Shout at the Devil

Wilbur Smith - Shout At The Devil

PART ONE

Fly

Rachid El Keb was an exporter of precious stones, of women for the harems and great houses of Arabia and India, and of illicit ivory. This he admitted only to his trusted clients; to the rest he was a rich and respectable owner of coastal shipping.

In an afternoon during the monsoon of 1912, drawn together by their mutual interest in pachyderms, Fly

The hot tea made Fly

"Listen, Kebby, you lend me just one of those stinking little ships of yours and I'll fill her so high with tusks, she'll damn nigh sink."

"Ah!" replied El Keb carefully, and went on waving the palm-leaf fan in his own face a face that resembled that of a suspicious parrot with a straggly, goatee beard.

"Have I ever let you down yet?" Fly

"Ah!" El Keb repeated.

This scheme has a flair. It has the touch of greatness to it. This scheme..." Fly

"Ah!" El Keb said again, and refilled his tea cup. Lifting it delicately between thumb and forefinger, he sipped before speaking. "It is necessary only that I should risk the total destruction of a sixty-foot dhow worth..." prudently he inflated the figure.".. two thousand English pounds?"

"Against an almost certain recovery of twenty thousand, Fly

"You'd put the profits so high? "he asked.

"That's the lowest figure. Good God, Kebby! There hasn't been a shot fired in the Rufiji basin for twenty years. You know damn well it's the Kaiser's private hunting reserve.

The Jumbo are so thick in there I could round them up and drive them in like sheep." Involuntarily Fly

"Madness hispered El Keb, with the gold gloat softening the shape of his lips. "You'd sail into the Rufiji river from the sea, hoist the Union Jack on one of the islands in the delta and fill the dhow with German ivory. Madness."

"The Germans have formally a

"The Germans would have a gunboat there in a week.

They've got the Blacher lying at Dares Salaam under steam, heavy cruiser with nine-inch guns."

"We'd be under protection of the British flag. They couldn't dare touch us not on the high seas not with things the way they are now between England and Germany."

"Mr. O'Fly

"You damn right I am." Fly

"You'd need a British captain for the dhow," El Keb mused, and stroked his beard thoughtfully.

"Jesus, Kebby, you didn't think I was fool enough to sail that dhow in myself? "Fly

"Forgive me." El Keb smiled again. "I underestimated you."

He stood up quickly. The splendour of the great jewelled dagger at his waist was somewhat spoiled by the unwashed white of his ankle-length robe. "Mr. O'Fly

The leather purse of gold sovereigns had been the pivot on which the gentle confusion of Sebastian Oldsmith's life turned. It had been presented to him by his father when Sebastian had a

In gradually dwindling quantity the sovereigns had remained with him through the series of misfortunes that ended in Zanzibar, when he awoke from heat drugged sleep in a shoddy room to find that the leather purse and its contents were gone, and with them were gone the letters of introduction from his father to certain prominent wool brokers of Sydney.

It occurred to Sebastian as he sat on the edge of his bed that the letters had little real value in Zanzibar, and with increasing bewilderment, he reviewed the events that had blown him so far off his intended COUrse. Slowly his forehead creased in the effort of thought. It was the high, intelligent forehead of a philosopher crowned by a splendid mass of shiny black curls; his eyes were dark brown, his nose long and straight, his jaw firm, and his mouth sensitive. In his twenty-second year, Sebastian had the face of a young Oxford don; which proves, perhaps, how misleading looks can be. Those who knew him well would have been surprised that Sebastian, in setting out for Australia, had come as close to it as Zanzibar.