Hashish: A Smuggler's Tale (3 page)

Joseph, once in possession of my saw-blade, had only to wait his chance. His chain-companion readily agreed to try his luck with him. The chain had to be cut during working hours, for at night it was removed, and there were always warders on the look-out at this moment.

The weeks passed, but they passed almost joyously, gilded by the hope of freedom which made all hardships easy to bear.

One day, Joseph and his companion happened to be at the end of a team of workers engaged in digging a trench. A warder supervised them from a bank where he was sitting drowsing, overcome by the heat.
Joseph realized that his hour had come. In a few minutes he had sawn through the padlock. His legs were now free, but his unfortunate companion still had the whole length of the chain attached to his right leg. In vain he implored Heibou to cut open his padlock too; the Tigrean thought of nothing but his own freedom.

Paying no attention to the prayers of his comrade, he fled between the rocks; then when he reached the shelter of a clump of mimosas he wheeled sharply round, and sped like an arrow towards the mountains. The unhappy Dankali, abandoned, could not resist trying to make a bid for liberty. He held his chain in his hand, so as to be able to run, but the noise he made woke the warder up. The latter, dazed with sleep, did not immediately realize what had happened. The convicts were working with unusual ardour, even forgetting the songs which generally accompanied their labour. This feverish and silent activity astonished him, but he had still no suspicion of what had happened. Mechanically, he counted the workers. There were two missing.

They went over there,’ said one of the convicts, pointing in an opposite direction, ‘no doubt to relieve themselves.’

In a second, a shrill blast from the warder’s whistle had galvanized into life the little troop of armed soldiers which guarded the convicts. Off they went in pursuit of the fugitives across the chaos of rocks and mimosa. From time to time, a red tarboosh could be seen bobbing on the heights, then all disappeared into the mountains. The minutes dragged painfully by. Then a distant shot was heard, followed by three others, and the heavy silence fell again.

The convicts waited.

At last, the troop could be seen afar off, heading for home. Two of the soldiers were carrying a limp burden. It was the luckless Dankali, whose back had been broken by a bullet. Hindered in his progress by his chain, he had been seen. The pursuers rushed after him. In spite of the twenty-five pounds of iron he was dragging after him, he had maintained his start, for he was running for his life. A deep ravine barred his way, and in his desperation he threw himself from the perpendicular wall and rolled down, carrying blocks of stone with him as he fell. By a miracle he arrived alive at the foot. This time, he had a very long start, for nobody dared to follow him in his crazy leap. But from the top of the cliff the soldiers fired at him as he ran out from cover over the sands of the riverbed.
The first three shots missed him, but the fourth killed him on the spot.

Heibou had got safely away. He had known what he was doing when he had left his unlucky comrade hampered by his chain. He had calculated that the capture of the Dankali would occupy the soldiers long enough to let him get clear away, and that is exactly what happened.

So that was what my saw had been used for. I had given it out of pity for a heartrending smile, it had cost the unhappy wretch his life and saved a low scoundrel. This was the beginning of a sinister affair; but the time has not come yet to relate it — we must follow the chain of events.

I installed a collapsible hut near Massawa, on the Ras Madour, at the foot of the great lighthouse, and there I left my wife and my daughter Gisèle. In this way I could see them sometimes during the trocasfishing expeditions, which would last for about four months.

The life of the trocas fishers is spent in the horrible stench of these big sea snails rotting in the hold. Of all filthy odours, this one is easily first, being almost unimaginably foul.

We should take two or three months to fill the boat, which had no deck, so we had to live right on top of the putrefying mass. We ate, drank and slept there, and we finished up by becoming absolutely insensible to the smell. Tiny black flies were hatched out in clouds from this putrefaction, and surrounded the ship like a living veil. No wind was violent enough to drive them away, and only during the night did we have a respite from them. These horrible little creatures got into our ears, noses and mouths. If we tried to drive them away, we only squashed them, for they stuck like glue and did not fly away. They fell into all our food, and we ate them by the hundred. At first we spat them out with disgust, but soon we got tired of struggling against this tenacious plague, so we just swallowed them resignedly, and finally got so used to them
that we no longer noticed them, just as we no longer smelt the vile stench.

A ship laden with trocas can be scented six miles away if one passes to windward of her, and when the crew go ashore, in spite of the most minute and careful washing, their hair, skin and clothing hold the smell for several days.

These trocas fishers do not consort with the divers, who despise them as the skilled workman despises the navvy, and consider their work rough and lacking in art. Generally they are Dankalis from the coast, very simple and primitive men, who are capable of doing the most repugnant work without the slightest feeling of disgust.

The work seems fairly easy. All that is necessary is to be able to stay for many hours immersed in the warm waters that bathe the madreporic banks.

The regions most fruitful for sea-snail fishing are situated to the north of Suakin and stretch to the other side of Jidda. There you find vast solitudes where cargo boats never venture. The coast of Arabia, forty or fifty miles away, is deserted and waterless, and only frequented by smugglers or pirates, who follow the inner channel between the reefs and the coast in order to avoid the everlasting north wind which comes down from Egypt and dies away in the middle of the Red Sea.

The ship which is fishing for trocas is anchored among the big reefs which spread over the surface of the water like great tables, separated from each other by winding straits. In the summer months the sea-level is about two feet lower than in winter, therefore, summer, when the men can get a footing on the reefs, is the trocasfishing season. Even under the best conditions they are generally in water up to their waists and often up to their armpits. They advance slowly, pushing before them a box with one side made of glass, which they place against the surface of the water in order to get a better view of the bottom. Whenever they see a trocas, they have to plunge their entire body under water in order to seize it; they are always white with salt, for the burning wind and the sun dry in a few seconds the salt water left on their skins.

The reef is a complicated world teeming with intense life. Its surface is covered with holes hidden under trap-doors of brittle coral which give way under your bare feet and take the skin all off your legs. The bottom of the black openings is alive with venomous sea-urchins, which at the slightest contact strike out with their slender tentacles. Venomous fishes,
whose bites are often mortal, sleep in the warm water. The most terrible variety hide under the rocks and cannot be distinguished from the seaweed. Others, motionless in the crystalline, sun-bathed water, undulate their many-coloured fins like the airy feathers of marvellous birds. The fishers sing loudly and churn up the water in order to put these dangerous inhabitants of the coral forest to flight. When the tide is high all the fishers return to their ships, the only refuge in these solitudes out of sight of land.

A sail stretched over a few spars serves them as a tent, and there the poor fellows lie, enjoying their rest and listening to the monotonous music of the tamboura, indifferent to the sticky flies, the sizzling heat rising from the surface of the water, and the stench they are breathing. They slowly savour a cupful of a decoction made from coffee-bark, which is always brackish because of the stagnant water in the wooden barrels. But the peppery taste of the ginger flavouring gives them the illusion of a delicious drink.

The rashes on their skin smart from the salt, so they rub them with chewed tobacco. They all have these rashes, which are caused by contact with a kind of colourless jelly-fish, which is invisible in the water, and the touch of which sets up a very painful irritation like that produced by nettles, which turns into a pruriginous rash. Nearly all of them have phagedenic wounds on their legs. This tropical disease gradually eats away the flesh right in to the bone, and to these indolent wounds they apply thin plates of lead or brass.

In spite of myself I thought of life on the galleys when I saw in what a miserable state these men lived. All of them were gay, however, believing they were there of their own free will. It didn’t occur to them that their poverty compelled them to do this work, under penalty of dying of hunger, and nobody had ever told them they were to be pitied. They were blissfully unaware that life contained luxuries which were more indispensable to Europeans than necessities, so without care or regret they enjoyed this passing hour of rest. What a sublime lesson for a civilized man capable of realizing what he has become.

At this season, prolonged periods of calm brood over these inland seas. The surface of the water is like a uniformly dull mirror, on which the flat reefs can no longer be distinguished. The horizon melts into the sky; one is in unlimited space, in immeasurable emptiness.

I had been living for nearly two months among all these
boutres.
Five of them were fishing for me, but there were more than fifty scattered among the reefs, so far from each other as to be practically out of sight. I had got attached to all these poor fellows, who often came and asked me for a
daoua
(remedy) for a sick comrade.

Djobert, of whom I spoke when I was describing the wreck of the
Ibn-el-Bahr
in
Aventures de Mer,
was on a big
boutre
moored a cable’s length from us. Some of the men I had in my crew at the time of the wreck were with him. They were fishing for trocas and
sadafs
(pearl oysters) at the same time. As usual they had a swarm of urchins five or six years of age with them, but this time there was a veritable infant among them, barely two years old. He was the son of Ramadan, whose wife had died just before the ship set sail. He had no time to take a fresh wife, so the simplest thing to do was to bring the baby along. And he got on excellently among all these rough fellows, who are so infinitely gentle with little children.

One night, the mooring-rope of Djobert’s
boutre
was broken by an unexpected gust of wind, and they were obliged to hoist the sail as best they could in the darkness, and hastily seek another anchorage before the sea should get rough. The tiny creature had been asleep on the folded sail, clutching the ship’s cat in his arms. During this abrupt manoeuvre, in the darkness and scurry, both of them were thrown overboard without any one noticing. The sleeping child went down to the bottom without uttering a cry, but the cat rose to the surface, mewing desperately. One of the men took pity on it and dived to save it. It was then the men bethought them of the baby, the cat’s inseparable companion, and they realized what had happened. After half an hour’s searching, the small, unconscious body was brought back. They thought he was dead, but I arrived in time to save him by means of artificial respiration.

This proves once again that there should always be a cat on board a ship, and that it is not without reason that it is looked upon as a mascot.

An unnamed island rises out of this reef-strewn wilderness. It is really one of the madreporic tables on which the sand has chosen to accumulate. Why on this one rather than on another? Probably it is a question of currents, for this islet is at the edge of the reefs, and lies open to the sea. In winter it is invisible, so little does it rise above the surface of the water. In summer when the level of the water sinks, it forms a sort of horseshoe twenty yards wide and fifty long. There is nothing on it, not a blade of grass or the scrubbiest bush, yet from April to September two Chinese live there.

The divers had more than once spoken to me of these ‘Chinas’ who traded in trepangs, so when in the rosy light of dawn I made out their hut on the edge of the water, I felt curious and decided to go and have a closer look at these two yellow men lost in the countries of the black races.

Nothing was stirring on the island as I ran my
pirogue
up on the beach, save armies of hermit crabs which retreated in serried ranks making noises like castanets.

The hut was made of mats, and was much smaller than it had appeared outlined against the sky. On the beach was an enormous cauldron set on a brick hearth, a heap of firewood, a pile of sacks under an old tarpaulin, and on the sand, drying in the sun, rows of small objects neatly set out. These were the trepangs.

Naturally, a smell of rotten fish hovered over everything. Our shouts caused some greyish bundles to stir, and several Somalis, drunk with sleep and rubbing their eyes, crawled out from beneath the empty sacks.

While we were exchanging the traditional
nabatba
(Somali greeting), the mat which acted as door to the hut was pushed aside, and a fleshless yellow head of indefinite age was thrust out cautiously. A bare second it stared, then wrinkled up in a smile, and the entire man, head and body, emerged from the hut and came towards us. Only his face was Chinese, for he was clad in a loin-cloth, and his skin was burnt as black as any Negro’s.