Then one midday they spied a hill with a single Roman column rising out of its top, and a city jumbled about its base. “It looks as if a movement of the earth has shaken the whole city down into rubble,” Jack said, but the rais said that Alexandria always looked that way, and pointed to the fortifications as proof. Indeed a square-sided stone castle rose from the middle of the harbor, at the end of a broad causeway; it seemed orderly and showed no signs of damage. One or two of the faster French ships had already dropped anchor under the shelter of its guns. Gazing for a few moments through a borrowed spyglass, Jack could see men in periwigs going to and fro in longboats, parleying with the customs officials, who here as in Algiers were all black-clad Jews.
“The French pay three percent-merchants of other nations pay twenty,” Monsieur Arlanc commented, “probably thanks to the machinations of your Investor, and of other great Frenchmen.” Since his being rescued from the galley, he had been accepted as a sort of advisor to the Cabal.
“Once the Turks see how the French fleet was mangled by the Dutch, perhaps they’ll change their policy,” van Hoek said.
“Not if the Duc d’Arcachon bribes them with a galleot-load of gold bars,” Jack put in.
Most of the French fleet, including Meteore, set their courses direct for the harbor of Alexandria proper. Nasr al-Ghurab, however, pointed them straight up the coast; raised all the sail he could; and put the galeriens to work, driving them at a blazing speed of nine knots for two hours. This brought them to a cusp of land called Abu Qir. From here Alexandria was still plainly visible through dust and heat-waves, and presumably the reverse was true; no doubt some French officer had watched every oar-stroke through a spyglass.
There was no city at Abu Qir, other than a few huts of Arab fishermen surrounded by spindly racks where they put fish out to dry in the sun. But there was a solid Turkish fort with many guns, and a customs house below it, having its own pier. Moseh and Dappa went in using the skiff while the rais and the others managed the ticklish job of bringing the galleot alongside the pier. Out of the customs house came the Jew who was in charge of the place, followed by Moseh, Dappa, and a couple of younger Jews-his sons-who carried sticks of red wax, bottles of ink, and other necessaries. The Jew was speaking a queer kind of Spanish to Moseh. He spent a couple of hours going through the hold, putting a customs-seal on each of the wooden crates without actually inspecting them, and without exacting any duties-this, of course, had all been pre-arranged on the Turkish side, by the Pasha working through his contacts in Egypt. This customs house at Abu Qir was the only one in the Ottoman Empire, or the world for that matter, where they could have done it.
The inspector made it clear to everyone within earshot that he was not happy with any part of the arrangement, but he did his part and departed without creating any obstructions or demanding any baksheesh above and beyond what he was getting anyway: a purse of pieces of eight, handed to him by Nasr al-Ghurab after the “inspection” was complete.
This inspector turned out to be a hospitable soul, who importuned Moseh to come in and share an evening meal-making the reasonable assumption that the galleot would remain tied up to his pier all night. And indeed this would have been easiest. But a French sloop-of-war had been dispatched from Alexandria and was halfway to them now, her triangular sail apricot-colored in the late afternoon sun, and no one liked the looks of that. Furthermore, according to this Jew, a fine high-road called the Canopic Way joined Alexandria to Abu Qir, and riders on good horses could easily make the trip in a couple of hours. Having no particular desire to be trapped between the French sloop and a hypothetical squadron of French night-riders, Nasr al-Ghurab ordered the galleot to put to sea about an hour before sunset. Under other conditions this would have been most unwise. But the current of the Nile would tend to push them away from the land, and according to the weather-glass that van Hoek had improvised from a glass tube and a flask of quicksilver, the skies would be clear for at least another day. So they abandoned themselves to the waves, and spent an uneasy night throwing the sounding-lead over the side and hauling it in again, over and over and over, lest they run aground in the Nile’s shifting sands.
When the sun rose upon one tired and irritable Cabal, they found themselves in the center of a vast half-moon-shaped bay, contained between the headland of Abu Qir to the southwest, and a huge sand-spit to the northeast, some twenty miles farther along the coast from Abu Qir. This bay had no distinct shore, but rather smeared away into mud-flats that extended for many miles inland before they became worthy of supporting trees, crops, and buildings. It soon became plain that the galleot had been drifting in a lazy orbit, a vast whorl of current driven by the Nile. For according to the rais, the sand-spit to the northeast had been constructed, one grain of silt at a time, by the Rosetta Mouth, which was bedded in it somewhere. And when the sun bubbled up from the horizon and shone as a red disk through the haze of floury dust sighing down from the Sahara, it silhouetted a skyline of mosque-domes and minarets, deep among those mud-flats, which was the city of Rosetta itself.
The morning’s peace was then broken by wailing and sobbing from the head of the galleot. Jack went forward to find Vrej Esphahnian kneeling on the heavy timber that had once supported the ram. The Armenian was now doing some ramming of his own, repeatedly butting his forehead against the timber and clawing at his scalp until blood showed. He did not appear to hear anything Jack said to him. So Jack lingered until he was certain that Vrej did not intend to hurl himself into the bay, and then returned to the quarterdeck, where tactics were being discussed.
As soon as it had grown light enough to see, they had turned the galley northwards and begun rowing out of this bay. Rosetta (or Rashid, as al-Ghurab called it) had been close enough that they’d heard the city’s muezzins wailing at the break of dawn. But the rais explained that to reach the city they would have to go several miles north to the tip of the bar, and find their way in at the river-mouth, then work upriver for an hour or two.
It was not long before the French sloop came into view; she had sailed out into deeper waters for the night and was now patrolling off the Rosetta Mouth. Fortunately a wind came up from the southwest, and by raising some canvas the galleot was able to run before it, overshooting the river-mouth and making excellent speed towards the east-as if she intended to go in at the Damietta Mouth, a hundred miles away, or to break loose altogether and make a run for some other port. The sloop’s skipper had no choice but to bite down hard on that bait, and to chase them downwind. When she had drawn abeam of the galleot, and begun to converge toward them, al-Ghurab struck the canvas, wheeled about, and set the oar-slaves to work rowing upwind. The sloop came about in response. But lacking oars, she could only work upwind by tacking, and so she had no hope of keeping pace with the galleot. The gap between the two vessels was about half a mile to begin with, and grew steadily as they rowed towards the snarl of interlocking and ingrown sand-bars that guarded the Nile’s Rosetta Mouth.
These maneuvers took up half the day, which gave Vrej Esphahnian time to calm down. When he seemed capable of speech again, Jack brought him a cup and a wineskin, and sat with him in the bow-now the least foul-smelling part of the ship, as they were working into the wind.
“Forgive my weakness,” said Vrej in a hoarse voice. “When I saw Rosetta, I could think only of the tales my father told me, of how he passed through that place with his boat-load of coffee. He had nursed that boat through countless narrow seas and straits, canals and river-courses, and when he passed through customs at Rosetta and sailed down to the river’s mouth, suddenly the vast Mediterranean opened up before him: to some, an emblem of terror and harbinger of wild storms, but to him a vista of freedom of opportunity. From there he sailed direct to Marseille and-”