by M. M. Kaye
This was a situation that had never even occurred to Hero. And the obstacle it presented was not the only one, for the Arabic and Swahili of which she had been so proud turned out to be largely unintelligible to her uncle’s servants. They listened to her with polite, expectant smiles and nodded their heads (which she had at first taken for assent, not realizing that in general it signified the reverse), and it was soon clear that the languages she had so painstakingly acquired in Boston differed as widely from the real thing as Miss Penbury’s French differed from that spoken by Monsieur Jules Dubail.
Without a working knowledge of one of the local tongues, and some knowledge of the town. Hero did not see how she was to find her way to Captain Frost’s house. But these last two problems were speedily solved, for Aunt Abby had engaged a personal maid for her, Fattûma, who not only spoke and understood English, but was familiar with every street, lane and alleyway in the city.
Questioned by her new mistress, Fattûma assured Hero that the house occupied by the Captain and several members of the Virago’s crew was well known and lay in one of the quieter streets near the edge of the town, less than a quarter of a mile from the Consulate. It was known locally as ‘The Dolphins’ House’—taking its name from a frieze of those creatures carved above the door—and could be easily identified because it faced an ancient graveyard; a small private burial ground, much overgrown by trees, where half-a-dozen broken tombstones were said to mark the graves of a Portuguese Admiral and his Arab wives.
The only question that remained was how to get there, and though this should have been the easiest part of it, it proved the hardest. For though the European community in Zanzibar made it a custom to stroll or ride upon the open maidan in the cool of the evening. Aunt Abby was certainly not going to permit her niece to join such promenades until the damage to her looks had been repaired, and Hero found herself virtually a prisoner, with her walks restricted to the Consulate garden. A situation that in the circumstances she found distinctly frustrating.
The garden was not a large one, but it was cool and shady. A stone-flagged terrace, on to which the doors and french windows of die ground-floor rooms opened, was made colourful by jars filled with flowering shrubs, and a short flight of steps led down from it to a formal pattern of little paths bisecting the equally formal flowerbeds which centred on a small pool sprinkled with lily-pads. Frangipani and jasmine scented the air, there were pomegranates, jacarandas, a palm and a feathery pepper tree, and, at the far end of the garden, a cluster of orange trees that concealed a thatched summer-house, a fitter of flower-pots and watering-cans, and a small iron-barred door that was used only by the gardeners and the night-watchman.
An old, high and solid wall enclosed the whole, and from the far side of it rose the noise and clamour of Zanzibar: the cries of coconut-sellers and vendors of fruit and water, the creak of homali carts, the shrill voices of children, a babel of tongues gossiping, quarrelling, cursing, laughing; the twang of zithers and the thump of drums, the braying of donkeys and the bark of pariah dogs. But inside the wall the scent of flowers and the green shade of trees gave an illusion of quiet, and it was as though the garden was some small enclosed backwater beside a rushing river.
At any other time such an atmosphere might have seemed soothing and pleasant to Hero. But now she found it exasperating to stroll gently along garden paths when she wished to go out into the city and look for a house with dolphins carved above its door. She was unused to being thwarted, and the whole situation had begun to irk her abominably, because she could not feel free to embark upon any campaign against slave trading in Zanzibar until she had paid her promised debt to one shameless trader. Once that was done and the slate clean, she need have no qualms about doing all that was possible to have him outlawed from the Island. But until then she felt as though her hands were tied, and she she did not relish the feeling. There must be some way of getting out of the house unseen and without her relations.
Three days later, in the dullest hour of the day, a solution to that problem suddenly presented itself…
The long hot gap between noon and the hour when the air cooled toward sundown was occupied by a siesta: a custom which appeared common to all Zanzibar, and seemed a scandalous waste of time to Miss Hollis, who could not understand how white people could let themselves become so sunk in sloth as to sleep away the greater part of each day. On this afternoon, as usual, the voices and the busy clatter of the morning had died down to a drowsy murmur no louder than the sound of distant surf, and even the crows and the pariah dogs appeared to have fallen asleep. And once again a suffocating feeling of frustration pressed upon Hero like a tangible weight: the whole situation was ridiculous, and in her present position she was not much better off than those unfortunate Arab women who lived penned up in harems and were only allowed out cloaked and veiled and—
Why, that’s it! thought Hero. Of course that’s it! Why ever didn’t I think of it before?
She sprang up from the bed, and in the next instant was across the room and ringing the small brass hand bell for Fattûma.
That same evening Uncle Nat and Clayton were engaged to visit an influential landowner who lived some few miles outside the city on the east coast of the island. As his estate could be reached more easily by sea they were taking a boat, and it had been decided that Aunt Abby, Hero and Cressy should accompany them for the sail: the ladies to remain on board during the call, which might be expected to last for at least an hour. It was to have been Hero’s first outing, and she regretted having to miss it, but the opportunity it offered her was far too good to be wasted.
She consoled herself with the reflection that duty should come before pleasure, and when Cressy came to rouse her from the afternoon siesta she pleaded a headache and urged that the expedition should not be cancelled on her account, but that she might be left to sleep. Fattûma, said Hero, would look after her, and there was not the least need for either Aunt Abby or Cressy to remain in the house. In fact if they meant to forgo their evening outing on her behalf they would only succeed in making her feel sadly upset.
It was this last observation that had persuaded them to leave her, and the rest had been simple. Ten minutes after their departure Hero was safely in the summer-house and being robed by the resourceful Fattûma in a schele, the street garb of an Arab woman. A shapeless black garment that covered her from head to foot and left only a narrow, heavily fringed slit for her eyes.
Worn over her own dress it proved stiflingly hot, but she could not very well appear before Captain Frost in her petticoat It was bad enough to have to remove her hoops, for she would naturally have preferred to look dignified and well dressed on such an occasion. But that could not be helped, and Hero Athena had never been one to cry over spilt milk or allow trifles to obstruct her. If this was the only way in which she could pay a personal call upon Captain Frost to thank him—and thereby prove him wrong—then it would have to be taken.
She removed her shoes, and exchanging them for a pair of heelless curl-toed slippers that Fattûma had provided, shuffled after her maid through the grass and the fallen leaves to the door in the garden wall. The hinges squeaked as Fattûma eased it open, but there was no one at hand to hear or see the two women slip out into the hot dust of a narrow, evil-smelling lane, closing the door cautiously behind them.
The air inside the garden had been sweet with the scent of flowering trees and cool from the newly watered earth, but once outside, the heat and stench of the city met them like a waft from a burning rubbish dump. Fattûma glanced anxiously about her, but except for a gaunt pariah dog nosing at a Utter of decaying refuse the lane was deserted, and she turned down it and led the way at a brisk pace for some fifty yards to where a sharp turn brought them into a busy street frill of cobblers’ shops.
If Hero had had any qualms as to the efficiency of her disguise they were soon proved groundless, for no one paid the least attention to her. No heads turned, and it was plain that shuffling, shrouded women
were a common sight in Zanzibar. But she was not tempted to linger and look about her. She could see nothing in the least attractive in diese narrow odiferous streets or in the colourful crowds that filled them, and as she picked her way between the dirt and garbage and past the loitering, chattering citizens, her only emotions were disgust and indignation.
It was a crying disgrace that the public should be permitted to throw their refuse into the streets—and with no proper gutters, and flies everywhere! What were the foreign community thinking of to allow it? Surely they must be able to see, even if the unenlightened heathen could not, that such a degree of filth could only lead to disease and epidemics? Why did they not bring pressure to bear on the Sultan’s Government, and see to it that half these squalid houses were pulled down and the tortuously narrow streets widened? It was their plain duty to do so, and she would speak to Uncle Nat about it. ‘Romantic Island’ indeed! What was romantic about dirt and ignorance? It was all very well for writers of fiction, or unthinking little sentimentalists like Cressy, to pronounce palm trees and unhygienic Eastern towns “picturesque’ and “romantic’, but anyone who could describe Zanzibar city as either must be lacking both eyes and a sense of smell!
Hero had been too occupied in looking where she stepped to pay much attention to where she was going, but now at last they had left the shops behind them and were in a quieter part of the town where the old Arab houses, three and four storeys high, towered up on either side of streets so narrow that friends living opposite each other must surely have been able to lean from their windows and touch hands above the heads of the passers-by.
The sun had long since left these man-made canyons, but the heat still lingered in them, and high overhead innumerable wooden shutters, closed throughout the hot day, were being thrown open to catch the first cool of the evening. From somewhere on the far side of the houses came a dry rustic of coconut palms in the sea wind and the sound of waves on an unseen beach, and presently the road bent and widened, and Hero could smell salt water.
A single dark patch of greenery broke the line of close-packed houses: rain trees, a flamboyant, a frangipani white with blossom, and a tangle of weeds and creepers fenced in by what had once been iron railings. There was a rusty wrought-iron gate in the railing, flanked by crumbling stone pillars carved with the arms of Portugal; and behind it, among the shadows and the encroaching creepers, half-a-dozen weather-worn tombstones lifted their heads through the weeds.
It was the little graveyard that Fattûma had spoken of, and facing it stood an old, pink-washed Arab house, four storeys high and boasting an imposing door studded with the big conical bronze nail-heads that were a relic of the long-ago days when Arabs of the coast protected their doors from the assaults of war elephants. A frieze of carved dolphins gambolled above it, and the door itself stood wide, showing an open courtyard in which a fountain played and idling men lolled and chattered.
Hero recognized several members of the Virago’s crew, unfamiliar in their shore-going splendour of flowing white robes, gorgeously embroidered waistcloths and freshly laundered turbans; and looking upward she saw that the house stood four-square about the courtyard, rising up in tiers of shaded verandahs. The sound of women’s voices and the tinkle of a mandolin drifting down from them suggested that not only privileged members of Captain Frost’s crew, but their families as well occupied quarters in the big rambling house, and in response to a call by the elderly doorkeeper a small stout negress trotted out and looked at the visitors enquiringly.
Hero turned to Fattûma and said: “Tell them what I am here for, and ask this woman if there is a looking-glass anywhere. And a room where I can take these things off and make myself tidy.”
The little negress smiled widely and led the way up a curving flight of stairs to a long verandah, and through a curtained archway into a room furnished with Persian rugs, small inlaid tables, a pair of richly carved brass-bound chests and orange lines in glazed earthenware pots. A vast looking-glass in an ornate gilded frame covered most of one wall, and although it was stained and spotted from the heat of many summers and the damp of many monsoons, the dim, silvery image that it reflected was still clear enough to show Hero that a short walk in a Schele was not calculated to improve any lady’s appearance.
Her hair clung to her forehead in damp tendrils and her dress was not only shockingly creased but stuck moistly to her back, while as for the curling toes of those Eastern slippers, they were as incongruous as jackboots at a ball. She should have thought to bring her own shoes with her—and a comb. But it was no good regretting that now. She would just have to face Captain Frost as she was and since he had never seen her looking anything but dishevelled he was not likely to find fault with her present appearance.
Hero brushed the sweat from her forehead and shook out her crumpled skirts, and telling Fattûma to wait there for her, returned to the verandah and followed the fat little negress up yet another flight of stairs, along another verandah, and finally into a long, high-ceilinged room where a line of arched windows looked out above the tops of palm trees and casuarinas onto the open sea.
The room was furnished in much the same fashion as the one she had just left, but contained in addition several divans, a great many flat, silk-covered cushions, a white cockatoo with a sulphur-yellow crest, and a dark-eyed, golden-skinned woman who wore a loose green tunic, full trousers of lilac-coloured silk, a spangled head veil and a great deal of silver jewellery. There was also a child, similarly dressed and apparently about three or four years of age, and Hero checked uncertainly, realizing that she had been brought in error to the women’s quarters and that this must be the family of Hajji Ralub or some other member of the Virago’s crew.
It had obviously never occurred to the negress, or to Fattûma either, that she could possibly wish to be ushered, unveiled and unattended, into the presence of a man. The woman appeared equally disconcerted, and the child abandoned its pursuit of a small Persian kitten to stare at the visitor in wide-eyed interest.
Hero said hastily, and in English: “I am afraid there has been a mistake, Mrs—er—is it Ralub?”
She turned enquiringly to the negress who nodded vigorously and said something that Hero took, correctly, to mean that the Hajji was from home, and the woman moved forward doubtfully and said in halting English:
“You—you wish—to speak with me?”
Her voice was soft and hesitant and as charming as her face, and for the first time in her life Hero was conscious of feeling clumsy and oversized. The pretty creature was so small and slim, and so delicately formed! As exquisite as a portrait of a Sultan’s favourite painted on ivory.
“No. That is…It was Captain Frost I really wished to see, but I am afraid my maid misunderstood. I am so sorry.”
“There is no sorrow. He will come soon. You will wait—perhaps?”
She gestured gracefully towards a cushioned divan, inviting her unexpected guest to be seated, and turned to give a brief order to the negress, who scurried away and returned almost immediately accompanied by two women carrying a selection of refreshments that included glasses of sherbet, assorted sweetmeats and coffee in tiny cups of egg-shell china enclosed in filigree holders.
Hero accepted the coffee and instantly wished that she had taken sherbet instead, for the coffee was sickly sweet and so full of grounds that she found some difficulty in swallowing it without choking. The sweetmeats looked to be equally exotic and she refused them with what she hoped was a polite smile, and cautiously nibbled a blanched almond while her hostess saw the trays conveniently disposed on various tables and dismissed the servants with a wave of her hand. The curtain fell behind them and Hero, searching for conversation, said: “You speak very good English.”
The woman smiled and made a pretty, deprecating gesture: “No, no. Amrah speak well. Not me.”
“Amrah?”
“My daughter. I am Zorah.”
“Mama,” said the child firmly, removing its finger from its mouth a
nd pointing.
The woman smiled and said something in murmured Arabic that Hero did not catch, and the child came forward and made a solemn little obeisance. It did not look like the child of such a mother, for its rose-petal skin was almost as fair as Hero’s own and the dark eyes and curly hair were brown rather than black. It might almost have been a European child in fancy dress, and for a moment Hero wondered if the negress had misinterpreted her question, and it was not Hajji Ralub but the bigamous Mr Potter who was the head of this particular family. But that was surely impossible! Batty was elderly and grey-headed, and this woman was so young and so lovely And yet, Arabs!…Hero remembered being told that the late Sultan had had children born to him long after he had become a grandfather.
She returned the child’s bow with suitable gravity and said: “So you speak English, Amrah? That’s very clever of you.”
“Yes,” agreed the child complacently. “What’s your name?”
“Hero. Hero Hollis.”
“That ain’t a proper name.”
“It’s mine,” Hero assured her. “It’s a Greek name.”
“Are you a Greek lady?”
“No, I’m an American.”
“What’s a Na’merican?”
The woman, Zorah, intervened with a gentle reproof, but was ignored: “Where’s Na’merica?” demanded Amrah.
“It’s a big country a long way away across the sea.”
“How long ‘way?”
“Oh—miles and miles. Hundreds of miles. On the other side of the world.”
