And as David mumbled his thanks, the lips smiled behind the beard. ‘I may say I’m just as relieved as you are.’ And he added brusquely, ‘There’s an Arab sambuq waiting now off Ras al-Khaima to pick you up. Tonight we shall pass through the Straits of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf. With luck we should sight the sambuq about an hour after dawn. Now, you speak Arabic I’m told.’
‘A little,’ David admitted. ‘But it’s not easy to make myself understood — it’s the different dialects, I think.’
‘Well, do you think you can pass yourself off as an Arab?’ And without waiting for a reply, Griffiths added, ‘It’s the passengers, you see. They’ll talk if they see a white member of my crew being put aboard a dhow.’ A few words of briefing and then the Captain’s hand gripped his arm. ‘Good luck now, man. And a word of advice before you go — tread warily. It’s no ordinary man you’ve got for a father, indeed it isn’t. He’s the devil of a temper when he’s roused. So go easy and watch your step.’ And with that he dismissed him and turned again in his seat to stare through the glass at the lights of a ship coming up over the dark horizon.
David left the bridge, dazed and almost reluctant, for now the future was upon him — unknown, a little frightening. At dawn he would leave the ship and the companionship of the men he’d lived with for the past few weeks, and that last link with the home he’d known all his life would steam away, leaving him alone in a strange country, amongst strange people. It surprised him that he felt no excitement, no exhilaration — only loneliness and a sense of desolation. He didn’t know it then, but it was in this moment that he said goodbye to his boyhood.
The Mate found him sitting on his bunk, staring vacantly into space. ‘Here you are, Whitaker.’ And he tossed a bundle of clothing down beside him. ‘Ali Mahommed sold them to me — kaffyah, agal, robe, sandals, the lot, even to an old brass khanjar knife. Three pounds ten, and I’ve deducted it from your pay.’ He placed some East African notes and some silver on top of the clothes. The Old Man told you what to do, did he? Okay, so long as you greet the naukhuda with a salaam alaikum and a few more words of Arabic. And get along to the paintshop and put some stain on your face and hands. Your face is about as pink as a white baby’s bottom.’
Dressing up as an Arab for the first time in his life helped to pass the time, but still the long hours of the night stretched ahead. He lay awake a long time thinking about what the morrow would bring and about the man he hadn’t known was his father till that tragic day. And then suddenly it was light and almost immediately, it seemed, one of the Arab crew came down to tell him the sambuq had been sighted. He listened then, waiting, tense and expectant. And then the pulse of the engines slowed and finally died away. This was it — the moment of irrevocable departure. His hand touched the brass hilt of the great curved, flat-bladed knife at his girdle. He checked the kaffyah, made certain that the black agal was in its place, circling his head. He went quickly up to the after well-deck and waited in the shelter of the main deck ladder. The rope ladder was over the side opposite No. 3 hatch, one of the crew waiting there to help him over. The faint chug of a diesel sounded in the still morning air, coming slowly nearer. He heard the bump of the dhow as it came alongside, the guttural cry of Arab voices, and then the man by the ladder was beckoning him.
He went out quickly with his head down, hidden by his kaffyah. A dark-skinned hand caught his arm, steadied him as he went over the bulwarks. Glancing quickly up, he caught a glimpse of the Captain leaning with his elbows on the rail of the bridge wing and below, on the boat deck, a short, tubby man in a pale dressing-gown standing watching. And after that he could see nothing but the ship’s rusty side.
Hands reached up, caught him as he jumped to the worn wood deck of the dhow. He called out a greeting in Arabic as he had been told and at the same moment he heard the distant clang of the engine-room telegraph. The beat of the Emerald Isle’s engines increased and the hull plates began to slide past, a gap opening between himself and the ship. He turned away to hide his face and found himself on a long-prowed craft built of battered wood, worn smooth by the years and bleached almost white by the torrid heat of the Persian Gulf. A single patched sail curved above it like the dirty wing of a goose hanging dead in the airless morning. The sea around was still as a mirror and white like molten glass, and then the swirl of the ship’s screws shattered it.
There were three men on the sambuq and only the naukhuda, or captain, wore a turban as well as a loin cloth. He was an old man with a wisp of grey moustache and a few grey hairs on his chin which he stroked constantly. The crew was composed of a smooth-faced boy with a withered arm and a big, barrel-chested man, black as a negro, with a satin skin that rippled with every movement. The naukhuda took his hand in his and held it for a long time, whilst the other two crowded close, staring at his face, feeling his clothes — six brown eyes gazing at him full of curiosity. A flood of questions, the old man using the deferential sahib, legacy of India. Whenever he said anything, all three listened respectfully. But it was no good. He couldn’t seem to make himself understood.
At length he gave it up and judging that it would be safe now to turn his head to take a last look at the Emerald Isle, he was appalled to find that she had vanished utterly, swallowed in the humid haze of the day’s beginning. For a time he could still hear the beat of her engines, but finally even that was gone and he was alone with his three Arabs in a flat calm sea that had an oily shimmer to its hard, unbroken surface.
He felt abandoned then, more alone than he’d ever been in his life before. But it was a mood that didn’t last, for in less than an hour the haze thinned and away to port the vague outline of a mass of mountains emerged. A few minutes later and the sky was clear, a blue bowl reflected in the sea, and the mountains stood out magnificent, tumbling down from the sky in sheer red cliffs to disappear in a mirage effect at the water’s edge. Ahead, a long dhow stood with limp sail suspended in the air, and beyond it the world seemed to vanish — no mountains, nothing, only the endless sky. For the first time he understood why men talked of the desert as a sea.
Twice the sambuq’s aged engine petered out. Each time it was the boy who got it going. The naukhuda sat dreamily at the helm, steering with the toes of his right foot curled round the smooth wood of the rudder bar. A charcoal fire had been burning on the low poop ever since he’d come on board and the big cooking pot above it eventually produced a mess of rice and mutton which they ate in their fingers. A small wind stirred the surface of the sea, increased until it filled the sail and the engine was switched off. In the sudden quiet, the sound of the water sliding past the hull seemed almost loud. The mainsheet was eased out and the sambuq took wing. ‘Ras al-Khaima.’ The naukhuda pointed across the port bow. At the very foot of the mountains and low on the horizon, he made out the dun-coloured shape of houses, the tufts of palms. And shortly after that the coast ahead showed up, low and flat, a shimmering line of dunes.
The sun was barely halfway up the sky when they closed that dune coast. A line of camels marched sedately along the sand of the foreshore and close under the low cliffs a Land-Rover stood parked, a lone figure in Arab clothes standing beside it. He thought then that this was his father and braced himself for that first meeting, wondering what he would be like. But when the naukhuda paddled him ashore in the sambuq’s dugout, it was an Arab who waded into the shallow water to meet them.