teasing me as she sat by a woodland stream plaiting her braids … a gaudy barbarian queen lounging on cushions surrounded by her tame lions … a tawny young beauty remarking to my captors: ‘If we feed him into the fire, little by little, he will speak …’
Aye, it’s an interesting country, Abyssinia.
If you’ve read my previous memoirs you’ll know me better than Speedicut did, and won’t share his misgivings about trusting me with a cool half million in silver. Old Flash may be a model of the best vices – lechery, treachery, poltroonery, deceit, and dereliction of duty, all present and correct, as you know, and they’re not the half of it – but larceny ain’t his style at all. Oh, stern necessity may have led to my lifting this and that on occasion, but nothing on the grand scale – why, you may remember I once had the chance to make away with the great Koh-i-noor diamond,fn1 but wasn’t tempted for an instant. If there’s one thing your true-bred coward values, it’s peace of mind, and you can’t have that if you’re a hunted outlaw forever far from home. Also, pocketing a diamond’s one thing, but stacks of strong-boxes weighing God knows what and guarded by five stout lads are a very different palaver.
Speed had spoken lightly of a quick trip to Alexandria, but with that pack of dilatory dagoes tacking to and fro and putting about between the heel of Italy and Crete, we must have covered all of two thousand miles, and half the time allotted me to reach Napier had gone before we sighted Egypt. It’s a sand-blown dunghill at any time, but I was dam’ glad to see it after that dead bore of a voyage – and no dreary haul across the desert in prospect either. The camel journey was a penance I’d endured in the past, but now it was rails all the way from Alex to Suez, by way of Cairo, and what had once taken days of arse-burning discomfort was now a journey of eight hours, thanks to our engineers who’d won the concession in the teeth of frantic French opposition. They were hellish jealous of their great canal, which was then within a year of completion, with gangs of thousands of the unfortunate fellaheen being mercilessly flogged on the last lap, for it was built with slave labour in all but name.9
We didn’t linger in Alexandria; Egypt’s the last place you want to carry a cargo of valuables, so I made a quick sortie to the Hôtel de l’Europe for a bath and a civilised breakfast while the Marine sergeant drummed up the local donkey drivers to carry the boxes to the station, and then we were rattling away, four hours to Cairo, another four on the express to Suez, and before bed-time I’d presented myself to the port captain and was dining in the Navy mess. Abyssinia was on every lip, and when it was understood that the celebrated Flashy was bringing Napier his war-chest,10 it was heave and ho with a vengeance. A steam sloop commanded by a cheerful infant named Ballantyne with a sun-peeled nose and a shock of fair hair bleached almost white by the sun was placed at my disposal, his tars hoisted the strong-boxes aboard and stowed them below, the Jollies were crammed into the tiny focsle, and as the sun came up next morning we were thrashing down the Gulf of Suez to the Red Sea proper, having been in and out of Egypt in twenty-four hours, which is a day longer than you’d care to spend there.
The Suez gulf isn’t more than ten miles across at its narrowest point, and Ballantyne, who was as full of gas and high spirits as a twenty-year-old with an independent command can be, informed me that this was where the Children of Israel had made their famous crossing in the Exodus, ‘but it’s all balls and Banbury about the sea being parted and Pharaoh’s army being drowned, you know. There are places where you can walk from Egypt to the Sinai at low tide, and an old Gyppo nigger told me it wasn’t Pharaoh who was chasing ’em, either, but a lot of rascally Bedouin Arabs, and after Moses had got over at low water, the tide came in and the buddoos were drowned and serve ’em right. And there wasn’t a blessed chariot to be seen when the tide went out, so there!’11
His bosun said beggin’ his pardon, sir, but that was blasphemy, and they fell to arguing while the tars grinned and chaffed and my Bootneck sergeant scowled disapproval; he wasn’t used to the free and easy style of these Navy youngsters who couldn’t help bringing their fifth-form ways to sea, and treated their men more like a football team of which they were captain, than a crew. It was natural enough: the young cornet or ensign in the Army, when he joined his regiment for the first time, entered a world of rigid formality and discipline, but here was this lad just out of his ’teens with a little floating kingdom all his own, sent to fight slavers and pirates, chase smugglers, shepherd pilgrims, and escort the precious bullion on which a whole British army would depend – and not a senior to turn to for advice or guidance, but only his own sense and judgment. Young Ballantyne couldn’t follow orders, because he hadn’t any beyond a roving commission; his crew were all older than he was, but he must live with ’em and mess with ’em, share their hardships and dangers as one of ’em, and make them like and trust him because he was what he was, so that when he said ‘Go!’ they’d obey, even unto death.
I’d never have done for the Navy. You may fool soldiers by holding aloof and looking martial, but Jack would have seen through me before we’d crossed the bar. That’s the hellish thing about life aboard ship – there’s nowhere to hide either your carcase or your nature.
We had a taste of Ballantyne’s the second day out, just after we’d passed the Ras Mohammed point at the foot of Sinai, and the hand in the bows spotted a low, ugly-looking craft with a great lateen sail