by P. B. Kerr
“And would you have kept a record of the purchaser?” asked Nimrod.
Mr. Bilharzia looked surprised even to have been asked such a question. “Of course. This is a respectable business. With everything aboveboard. But we shall have to look in the purchase ledger for the winter of 1859 to find the buyer’s name.”
They waited while Mr. Bilharzia fetched another ledger from the shelves and when he had blown the dust from the cover, he opened it and started to turn the pages.
“Yes. Here we are. Winter 1859. Morebelchin, Sourbelchin, Rudebelchin, and Vilebelchin were sold to … well now, this is most unusual.”
“What is?” asked Nimrod.
“These four camels were sold not to an Afghan, or an Indian, or even the British Army.” Mr. Bilharzia pulled a face. “These were four of two dozen camels sold to an Australian gentleman. A Mr. George Landells of the Victorian Exploration Expedition, Melbourne, Australia. The camels were delivered by my ancestor to Karachi, in what was then India, for loading onto the cargo ship, SS Chinsurah.”
“What would an Australian want with two dozen camels?” said Axel.
“You’d think they had enough weird animals of their own,” said John. “What with kangaroos and the duck-billed platypus.”
“What do you mean, weird?” Mr. Bilharzia looked and sounded as if he had been insulted. “There is nothing weird about camels. Nothing at all.”
He closed the ledger, with a loud bang that made John jump.
“The camel is the most beautiful animal ever made,” insisted Mr. Bilharzia. “Not just beautiful but remarkable, do you hear? Tell me, American. Can you drink forty gallons of water at once? Does your skin reflect sunlight and insulate you from heat? Can your nostrils trap and recycle the water in your body when you breathe out? Can you carry a rider for one hundred and twenty miles in a single day? Can you see where you are going in a sandstorm? Don’t talk to me about weird, sonny. There are one hundred and sixty different words for camel in the Arabic language. But only one word for a fool of an American who thinks that camels are weird and that word is —”
“Mr. Bilharzia, my nephew meant no offense,” Nimrod said smoothly. “And in truth he has more acquaintance with camels than ever you might suppose. The boy has ridden camels. Raced camels. You might even say he knows camels inside out. He spoke as many young Americans speak, which is sometimes as he thinks. You don’t really think camels are weird, do you, John?”
“Not in a bad way,” said John. “Only in a good way. And if I said weird, I really meant that they’re remarkable. I just thought that with the remarkable animals that Australians already have, that it was strange they should want any more. I mean, you don’t think of camels when you think of the Sydney Opera House, do you?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Nimrod, “you don’t think of opera, either. But that’s another story. The fact is, John, that deserts occupy almost a fifth of the Australian continent. About half a million square miles. And there are ten of them. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth. Even drier than Antarctica. And that makes it perfect country for camels.”
John shrugged. “I guess it does.” He smiled at Mr. Bilharzia. “Sorry, Mr. Bilharzia. No offense intended.”
“Apology accepted,” said Mr. Bilharzia.
“Here,” said John. “Have another mint.”
“Thank you.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Nimrod, “there are more than a million wild camels living in Australia. And many of them will be descended from the twenty-four bought by this Mr. George Landells of Melbourne, Australia.”
“A million?” Mr. Bilharzia was astonished. “Wild, you say?”
Nimrod nodded.
“Perhaps I should set up my business in Australia,” said Mr. Bilharzia.
“Indeed, they are considered to be agricultural pests,” said Nimrod. “A bit like rabbits. And in some parts of the country they have even tried to eradicate them.”
“Eradicate?” Mr. Bilharzia looked aghast. “You mean —”
“Yes,” said Nimrod. “They shoot them.”
Mr. Bilharzia opened his mouth and his eyes with horror and pressed his hands hard against the sides of his skull as if he thought it might explode.
For a moment John was convinced that Mr. Bilharzia, who was clearly very fond of camels, had screamed. And it was a moment or two before he realized that the scream had come and was still coming from outside.
It was a man’s scream and to Nimrod’s keen ears there was something about it that sounded almost familiar.
“Curious,” he said.
Upstairs in Mr. Bilharzia’s house, Philippa heard the scream, too, and went to look out of the window.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Mrs. Bilharzia. “We get all sorts in this neighborhood. It might be terrorists. It might be soldiers on R & R. Or an animal in pain. A dog. We get a lot of strays in this part of Kandahar and people are sometimes very cruel to them.”
The scream continued like something infinite in the air.
“You know what? It’s probably someone making a protest about the electricity cuts. ’Round here the power is always going off and people are really fed up with it.”
“The lights seem to be working,” said Philippa.
“We have a generator,” explained Mrs. Bilharzia proudly.
Philippa moved the curtain aside and stared down into the street. It was almost dark outside, although the ash from the eruption of Mount Taftan, in Iran, had left the sky bloodred. An empty car was parked with its headlights on beside the glowing blue camel-shaped swimming pool at the back of Mr. Bilharzia’s house. In the headlights she could see a bald, middle-aged, rather stout-looking man just standing in front of the car and, it seemed to her, screaming for no good reason. His hands were pressed to each side of his face and his eyes were wide open with fear and loathing.
The professor joined her at the window. But it was hard for him to see anything through his mask and the eye grille in his chadri.
“What is it?” he said.
“It doesn’t look like someone protesting against anything,” said Philippa. “And it certainly doesn’t sound like someone protesting.”
Was he the driver, perhaps, and had just received some rather bad news? Or the victim of some crime — an attempted robbery, or even a hit-and-run? Or had he escaped from a lunatic asylum and was shrieking because he was suffering from some sort of mental disorder? Or perhaps was he shrieking at the top of his voice just for the fun of it? She couldn’t imagine why anyone, let alone a grown man, would scream like that, and for so long, too. It seemed quite unmanly to her. And yet there was something about the man and indeed his screaming that was strangely familiar.
Something about the pin-striped trousers, and the vest, and the white shirt and the black tie and the pink bald head she seemed to recognize.
“It can’t be,” she said.
She removed her glasses, cleaned them on the back of Professor Sturloson’s electric-blue chadri, and, putting them back on her nose, opened the window and leaned out to get a better look.
“It is,” she said, and hurried toward the door.
Outside, she sprinted around to the back of the house, narrowly avoided falling into the camel-shaped swimming pool, and almost collided with the still-shrieking Groanin and the horrible thing that was attached to his torso. Indeed, so close did she come to colliding with her old friend and the Solifuga clinging to his belly that it hissed loudly at her with its stridulatory organ and then snipped its rattling and hideous mouthparts defensively in the air.
Philippa, who hated creepy crawlies of any size, let alone one as big as a dinner plate, screamed loudly. Hers was a loud, high-pitched, piercing scream, whereas Mr. Groanin’s scream was now running out of energy and air; Philippa’s loud and piercing scream was also over relatively soon, although to be fair to Groanin, it might have been a very different story if the camel spider had been attached to her.
Wringing
her hands nervously, she took several steps back from the butler and, momentarily containing her horror and disgust, tried to stay looking at him long enough to figure out what to do.
“What is it?” she said.
Groanin, who was almost out of air because he had been screaming for so long now, just shook his head.
“Is it poisonous?”
Groanin shook his head and then whispered, “I don’t know, miss. I don’t even know what it is.”
“It’s a camel spider,” said Axel, who was next on the scene. “A smaller one than that put me in hospital for six weeks.”
“Thank you,” whimpered Groanin, “for sharing that with me, whoever you are.”
Next on the scene was John who stared openmouthed at the horrid thing stuck to his old friend and said, “That is an awesome-looking horror, Mr. Groanin.” He shook his head. “Alien One, Two, Three, and Four. Hey, let’s hope it hasn’t laid an egg inside you, or you’ll be eating breakfast on your own for a while.”
“Please,” whimpered Groanin. “Someone. Help me.”
Nimrod appeared and next to him was the person wearing the chadri, whom everyone in Mr. Bilharzia’s house assumed was Nimrod’s wife, but was in fact Professor Sturloson.
“Oh, I say, Groanin,” said Nimrod. “That is a magnificent specimen. You know, I think that’s the largest female Solifuga or Pseudoscorpionida I think I’ve ever seen. Just look at the size of the creature’s prosoma, to say nothing of those enormous biting parts — the chelicerae.”
He leaned toward his butler to take a closer look. And so did Professor Sturloson.
“This one appears to have chewed through your vest and your shirt,” said Nimrod. “But lucky for you, it hasn’t yet tried to chew through your not insubstantial stomach.”
Groanin whimpered again and shut his eyes.
“I was hoping to see one of these,” said the professor. “I’ve heard so many stories about these little creatures.”
“Little?” John guffawed. “It’s huge.”
“How clever of you to find it, Groanin,” said Nimrod. “Normally, they’re very shy and shun the light. That’s what the name Solifuga means. It’s Latin for ‘the thing that flees from the sun.’ ”
“I didn’t find it,” whispered Groanin. “It found me. If I’d found it before it found me, I’d have dropped a rock on it. Or stamped on it. Or hit it with a hammer.”
“Nonsense,” said Nimrod. “Is it?”
“Marvelous bugger, isn’t he? When I was a boy we used to call them jerrymuglums. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. But I used to have a South African friend as a boy who called them haarskeerders. And he was terrified of them. Used to claim they could cut your hair in your sleep and line their nests with it.”
“Get it off,” whispered Groanin.
“All in good time,” said Nimrod. “All in good time. They’re not venomous as such. But the bite is supposed to be extraordinarily painful and can easily get infected.” “I can testify to that,” agreed Axel.
“Unfortunately, they don’t much like being handled at the best of times,” said Nimrod. “Even by someone like me.” He took hold of the creature’s abdomen and tugged gently. “Who knows what it’s doing.”
“If you don’t get that thing off me soon,” squeaked Groanin. “I’m going to die of heart failure. Do you hear? Either that, or I shall simply suffocate from lack of oxygen.”
Nimrod bent closer and blew gently on the camel spider’s back.
“Be careful,” squealed Philippa.
“Why don’t you just zap it with djinn power?” asked John. “Blast it into the next world.”
“Because, my young zap-headed friend, I might also zap Groanin in the stomach, which would be a great pity. No, this has to be handled with care and precision.” He blew on the spider again.
“Try not to breathe for a moment,” said Nimrod. “I think it’s attracted to the sound of your lungs. Not having any lungs of its own.”
“Really?” said the professor. “How does it breathe?”
“With great difficulty, I hope,” said Philippa, who was feeling thoroughly revolted by the spider.
“Through some slits on its trachea,” said Nimrod. “Here we go. Nice and easy does it.”
“I think it’s shifting now, Groanin,” observed John. “Get ready to be very happy.”
Now there are lots of urban myths about camel spiders, but the one story about them that is actually true is that they can run incredibly fast; so that one moment Nimrod was lifting the spider clear of Groanin’s bare belly, the next he was laying it down on the ground, and the moment after that it was running at ten or fifteen miles an hour but in no particular direction, and thus scattering a screaming Groanin, a yelling Axel, a howling John, and a shrieking Philippa, north, south, east, and west. Much to the amusement of Nimrod and the professor.
Gradually, everyone came back and Groanin got to explain what had happened to him after the others had left him at the hotel in Sorrento.
“I shall never ever leave your service again, sir,” the butler told Nimrod finally. “It has been the worst experience of my life. Nothing that happens to us now could ever be worse than what I’ve been through these last few days.”
Hearing this, Philippa exchanged a look with John. “Let’s hope you’re right,” she said.
“Of course he’s right,” insisted Nimrod.
“What now?” asked the professor.
“Back to the carpet, I think,” said Nimrod. “And then on with our journey.”
He leaned into the Toyota interior for a moment and, touching the steering wheel and the gearshift, he uttered his focus word quietly, just so as to leave a small something for the three kidnappers, if and when they returned.
“Where are we going?” asked Groanin, fetching his luggage from the trunk of the car.
“Australia,” said Nimrod.
“Follow that camel, eh?” said the professor.
“Exactly.”
Groanin nodded and, putting on his jacket, he buttoned it up to cover the hole in his shirt.
“Just as long as no one asks me to follow that spider.”
Philippa hugged him happily. “I don’t think any of us can run that fast,” she said.
CHAPTER 25
SHE WHO ENTANGLES MEN
They followed the road out of Kandahar and into the pitch-black and silent desert.
“That small stone you left near the spot where we buried the carpet should come in handy anytime now,” John told Nimrod.
“If you mean,” said Nimrod, “as I think you do, John, that we won’t find it or the carpet in the dark, then you couldn’t be more wrong. It’s a beacon stone. It gets hotter, the nearer I get to it. And the hotter it gets, the more it starts to glow.”
“Oh. I see. Well, why didn’t you say so before?”
They walked on until seeing something very bright on the road ahead, Philippa said, “Is that it?”
Nimrod frowned. “No, that is much too bright for a beacon stone,” he said. “That’s something altogether larger. Besides, it’s off the ground. Not on it.”
“Looks military to me,” said John. “Most probably a Solar Stik Remote Area Lighting System that’s used by the EOD guys. That’s explosive ordnance disposal to you.”
“I presume you mean the bomb squad,” said Groanin.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?” muttered the butler.
Farther down the road, a British soldier waving a flashlight walked slowly toward them.
“’Ere, you: Mustapha. You can’t go up this pigging road.” The soldier spoke first in English, and then in a sort of mangled Pashto that sounded quite unintelligible to Afghan ears. “It’s closed.”
“What seems to be the trouble, Officer?” said Nimrod politely.
“You speak English, then?” said the British soldier.
“I am English,” said Nimrod.
“Where from?”
&nb
sp; “London,” said Nimrod. “Kensington, to be exact.”
“You’re a long way from pigging Kensington, mate,” said the soldier.
“And these are my friends from New York, Iceland.” Nimrod pointed at Groanin. “And Manchester.”
“Manchester? Which team do you support?”
“City,” said Groanin. “You?”
“Me, too,” said the soldier. He grinned and clapped Groanin on the back.
For several minutes, the two Mancunians discussed the state of English football before Nimrod politely cleared his throat and asked again why the road was closed.
“’Cos there’s something big buried in the ground up ahead,” explained the soldier. “Most likely a pigging bomb.
We’re waiting for one of our lads from the squad to come and have a look at it.”
“How big?”
“Pretty big. At least twenty or thirty feet long.”
“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” said Nimrod. “For which I am sincerely sorry. You see, we buried something by this road earlier on today. A carpet. For safekeeping. It was heavy and we didn’t want to carry it all the way into Kandahar. No more did we feel inclined to leave it by the side of the road, in case it was stolen. So, as I say, we buried it. And now we’re back to dig it up again. I should have realized how sensitive people are to that sort of thing in this country.”
“You’d better speak to my officer,” said the soldier. “Captain Sargent.”
“Lucky he’s not a sergeant,” said Groanin.
“That’s nothing,” said the soldier. “We have a lieutenant colonel whose name is Major. And a brigadier whose name is Sirr, with two rs. You’ve no idea the pigging confusion that’s caused when those three are in the room. Which is pretty typical of the whole mission, really. None of us really knows what we’re doin’ here.”
The soldier led the way to his officer, Captain Sargent. The captain was a big, fat man with a very small mustache and a blue beret.