Left of Africa

by Hal Clement

  It was the one next to the Syrian Sun, and David’s crew could see everything that happened. Some of the men were seized before they could get out of reach; they were handled roughly but suffered no great harm. Those higher up were less fortunate, as the black men had to let go of their spears to hold their captives effectively and apparently did not like to waste the weapons. Several men on the ropes, and two or three already on deck, were wounded or killed by thrown spears. There was no attempt to board the ship by the attackers; they simply cast spears at any head showing itself, while retreating to the bank once more with their dozen captives.

  Gizona had been watching with clenched fists, but had not been able to think of anything to do. He was aroused by the sharp twang of a bowstring beside him, and turned to see Nimshi and Sargon loosing arrows as rapidly as they dared— the prisoners among the natives made it necessary to take careful aim. For a moment the blacks did not seem to recognize where the new attack came from; then they began with howls of rage to launch spears at the Sun. Gizona prudently ducked below the bulwark; the other two stayed where they were and kept shooting.

  A voice reached them from the ship on their other side, just audible above the yelling of the natives. "Admiral’s orders! Half of each crew arm and ashore— rescue the prisoners!"

  Captain David responded instantly. "Ainel! Your watch to arms!" he ordered, and then relayed the command to the next ship in line— the one originally attacked. Gizona saw the men seize their weapons and spring to the stern of the ship, which had drifted a short distance out into the river. Men on the other ships were doing the same, waiting for the order which would send them at the enemy together. Gizona was a trifle surprised; he had not expected such military precision from a nation of traders, and had never stopped to think that traders of all people are the ones most likely to have to fight off attackers.

  Gizona himself had no weapon but a short knife, utterly useless in a fight such as this promised to be; he swung his gaze about desperately, searching for something he could get hold of before the landing order was given.

  But it was never was. Before the sailors-turned-soldiers had finished assembling, a far louder yell sounded from the shore, and a body of warriors that must have numbered fully five hundred swarmed out of the trees growing a few dozen yards from the water. A single glance was enough for the admiral; all has crews put together came to little over half the number of enemies, and the latter would have the additional advantage of being above wading men if the sailors attacked. The Phoenician shook his head.

  "Out oars, and to sea." That order, too, went along the line of ships, and must have reached the ears of the prisoners on shore. Gizona could see them clearly enough, each with his arms held by two towing natives, and each with his gaze fixed on the ships. They knew perfectly well that there was no hope of rescue, but not one of them called for help.

  That was the thing that stuck longest in Gizona’s mind, as the river mouth blended with the rest of the coast behind them. Those men had known rescue was impossible; they had not asked their friends to risk their lives and their ships in attempting it. Gizona wondered if he would be man enough to do the same, if that sort of thing ever happened to him. It was another step toward manhood for the boy.

  CHAPTER 18

  He still didn’t know, and much had happened since the men had been dragged out of sight at the Gouritz River. The natives had been right; another hundred miles of travel had brought the fleet to the point where the coast began to trend definitely northward, and Nimshi’s worst worries had ceased.

  The Admiral’s troubles were not over, however. For a time it did seem that they were; fair winds kept the ships bowling along a regular coast, with little or no trouble from storms or reefs. The sun, frighteningly low in the northern sky at midday when they rounded the Cape of Good Hope, seemed to be creeping back to meet them, and the southern stars were sinking again. Gizona was looking for old friends in the northern skies, and finding them.

  But the climate grew hotter, and hotter. It was worse than on the eastern coast by far; and the nature of the shore changed too. Dangerous men and animals became common as the vegetation changed and thickened into a form Gizona had never seen— a jungle, a tropical rain forest. Men from the ships were lost both to natives and animals, and it became the usual! thing to sleep on board even though the vessels were still brought ashore at night.

  Any temptation the admiral might have felt to keep sailing during the darkness was overcome by the loss of another ship in broad daylight, for no obvious reason. No one ever knew what she struck; she filled and sank almost as quickly as had the galley so long before, and the few men rescued could cast no light on the matter.

  Then, it seemed, sleeping on the ships had not been enough; other dangers reached even there. Sickness-fevers that weakened and killed in spite of all the knowledge of the Phoenician doctors— crept aboard. Twice, after consulting with his captains, the admiral had abandoned a ship which could no longer be manned, dividing her weakened crew and depleted stores among the others.

  Then even more discouragingly, the shore had bent westward again, and even trended slightly to the south. This had discouraged many and more ships had been lost on shoals and reefs as much because the morale of their crews had failed as from any other reason. Three vessels only had beached at the Gambia River to plant and reap another crop of food.

  But the coast was running northward again by then, and spirits were higher; for their shadows were again pointing north, and once again there were some northern stars that never set. The troubles were not over, but all three of the ships came through them successfully— storms, and shoals that had to be skirted for days out into the western sea before it was possible to turn back to the coast. It was fortunate that there were more than the original crews on the three ships, for during this adventure the oars had to be kept going more often than not.

  Now the coast had been running northeast for weeks, and everyone on the ships was hoping that they might find themselves soon in familiar waters.

  "What do you think, Gizona?" Nimshi, standing beside the boy on the Syrian Sun’s deck, had long since come to accept him as a friend and equal. Gizona was now almost as tall as the Judean, and fully as strong; it was nearly three years since he had been captured from the sinking Proteus. The voice with which he answered Nimshi’s question was as deep as Sargon’s— most of the time.

  "I think it won’t be long," he said flatly. "The northern stars are almost as high as they were when I passed the Great Rock with the Greeks, and it seems to me that that must tell how far north we are."

  "I suppose so. Still, that idea of yours about why the sun and the stars seem to go north when we go south can’t be right."

  "Why not?"

  Nimshi stooped and scratched a square on the deck with the point of his knife.

  "Look," he said, "If my finger over the north edge of this square is a star, we'll say, and this finger on the deck is our fleet, it’s easy to see why the star should get lower in the north when we go south; but look here." He moved the finger representing the fleet as far as he could to the "south," getting far outside the square which represented the world. "No matter how far south we go, that star never really goes all the way down. It would get close to the horizon, but it wouldn’t set. The real stars did go down completely; some of the one’s we'll be seeing tonight didn’t rise for months when we were in the far south. That doesn’t seem to make sense to me."

  "It doesn’t to me, either," Gizona admitted. "Of course, I just made up that picture to scare the soldiers away— I wonder what became of them?— and never thought we were really near the edge of the world."

  "Maybe not. But why do the stars act that way? I can’t understand it."

  "I’m getting an idea, but I can’t believe it yet. Maybe we’ll find we’re all wrong, and aren’t coming back to the sea of Greece and Egypt and Phoenicia at all. I’d rather keep the idea to myself until we do get back to shores we know. T
hen I'll tell you— but you won’t believe it either."

  Nimshi looked at the boy thoughtfully.

  "Maybe I won’t— but if it’s your idea, that’ll be enough for a lot of people."

  "And I’m one of them," Sargon had come up unnoticed and heard the latter part of the conversation, "and the captain is another."

  "That’s not what I came about, though," he went on. "Someone heard you say a couple of days ago that we must be getting near the end of the trip, and everyone supposes you’re right; so what I was wondering is— what do we do next? Nimshi and I could always join Pharoah’s guard, I suppose, but that might not be much fun."

  "And might not get you rich as fast as you like?" added Gizona with a smile. "Well, I don’t know. The closer we get to the Great Sea, or the closer I think we get, the more I think about the first real friend I ever had. He was Orestes, the captain of the Greek ship you sunk when you captured me. He wanted me to become a trader. He seemed to think that to a ship’s captain my memory was worth more than gold."

  "I’d rather have gold than a good memory any day," said Sargon.

  "And I’d rather be a ship’s captain than work for one," returned the boy. "I don’t care how long it takes, and I have plenty of time to get rich If I decide I want to. I like to know things." "That last know, Well, it’s worth talking over, anyway.” They were interrupted by a hail from the masthead. "Thore is land on the port bow. We are entering a gulf." Everyone looked up, The watchman was pointing in the direction he had named, and David noted it carefully. The Sun was enough ahead of the other two ships so they had probably not seen the land as yet, and the captain ordered the sail partly furled so that the others might come within hailing distance. This sort of thing had happened before, and always required the decision whether to sail across the mouth of the gulf or hug the coast.

  This time, after a brief discussion, the former choice was made, since the wind was strong and should bring them across to land again before nightfall. The hours passed, and the peak that the masthead man had seen gradually grew visible from the deck.

  Gizona paid little attention for some time— he always took a good look at every section of land they passed, in order to have the record in his memory; but in a case like this he frequently waited until he was close enough to shore to see it well. He slept through the middle part of the day.

  When he awoke, it was mid-afternoon. The ships were still miles from shore, but they were close enough to see much of the outline of the great rock whose tip the lookout had spotted. For some minutes Gizona eyed it with a puzzled air; then he went up the mast like a monkey or a sailor and crowded in beside the man on watch, to look some more. He was not used to being unsure of himself in a matter of memory, but this time it happened.

  His previous passing of Gibraltar had been on a dark night. He had seen only its outline, and that had been from a different direction. It took him half an hour, and a careful look at the other parts of the coast that were becoming visible, to make sure; but when he did, he wasted no more time.

  "Captain! Tell the admiral, and sail south of the rock! That is the entrance— the sound— the way into the Great Seal We’re back!"

  David had begun to suspect as much already, though his voyages had never taken him this far west, and he altered course without delay or argument. The crew gathered along the sides shouting and gesticulating; even such hardened seamen as those could sometimes be glad to see the end of a voyage— it seemed like the end, though weeks of travel still lay between them and the Nile, since they were back in known waters. The excitement spread to the other ships, and the Sun had to come alongside the admiral’s vessel while Gizona transferred to convince Tennes that he was right.

  By sundown, there was no doubt; they were directly opposite the rock with the waters of the Mediterranean spreading before them. Gizona pointed out with confidence a landing place on the Spanish coast where he had stayed the night with the Proteus’ crew three years before, and the men found everything as he had said it would be. The supplies in the fleet did not allow for very riotous celebration, but they did well with what they had.

  "And that’s that," said Nimshi, when most of the men were finally asleep. "We’ve been all the way around Africa for Pharoah, though I still don’t see what good it will do him. I’m curious about something else than that, though. Gizona, only this morning you said you had an idea about why the stars went down in the north the way they did, but that you wouldn’t be sure until we got back. Well, what is it? You’ve got me curious."

  The boy looked doubtfully at his former master for some moments, and then at Sargon, who had also seated himself beside them.

  "Allright," he said at last. He took a handful of mud from the stream bank a few yards away and returned with it to his seat. Silently he kneaded and rolled it in his hands until it formed a ball about four inches in diameter. This he held up so that it could be seen in the light of a dying cooking fire.

  "That’s it," he said. "Suppose you were a bug on the top of that ball, looking at the stars. You’d see them just as we do. Now, if you crawled this way," he ran a finger down the face of the globe that was pointing south, "wouldn’t the stars on the other side seem to go down behind it— and things on this side, like that fire, seem to rise higher?" The men were silent for some time.

  "You— you mean you think the world is a ball? Nimshi sounded doubtful, in spite of what he had said earlier about Gizona’s idea. "It seems silly. Everything that wasn’t right on top would fall off."

  "I know. I don’t see the answer to that either. All I say is that if the world is round, I can understand the way the stars moved. Maybe there’s some other way to find out for sure— I don’t know." The Judean’s face suddenly broke into a grin, and he looked across for a moment at his older companion. Sargon nodded, and Nimshi spoke.

  "It’s a mad idea, all right, boy— but there is one way to find out if it’s right, and that ought to be a lot of fun. We'll find out with you; there’s only one thing you'll have to tell us." "What’s that?" For once, Gizona was a little slow in following. "Do we start east or west?"