by Andrew Lane
On the last day of the voyage, as they began to approach Egypt, and the port of Alexandria, Mr Reilly stepped back during their regular sparring and lowered his sword. Sensing that this was more than just a ploy – and Reilly had warned him about opponents who lowered their weapons as a deception only to raise them again a few seconds later – Sherlock lowered his own sword, but kept it ready just in case he needed it again.
‘I have to say,’ Reilly said, breathing slightly heavily, ‘that you have been a most excellent student. It has been my absolute pleasure to teach you over this past week.’
Sherlock smiled. ‘I have learned a lot on this voyage,’ he replied. ‘More than I ever thought I would.’
‘You have several characteristics that make you a most excellent swordsman,’ Reilly continued. ‘You are not afraid, for a start, your reflexes are admirably fast, and you can submerge your intellect and allow your instincts to take over.’ He smiled. ‘If you ever find yourself in a situation where your life depends on your swordsmanship, I am sure you will prevail.’
‘Assuming that my opponent hasn’t been trained by you,’ Sherlock pointed out.
Reilly lowered his sword further and stepped forward with his left hand extended. ‘These past few days have been the most excellent fun. I wish you good luck, Mr Holmes, in whatever you choose to do with your life, but I would say that if you wished to make a living giving lessons in swordsmanship, then the world would willingly accept you. You have taken to these lessons as a duck takes to water. I have been fighting professionally for more years than I care to remember, and I cannot recall a better student.’
‘You flatter me, Maestro,’ Sherlock replied, using the highest honorific he could to acknowledge the respect he had gained for his fencing master. Lowering his own sword he shook Reilly’s hand firmly. ‘You are a most excellent teacher. I bless the fortune that brought me to this ship at the same time as you.’
Knowing that Egypt was nearer the equator than England, and that the Suez Canal was being dug mainly through desert and rock, Sherlock had expected Alexandria to be hot but dry. He was wrong. It was a port on the Mediterranean Sea, which meant that it was hot but also very humid. The sunlight was blindingly strong, making everything look faded, and Sherlock could feel its heat as a physical pressure on his forehead and scalp. Walking around was like moving through invisible clouds of steam, and there was a strong smell in the air of marshy, stagnant water. James Phillimore took immediate fright.
‘I can actually see the particles of disease floating in the air!’ he cried as they came down the gangplank from the ship. ‘This place must be the first circle of hell!’
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and clamped it over his mouth and nose.
The Alexandria docks were a strange mixture of old stone buildings that looked like they had been there forever and could last just as long, and temporary shacks and huts that looked like they had been built yesterday and would fall down tomorrow. The locals were either dressed in loose robes and had material like scarves protecting their heads and necks or they were dressed in dark suits and had strange little brimless red hats on their heads. The Europeans, by contrast, were easily identifiable in their linen suits, shirts and ties, and white hats. Once or twice, as they disembarked and walked across the quayside, Sherlock caught sight of tall men dressed in black robes, with black scarves wound around not only their heads but their faces as well, leaving only a slit for their eyes. They made him uneasy. He knew it was unfair, but they reminded him of the men who had broken into Holmes Lodge and attacked him.
There were animals as well – lots of them. Not just the underfed dogs and scrawny cats that one might expect at any port in the world, but donkeys, horses and even camels. Sherlock had never seen a camel before, and was amazed by how strange they looked. Matty just looked at them, looked at Sherlock and said, ‘You know that game where you draw a head on a piece of paper, then fold it over so that only the neck can be seen, and you give it to someone else? They draw a body, then fold it over and give it to someone else who draws the legs?’
‘Yes. Why?’
He pointed to the nearest camel, which was gazing at them with what looked like contempt on its face. ‘That’s what you get if you do it for real,’ he said.
Once the Princess Helena had docked, the crew started to take the baggage down to the quayside while the passengers disembarked and queued up in a massive and high-ceilinged hall to present their passports and their paperwork to a series of uniformed and frankly bored civil servants. From there Sherlock, Matty and James Phillimore, who spent most of his time mopping the back of his neck with a handkerchief, made their way via carriage to the hotel into which the Arundel travel agent had booked them.
‘What’s our first move?’ Matty asked as they stood in the marbled lobby of the hotel. The space was kept cool by having small windows, and by large sheets of woven bamboo that hung from the ceiling and were pulled back and forth by ropes leading through small holes in the walls. Outside, in the heat of the day, small native boys pulled on the ends of the ropes for hours on end for just a few coins.
Sherlock thought back to his discussion with Mrs Loran on board the Princess Helena.
‘We need to get to a town called Ishmaili,’ he said. ‘That’s where Monsieur de Lesseps is living while he oversees the construction of the canal.
‘How do you know that?’ Matty asked.
‘I . . . picked the information up somewhere,’ Sherlock said, not looking at Matty.
Sherlock interrogated the hotel’s desk clerk as to the best way to get to Ishmaili. It turned out that there was a railway line between the town and Alexandria, and there were several trains a day. Sherlock made a quick decision, and after they had eaten a quick European-style lunch in the hotel restaurant he ushered the other two out into the sunshine again, where they secured a carriage to Alexandria Station.
Buying tickets was an exhausting process, involving a great deal of hand-waving and the payment of what looked to Sherlock like an exorbitant amount of money, but eventually they were waiting on the platform. The other passengers were a cross-section of humanity, from people like them in linen suits and hats, carrying carpet bags or black leather Gladstone bags, to natives carrying wickerwork baskets filled with squawking chickens. Within half an hour a massive steam train of elderly design pulled itself along the tracks and hissed to a halt like some labouring beast.
They had First Class tickets, which meant that their carriage at least had wooden seats to sit on, and they weren’t sharing it with the natives or the chickens. The men sitting around them – and they were exclusively men – seemed to be either people working on the canal or, Sherlock suspected, journalists wanting to write stories about its construction.
The journey was scheduled to take two hours, and it took them through a landscape of baked earth, scrubby bushes and a horizon that wavered uncertainly in the heat-haze. The carriage was ventilated only by whatever meagre breeze managed to find its way through the open windows, and since the air outside was roasted by the sun, all the breeze did was substitute moving hot air for still hot air. Despite the fact that they had First Class tickets – or perhaps because of that – there was a constant stream of native Egyptians coming through the carriage with trays of hot and cold snacks, fruit and drinks.
‘Do not drink the water, and do not eat any food that hasn’t been cooked, except for the fruit,’ Phillimore warned them. ‘I have read about this. The water here is infested with disease. Cooking kills the particles of the disease, and the skin of the fruits prevents those same particles from getting in.’
It was exactly an hour into the journey that the attack happened.
Phillimore and Matty were dozing. Sherlock was staring through the window at the unchanging picture outside, comparing it with the equivalent English countryside which would have kept flashing up new things to look at.
The window by his head suddenly cracked. Splinters of glass rained down on
him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sherlock glanced up in shock. There was a small hole in the window, surrounded by cracks running all the way to the frame.
In their seats, Phillimore and Matty jerked awake.
Something appeared outside the window. Sherlock’s head snapped around in shock.
Several men riding camels were racing alongside the train, parallel with the track. They were holding rifles in one hand and the reins of the camels in the other, and they were wearing black robes which billowed out behind them and black cloth wrapped around their heads. Their camels didn’t gallop the way that horses did: they had a strange lolloping gait, and part of Sherlock’s mind – the part that wasn’t incredulously trying to work out why someone was shooting at them – noticed that their right legs, front and back, moved in unison, and so did their left legs. It looked so clumsy, but they were keeping up with the train.
Looking around, Sherlock noticed that the other passengers had ducked beneath the level of the windows.
He looked out again. One of the men in black was jabbing his rifle in Sherlock’s direction, trying to get the attention of the other two who kept glancing into the windows they passed as if they were looking at something.
The man who had noticed Sherlock looked directly into his eyes, pointed his rifle one-handed at Sherlock’s face, and pulled the trigger again.
Sherlock ducked just as the bullet smashed the entire window. He was sure that he could feel the bullet drawing a blazing hot line through the air, just above his scalp.
This is deliberate, he thought wildly. They’re looking for us!
He looked around desperately, trying to work out what to do, but apart from keeping down, he couldn’t think of anything. It wasn’t as if they could get off the train. They were trapped. He threw himself off the bench and into the space down by the floor.
The other two riders had finally noticed their companion’s gesticulations, and had slowed their camels down to keep pace with Sherlock’s window. All three of them were pointing their rifles at where Sherlock and his friends were sitting. They were aiming down, trying to get their bullets into the space where Sherlock, Matty and Phillimore were all squashed together.
Over the rushing of air past the window Sherlock heard several flat cracks. Across the other side of the carriage, wood splintered.
Sherlock poked his head above the window ledge. One of the camel riders was dropping back, but the other two were still keeping up, and still trying to take aim over the juddering ride of their camels.
Sherlock glanced backwards. He thought that the third rider was trying to jump from the back of his mount to the platform where Sherlock and the others had climbed on. He was trying to get on the train to kill them!
Sherlock ducked back just as more bullets sprayed the carriage, shattering windows across the far side. Sherlock wondered briefly what the driver and engineer were making of this, up front. Did they even know what was happening?
Beside him Phillimore stood up. He reached for his bag, which was on a rack near the ceiling.
‘Get down!’ Sherlock yelled.
Phillimore ignored him. He pulled the bag down to the bench and opened it. A bullet zoomed past his head, but he ignored it. From the bag he pulled a revolver with a long barrel. Turning, he pointed it at the nearest rider and pulled the trigger.
There was an explosion of smoke, fire and noise, and the rider fell from his camel as if pushed. Within seconds he had vanished behind them.
Phillimore took careful aim at the remaining rider. The man tried to train his rifle at Phillimore but the barrel kept waving around. Phillimore, stabilized by the carriage floor, was in a better position. He fired again, missing the rider but hitting the camel’s right ear. The camel, already spooked by the noise and the train, veered sideways, running out of control. Within moments the camel and its rider were vanishing into the distance and the heat-haze.
‘You’ve got a gun!’ Sherlock said. He immediately cursed himself for saying something so obvious, but it had been a surprise.
‘I thought this trip might be dangerous, especially based on what happened back in Arundel,’ Phillimore said. ‘So I packed my gun, and a good thing I did so.’
‘How did you get it past Customs in Alexandria?’
Phillimore looked at him as if he’d said something else stupidly obvious. ‘I didn’t tell them,’ he said.
The door at the end of the carriage suddenly burst open. The third black-robed man – the one Sherlock had seen climbing on board the train – filled the opening from side to side and top to bottom. He was carrying his rifle ready for use, and his hawklike gaze scanned the carriage looking for his targets.
Phillimore raised his revolver and fired.
The bullet hit the man in his right shoulder. He fell backwards, out of the carriage, screaming. The train chose that moment to sharply jerk as its wheels hit a bump, or some kink in the track, and the man abruptly rolled sideways and, before he could catch hold of anything, fell off the platform.
Sherlock leaned out of the window, and saw a black blur as the man hit the ground and was immediately left far behind.
‘That was . . . interesting,’ Sherlock murmured.
Matty crawled out from under a bench. ‘Is it all over?’ he asked.
‘Thanks to Mr Phillimore here,’ Sherlock said.
The conductor – a dark-suited man with a red hat – hurried into the carriage. He was carrying a rifle of old design. He glanced around. ‘Bedouin tribesmen – very rare they make an attack. Is everyone all right?’ He spoke first in French, then repeated it in heavily accented English, and again in what was presumably Egyptian. The other passengers emerged from hiding and shakily reassured him that they were, indeed, all right. Some conversation ensued in which he presumably asked what had happened to the attackers and they gave him various contradictory stories. Sherlock gestured to Phillimore to put his gun away before someone started asking difficult questions. Indeed, a few seconds after he replaced it in his bag one of the passengers pointed to Sherlock and Phillimore and said something in voluble French. Sherlock just tried to look innocent. Phillimore, he had noticed, always looked innocent, so that was all right.
The conductor came down the aisle to talk to them, but he only wanted to make sure that they weren’t injured, and that the lack of a window wasn’t disturbing them. He suggested that they switch to different seats, but Sherlock was quite enjoying the breeze and elected to stay.
‘Is it just that bad things always seem to happen to us?’ Matty asked once the conductor had gone. ‘Or is it that those blokes were aimin’ at us?’
‘I think they were,’ Sherlock said darkly. ‘There are, what, four carriages behind us, and yet they rode along the length of the train until they found us. This is the only window they fired through, as far as I can tell. Either they had deliberately chosen us as targets or we are sitting in the unluckiest seats on the train.’
‘So someone knows we’re here,’ Matty pointed out.
Sherlock nodded. ‘Difficult to avoid it. The voyage was long, our names were on the passenger manifest, and we had no choice other than to draw attention to ourselves in Alexandria.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll just have to be alert.’
Two hours later they arrived in Ishmaili. Unlike Alexandria, which was obviously a very old city before the Suez Canal was even thought of, no building in Ishmaili seemed to be more that ten years old, although the sun and the wind had weathered them. Ishmaili looked like it had been built purely as a base from which the canal could be built. As the train wound its way through the town and slowed as it approached the station, Sherlock observed that there were two very different parts to the city, separated by the train track itself. On one side the houses looked native: earth-coloured single-storey buildings that were barely more than huts or shacks, presumably occupied by native Egyptians who were working as builders. On the other side the buildings were several storeys high, made of whitewashed brick, with s
olid tiled roofs in a variety of colours. They were the kind of houses that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Malta, or Gibraltar, where their ship had stopped on the way to Alexandria: European-style dwellings. This was obviously where the managers and the engineers lived – in more comfort.
In the distance, on the workers’ side of the tracks, Sherlock saw a line of green vegetation running along in a straight line for as far as he could see. That, he suspected, was the canal, and the vegetation was growing there because of the water soaking into the ground. There were also what looked something like large steam trains lined up along the side of the canal: huge machines made out of iron with gantries and girders coming out of them in all directions like the legs of vast insects.
One house, bigger than the rest, on a slight rise in the ground and surrounded by palm trees, was, Sherlock thought, probably where Ferdinand des Lesseps lived.
The train stopped and they disembarked, with the contrite and sincere apologies of the conductor ringing in their ears.
‘’Otel?’ Matty asked, and then, hopefully, ‘An’ food?’
‘No,’ Sherlock said. ‘We go straight to see Monsieur de Lesseps.’ At Matty’s crestfallen expression he added, ‘But if we see anyone selling food from a roadside stall on the way we can get some.’
Ishmaili was obviously a popular destination, and there was a bustle of activity around the station with donkeys, carts and even camels being used to ferry people to where they were going. It was cooler there than it had been in Alexandria, and the air was fresher.
Sherlock was prepared to have to find someone to translate for them, or to have to somehow indicate via sign language that they wanted to visit the big man in the canal company, but the driver of the first cart that they found spoke French – a language of which Sherlock had learned enough to get by. He took them on a twenty-minute journey through the European section of town, although Sherlock was fairly sure it could have been accomplished in ten.
