men I have aboard.'
'Hairy buggers,' muttered Bonden, gazing up the side as his Captain went aboard the Torgud, welcomed by the clash of cymbals; and by this he meant not only bearded but savage, fierce, dark, passionate, rough, fiery, vicious and tigerish. Jack had much the same impression, and he had more of a right to it since he saw the whole crew, the surprisingly numerous crew: they all had a certain family look although they were of many different races and colours, from shining black to the sour-cheese grey of Bcssarabians; they were presumably united by religion, certainly by their awe of the Capitan-Bey - defaulters in the Torgud were cut up for bait - and they visibly trembled before him. The officers all appeared to be Turks, and judging from the knowledgeable zeal with which they showed their great guns and small arms they understood the fighting part of their profession, while the way the ship had rounded served to prove that at least some of them were competent seamen; yet none seemed to have the slightest notion of order, discipline, or cleanliness, except as far as the guns were concerned. These were all brass, and they all gleamed nobly in the declining sun; apart from that the Torgud appeared to possess no first lieutenant, no bosun, no captain of the sweepers. The rigging was knotted rather than spliced when repair was needed, the planking of the deck could not be seen at all for dirt, and between the guns lay little heaps of human excrement. Yet in spite of this the Torgud was evidently a formidable vessel, not unlike a larger, much more dangerous version of the pirate ships Jack had seen in the West Indies: he had little time for reflection however, because as Mustapha showed his ship he also expounded his plan of attack on Kutali, explained it with an exuberant vitality that called for the closest attention, particularly as Graham was sometimes at a loss for a sea-term. In essence the attack was to be a bombardment by shallow-draught gunboats armed with the cannon Jack would supply, and this would be followed by a general assault. Mustapha had nearly forty suitable caiques up and down the coast; they would open half a dozen breaches in the wall, and his men would carry the place by storm. He looked attentively at Jack, but Jack, having nothing to say about an attack on a town whose shore he did not know and whose defenders and fortifications he had never seen, merely bent his head politely. In any case, much of his mind was taken up by the extraordinary half-seen spectacle of the midships cannon. The middle gun in the long row of brass eighteen-pounders seemed to tower over its fellows in the strangest way; but its uncommonly large portlid was shut at the moment and the sailmaker had spread his work over much of its bulk.
'This is my heart's delight,' said Mustapha, waving the canvas away; and to his astonishment Jack beheld a thirty-six-pounder, an unheard-of, preposterous weapon for a frigate - even a first-rate line-of-battle ship carried no more than thirty-two pounders and those only on the lowest tier - and so massive that it dwarfed its neighbours. And over against it, on the larboard side, there was its fellow, its necessary counterpoise.
'I have never seen such a beautiful gun,' cried Jack, examining the dolphins that twined round the King of Portugal's arms and the well-worn touch-hole. 'But do you indeed find they answer the weight and the confusion?' he asked, looking keenly at the reinforced deck and side and the triple ringbolts; and until they reached the cabin they discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the arrangement, the inconvenience of different calibres on the same deck, the extra weight so high in the ship and its effect on her roll in heavy weather, as opposed to the crippling effect of thirty-six pound shot hitting the enemy at a distance.
In the cabin itself, a singularly gorgeous room hung with crimson damask, the appearance of coffee broke the thread, and in any case it was evident that Jack was about to leave: he could not be persuaded to stay any longer, nor to visit the nearby port of Karia, because he had a rendezvous with his consort the Dryad. This being established Mustapha went over his plan of attack again, with a reasonably convincing account of the forces at his disposal, and once again he stated his opinion of Sciahan Bey and Ismail.
Sciahan's chief crime, apart from greed and avarice, was age, cold-blooded, incompetent age, and Jack had the impression that although Mustapha would certainly expel Sciahan from Kutali if he could, perhaps killing him in the process, he did not really dislike him. With Ismail it was quite a different matter: here there were detailed, persuasive charges of faithlessness, hypocrisy and disloyalty - Mustapha's voice grew even stronger, his eye more terrible: he called upon God to curse his children's children if ever he allowed that vile unmanly traitor to get the better of him.
Jack had seen some passionate men, but none who seemed to swell so much, nor whose great clenched fist trembled so with rage, none whose eyes became more suffused with red. Clearly there was something very much more than competition for the disputed town between Mustapha and Ismail: though on the other hand there was no doubt that Mustapha was also extremely eager to possess Kutali.
The Capitan-Bey boomed organ-toned, and in the barge alongside Bonden said, 'How their skipper does carry on, to be sure: like a bull in a barn.'
At this the portlid of the starboard thirty-six-pounder opened and a hairy, turbanned face peered out. 'Well, you'll know me again, mate,' observed Bonden, having been stared at for a full unwinking minute.
'Barret Bonden,' said the hairy face, 'you don't remember me.'
'I can't say as how I do, mate, behind all them whiskers.'
'Ezekiel Edwards, quarter-gunner in Isis when you was captain of the foretop. Zeke Edwards: ran when we was off of Tiberoon.'
'Zeke Edwards,' said Bonden, nodding his head. 'Yes.' Then, 'What are you doing in this barky? Was you took? Are you a prisoner?'
'No. Which I belong to her. Gunner's mate.'
Bonden considered him for a moment, and said, 'So you turned Turk, and grew a full set, and clapped a pudding-cloth round your head.'
'That's right, mate. Being I never was brought up religious; and being I was circumcised already, any gate.'
The other bargemen had been gazing steadily at Edwards with their mouths open; they now closed them and stared with wooden disapproval out to sea: but he had spoken with such an awkward, urgent, pleading tone, as though longing beyond expression to hear and utter Christian sounds, that Bonden replied. Rather severely he asked what Edwards was doing with that thirty-six-pounder - what a thirty-six-pounder was doing in a frigate, for Christ's sake, a long thirty-six-pounder?
This released a flood of words, a stumbling confidential rush with scraps of Greek and Turkish and lingua franca mixed with the burring West Country English, all delivered into Bonden's disapproving, half-averted ear. The guns were from Corfu, from the French general in Corfu; and he had let the skipper have them because why? Because they was Portuguese and did not take the French thirty-six-pound ball, nor any other bloody ball now made, that was why. But the Capitan-Bey did not care for that: he had marble round-shot made by the Greeks in the island of Paros, smooth as glass. The trouble was, they often cracked if not stowed very careful; and then they cost a mint of money. You could not blaze away with half a dozen rounds just to keep your hand in - you could not fling marble balls about, not marble balls at nineteen piastres a piece.
'Marble balls,' said Bonden, obscurely feeling some reflection upon the Surprise and her plain iron round-shot.
