"It's close on it, though."
"If it was lead—and I can figure lead better 'n gold somehow—I'd say it would catch five. And wif 'em 'Gyptians caying de golden bowl, a good ton of silver."
"That's no trifle, either."
"Cap'n, you reckon that's as much as one of 'em English lawds has got?"
"Some of them have much more—in land and money—but some not as much."
"I heard 'em talk about a miUion dollars. I don't know what 'at is. Would de gold bring a million dollars?"
"Twice that much—maybe three or four times—when we can get it into a Christian port, but that part's not going to be easy. About twenty-five baggage camels could get it to the coast if we could stay clear of robbers; then it would have to be loaded on Arab dhows. A good many are pirates already, and almost all would turn pirate on a moment's notice. The nearest Christian port that can be reached from the Red Sea is Cape Town in South Africa—several weeks' sail."
"Then we got to move it on the sly, somehow. We got to make out like it's something else'n gold."
"When I was a boy, we painted copper pennies with quicksilver and tried to pass them as half-dollars. But we never fooled anyone."
Jim laughed at that—his deep-throated laugh that was one of the joys of my life, and my heart was suddenly Hght. Jim and I had found a king's treasure only yesterday. There might be a third as much gold as was fetched to King Solomon every year from the mines of Ophir—six hundred and some talents of fifty-eight pounds each—and quite possibly the gold-rich northern Sudan was itself Ophir, for some regions of it still bore the name of Aphar. If we let ourselves be saddened by the hard problem of transporting it to a Christian port, we had been ill-picked to find it. Fate, having dealt with us so terribly or splendidly since we were young, deserved better of us than this.
For a fortnight Jim and I worked happily underground, separating gold and silver from the wood or stone it had adorned and piling it up for removal. The riddle of its shipment remained opaque as ever. Then an incident of the camp cast the first beam of light.
Another patriarchal family of shepherds had paid us a visit, their band including a small Negro boy, probably a slave, whom they treated as one of their own blood. Apparently he had never seen an elephant tusk at close range, and on looking at one of our growing pile, he was surprised to find that it had a hollow end. This hollow became smaller throughout almost half of the tusk's length, but the tusk was a large one, and he was able to insert his whole arm. Still unable to hit bottom of the curious cavity, he dropped in a handful of stones.
As soon as our visitors had gone, 1 poured water into various tusks from a pot containing a half-gallon. The larger tusks took the whole amount and more, tusks as small as forty-pounders would hold a quart.
Gold was eighteen times heavier than water. Since a pint of water was a pound the world around, a quart of gold weighed thirty-six pounds. Ivory varied greatly in density and hardness: big tusks that looked about the same size often varied twenty pounds in weight. An ivory buyer would of course investigate a tusk unusually heavy for its size; a porter or a dock hand would curse and ask no questions.
I wondered where I could buy five hundred tusks of mature bulls.
On the following day Jim, Isabel, and I, with a few Tuareg who wished to go for entertainment, rode twenty miles across the plain to Takuba's kraals. We had not the shghtest compunction in leaving several tons of treasure in easy reach of Isabel's followers and clansmen; their well-tested loyalty to her was hardly more of a restraining force than their natural reluctance to go underground and, strange as it might seem, their diminished interest in the hoard now that the demons guarding it had met defeat. The Tuareg must either work hard or play hard or ride hard. They could not endure inactivity for very long.
Isabel addressed Takuba in their native tongue and gave me his reply.
"Takuba says that about three hundred miles south of here, where the Blue Nile joins the White Nile, the land juts out into the waters in the shape of an elephant's trunk, and thus it is called Khartoum, which means an elephant's trunk in the language of the people living in that country. Every year a great fair is held there. This year it will begin on a new moon following the next new moon, and will last for two moons. There will come down from his capital, Sennar, on the Blue Nile, Akbar, who is king of the Fung, the mightiest of the tribes, who trace their descent from the Juhayna Arabs. And since he is overlord of the Sudan, he takes a tax from all goods bought and sold, but also he keeps out robbers. It is at this fair that the lesser kings sell their stores of ivory as well as slaves, which are bought by traders coming up the river from Egypt, or down the Blue Nile from Ethiopia, or down the White Nile from the Country of the Naked People; these traders are not blacks but Arabs, some of them from Mombasa and some from Zanzibar. And there is one trader, whose name is Kamel Malik, who Lives in a tent as fine as Akbar's and will buy or sell a thousand slaves or ten thousand tusks without spitting once."
Far away in the camps of the Beni Kabir I had heard of Kamel Malik of Mombasa, the king of the traders.
"What money is used for this buying and selling?" I asked. "It can't be shells on a string!"
"Nor cows or sheep or camels," Isabel replied with some wonder when she had talked to Takuba, "but any silver money is good, as are also bars of silver to the weight of two hundred rupees, of which Kamel Malik keeps a great store."
Two hundred rupees equaled twenty English pounds—hence a bar of silver weighing about five pounds avoirdupois.
"Ask Takuba if any gold is used in buying and selling."
"Takuba says that gold is sometimes brought from the Beni Shangul, which is a land of mighty mountains far up the Blue Nile," Isabel reported shortly. "It comes in bars or in skin sacks of golden pebbles and dust, and it is told that men from afar will buy it at ten times its weight in silver, but this Takuba cannot believe."
This was good luck of no surprising sort, provided that Takuba had some of the silver bars in store and that he would lend me one. Being subject to Simba, king of the Beni Amer, he took care not to ask what I wanted of it or why I needed a pan or pot of cast iron. This article was not on the premises. I told Isabel of the stumbling block, for she liked to share in my small as well as big affairs here in Africa. She conversed with Takuba and quickly found the answer.
"The silversmiths of Agades melt silver, not in an iron pan, but in an earthen jug, Takuba thinks you need a round bowl, made of well-baked clay, which he can have made for you at the village. Around the top will run a band of wrought iron, from which three strong spikes stand out. With the bowl will come three strong pipes of wrought iron to fit over the spikes. Thereby the bowl may be lifted even if the milk you pour from it is as heavy as melted lead."
"Such a bowl would exactly fit my needs. Ask him also to buy a dozen ax heads of the hardest kind, and a dozen hammer heads as heavy as a man may swing, and if he can get us three or four anvils, they will be most welcome. All this will cost several bars of silver or a drove of cattle. Tell Takuba that I will repay him in due course, and that I am his protected."
Our next task was to build a blacksmith's forge, which did not tax us greatly, since we had an abundance of brick and the wherewithal to make a big pair of bellows. This we set up near camp, proposing to tell any innocent shepherds who came by that we used it for melting lead and casting bullets; in thickets near at hand we dug pits for quick concealment of more questionable gear. The obtaining of charcoal was an easy chore. The natives made it by leaving a vent in a stack of wood burned under a covering of moist earth. The product, if heated long enough, was almost pure carbon.