“Leaving a passenger behind?”
The agent gave a tactful but forbearing cough. He said, “But Captain… it isn’t a passenger you’re leaving behind. It’s a body. In any case, the Line could hardly be expected to hold the ship indefinitely for one passenger even if we hadn’t had this report. The matter must be left to us — the shore-side people on the spot — to deal with now. As it is, London will do all the notifying of next-of-kin and so on, and they want you to land his effects at Aden for transit home in the next ship coming through, so as not to delay you further here.”
Sir Donald threw up his arms helplessly. The one consolation was that Shaw’s own department was certainly in the picture by now and they would be doing all that was necessary behind the scenes. They hadn’t contacted him or told him to remain in Port Said, hadn’t given him any guidance at all. So in the meantime he could only obey his orders from the Line; it wasn’t up to him to approach the Embassy.
A few hours later the Egyptian armed guard was withdrawn from the gangway and the accommodation-ladder was raised and stowed, the ‘snake’ pontoon was slacked away and hauled inshore. Once again the pilot boarded and Sir Donald Mackinnon climbed slowly up to his bridge. The passenger decks buzzed with rumours. Some minutes later the signal flashed to tell the New South Wales to take up her station for leading the convoy southwards for Suez. Sir Donald gave a quiet order to his officer-of-the-watch and the berthing telegraphs clanged over. Men on the fo’c’sle heaved in on the slip-wire, bringing it home from the ring of the buoy, and a moment later the Captain put his main engines dead slow astern and came away from his moorings.
“Stop engines… port twenty… slow ahead together.”
The New South Wales moved her vast bulk, headed for the canal entrance. Behind her, the second ship in the line began moving into station. As the blaze of Port Said’s lights slid slow and quiet from view along the liner’s side, the bos’n, hissing between his teeth and looking vicious, for he had heard about what had happened to one of the passengers — and a passenger who was a particularly decent bloke who’d taken the trouble to talk to him once or twice about his job— directed a fire-hose down on to the last of the bum-boats which, with lines out to the ship’s rails so that trade could be carried on to the very last moment, were being carried along with the vessel. Shrieks and wails came up, fists were brandished, oaths hurled to the heights. The steady stream of water flushed full force into the boats, and then the occupants cut their lines and drifted rapidly astern.
It wasn’t only the bos’n, of course, who had heard by now about Shaw. Every one in the ship, as the liner steamed on into the canal, knew that a passenger was being left behind dead. And this, the second tragedy to happen within so short a time, cast a further blight over the great vessel, increased the feeling of uncertainty and tenseness, the feeling that now they could never be sure what might happen next. Judith was terribly upset. She’d got to like Esmonde Shaw so much in those few short days from Naples and now the ship felt strangely empty without him. Somehow she couldn’t believe he’d really gone, that there wasn’t some other explanation of all this; so certain had she felt that there was indeed much more behind it, in all the circumstances, that during the long day’s vigil she had spoken to the Captain, revealing her own part in what was going on. But the Captain, though he’d arranged for an unobtrusive watch to be placed on the girl, had been powerless to do anything further in a matter of this kind.
As they steamed through the muddy canal water, decks towering above the green, cultivated ribbons of the banks which stretched away into desert darkness, Judith, not wanting either to sleep yet or to talk to anyone, leaned over the rail in the quietest spot she could find. As she stood there, Sigurd Andersson strolled past, gave her a quick look, hesitated, passed on and went below. She remembered that Esmonde Shaw had warned her to keep out of his way, and while he was near she felt a little shiver of distate for the heavy, pasty man. He was, she thought, rather like a big fat slug that had crawled from some fetid hole. According to Shaw, that man might be Karstad… she wondered how much he had had to do with what had happened in Port Said. Again she remembered with a pang her father’s taut, nervy anger after Karstad had called to see him.
The liner anchored later on in the Great Bitter Lake to allow the northbound convoy to pass; and it was nearly noon before they raised the canal-side bungalows of Port Tewfik and came sliding down the last straight stretch of waterway between green gardens and white buildings, slid down into Suez Roads and the Gulf of Suez, which later, after Ras Mohammed had been left away to port, would carry them on into the cruel, searing heat of the Red Sea proper, for Aden and the Gates of Hell. Briefly the ship stopped engines in the Roads and dropped the pilot as the cutter came fast off shore to pick him up from the jacob’s-ladder dangling from the gunport door. And then she gathered way, pushed the flat, shimmering blue waters aside as her engines came up to Full Away, heading out and south for Aden.
There was a smile hovering on the lips of Sigurd Andersson as he looked out astern from the deck just abaft the veranda bar, and watched Egypt fade into the gathering heat-haze which shimmered up into a metallic sky. His brain was full of happy thoughts winging on to a spot in the ocean beyond Ceylon. But he still had one more thing to do, just in case there was a slip, and it would be just as well to do it now. Casually Andersson sauntered away, flicked his cigar-butt into a deck ashbox, thrust his flabby white hands into the pockets of his immaculate sharkskin trousers.
He made his way down into the ship towards the engineer’s alleyway. Walking along amid a pervading smell of grease and oil and heat, he knocked at one of the cabin doors.
Black dots had been flying, circling in the dawn air above Solli, above the tall tower.
Slowly, twistingly, they had come lower. Shaw heard the fleshcreeping whirr of wings, the beat and flap of approaching tearing death. He was carrion; and the carrion birds were coming with their sharp beaks, the beaks built by nature for ripping flesh, and with their appropriately funereal black bodies.
He could do nothing but wait for the end now.
Nothing, that was, except think. And think back, except when he could force his reeling mind away from it, to the dreadful journey to this stinking, bone-and-flesh-filled Tower of Silence. How first of all they’d stripped him and stained his body with the juice of berries so that the locals wouldn’t become suspicious, as they might if a white man were to be deposited in their precious tower; how he had then been dressed in a kind of white sheet-like affair, no doubt an Arab, or more probably an Indian, shroud. How after that they had carried him to a low, open cart and, with the policemen behind like ghoulish mourners, had dragged him through the narrow street to the ghastly charnel-house where now he lay. Shaw had been able to hear the false weeping and wailing of the followers, the last polite, formal respects being paid, traditionally, to the dead. And then they had come to this place, and he had been lifted to the heights, the fresh, the newest meal to be left where it was handiest for the birds; and then the bearers had gone away and he had been alone.
The vultures, interrupted in a current meal, had been hovering even then. They didn’t come down while live men stayed there, but as soon as Shaw had been left and the others had gone, the first bird had flapped down, squawking, and had settled on his chest. The thing stood there and looked at him keenly, critically, flapping its wings from time to time as though doing a balancing act. It had lurched a little, and then it had taken its first exploratory peck at Shaw’s cheek.