Book 19 - The Hundred Days

by Patrick O'Brian

  'I can well believe it,' said Stephen. 'About how many lions a side?'

  'Sometimes as many as eight.'

  'Lionesses too?'

  'No, no, no. Dear me, no,' said Jacob. Ibrahim shook his head with great disapproval, but then spoke for some minutes. 'He says that sometimes a strange lioness, a lioness from away, comes roving into our part: the lionesses from here will join and attack her, roaring very like the true lions. And he says we should hurry: we are late already, which the Dey cannot bear.'

  They regained the path, and as they rode Stephen observed, 'So that is what the Vizier meant by le club des lions. I presume lions do not climb trees, but I should be obliged if you would confirm it with this amiable youth.'

  'He confirms it. Leopard, yes: lions, no.'

  'Then I believe I must see this club, if time can possibly be found.'

  There seemed to be time and to spare in the Dey's hunting camp, a number of small tents tucked into an unexpected and almost invisible dell some way from the river-bank and the natural road along the stream, the highway for all the creatures of the region. There were different human paths leading from it to the camp, one for each day of the week, so that the place should not become too notorious; and today being Tuesday, Ibrahim led them up through a stand of oaks, where in spite of the presence of men no great way off, wild boars had been ploughing the ground for acorns and tubers over a stretch of between fifteen and twenty acres so that it looked like a well ploughed and harrowed field.

  At the guarded descent into the dell Ibrahim showed his pass again and they were led to a tent with a small heap of rugs in it, the topmost being of an enchanting diapered pattern whose colours glowed like jewels when the sun touched them.

  Amos Jacob and Stephen passed their time discussing chronic diseases they had personally encountered and the measures they had taken to alleviate them at least in some degree, with estimates of their success, usually very slight or even non-existent, but on one or two occasions most gratifying and spectacular. They were deep in two extraordinary, unaccountable and lasting cases of remission in phthisis and tetraplegia when the chief huntsman came to say that Omar Pasha would now receive them.

  They found the Dey in a fairly high state of grease and good humour. Stephen bowed and said, 'May I present His Britannic Majesty's government's greetings and good wishes to His Highness Omar Pasha?'

  Jacob translated, but in Stephen's opinion not quite literally, since the name of God occurred several times.

  Omar rose, bowed—they all bowed—and said he was most gratified by his English cousin's friendly message, the first he had received from a European ruler: he desired them to sit down and called for coffee and a hookah. 'I have just succeeded in putting these together,' he said, observing that Stephen's eye was keenly turned upon a beautiful pair of guns, of double-barrelled, rifled guns. 'I took the plates off to look at the sear, but for a great while I was puzzled to get them and the sear-spring back again. However, with God's help it is done now, ha ha! Blessed be the Name of God.' Jacob made the ritual response and Stephen a murmur: the Pasha looked so pleased at his success that Stephen asked whether he might look at the nearer gun.

  'By all means,' said the Dey, and put it into his hands. The gun was much lighter than Stephen had expected, and it came up to his shoulder almost like a fowling-piece, a pretty solid fowling-piece for duck or geese. 'You are accustomed to guns, I find?' said the Dey, smiling.

  'Indeed I am, sir,' replied Stephen. 'I have shot many and many a creature with them, partly for sport and partly for study.'

  The coffee and the pipe came in; and after a longish pause in which they smoked and drank, Stephen said, 'I do not believe I have ever had better nor more welcome coffee: but now, sir, with your permission I will deliver the message that His Majesty's Ministry has entrusted to me. It has come to their knowledge that several numerous Shiite brotherhoods and confederacies along the Adriatic and lonian coast and inland to Serbia who support Bonaparte . . .'

  'Bonaparte, that son of a dog,' said the Dey, his face clouding with anger and taking on a very wicked look.

  '. . . have combined to intervene in his favour by doing all they can . . .' Stephen carried on, although he knew that he had lost the Dey's attention and that he was irritating him.

  'Your master must have some very weak advisers,' said the Dey when Stephen came to an end, 'very weak, if they can believe that after his Royal Navy has so banged and battered Bonaparte's friends in the Adriatic. I love the Royal Navy: I knew Sir Smith at Acre . . . but I leave all these things to my Vizier: he understands politics. For my part I understand soldiers: soldiers and their fate. And I know that this Bonaparte must fall. Whether there is any truth in this alleged plot and whether it succeeds or fails is of no consequence: this Bonaparte must fall. It is written. He has gone beyond what is allowed and he must therefore necessarily fall: it is written.' He jerked his head and muttered, looking intensely disagreeable; but presently his eye fell on the guns once more, and with a far more amiable expression he said, 'So you are interested in animals, sir, in the hunting and study of animals?'

  'Very much so indeed, sir.'

  'Then should you like to hunt a lion with me? I mean to lie in wait for one tomorrow evening.'

  'I should like it of all things, sir; but I have not so much as a fowling-piece with me.'

  'As for that, you may choose either of these and grow used to it, shooting all through the afternoon—there is no want of powder and shot in this camp, I do assure you—and then in the evening, with your gun still warm and supple, we will walk along the river-bank in blood-soaked shoes.'

  'Blood-soaked shoes, Pasha?'

  'Why, yes: did you not know that blood—swine's blood, deer's blood—does away with human scent? Along the bank until we are under Ibn Haukal's crag: a few feet up this crag there is a hollow called Ibn Haukal's cave, since he meditated there for a while during his travels: it is large enough for two men and it is somewhat hidden by tall grass and plants hanging from above. Some way farther up the stream, in the same kind of rock, there is a much larger and deeper cave where this lion Mahmud and his mate have their young. Although the cubs are quite large by now he still feeds them and of course his lioness; and it is his custom to walk down to the stream to some scattered bushes near a common watering-place and there to wait for a boar or a deer or whatever offers—last year he took one of my men who was trapping porcupines. I mean to wait for him on his way home, since he carries his prey hanging to the left. This allows one to shoot him behind the right ear and perhaps to kill him with the first shot. We shall, God willing, have the kindest moon for both his journeys.'

  '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 dell 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 lef
t 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, self-contained 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.