by Sarban
Copyright Information
The Sacrifice and Other Stories
by Sarban
First published 2002 by Tartarus Press at
Coverley House, Carlton-in-Coverdale, Leyburn,
North Yorkshire, DL8 4AY, UK
All stories © the Estate of Sarban (John William Wall)
Cover illustration © R.B. Russell, 2002/2016
CONTENTS
The Sea-Things
Number Fourteen
The Sacrifice
The King of the Lake
The Sea-Things
‘I KNOW AN Arab who’s seen a mermaid,’ said Stanislaw. We responded to this piece of information in several different ways. Ben Baker emptied his glass and commented sourly from the depths of twenty years experience of the race. ‘You mean he wouldn’t admit that he hadn’t.’ Joe Swingletree winked at me from behind Stanislaw’s shoulder and clapped his hands for the waiter. George Turgoose folded his arms on the table in front of him, leaned slightly forward looking into Stanislaw’s pale grey innocent eyes, and asked with a seriousness that made us grin:
‘Oh? Whereabouts did he see it?’
So Stanislaw told us. We listened tolerantly, in a comfortable state of feeling no compulsion either to believe or disbelieve. We were idling away a hot summer night on the terrace of the Red Sea Hotel at Port Sudan, and it didn’t matter much what we talked about over our whiskies and sodas. I had a day or two to spend waiting for a ship and George Turgoose, the Port Sudan manager of Saunders, Grimes and Company, whom I had known for many years, was putting me up. We had dined at the hotel and after dinner Swingletree, George’s assistant, and later Baker and Stanislaw had joined us on the terrace. The conversation, such as it was, had wandered to fishing, and from accounts of record barracudas and bayads we had got onto tales of rarer fish. Each one of us had his own story of an unknown creature, fantastically masked, finned, helmeted or crested, painted with astonishing colours, that he had seen hooked out of the depths of that coral-fringed sea whose waters so strangely teem with life between lifeless shores.
We were none of us good zoologists; we could describe but not identify the odd creatures we had seen at one time or another. We were not credulous of marvels, but we were too well acquainted with those waters to believe that we knew anything like the limits of the range of species they contained; and some of us had on occasion perhaps experienced something more than wonder in our glimpses of the inhabitants of the depths. You may paddle a dug-out canoe lazily out among the reefs from the Arabian or the African shore on a tranquil day, over the flashing shallows, gliding through a brilliant world that consists of the four simple elements, with life present only in one—in the thin water on which you ride—and a stroke of the paddle will take you over the edge of the reef to where the water goes down to immeasurable blue-green and green-black depths. You may perhaps, if you suspend your paddle and linger there, over that gulf, feel a vague uneasiness, something too slight to be a sense of danger, but yet enough to hold you with the fascination of the dangerous as you stare down, letting your eye sink further and further into the strange aqueous night that defies all the wide white light that blazes and beats above you. Then suddenly you realise that the long, scarcely moving shadow below you—a shape defined blackly against the tenebrous depth—is not the shadow of your canoe, but moves with its own life, and then draws its brush softly across your heart and you dip your paddle and send your cockle-shell leaping on to the cheerful golden shallow of the reef.
Giant rays and sharks, naturally we had seen those. We had seen such monsters hooked and hauled on shipboard, no longer mysterious but loathsome and still too menacing for pity, for anything but horror as we turned away from where the brown crews messily despatched them. But some of us had once or twice in the course of years caught a glimpse of something that was neither ray nor shark. Each of us could tell a little story of a gliding shadow beneath his boat, of a powerful swirl in the black, weedy water of a gulf between the reefs, of a violent commotion far out in the still water of a deep inlet, and a second’s sight of a wet black surface lifted glistening to the sun and at once submerged again: little stories that we told diffidently, sparing words and ending with a shrug that stood for a question mark.
We talked of unknown monsters, but we were careful in contributing our little scraps of evidence to abstain from any conclusion that there had been a violation of Nature’s laws. Now Stanislaw, without any such scientific scruples, produced his hear-say mermaid. It was as much as to say that our restrained stories were all Hans Andersen, too, and our studied admissions of ignorance only a kind of inverted make-belief. The conversation had been showing some sign of becoming serious, and that would never do for a summer night on the Red Sea. The waiter brought the next round of drinks and we grinned at Stanislaw over our glasses and began to think of some funny stories to tell. But Turgoose spoke quite seriously:
‘Whereabouts did he see his mermaid?’
‘It was somewhere down near Qunfida, I don’t know exactly where,’ said Stanislaw. ‘It was an old fellow called Ali Hamdani who told me about it. I was down there building the condenser. I went for three months and stayed eighteen, sitting about waiting for the Arab Government to make up its mind to order another ton of bricks and another ten feet of piping, you know. I got to know Ali Hamdani quite well; he was what you might call the deputy Governor of the place, but as he happened to be able to read and write he was also the Town Clerk and the Municipal Engineer as well. He was the chap I had to deal with about the condenser. He was the dimmest, dullest, most self-effacing, dried-up-stick of a down-trodden under-skinker you could imagine; a relic of the Turkish time, he’d been bottle-washer to the last Ottoman governor of Qunfida, and the Hejazi revolt and the Wahhabi conquest after it had just left him sitting there in his bare little office among the flies making marks on dirty little scraps of paper and tying knots in the bits of string that kept the administration of the town together. You wouldn’t have said he had one spark of imagination or fancy in him; he didn’t know anything about the world outside the Hejaz, and I don’t believe he’d even been to Jedda, God help it, more than twice in his life. He knew there’d been a Turkish Empire, of course, and I suppose he understood that there was now a British Empire with its capital at Port Sudan, but that’s about as far as his curiosity about the world had gone. He’d no interest in hunting like most Arabs, and I don’t think he could have told you the name of any blessed fish or bird or reptile there was about the place. Not that there were so damn many of the last two, as far as I could see.
‘Well, one night I was at a sort of dinner-party that the Governor gave for a collection of sheikhs and I found myself squatting next to Ali Hamdani. I used to go fishing to while away the time when work on the condenser was held up, as it usually was, for something or another, and, for want of something better to talk about, I began asking Ali Hamdani about the sorts of fish there were to be had off the town. It was then that he came out with his mermaid story. I had made some trite remark about the variety of fishes in the Red Sea. Yes, he said, the Lord, in His special favour to the Arabs had stocked their sea—their sea, mark you—with every useful creature. Not only useful. In order to impress His chosen people with His virtuosity in the matter of creation, Allah, it seems, had dropped a few marvels within convenient range of Qunfida. Among these, said Ali Hamdani, was a remarkable creature called bint-ul-bahr. The name means ‘sea-maiden’, of course, but I didn’t think much of that: some fish and shell-fish have similar names in Arabic. They call crayfish bint-ur-rubban—‘the pilot’s daughter’—for instance, in some parts. However, I’d never heard of this ‘sea-maiden’ fish before, so I said: ‘What’s it like?’
‘He’d only seen the one ever in his life,
he said, and never heard tell of anyone else seeing one before or since. He stressed the rarity of it with more than a hint that it was only peculiar piety and a life free from doctrinal lapses that could qualify anybody for this sort of private view of one of the Creator’s fantaziyahs. But when he came to describe the thing I gaped. There was never anything picturesque about his language—usually when he talked you had the impression of something about as colourful as a silver-fish eating through a logarithm; and in this same drab, detailed way he described for me an animal he had seen washed up on the beach many years before. He started at the tail and ended at the head and, believe it or not, the description he gave was exactly that of mermaid such as you’ve seen pictures of in kids’ fairy-tale books. And I’ll bet every penny the Arab Government still owes me for that job that Ali Hamdani had never heard a European fairy-tale—never even dreamt that we had such tales in Europe. How do you explain that?’
We did explain it, after a fashion. One always has an explanation for the other man’s mystery. Someone talked about banat-ul-bahr—sea-maidens—in the Thousand and One Nights; Ben Baker mentioned the Aden mermaid and said he’d seen fakes hawked by Arabs: a baboon’s torso sewn onto a dog-fish tail; I put in a suggestion about the dugong.
‘Maybe, maybe,’ replied Stanislaw to all this. ‘I’m just telling you what he told me.’
Turgoose was the only one who hadn’t suggested some explanation. He seemed to brush all ours aside. ‘Do you remember,’ he asked, with an air oddly like a child pondering its bed-time story, ‘do you remember whether he said anything about her hair? Was it long? What colour was it?’
Swingletree guffawed. ‘Platinum blonde, it ought to have been,’ said Baker, getting up. ‘Pity your firm closed their branch down over there: you might have done a nice bit o’ business exporting ’em over to this side. They’d be a good line in the Sudan in summer, when all the wives are on leave.’
‘Sorry,’ Stanislaw said, grinning, and rising with the others, ‘I don’t remember that he mentioned that bit.’
The three of them said goodnight and I expected Turgoose, who had to be up early in the morning, to propose strolling back to his house and turning in; but he hesitated, glanced up and down the empty terrace, then said, ‘Have the other half.’
He called the Sudanese boy who lolled half asleep beside the hotel door and ordered two more whiskies and sodas and we sat for some time in silence.
I remarked, at length, that I had not known that the Qunfida branch of Saunders, Grimes and Company had closed down.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘At the end of the war. Absolutely nothing doing. Just losing money,’ He spoke absently, thinking of something else. Then, after watching the waiter set our drinks out, he said abruptly: ‘Odd story, that, about Ali Hamdani’s mermaid.’
‘Not so odd,’ I said, clinging jealously to my theory of the dugong. ‘Given an Arab’s faculty for exaggerating and distorting.’
He interrupted me. ‘I mean, what’s odd about it to me is that I never heard it before.’
‘Why? Does Stanislaw repeat himself so much?’
‘Not from Stanislaw. I mean in Qunfida. You know I was three years there before the war. I knew this chap Ali Hamdani. He was still Deputy Governor and Town Clerk and what-not in my day. Still is, I suppose. Stanislaw’s description of him is pretty accurate. I’m absolutely certain that he didn’t make the story up. I had a lot to do with him and I always found him quite truthful, and as for imagination—if you’d shown him one end of a camel he couldn’t have imagined the other. No, I’m satisfied that he would have described only what he saw—as far as he saw it: he was terribly short-sighted in my time.’
‘Well,’ said I. ‘He didn’t seem to have missed many of the mermaid’s points, according to Stanislaw.’
Turgoose made a little sideways gesture with his hand as if exonerating Stanislaw.
‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how well Stanislaw understands that dialect. Pretty well, probably. But Ali would have used some literary words—he speaks in a pedantic sort of way—that Stanislaw might have been a bit hazy about. And then you have to take into consideration the predisposition a European would have to picture a mermaid in the traditional form as soon as someone began describing a woman of the sea. What Stanislaw says Ali Hamdani said may not be quite what he did say. I wish he had told me what he saw. I wonder why he didn’t? But then,’ he added, very softly after a moment’s silence, ‘but then, I shouldn’t have believed him, then.’
‘What makes you disposed to believe him now? I mean ‘believe’ as distinct from keeping an open mind on the subject,’ I asked, with a touch of sarcasm which, I hope, was involuntary.
Turgoose seemed not to notice my question.
‘I wish I could be certain what he saw. It would settle a question that’s troubled me these ten years. Clearly what Ali Hamdani saw was something different from what Stanislaw thinks. Did you notice I tried to ask him about the mermaid’s hair? Well, surely the main feature about the classical mermaid after her fish tail was her flowing hair which she spent so much time combing out, sitting on the rocks at her toilet or popping up, you know, with a comb and a glass in her hand. . . . ‘
‘Talking of glasses,’ I said with feeble facetiousness to relieve what I felt to be an inappropriate seriousness on Turgoose’s part; and I signed to the waiter.
‘Come to think of it,’ he went on, ‘it’s an argument for their non-existence, that long hair. It would be such a hindrance in swimming. Did you ever see or hear of any aquatic or amphibious animal that had a copious mane reaching halfway down its body? So when Stanislaw said Ali Hamdani had described a fairy-book mermaid I asked him what colour her hair was; but you see Ali hadn’t mentioned her hair. The thing he saw was maneless.’
‘Well, dugongs haven’t any mane,’ I pointed out. ‘But what is this question that’s troubled you these ten years?’
He watched the boy pour out the soda.
‘Let me tell you this way: you were in these parts before the war; do you remember anything about a man called Colombani? Doctor César Colombani?’
I felt that the name ought to be familiar to me. I searched my memory, but ‘before the war’ seemed a very remote epoch now that one came to fish in it for what had been some ephemeral piece of news. Half recollecting, half guessing, I hit on shipping. It was something to do with a ship in the Red Sea. Wait a moment—those little French tubs from Jibuti, the Kreuzer line. It was one of those, wasn’t it? The Mahrusa. I remember now. There was a death at sea: An Italian; or was he French? Was that the man?
Turgoose nodded. ‘That’s the man. Yes, he was drowned. I think—I hope he was.’
‘My dear George!’
‘For his sake!’ he added hastily and grimly. ‘You may not remember what he was doing down in the Red Sea? Well, I’ll tell you. He was a Frenchman, a Corsican, I suppose. His hobby, or maybe you could call it his study, was something I’d never heard of before those days, though I see it’s been taken up quite a lot in the Mediterranean now. Underwater fishing, where you wear goggles or some sort of breathing apparatus and pursue your game with a harpoon gun. Colombani was a pioneer of that sport; but strictly speaking his purpose in coming to the Red Sea was to study and make drawings of fish in their natural habitat; harpooning the big fellows was just a diversion by the way. What he was particularly interested in was the little creatures that live in the coral reefs. Apparently there had been very little work done in that field. He came down here to look at what the Sudan Government had been doing in marine biology and it was here that I made his acquaintance when I was over on a visit from Qunfida.
‘He was an enthusiast. His sole conversation was fishes, the sea, the sea-bed and the reefs. The questions came out of him in a steady stream. He had never been in this sea before and he was pumping everybody he met to build up his stock of information. Of course he questioned me about the Arabian side. As you know, there are endless miles of reefs and shoals a
nd shallows, sand bars and islets stretching away north and south of Qunfida, and I suppose, God forgive me, that I must have made the place sound attractive to him. I certainly thought I knew the place and all there was in and around it pretty well. I’d been there nearly three years with nobody to talk to and next to nothing to do; three years, day after day, every day the same, with nothing to look at, apart from a fortnightly ship, except that little heap of a town—more rubbish heap than town—and that itself dwarfed to insignificance by the immensity in which it is dropped down: the blank immensity of the sun and the sand and the sky and the sea. That coast had soaked into me, so to speak. I knew it with my very bones, and when a man talks about something he knows as intimately as that it sounds, I suppose, to a hearer as if he were interested in it and liked it, though in reality he may be deadly sickened of it. However, very probably it was not my conversation at all that roused Colombani’s interest in the Qunfida region; perhaps he’d come to the conclusion independently that the conditions on the Arabian side would be better for his work. Anyway, I had not been back in Qunfida long before I had a letter from him saying that he was trying to get a visa from the Arab Government, and also that our Chief Manager in Khartoum had assured him that the firm’s representative in Qunfida would be very pleased to help . . . and so forth.
‘I wrote back privately to Khartoum and said I didn’t think Colombani had a ghost of a chance of being given a visa: the Arab Government didn’t want unbelievers of any sort dodging about the Hejaz at that time, and such a queer one as Colombani, who spent most of his time in the all-but-nude frisking in and out of the water and flourishing scientific-looking apparatus would have set their noses twitching with the intensest of suspicions. You couldn’t have expected an Arab to believe that anyone would come all that way and go to all that trouble just to look at fish: it would be sunken treasure he’d be after, or pearls, or oil. However, I wrote back to Colombani by the same mail and said I’d be delighted to put him up if he succeeded in getting a visa.