Hashish: A Smuggler's Tale (2 page)

In direct contrast to this, he was spontaneously and whole-heartedly charitable. He would advance several months’ pay to an employee who was hopelessly tubercular, and pay his passage home to France so that he could go and die in peace beside his old mother. Nothing forced him to this generosity, neither public opinion nor mine, for he carefully concealed such good actions.

He would take up the defence of an obscure native, some miserable coolie whose fate could not affect him personally in the least. He would move heaven and earth to help him, even going so far as to brave the Governor’s anger on his behalf. What could one make of these contradictions? It was difficult to reconcile the kindness he showed to me and to many others with these disquieting traits in his nature. I was forced to explain it to myself by a lack of balance, a sort of hysteria, and I forced myself to see only great and noble qualities in him. Here was a fine fellow who did good by stealth, while posing before the world as a
creature without heart. My friendship deepened to affection, and for ten years I believed he repaid me in kind.

An unexpected spurt of activity in the sea-snail trade gave me the chance to be of service to Floquet. He proposed that I should go to Massawa with my
boutre
, the
Fat-el-Rahman
, and fish for them on his behalf. We made a partnership, to which I contributed my work and the small capital I had left. He provided the bulk of the capital, and undertook the sale in Europe, through a well-known broker in Le Havre who was his customer and friend.

I had just let my other two
boutres
, which were smaller than the
Fat-el-Rahman
, to the Government as coastguard ships. My adopted son, Lucien, was employed by the Government as clerk in the surveying department. My wife and my daughter Gisèle, now six years old, were living at Obock. They would come with me as far as Massawa, where I intended to put them on board an Italian liner bound for Europe, for my wife was worn out by the torrid climate of the coast, and even more so by the constant state of worry to which my wandering life condemned her.

’As soon as we had left Obock and rounded the Ras Bir, the heavy swell from the Indian Ocean plunged my family into the agonies of hopeless sea-sickness. We had to tack for three days to get through the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, through which swept the north winds, particularly violent at this time of year.

The currents are stemmed only for a few short hours at high tide. The rest of the time, all the waters accumulated by the south-east winter winds rush down in a furious stream into the Ocean.

It is necessary to sail close to the coasts in order to benefit by the cross-currents and eddies; this kind of navigation is very dangerous. It can only be practised by very small ships, and even for them it is often fatal.

One can never be sure how such a struggle will end; one always enters upon it with apprehension, each time one swears never again, and each time as soon as one has come safely through, all is forgotten in the joy of victory. I kept on with this exhausting navigation for twelve hours, then made my way into the inner channels of the archipelago of Assab in order to have a day’s calm. Thanks to this rest, my passengers recovered a little, and were able to eat.

The
Fat-el-Rahman
had no cabins; we lived on the narrow benches of the after-deck. At night we slept on the deck itself, rolled in blankets, and by day we rigged up an old bit of sail-cloth to shelter us from the sun.

You can understand that it was not exactly comfortable for a woman, so, in order to give my wife a rest, I decided to put in at Assab, the most southerly port of Eritrea.

The Italian who was Resident there, Doctor Lanzoni, welcomed us with touching cordiality. He was a fat man with a broad face covered with pimples, and his nose was so voluminous and violet that it looked like a potato or a very fat bud about to burst into leaf. But as is often the case with men who have thick lips, fleshy noses and high complexions, he had something which made one forget his ugliness after a few minutes. These unkind gifts of nature often go with cheery and good-humoured dispositions, and though my daughter had been terrified at first by this vast and noisy animal, she was soon playing familiarly with him. He put himself to a lot of trouble to entertain us, and showed us round his domain.

We went to see the convicts of the penitentiary at work, this being the only amusement available. It was a prison for natives, like the one the French used to have at Obock. The men were chained by the leg in pairs, and dirty and often blood-stained rags protected their ankles from the heavy iron rings. One of each pair carried the middle of the chain in his hand, so that they could walk more easily.

These fettered men were working on the construction of a road. They worked slowly; indeed, all their movements were slow because of their chains. Even the black Tigrean soldiers who acted as warders seemed to have caught the infection, for they too dragged themselves about.

What crimes have these Negroes committed?’ I asked.

‘Oh, nothing serious in most cases, but the law is very severe. The smallest theft is punished by several years’ imprisonment. However, if
they have more than three years to serve, they generally die before the end of their sentence, even though they are treated humanely.

‘The real criminals, the assassins, are condemned to solitary confinement for life, for, as you know, Italy has abolished the death penalty. In these cases, we allow relatives to bring them food, so that they rarely survive for long.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, when they are Dankalis, their families bring them poison. They prefer that way out. Some Residents tried to stop this by forbidding all visits, but this made no real difference, for with the complicity of native warders they managed in the long run to get hold of poison. So really, it is better to put no obstacles in their way.’

I watched the dreary detachment coming back from work and entering the courtyard by the single vaulted door pierced in the blank and melancholy wall.

One always feels a sort of embarrassment before human beings in captivity, a kind of shame at brandishing one’s freedom before their wistful eyes.

They asked us for cigarettes. I hadn’t any, but Lanzoni handed me several packets and, suddenly hailing a warder, went some distance off, so that he could pretend not to see that rules were being broken, for these poor devils are forbidden tobacco. I hastily flung over the packets of cigarettes, knowing they would be shared out, for prisoners feel a bond of brotherhood in their common misfortune.

It is only in the hell of a convict prison, when men have given up all hope of being able to exploit, enslave and oppress others for their own enrichment, that their thoughts turn to brotherhood, which then seems to them the sole remedy for their distress, for in giving little they receive much.

Suddenly, one of these creatures dressed in the grey uniform, on which a number in large black figures replaced all that had previously differentiated him from his fellows, turned round. The face on which despair had set its seal brightened into a smile, showing two rows of dazzlingly white teeth.

Where had I seen this face before? I couldn’t put a name to it, but I was convinced I had already met this man somewhere.

He was about to speak, but the warder slashed him with his whip to make him get back into the ranks, and I saw him no more.

I went back to my ship haunted by this vision of distress. I must have recalled to this captive the time when he was a free man, and even now as he slept in the promiscuous heap in the airless cell, he was smiling at memories of liberty.

During the night, my attention was attracted by hails from the shore. A human form was crouching on the sand, waiting. My curiosity was aroused, and I sent the
pirogue
to fetch the visitor. It was a Dankali woman, the wife of one of the prisoners. I could only see her vaguely through the darkness. From time to time, the starlight flickered for a moment on a purely cut profile or a pair of wild, dark eyes. She seemed to be very young, barely twenty.

Her husband had been in prison for a year. She kept prowling round the penitentiary like the female of a wild beast caught in a snare, which cannot keep away from the spot where her mate was captured. She cherished the hope that her man would be able to escape, and until he could, she came every day to bring him goat’s milk from her mountain herd.

This evening an askari had told her that the prisoner wished her to speak to me.

‘What is your husband’s name?’ I asked.

‘Youssouf Heibou; he is an Abyssinian. His chain-companion is a Dankali from Tajura, who knows you. He saw you when you threw the cigarettes, and tried to speak to you. So Youssouf thought that perhaps you could…’

‘Could what? Help them to escape?’

She nodded silently.

‘That is madness,’ I replied, deeply moved by this naïve clinging to an impossible hope.

‘If you have something which cuts iron, he could get away. He has been asking me for that this long time, but where could I get such a tool?’

The vison of this man in prison, the haunting memory of his sad smile, the solemnity of the night in these lava solitudes with the sea sleeping under the surf, this untamed woman so true to her female instincts, all seemed to me to partake of a greatness in comparison with which human contingencies ceased to matter.

So I gave the woman the blade of a metal-saw.

Noiselessly she vanished into the darkness, without a word of thanks.
Little did I know that she took my destiny with her. My action was to set free a venomous reptile, whose treacherous bite was destined to cost me dear.

In order to make my story clear, I shall sum up briefly the facts that I learned some time after.

The man who had smiled at me, the chain-companion of this Youssouf Heibou, was one of the two Dankali sailors whom Gabré had abducted by force on board the
boutre
with his eight companions whom he wished to save from slavery (this story is told in
Aventures de Mer
). After the adventures already recounted and the drowning of the unfortunate victims, they had been picked up by the Italian patroller along with the crew of the
boutre
which had been scuttled. Thanks to the care they had taken to lower the sails before the searchlight should fall on them, their ship had not been clearly seen and her hull, as she sank beneath the water, had easily been mistaken for a
pirogue.
However, some of the officers had declared that it wasn’t one. The whole business seemed dubious, because of the presence of this Dankali from Tajura, a well-known slave-market among Zaranigs, who are just as well known as slave-traders.

An inquiry was set on foot at Massawa, but the accused had had plenty of time to settle on their story, so they declared with firm unanimity that their ship had been wrecked on the Sintyan reef.

A commission was sent, and sure enough, the wreck which Gabré had sunk there when he was captured was found. Readers will remember that two days after this shipwreck I had taken off the ledger and the ship’s papers. The discovery of this document which indicated that there were eight passengers on board would have ruined the guilty men, for when they were picked up they were still horrified at the odious crime they had just committed, and dared not speak of their victims as passengers who had been drowned in the wreck, so they had declared that every one had been saved. I had unwittingly destroyed the proof that they were lying. This circumstance fitted in with their story, for there was nothing to show that the boat found on the Sintyan reef was not theirs.

A verdict of ‘Not proven’ was returned, and the entire Arab crew immediately hastened from the country, their consciences not being sufficiently clear to allow them to remain there in peace.

As for the two Dankalis, they stayed to get another ship. They had
only been lookers-on at this drama, which seemed ordinary enough to them, and in their simplicity, since they had done nothing wrong, they imagined they had nothing to fear.

But alas, human justice is not so subtle, but strikes blindly. Some days after the verdict had been given, the authorities at Massawa were informed that an overturned ship had been cast up by the sea on the beach at Beilul. The remains of two corpses were mixed up in the wreckage, and it could be seen that their hands were fettered.

This discovery led to a reopening of the inquiry, and the two unlucky sailors, who were still at Massawa, were immediately arrested. Skilfully questioned, they contradicted themselves, admitted part of the truth, then took refuge in obstinate denials of things which had been fully proved, as all Negroes do.

They were condemned to ten years’ hard labour and sent to Assab.

One died a month later, and the other became the chain-companion of Youssouf or Joseph Heibou, whose wife had come to see me this evening on the beach at Assab. This Dankali sailor knew me because he had seen me several times at Djibouti, and it was his poor smile which was to give the signal for the drama which fate had timed to begin with the escape of his companion, whom I did not know.

This Youssouf Heibou was a Tigrean whose spying activities had landed him in prison. As usual he had been a pupil of the mission school. It is most discouraging to note how often the only result of the undeniably self-sacrificing efforts of the missionaries is to produce odious Tartuffes endowed with all the vices. This is not the fault of the missionaries; it is due to the mentality of these primitive races. They cannot understand the practical virtues of the Christian religion, and the cult of dissimulation is all they learn from it.