Now when it came she was not really ready for it, and her confusion was genuine. Captain Codrington, this comes as such a surprise-'I do not see why. My admiration for you must be apparent, and the other day you led me to believe-' He hesitated, and then with a rush, 'you even allowed me to embrace you.'
Suddenly she was overcome with the urge to burst out laughing, if only he had known her further intentions towards him, but she skittered away from the subject, her expression as solemn as his.
When would we be able to marry? ' she asked instead. Well, on my return to-'There is a British consul at Zanzibar, and you are bound there, are you not! she interrupted quickly. 'He could perform the ceremony.'
Clinton's face lit with slow, deep joy. 'Oh Miss Ballantyne, does that mean, can I take it that -' He took a pace towards her, and she had a vivid image of the tiny house in Portsmouth bursting at the seams with little blond replicas of himself, and she took a quick pace backwards and went on hurriedly. I need time to think.'
He stopped, joy faded and he said heavily, 'Of course. 'It means such a change in my life, I would have to abandon all my plans. The expedition, it's such a big decision. 'I could wait a year, longer if necessary. Until after the expedition, as long as you wished, he told her earnestly, and she felt a flutter of panic deep in her belly. No, I mean I need a few days, that is all, and she laid her hand on his forearm. 'I will give you an answer before we reach Quelimane. I promise you that.'
Sheikh Yussuf was a worried man. For eight days the big dhow-rigged vessel had lain within sight of land, the single, huge lateen sail drooped from the long yard, the sea about her was velvet smooth during the day and afire with phosphorus during the long moonless, windless nights.
So deep and utter was the calm that not the slightest swell moved the surface. The dhow lay so still that she might have been hard aground.
The Sheikh was a master mariner who owned a fleet of trading vessels and who for forty years had threaded the seaways of the Indian Ocean. He knew intimately each island, each headland and the tricks of the tides that swirled about them. He knew the great roads that the currents cut across the waters the way a post coachman knows each turn and dip of the road between his stages, and he could run them without compass or sextant, steering only by the heavenly bodies a thousand miles and more across open water, making his unerring landfalls on the great horn of Africa, on the coast of India and back again on the island of Zanzibar.
In forty years he had never known the monsoon wind to fail for eight successive days at this season of the year.
All his calculations had been based on the wind standing steady out of the south-east, day and night, hour after hour, day after day.
He had taken on his cargo with that expectation, calculating that he could discharge again on Zanzibar Island within six days of loading. Naturally, a man expected losses, they were an integral part of his calculations. Ten percent losses was the very least, twenty was more likely, thirty was acceptable, forty was always possible and even losses of fifty percent would still leave the voyage in profit.
But not this. He looked up at the stubby foremast from which drooped the fifteen-foot-long scarlet banner of the Sultan of Zanzibar, beloved of Allah, ruler of all the Omani Arabs and, overlord of vast tracts of eastern Africa. The banner was faded and soiled as the lateen sail, both of them veterans of fifty such voyages, of calms and hurricanes, of baking sun and the driving torrential rains of the high monsoon. The golden Arabic script that covered the banner was barely legible now, and he had lost count of the number of times it had been taken down from the masthead and carried at the head of his column of armed men deep into the interior of that brooding land on the horizon.
How many times had that banner wafted out proudly, long and sinuous as a serpent on the breeze, as he brought his vessel up under the fort at Zanzibar Island.
Sheikh Yussuf caught himself dreaming again. It was an old man's failing. He straightened up on the pile of cushions and precious rugs of silk and gold thread, and looked down from his command position on the poop deck. His crew lay like dead men in the shade of the sail, their grubby robes folded up over their heads against the heat. Let them lie, he decided, there was nothing mortal man could do now, except wait. It was in the hands of Allah now. 'There is one God, he murmured. And Mohammed is his prophet. ' It did not occur to him to question his fate, to rail or pray against it. It was God's will, and God is great.
Yet he could not help feeling regret. It was thirty years since he had taken such a fine cargo as this, and at prices that compared with those of thirty years before.
Three hundred and thirty black pearls, each one perfectly formed, young& by Allah, not one of them over sixteen years of age. They were of a people he had never encountered before, for he had never before traded so far south. It was only in this last season that he had heard of the new source of black pearl from beyond the Djinn Mountains, that forbidden land from which no man returned.
A new people, well favoured and beautifully formed, strong and tall, sturdy limbs, not those stickline legs of the people from beyond the lakes; these had full moon faces and good strong white teeth. Sheikh Yussuf nodded over his pipe, the water bubbled softly in the bowl of the hookah at each inhalation and he let the smoke trickle out softly between his lips. It had stained his white beard pale yellow at the corners of his mouth, and at each lungful. he felt the delightful lethargy steal through his old veins, and take the edge off the cold frosts of age which seemed always now to chill his blood.
There was suddenly a higher pitched shriek, that rose above the low hubbub which enveloped the dhow. The sound was part of the ship, day and night it came up from the slave hold below the dhow's maindeck.
Sheikh Yussuf removed the mouthpiece from his lips and cocked his head to listen, combing his fingers through his scraggling white beard, but the shriek was not repeated. It was perhaps the final cry from one of his fine black pearls.
Sheikh Yussuf sighed, the din from below decks had slowly decreased in volume while the dhow lay becalmed, and he was able to judge with great accuracy how high his losses were by that volume. He knew he had already lost half of them. Another quarter at the very least would perish before he could reach Zanzibar, many more would go even after they were landed, only the very hardiest would be fit for the market, and then only after careful convalescence.
Another indication of his losses, though not as accurate, was the smell. Some of them must have gone on the very first day of the calm and without the wind the heat had been blinding. It would be even worse in the holds, the corpses would be swollen to twice life-size. The smell was bad, he could not recall a worse stench in all his forty years. It was a pity that there was no way in which to remove the bodies, but this could only be done in port.
Sheikh Yussuf dealt only in young females. They were smaller and much hardier than males of the same-age, and could be loaded more densely. He had been able to reduce the clearance between each deck by six inches,
