The Hundred Days (26 page)

‘Indeed we shall, with the blessing.’

‘So if by the end of tomorrow afternoon you are
pleased with the gun, and if you feel equal to waiting in silence, scarcely
even drawing breath for half an hour and then perhaps as long again for his
return, let us draw straws for the first to fire.’

Straws were brought, and Omar, with barely
concealed -pleasure, drew the longer. He at once began showing Stephen the
management of the rifle - an American weapon unfamiliar to Stephen - and when
they walked into the open, first to fire some random shots into the sky and
then to shoot deliberately at a candle, a lion far down, perhaps on the lake
shore itself, began series of great coughing roars that carried wonderfully on
the still evening air.

The next morning Stephen and Jacob, taking some
bread and mutton with them, spent most of their time on the bank of the Shatt, Jacob
improving Stephen’s rudimentary Arabic, Berber and Turkish, Stephen telling him
the elements of ornithology, illustrated by what few birds they had at hand.
Clearly there were the myriads of splendid flamingos, but very few other
waders; and the odd falcon or passerine fowl did not stay long enough for
anything like close observation. The flamingos however were a feast in
themselves, and they showed all their phases, feeding, preening, rising in
great squadrons for no apparent cause, wheeling in splendour, coming down
again, dashing the surface wide, and some placidly swimming. And in the course
of the day Amos Jacob grew perfectly familiar with the griffon, Egyptian and
black vultures, with a possible sight of the lappet-faced bird.

But their main business was learning the nature,
temper and power of the gun: Stephen shot at fixed marks far and near, and he
declared that ‘this was the truest, sweetest gun he had ever handled’. ‘I can
make no such claim,’ said Jacob, ‘having had so very little experience, and
that only with fowling-pieces; but I did hit what I intended to hit several
times, and once at a considerable distance.’ He paused and then went on, ‘I
would not ask many people, but I am sure that you will not make game of me if I
beg you to tell me the reason for these spiral grooves, the rifling, inside the
- barrels.’

‘They give a twist to the bullet, so that it flies
out spinning about its axis at a prodigious rate: this
evens out the inevitable minute inequalities of weight and of surface in the
bullet, giving its flight an extraordinary accuracy. The Americans shoot their
squirrels, a small and wary prey, from quite remarkable distances - shoot them
with the light squirrel-rifles they have known from childhood - and in the War
of Independence they were the most deadly marksmen. I have no doubt that these
of Omar Pasha’s are squirrel-rifles writ large.’

On their way back at dusk they met Ibrahim, sent to
look for them. ‘Omar Pasha was afraid you might have lost your way, and that
the lamb might be overcooked,’ he said. ‘Please to step out. May I carry the
gun?’

‘There you are,’ cried the Dey as they came down
into the deli and its scent of wood-smoke and roasting mutton. ‘I have not
heard’ you shooting this half hour and more.’

‘No, sir,’ replied Stephen through Jacob, ‘we were
contemplating a band of apes, Barbary apes, and they persecuting a young and
foolish leopard, leaping from branch to branch and pelting it, gibbering and
barking, until the animal fairly ran from them in open country.’

‘Well, you have been able to study animals, I
find,’ said Omar. ‘I am glad of it: there are not so many apes about, in these
degenerate days. But come and wash your hands and we will eat at once, to
digest before it is time to leave. Tell me, how did you find the gun?’

‘I have never fired with a better,’ said Stephen.
‘I believe that in a good light on a windless day, I could hit an egg at two
hundred and fifty paces. It is a beautiful gun.’

The Dey laughed with pleasure. ‘That is what Sir
Smith said about my sword,’ he observed. Three men brought three basins; they
washed their hands, and the Dey went on, ‘Now let us sit down, and while we eat
I will tell you about Sir Smith. You remember the siege of Acre, of course? Yes: well, on
the fifty-second day of the siege, when reinforcements under Hassan Bey were
just in sight, Bonaparte’s artillery increased its fire enormously, and before
dawn his infantry attacked, thrusting into the breach across the dry moat,
half-choked with fallen battlements, and there was furious hand-to-hand
fighting on each side of the pile of ruins. Sir Smith was with us together with
close on a thousand seamen and Marines from his ships, and they were in the
thick of the fight. My uncle Djezzar Pasha was sitting on a rock a little way
behind the battle, handing out musket cartridges and rewarding men who brought
him an enemy’s head, when suddenly it came to him that if Sir Smith were killed
his men would turn and all would be lost. As I brought him a head he told me to
require the English officer to withdraw and he came down with me to compel him
to do so, taking him by the shoulder. And while he was held, a Frenchman,
breaking through the press, cut at him. I parried the blow and with my backhand
took the man’s head clean off his shoulders. Between us we led Sir Smith back
to my uncle’s station, and it was as he sat down that he took my hand, and
pointing to my scimitar, said, “It is a beautiful sword”. But come, let us eat:
tepid mutton is worse than a luke-warm girl.’

‘I had not notion that Sir Sidney spoke Turkish,’
said Stephen aside to Jacob, while Omar was tearing the sheep apart.

‘He was in Constantinople with his brother Sir
Spencer, the minister; indeed I believe they were joint-ministers.’

When the lamb was no more than a heap of well-cleaned
bones, and when Omar, his chief huntsman and the two guests had eaten cakes
made of dried figs and dates, moistened with honey and followed by coffee, and
when the glow of the moon was just beginning to tinge the sky behind the
mountain, the Dey stood up, uttered a formal prayer, and called for bowls of
blood. ‘Goat, not swine,’ he said emphatically, patting Stephen’s shoulder to
encourage him: and so, armed and red-footed, they set off, first climbing from
the dell, then dropping by Wednesday’s path to the stream and its almost bare,
well-trodden bank. By now Stephen’s eyes were accustomed to the dimness and he
might have been walking along a broad highway, with Omar Pasha close before him. For so big a man he moved with an easy,
supple pace, making barely a sound: twice he stopped, listening and as it were
taking the scent of the air like a dog. He never spoke, but sometimes he turned
his head, when the gleam of his teeth could be seen in his beard. He would have
been the very model of a hunter, thought Stephen, with his silent tread and his
subfusc clothes, but for the fact that as the rising moon shed an even greater
light through the trees so it shone on the steel of the rifle slung over his
shoulder. Stephen’s was under his light cloak, its butt far down below his
knee: he had lived so long in cold, wet countries that the duty of keeping his
powder dry had assumed religious proportions. He was thinking of other
expeditions by night for the dawn-fighting and at the same time reflecting with
pleasure that he was keeping up without much effort, though the six-foot Dey
had a much longer stride, when Omar stopped, looked round, and pointing to a
mass of bare rock emerging from the trees he whispered, ‘Ibn Haukal.’ Stephen
nodded, and with infinite precaution they crept up to the small, low-ceilinged
cave. With infinite precaution, but even so Omar, the leader, dislodged a
little heap of shale that rattled down to the path, a very small but very
shocking avalanche. They were still standing motionless when a very small-eared
owl, known to Stephen from his childhood by the name of gloc, Athena’s owl,
uttered its modest song, ‘Tyu, tyu’, answered almost at once by another, a
quarter of a mile away. ‘Tyu, tyu.’

Omar, having listened very attentively indeed for
other sounds and hearing none, moved on, bent double, into the cave. They could
not stand upright, of course, but the front, opening on to the stream, was
quite wide enough for two and they sat comfortably, their guns across their
knees, gazing down at a path that grew more and more distinct as the great
moon, just beyond the full, mounted higher and higher in the sky, putting out
the stars.

The air was warm and most uncommonly still, and
Stephen heard a pair of nightjars churring away in their unchanging voice as
they wheeled about pursuing moths far down, perhaps almost as far off as the
Shatt. Brighter and brighter still, and the path just beneath, somewhat
constricted by Ibn Haukal’s crag, was strikingly clear, once Omar had very
gently cut away some of the overhanging shrub: and on this path they saw a
hyena, most distinctly a striped hyena, carefully working out a line, like a
hound - their own line, in fact, the scent of their bloody shoes. And where
they had turned it paused, uttered its habitual shrieking howl (Stephen noticed
that its mane rose as it did so) and ran straight up into the cave. For- a
moment it stood transfixed in the entrance, then turned and fled, its mad laugh
echoing from one side of the valley to the other. Omar neither moved nor spoke:
Stephen made no comment.

A long, long pause, interrupted only by the passage
of a porcupine; and though the silent wait grew a little wearisome Stephen had
the consolation of his watch, an elegant Breguet, a minute-repeater, that had
travelled with him and consoled him for more years than he could easily reckon.
Every quarter of an hour or so he would press a button and a tiny silver voice
would tell his attentive ear the time. If Omar ever heard the minute sound he
gave no sign; but just after twenty minutes past the hour he stiffened, changed
his grip on the gun, and Stephen saw the large pale form of a lion pace swiftly
across their field of vision from right to left.

The turn of the stream and its accompanying path,
together with a scattering of low bushes hid him after a very few seconds: but
Stephen was left the sharpest possible image of a great smoothly-moving
creature, pale, and with a pale mane, even; shoulder-blades alternately
protruding through a mass of muscle. A perfectly confident, selfcontained and
concentrated animal, between nine and ten feet long, perhaps three and a half
feet at the withers (though he held his head much higher than that), and
weighing a good thirty stone, with that enormous chest.

‘Mahmud,’ whispered Omar, smiling:
Stephen nodded, and they returned to their silence. But not for very long: far
sooner than Stephen had expected, away on the left there was a crashing of
branches, a wild flailing about, some high desperate shrieks, a very deep
sustained growling.

Now the minutes passed very, very slowly: both men
were extremely tense, and if Stephen opened his mouth to draw a deeper breath,
he could hear the beating of his heart.

Then at last came the sound of jackals, very usual
attendants on a lion’s kill: his furious snapping as they ventured too near:
and after a long but extraordinarily expectant wait, the sound of movement
among the downstream bushes.

Mahmud came clearly into sight on the left,
carrying a heavy wild boar, and carrying it high, well to the left to free the
stride of his leg. Nearer: nearer: and when he was just past the mid-point,
just going from them, Omar rose and shot him, aiming behind the right ear. But
though the lion fell he was on his feet again the next moment, roaring with
fury. Omar shot him again and this time he fell forward twitching, no other
movement.

But now his lioness was almost there. She lowered
her head over him, licking his death-wound and moaning. Then she looked up
directly into the cave with the men and charged straight for them in five
prodigious bounds.

Stephen saw her eyes clear in the moonlight: it was
a mere fair-ground shot and with real regret he killed her as she rose in her
last leap.

The Dey’s huntsmen knew very well that Mahmud was
his intended quarry, and when in the still night they heard three shots rather
than one it was clear to them that something was very much amiss. Five of them came racing down the nearest path from the camp with
torches, and they found their chief and his guest guarding the lions from the
jackals and hyenas, drawn by even the faintest smell of death.

By the light of a great fire they, the second
huntsman and his team, skinned Mahmud and his mate, while the headman lit the
Dey and his companion back to the camp, Omar most solicitously giving Stephen
his hand wherever the going was a little steep.

As soon as they reached the dell Jacob was summoned
from his tent and desired to translate the Dey’s gratitude and congratulations,
quite remarkably well-phrased and

convincing. Stephen begged Jacob to
say all that was proper and smiled and bowed, with gestures that disclaimed all
merit: but the force of very strong emotion so recently felt but only now fully
perceived was mounting so that he wholly longed for silence and his bed.

 ‘And the Dey
says,’ Jacob went on, ‘that a mule hardened to the task will be sent down to
bring the skins up in the morning: while as for Mahmud’s cubs, they are
perfectly capable of looking after themselves - have already killed several
young boars and two fawns - but nevertheless he promises you that they shall be
given a sheep or two every week for some months. And as for the foolish tale
about gold for the Shiite heretics he assures you that not an ounce, not half
an ounce, shall ever pass through Algiers while he is Dey; and he will send the
Vizier a direct order to that effect, in case there should ever have been a
ghost or perhaps I should say an apparition of misunderstanding or
incomprehension.’

Stephen nodded, smiled and bowed yet again. Omar looked
kindly at him and said to Jacob, ‘My saviour is
himself in need of salvation: pray lead him very quietly away.’ He clasped
Stephen, imprinted a bristly kiss on his cheek, bowed and withdrew.