This, he felt, was getting really serious.
He tried to argue, but it was quite useless; and the policemen wasted no time in listening anyway. Two of them seized Shaw by the arms while the third stuck a gun in his back, and they yelled at him in their own language as they dragged him away through the crowd, clearing a gangway by shouldering and pushing and lashing out with short, heavy sticks. As the mob thinned out Shaw found he was being taken to a police patrol car.
When they reached it the door was thrown open by the driver and he was bundled in.
Two policemen got in on either side of him, the third got in the front. One of the men, releasing an arm, frisked Shaw, jerked his gun from its holster and passed it to the man in front. The driver let in his clutch and they drew away. Shaw, breathing heavily, furiously, demanded to know what they intended doing. He snapped, speaking as well as he could in Arabic:
“I don’t propose being held in a police post while you frame a charge. I’m a British subject and I’m sailing in the New South Wales at midnight. I can prove—”
He broke off short with an involuntary gasp of pain as a fist smashed into his mouth. One of the men laughed, said in English: “That will not be necessary, Commander Shaw. We are quite prepared to believe what we already know.”
Shaw’s heart thumped; he scarcely noticed the trickle of blood down his chin. He asked, “What do you mean — and how do you know who I am, anyway?”
“Never mind. It is enough that we do know.”
“But I—”
The man let go Shaw’s arm and his elbow came back viciously, took Shaw in the ribs. He winced, and then doubled up as the elbow was followed by a fist. The man hissed, “Quiet. You are not catching the New South Wales or any other liner. And you are not going to a police station.”
“Where am I going then?” Shaw gasped the words out, the pain in his side snatching at his breath.
“That you will see in due course.”
Shaw’s brain whirled. Through the window, he could see the still-busy streets, the lights flowing past. People gaped in at the car as it slowed at corners, but they didn’t appear concerned about the bloody-faced man in the back. This was Egypt, not London, and Shaw was an Englishman… He tried to wrench his arms free, a gun-butt came down on his head with a crack and he passed out, slumped forward between the two men.
The car, going fast now, headed out of Port Said, making southward. One of the policemen searched through Shaw’s pockets, but apparently without result.
At eleven forty-five the canal pilot boarded the New South Wales and hands mustered on the fo’c’sle, stood by to let go the last lines from the buoy and move through the canal for Suez. And the liner’s Staff Commander climbed up to the Captain’s day-cabin, knocked and went in.
Cap under arm, he reported to Sir Donald Mackinnon.
“Ship ready to proceed, sir, but there’s a passenger adrift.” He added significantly, “It’s Commander Shaw, sir.”
“Shaw?” Sir Donald spoke sharply, jerked upright in his chair. “Dammit, Stanford! Him of all people. Any idea what’s keeping him?”
“No, sir. I didn’t see him before he went ashore. That girl — Miss Dangan, he'd got pretty friendly with her and she was waiting about at the head of the ladder. She said he told her he was going ashore, but he didn’t say where or what for. In fact he told her it was none of her business when she asked.”
“Damn and blast.” The Captain got to his feet, walked up and down the cabin, hands clasped behind his back, white eyebrows drawn together. He was leading the convoy through, should be under way in fifteen minutes. He snapped, “We can’t go through without Shaw. With Gresham gone too, that’s leaves us with no senior man in charge of that ruddy crate.”
“I know, sir.” Stanford hesitated. “Do you think this has anything directly to do with the cargo?”
“How the hell do I know! Anything can happen in Port Said these days.” The Captain looked at his watch. “Stanford, get hold of the agent and tell him I want to see him again at once. Let me know in fifteen minutes whether Shaw’s back or not — if he isn’t, I’ll have to hold the ship and miss the convoy.”
At the end of the fifteen minutes the Staff Commander reported no sign of Shaw. The pilot went ashore again and the liner was re-secured to the buoy. The hands were fallen-out from stations. The rumours began among passengers and crew. Few people had as yet gone to bed, and the atmosphere in the ship seemed to become more tense than ever.
Shaw had recovered consciousness after the police car had left Port Said behind and was still heading south. Opening his eyes, feeling sick and groggy, his hair stiff with caked blood, he looked out at sand and sand and more sand rushing into the headlights. He was evidently on the fringe of the desert. There was scarcely anything to be seen except an apology for a roadway, and the odd palm-tree. Occasionally a nocturnal Arab on a camel. A petrol can abandoned by the roadside among other garbage, and the sand. And the dust.
Shaw’s throat was dry, parched, painful. He would have given his soul for a drink of water to ease away the sandy grit which filled his mouth as the car drove clouds of the muck into the air, sent it swirling up all around so that they were moving along enveloped in a sand-storm of their own. This road had never been meant for anything that went so fast as this car. And despite the night air the car was hot. Even the policemen seemed to be feeling the effects of that drive. Their jacket collars were loosened, they sweated freely. There was a smell of hashish, which was a further irritant to Shaw. But they were still alert enough, and they still held his arms tightly, though they took no apparent notice of him when he stirred. A little later when the throbbing in his head had receded somewhat, he asked, for the second time:
“Where are you taking me?”
The man who spoke English laughed shortly. He said, “What does that matter? You are going to die. What does it matter where it is that you die?”
Shaw said, “Call it curiosity.”
The man shrugged. “Mere morbidity. But I shall tell you, as you wish it. You are going to the oasis of Solli, between Zagazig and Ismailia.”
There was a kind of gloating in his tone. Shaw said simply, “Oh. Thanks very much.”
The man looked at him oddly. He asked, “You have not, perhaps, heard of the oasis of Solli?”
“Never. Should I have done?”
“But yes… The man spoke quickly in his own language and then the two policemen exchanged looks over Shaw’s head. They laughed. The driver and the third policeman joined in as well. The four of them laughed loud and long. Then the English-speaker simmered down. Wiping his streaming face with a filthy handkerchief, he gasped: “You have not heard of the oasis of Solli! Ah, my friend, you will find out soon! Meanwhile it is better you do not know, perhaps. It is a fact that to look forward in ignorance is more fun, yes?”
It wasn’t so very long after that when the car drove in its surround of moving dust and sand, past a handful of nomad tents and a curious high tower standing out against the moon, into Solli. The car’s lights showed it as a dirty-looking place, with white-walled, single storey, shack-like buildings fringing a rutted street littered with the refuse from the habitations. There were many camels, and dark-skinned Arabs, men and women who came to their doorways to stare curiously at the police car as it went along the street; and other people, different people, people who seemed to belong to a strange race. To Shaw, they had more the look of India than of Egypt. The car turned off into a small courtyard and, out of sight now from the road, backed up until it was hard alongside a low doorway leading into a pitch-black room with a hint of moonlight in one corner…