‘There you are,’ cried the Dey as they came down into the deli and its scent of wood-smoke and roasting mutton. ‘I have not heard’ you shooting this half hour and more.’
‘No, sir,’ replied Stephen through Jacob, ‘we were contemplating a band of apes, Barbary apes, and they persecuting a young and foolish leopard, leaping from branch to branch and pelting it, gibbering and barking, until the animal fairly ran from them in open country.’
‘Well, you have been able to study animals, I find,’ said Omar. ‘I am glad of it: there are not so many apes about, in these degenerate days. But come and wash your hands and we will eat at once, to digest before it is time to leave. Tell me, how did you find the gun?’
‘I have never fired with a better,’ said Stephen. ‘I believe that in a good light on a windless day, I could hit an egg at two hundred and fifty paces. It is a beautiful gun.’
The Dey laughed with pleasure. ‘That is what Sir Smith said about my sword,’ he observed. Three men brought three basins; they washed their hands, and the Dey went on, ‘Now let us sit down, and while we eat I will tell you about Sir Smith. You remember the siege of Acre, of course? Yes: well, on the fifty-second day of the siege, when reinforcements under Hassan Bey were just in sight, Bonaparte’s artillery increased its fire enormously, and before dawn his infantry attacked, thrusting into the breach across the dry moat, half-choked with fallen battlements, and there was furious hand-to-hand fighting on each side of the pile of ruins. Sir Smith was with us together with close on a thousand seamen and Marines from his ships, and they were in the thick of the fight. My uncle Djezzar Pasha was sitting on a rock a little way behind the battle, handing out musket cartridges and rewarding men who brought him an enemy’s head, when suddenly it came to him that if Sir Smith were killed his men would turn and all would be lost. As I brought him a head he told me to require the English officer to withdraw and he came down with me to compel him to do so, taking him by the shoulder. And while he was held, a Frenchman, breaking through the press, cut at him. I parried the blow and with my backhand took the man’s head clean off his shoulders. Between us we led Sir Smith back to my uncle’s station, and it was as he sat down that he took my hand, and pointing to my scimitar, said, “It is a beautiful sword”. But come, let us eat: tepid mutton is worse than a luke-warm girl.’
‘I had not notion that Sir Sidney spoke Turkish,’ said Stephen aside to Jacob, while Omar was tearing the sheep apart.
‘He was in Constantinople with his brother Sir Spencer, the minister; indeed I believe they were joint-ministers.’
When the lamb was no more than a heap of well-cleaned bones, and when Omar, his chief huntsman and the two guests had eaten cakes made of dried figs and dates, moistened with honey and followed by coffee, and when the glow of the moon was just beginning to tinge the sky behind the mountain, the Dey stood up, uttered a formal prayer, and called for bowls of blood. ‘Goat, not swine,’ he said emphatically, patting Stephen’s shoulder to encourage him: and so, armed and red-footed, they set off, first climbing from the dell, then dropping by Wednesday’s path to the stream and its almost bare, well-trodden bank. By now Stephen’s eyes were accustomed to the dimness and he might have been walking along a broad highway, with Omar Pasha close before him. For so big a man he moved with an easy, supple pace, making barely a sound: twice he stopped, listening and as it were taking the scent of the air like a dog. He never spoke, but sometimes he turned his head, when the gleam of his teeth could be seen in his beard. He would have been the very model of a hunter, thought Stephen, with his silent tread and his subfusc clothes, but for the fact that as the rising moon shed an even greater light through the trees so it shone on the steel of the rifle slung over his shoulder. Stephen’s was under his light cloak, its butt far down below his knee: he had lived so long in cold, wet countries that the duty of keeping his powder dry had assumed religious proportions. He was thinking of other expeditions by night for the dawn-fighting and at the same time reflecting with pleasure that he was keeping up without much effort, though the six-foot Dey had a much longer stride, when Omar stopped, looked round, and pointing to a mass of bare rock emerging from the trees he whispered, ‘Ibn Haukal.’ Stephen nodded, and with infinite precaution they crept up to the small, low-ceilinged cave. With infinite precaution, but even so Omar, the leader, dislodged a little heap of shale that rattled down to the path, a very small but very shocking avalanche. They were still standing motionless when a very small-eared owl, known to Stephen from his childhood by the name of gloc, Athena’s owl, uttered its modest song, ‘Tyu, tyu’, answered almost at once by another, a quarter of a mile away. ‘Tyu, tyu.’
Omar, having listened very attentively indeed for other sounds and hearing none, moved on, bent double, into the cave. They could not stand upright, of course, but the front, opening on to the stream, was quite wide enough for two and they sat comfortably, their guns across their knees, gazing down at a path that grew more and more distinct as the great moon, just beyond the full, mounted higher and higher in the sky, putting out the stars.
The air was warm and most uncommonly still, and Stephen heard a pair of nightjars churring away in their unchanging voice as they wheeled about pursuing moths far down, perhaps almost as far off as the Shatt. Brighter and brighter still, and the path just beneath, somewhat constricted by Ibn Haukal’s crag, was strikingly clear, once Omar had very gently cut away some of the overhanging shrub: and on this path they saw a hyena, most distinctly a striped hyena, carefully working out a line, like a hound - their own line, in fact, the scent of their bloody shoes. And where they had turned it paused, uttered its habitual shrieking howl (Stephen noticed that its mane rose as it did so) and ran straight up into the cave. For- a moment it stood transfixed in the entrance, then turned and fled, its mad laugh echoing from one side of the valley to the other. Omar neither moved nor spoke:
