"Oh, the bill. Yes, well, let's not get excited. I mean, it won't help, now, will it?"
And the proprietor proceeded to become very excited indeed. His cries of anguish and indignation carried to the veranda where a dozen persons were already beginning the daily fight against heat and thirst. They crowded into the lobby to watch with interest.
Ten days you owe. Nearly one hundred rupees."
"Yes, it's jolly unfortunate, I know." Sebastian was grinning desperately, when a new voice added itself to the uproar.
"Now just hold on a shake." Together Sebastian and the Hindu turned to the big red-faced, middle-aged man with the pleasantly mixed American and Irish accent. "Did I hear you called Mr. Oldsmith?"
"That is correct, sir. Sebastian knew instinctively that here was an ally.
"An unusual name. You wouldn't be related to Mister Francis Oldsmith, wool merchant of Liverpool, England?"
Flynn O'Flynn enquired politely. He had perused Sebastian's letters of introduction passed on to him by Rachid El Keb.
"Good Lord!" Sebastian cried with joy. "Do you know my Pater?"
"Do I know Francis Oldsmith?" Flynn laughed easily, and then checked himself His acquaintance was limited to the letterheads. "Well, I don't exactly know him person to person, you understand, but I think I can say I know of him.
Used to be in the wool business myself once. "Flynn turned genially to the hotel proprietor and breathed on him a mixture of gin fumes and good-fellowship. "One hundred rupees was the sum you mentioned."
"That's the sum, Mr. O'Flynn." The proprietor was easily soothed.
"Mr. Oldsmith and I will be having a drink on the veranda. You can bring the receipt to us there." Flynn placed two sovereigns on the counter; sovereigns that had so recently reposed beneath Sebastian's mattress.
With his boots propped on the low veranda wall, Sebastian regarded the harbour over the rim of his glass. Sebastian was not a drinking man but in view of Flynn O'Flynn's guardianship he could not be churlish and refuse hospitality.
The number of craft in the bay suddenly multiplied miraculously before his eyes. Where a moment before one stubby little dhow had been tacking in through the entrance, there were now three identical boats sailing in formation. Sebastian closed one eye and by focusing determinedly, he reduced the three back to one. Mildly elated with his success, he turned his attention to his new friend and business partner who had pressed such large quantities of gin upon him.
"Mr. O'Flynn," he said with deliberation, slurring the words slightly.
"Forget that mister, Bassie, call me Flynn. just plain Flynn, the same as in gin."
"Flynn," said Sebastian. "There isn't anything well, there isn't anything funny about this?"
"How do you mean funny, boy?"
"I mean" and Sebastian blushed slightly. "There isn't anything illegal, is there?"
"Bassie." Flynn shook his head sorrowfully. "What do you take me for, Bassie? You think I'm a crook or something, boy?"
oh, no, of course not, Flynn," and Sebastian blushed a shade deeper. "I just thought well, all these elephants we're going to shoot. They must belong to somebody. Aren't they German elephants?"
"Bassie, I want to show you something." Flynn set down his glass and groping in the inside pocket of his wilted tropical suit, he produced an envelope. "Read that, boy!"
The address at the head of the sheet of cheap notepaper was "The Kaiserh of Berlin. Dated June 10, 191"-, and the body of the letter read:
Dear Mr. Flynn O'Flynn, I am worried about all those elephants down in the Rufiji basin eating up all the grass and smashing up all the trees and things, so if you've got time, would you go down there and shoot some of them as they're eating up all the grass and smashing up all the trees and things.
Yours sincerely, Kaiser Willem 111.
Emperor of Germany.
A vague uneasiness formed through the clouds of gin in Sebastian's skull. "Why did he write to you?"
"Because he knows I'm the best goddamned elephant hunter in the world."
"You'd expect him to use better English, wouldn't you?"
Sebastian murmured.
"What's wrong with his English?" Flynn demanded truculently. He had spent some time in composing the letter.
"Well, I mean that bit about eating up all the grass he said that twice."
"Well, you got to remember he's a German. They don't write English too good."
"Of course! I hadn't thought of that." Sebastian looked relieved and lifted his glass. "Well, good hunting!"
"I'll drink to that," and Flynn emptied his glass.
Sebastian stood with both hands gripping the wooden rail of the dhow and stared out across a dozen miles of water at the loom of the African mainland. The monsoon wind had ruffled the sea to a dark indigo and it flipped spray from the white-caps into Sebastian's face.
Overlaying the clean salt of the ocean was the taint of the mangrove swamps, an evil smell as though an animal had led in its own cage. Sebastian sniffed it with distaste as he searched the low, green line of the coast for the entrance to the maze of the Rufiji delta.
Frowning, he tried to reconstruct the Admiralty chart in his mind. The Rufiji river came to the sea through a dozen channels spread over forty miles, and in doing so, carved fifty, maybe a hundred, islands out of the mainland.
Tidal water washed fifteen miles upstream, past the mangroves to where the vast grass swampland began. It was there in the swampland that the elephant herds had taken shelter from the guns and arrows of the ivory hunters, protected by Imperial decree and by a formidable terrain.
The murderous-looking ruffian who captained the dhow uttered a string of sing-song orders, and Sebastian turned to watch the complicated manoeuvre of tacking the ungainly craft. Half-naked seamen dropped out of the rigging like over-ripe brown fruit and swarmed around the sixty-foot teak boom. Bare feet padding on the filthy deck, they ran the boom back and forward again. The dhow creaked like an old man with arthritis, came round wearily on to the wind, and butted its nose in towards the land. The new motion, combined with the swamp smell and the smell of freshly-stirred bilges, moved something deep within Sebastian. His grip upon the rail increased, and new sweat popped out like little blisters on his brow. He leaned forward, and, to shouts of encouragement from the crew, made another sacrifice to the sea gods. He was still draped worshipfully across the rail as the dhow wallowed and slid in the turbulent waters of the entrance, and then passed into the calm of the southernmost channel of the Rufiji basin.
Four days later, Sebastian sat cross-legged with the dhow captain on a thick Bokhara carpet spread upon the deck, and they explained to each other in sign language that neither of them had the vaguest idea where they were. The dhow was anchored in a narrow water-way hemmed in by the twisted and deformed trunks of the mangroves. The sensation of being lost was not new to Sebastian and he accepted it with resignation" but the dhow captain, who could run from Aden to Calcutta and back to Zanzibar with the certainty of a man visiting his own outhouse, was not so stoical. He lifted his eyes to the heavens and called upon Allah to intercede with the djinn who guarded this stinking labyrinth, who made the waters flow in strange, unnatural ways, who changed the shape of each island, and thrust mud banks in their path. Driven on by his own eloquence, he leapt to the rail and screamed defiance into the brooding mangroves until flocks of this rose and milled in the heat mists above the dhow. Then he flung himself down on the carpet and fixed Sebastian with a stare of sullen malevolence.