But at the time Jack took little notice of this ambience and concentrated on the matter of the lock and the chain almost as intently as Gerard. At the moment that the galley pulled Gerard under water he still had not got the lock open, and Jack began to think his plan had failed. The Turk who sat in the aisle was pulled under crying "Allahu Akbar!" and then the man who sat next to Monsieur Arlanc went down intoning "Father into your hands I commend my spirit." Then it came to the point where Monsieur Arlanc's face was only visible in the troughs of the waves. But then the head of Gerard re-appeared, followed by that of the Turk; they were clambering uphill, using the galley as a ladder even as it slid deeper. Gerard reached a temporarily secure place, turned around, hefted the opened padlock in one hand, and flung it at Jack's head. Jack ducked it and laughed. "There is your redemption, English!" screamed Gerard, weeping with rage.
NOW THEY MADE direct for the Mouths of the Nile, sailing by day and rowing by night. Every few hours they sighted remnant ships of the French fleet, now scattered across fifty miles. Several times they saw Météore, which had survived the battle with the amputation of her mizzenmast, and she signalled to them with mirror-flashes.
"A group of two, then a group of three," said Nasr al-Ghuráb.
"According to the Plan, this is a signal that we are to curtail the voyage, and put in at Alexandria instead of going on to Abu Qir," Moseh said.
Al-Ghuráb rolled his eyes. "That would be as good as going direct to Marseille. In El Iskandariya, the French are almost more powerful than the Turks."
"There is no point in making it easy for the Investor to bugger us," Jeronimo scoffed.
"Then we shall go to Cairo and make it slightly more difficult," said the raïs.
"Cairo I like better than Alexandria," Jack said, "but I do not like Cairo much. It is a cul-de-sac—the end of the line."
"Not so—we could row up the Nile to Ethiopia!" Dappa said.
Nyazi, viewing Dappa's jest as a challenge to his hospitality, declared that he would gladly sleep naked in the dirt to the end of his days in order to provide the Cabal with comfortable beds—providing they could get as far as the foothills of the Mountains of Nuba.
"The entire point of choosing Cairo was that it is as far East as Mediterranean vessels can go," Moseh reminded them, "and so our cargo should have the highest value there, at the reputedly stupendous bazaar of the Khan el-Khalili, in the very heart of that ancient city, called by some the Mother of the World. And this is as true now as it was before."
"But once we go in we cannot come out—the Investor needs only to post ships before the two Mouths of the Nile, at Rosetta and Damietta, and we are bottled up," van Hoek pointed out.
"Nonetheless, this half of the Mediterranean is yet Turkish. Turks control every harbor," said the raïs, "and word has gone out, on faster boats than ours, that if a galleot should appear, with a crew of mostly infidels, and such-and-such markings, it is to be impounded at once, and the crew put in irons. Going to Cairo and trading our cargo for a vast array of goods in the Khan el-Khalili is not such a miserable fate compared to the alternatives—"
"One, being buggered by the Investor in Alexandria," said Jeronimo.
"Two, being thrown into a dungeon-pit in some flyblown port in the Levant," said Dappa.
"Three, running the ship aground in some uninhabited place and trudging off into the Sahara bent under the weight of our cargo," said Vrej.
"Ethiopia sounds better every minute," said Dappa.
"I shall distribute my wives equally among the nine of us who still have penises," proclaimed Nyazi, "and Jack can have my finest camel!"
"Jack, fear not," said Monsieur Arlanc, taking him aside. "I know one or two negociants in Grand Caire. Through them, I can help you sell your share of the goods, and get a bill of exchange, payable in Amsterdam."
Jack sighed. "I do not predict any of us will sleep easy in Cairo."
So they made no response to messages from the Investor's jacht, and used their (now) superior speed to stay well clear of her. And yet they did not attempt to pull away and vanish during the night-times, as there was no advantage in throwing the Investor into a rage.
High sere country, veiled in dust, began to appear off to starboard. The water took on a brown tinge and then became polluted with mud, sticks, and straw, which Nasr al-Ghuráb called sudd. He said it had been washed down out of Egypt by the Nile. The river, he said, would be at its fullest now, as it was the month of August.
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 raïs 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 Météore, set their courses direct for the harbor of Alexandria proper. Nasr al-Ghuráb, however, pointed them straight up the coast; raised all the sail he could; and put the galériens 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 raïs 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-Ghuráb after the "inspection" was complete.