Murder on the Leviathan

Reginald Milford-Stokes

My precious Emily,

Today we entered the Suez Canal. In yesterday’s letter I described the history and topography of Port Said to you in detail, and now I simply cannot resist the temptation of relating to you certain curious and instructive facts concerning the Great Canal, this truly colossal monument to human endeavour, which next year celebrates its tenth anniversary.

Are you aware, my adorable little wife, that the present canal is actually the fourth to have existed and that the first was excavated as long ago as the fourteenth century Before Christ, during the reign of the great Pharaoh Rameses? When Egypt fell into decline the desert winds choked up the channel with sand, but under the Persian king Darius, five hundred years Before Christ, slaves dug out another canal at the cost of 120,000 human lives. Herodotus tells us that the voyage along it took four days and that two triremes travelling in opposite directions could easily pass each other without their oars touching.

Several ships from Cleopatra’s shattered fleet fled to the Red Sea by this route and so escaped the fearful wrath of the vengeful Octavian Caesar.

Following the fall of the Roman Empire, time again separated the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with a barrier of shifting sand one hundred miles wide, but no sooner was a powerful state established in these barren lands by the followers of the Prophet Mohammed than people took up their mattocks and pickaxes once again. As I sail through these dead salt-meadows and endless sand-dunes, I marvel unceasingly at the stubborn courage and ant-like diligence of humankind in waging its never-ending struggle, doomed to inevitable defeat, against all-powerful Chronos. Vessels laden with grain plied the Arabian canal for two hundred years, and then the earth erased this pitiful wrinkle from its forehead and the desert was plunged into sleep for a thousand years.

Regrettably the father of the new Suez was not a Briton, but the Frenchman Lesseps, a representative of a nation which, my darling Emily, I quite justifiably hold in the most profound contempt. This crafty diplomat persuaded the Egyptian governor to issue a firman for the establishment of The Universal Company of the Suez Maritime Canal. The Company was granted a 99-year lease on the future waterway, and the Egyptian government was allotted only 13 per cent of the net revenue. And these villainous French dare to label us British pillagers of the backward peoples! At least we win our privileges with the sword, not by striking grubby bargains with greedy local bureaucrats.

Every day 1600 camels delivered drinking water to the workers digging the Great Canal, but still the poor devils died in their thousands from thirst, intense heat and infectious diseases. Our Leviathan 15 sailing over corpses, and I seem to see the yellow teeth offleshless, eyeless skulls grinning out at me from beneath the sand. It took ten years and 15 million pounds sterling to complete this gargantuan work of construction. But now a ship can sail from England to India in almost half the time it used to take. A mere 25 days or so and you arrive in Bombay. It is quite incredible! And the scale of it! The canal is more than 100 feet deep, so that even our gigantic ark can sail fearlessly here, with no risk of running aground.

Today at lunch I was overcome by a quite irresistible fit of laughter.

I choked on a crust of bread, began coughing and simply could not calm myself. The pathetic coxcomb Renier (I wrote to you about him, he is the Leviathans first lieutenant) inquired with feigned interest what was the cause of my merriment and I was seized by an even stronger paroxysm, for I certainly could not tell him about the thought that had set me laughing: that the French had built the canal, but the fruits had fallen to us, the English. Three years ago Her Majesty’s government bought a controlling block of shares from the Egyptian khedive, and now we British are the masters of Suez. And incidentally, a single share in the canal, which was once sold for fifteen pounds, is now worth three thousand! How’s that! How could I help but laugh?

But I fear I must have wearied you with these boring details. Do not blame me, my dear Emily, for I have no other recreation apart from writing long letters. While I am scraping my pen across the vellum paper, it is as though you are here beside me and I am making leisurely conversation with you. You know, thanks to the hot climate here I am feeling very much better. I no longer remember the terrible dreams that haunt me in the night. But they have not gone away. In the morning when I wake up, the pillowcase is still soaked with tears and sometimes gnawed to shreds.

But that is all nonsense. Every new day and every mile of the journey bring me closer to a new life. There, under the soothing sun of the Equator, this dreadful separation that is tearing my very soul apart will finally come to an end. How I wish it could be soon! How impatient I am to see your tender, radiant glance once again, my dear friend.

What else can I entertain you with? Perhaps at least with a description of our Leviathan, a more than worthy theme. In my earlier letters I have written too much about my own feelings and dreams and I have still not presented you with a full picture of this great triumph of British engineering.

The Leviathan is the largest passenger ship in the history of the world, with the single exception of the colossal Great Eastern, which has been furrowing the waters of the Atlantic Ocean for the last 20 years. When Jules Verne described the Great Eastern in his book The Floating City, he had not seen our Leviathan - otherwise he would have renamed the old G.E. ‘the floating village’. That vessel now does nothing but lay telegraph cables on the ocean floor, but Leviathan can transport 1000 people and in addition 10,000 tons of cargo. This fire breathing monster is more than 600 hundred feet long and 80 feet across at its widest. Do you know, my dear Emily, how a ship is built? First they lay it out in the moulding loft, that is to say, they make a full-scale drawing of the vessel directly onto the smoothly planed floor of a special building. The drawing of the Leviathan was so huge that they had to build a shed the size of Buckingham Palace!

This miracle of a ship has two steam engines, two powerful paddle wheels on its sides and in addition a gigantic propeller on its stern. Its six masts, fitted with a full set of rigging, tower up to the very sky and with a fair wind and engines running full speed ahead the ship can make 16 knots! All the very latest advances in shipbuilding have been used in the vessel. These include a double metal hull, which ensures its safety even if it should strike a rock; special side keels which reduce pitching and rolling; electric lighting throughout; waterproof compartments; immense coolers for the spent steam - it is impossible to list everything. The entire experience of centuries of effort by the indefatigably inventive human mind has been concentrated in this proud vessel cleaving fearlessly through the ocean waves. Yesterday, following my old habit, I opened the Holy Scriptures at the first page that came to hand and I was astonished when my eyes fell upon the lines about Leviathan, the fearsome monster of the deep from the Book of Job. I began trembling at the sudden realization that this was no description of a sea serpent, as the ancients believed it to be, nor of a sperm whale, as our modern-day rationalists claim - no, the biblical text clearly refers to the very same Leviathan that has undertaken to deliver me out of darkness and terror into happiness and light. Judge for yourself: ‘He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him: one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride.’

The pot - that is the steam boiler; the pot of ointment - that is the fuel oil; the shining path - that is the wake at the stern. It is all so obvious!

And I felt afraid, my darling Emily. For these lines contain a terrible warning, either to me personally or to the passengers on the Leviathan, or to the whole of mankind. From the biblical point of view pride is surely a bad thing? And if man with his technological playthings ‘beholdeth all high things’, is this not fraught with some catastrophic consequences? Have we not become too proud of the keenness of our intellect and the skill of our hands? Where is this king of pride taking us? What lies in store for us?

And so I opened my prayer book to pray - the first time for a long, long time. And there I read: ‘It is in their thoughts that their houses are eternal and their dwellings are from generation to generation, and they call their lands after their own names. But man shall not abide in honour; he shall be likened unto the beasts who die. This path of theirs is their folly, though those that come after them do commend their opinion.’

But when, in a paroxysm of mystical feeling, I opened the Book once again with a trembling hand, my feverish gaze fell on the boring passage in Numbers where the sacrifices made by the tribes of the Israelites are itemized with a bookkeeper’s tedious precision. And I calmed down, rang my silver bell and told the steward to bring me some hot chocolate.

The level of comfort prevailing in the section of the ship assigned to the respectable public is absolutely staggering. In this respect the Leviathan is truly without equal. The times are gone when people travelling to India or China were cooped up in dark, cramped little cubbyholes and piled one on top of another. You know, my dearest wife, how keenly I suffer from claustrophobia, but on board the Leviathan I feel as though I were in the wide open spaces of the Thames Embankment. Here there is everything required to combat boredom: a dance hall, a musical salon for concerts of classical music, even a rather decent library. The decor in a first-class cabin is in no way inferior to a room in the finest London hotel, and the ship has two hundred such cabins. In addition there are 230 second-class cabins with 600 berths (I have not looked into them - I cannot endure the sight of squallor) and they say there are also capacious cargo holds. The Leviathan 5 service personnel alone, not counting sailors and officers, numbers more than 200 stewards, chefs, valets, musicians, chambermaids.

Just imagine, I do not regret in the least not bringing Jeremy with me. The idle loafer was always sticking his nose into matters that did not concern him, and here at precisely 11 o’clock the maid comes and cleans the room and carries out any other errands I may have for her. This is both rational and convenient. If I wish I can ring for a valet and have him help me dress, but I regard that as excessive - I dress and undress myself. It is most strictly forbidden for any servant to enter the cabin in my absence, and on leaving it I set a hair across the crack of the door. I am afraid of spies. Believe me, my sweet Emily, this is not a ship, but a veritable city, and it has its share of low riff-raff.

For the most part my information concerning the ship has been garnered from the explanations of Lieutenant Renier, who is a great patriot of his own vessel. He is, however, not a very likeable individual and the object of serious suspicion on my part. He tries his hardest to play the gentleman, but I am not so easily duped. I have a keen nose for bad breeding. Wishing to produce a good impression, this fellow invited me to visit his cabin. I did call in, but less out of curiosity than from a desire to assess the seriousness of the threat that might be posed by this swarthy gentleman (concerning his appearance, see my letter of 20 March). The meagreness of the decor was rendered even more glaringly obvious by his tasteless attempts at bon ton (Chinese vases, Indian incense burners, a dreadful seascape on the wall, and so forth). Standing on the table among the maps and navigational instruments was a large photographic ponrait of a woman dressed in black, with an inscription in French: ‘Seven feet under the keel, my darling!

Francoise B.’ I enquired whether it was his wife. It turned out to be his mother. Touching, but it does not allay my suspicions. I am as determined as ever to take independent readings of our course every three hours, even though it means that I have to get up twice during the night. Of course, while we are sailing through the Suez Canal this might seem a little excessive, but I do not wish to lose my proficiency in handling the sextant.

I have more than enough time at my disposal and apart from the writing of letters my leisure hours are filled by observing the Vanity Fair which surrounds me on all sides. Among this gallery of human types there are some who are most amusing. I have already written to you about the others, but yesterday a new face appeared in our salon.

He is Russian - can you imagine that? His name is Erast Fandorin.

You are aware, Emily, of my feelings regarding Russia, that misshapen excrescence that has extended over half of Europe and a third of Asia.

Russia seeks to disseminate its own parody of the Christian religion and its own barbarous customs throughout the entire world, and Albion stands as the only barrier in the path of these new Huns. If not for the resolute position adopted by Her Majesty’s government in the current eastern crisis, Tsar Alexander would have raked in the Balkans with his bear’s claws, and …

But I have already written to you about that and I do not wish to repeat myself. And in any case, thinking about politics has rather a bad effect on my nerves. It is now four minutes to eight. As I have already informed you, life on the Leviathan is conducted according to British time as far as Aden, so that it is already dark here at eight o’clock. I shall go and take readings of the longitude and latitude, then take dinner and continue with my letter.

I see that I did not finish writing about Mr Fandorin. I do believe that I like him, despite his nationality. Good manners, reticent, knows how to listen. He must be a member of that estate referred to in Russia by the Italian word intelligenzia, which I believe denotes the educated European class. You must admit, dear Emily, that a society in which the European class is separated off into a distinct stratum of the population and abo referred to by a foreign word can hardly be ranked among the civilized nations. I can imagine what a gulf separates a civilized human being like Mr Fandorin from some bearded Kossack or muzhik, who make up 90 per cent of the population of that Tartarian-Byzantine empire. On the other hand, a distance of such magnitude must elevate and ennoble an educated and thinking man to an exceptional degree, a point that I shall have to ponder at greater length.

I liked the elegant way in which Mr Fandorin (by the way, it seems he is a diplomat, which explains a great deal) put down that intolerable yokel Gauche, who claims to be a rentier, although it is clear from a mile away that the fellow is involved in some grubby little business or other. I should not be surprised if he is on his way to the East to purchase opium and exotic dancers for Parisian dens of vice. [The last phrase has been scratched out.] I know, my darling Emily, that you are a real lady and will not attempt to read what has been crossed out here. I got a little carried away and wrote something unworthy for your chaste eyes to read.

And so, back to today’s dinner. The French bourgeois, who just recently has grown bold and become quite terribly talkative, began discoursing with a self-satisfied air on the advantages of age over youth. I am older than anyone else here,’ he said condescendingly, a la Socrates. ‘Grey-haired, bloated and decidedly not good-looking, but you needn’t go thinking, ladies and gentlemen, that papa Gauche would agree to change places with you. When I see the arrogance of youth, flaunting its beauty and strength, its health, in the face of age, I do not feel envious in the least. Why, I think, that’s no great trick, I was like that myself once. But you, my fine fellow, still do not know if you will live to my 62 years. I am twice as happy as you are at 30, because I have been fortunate enough to live in this world for twice as long.’ And he sipped at his wine, very proud of the originality of his thought and his seemingly unimpeachable logic. Then Mr Fandorin, who had so far not said a word, suddenly remarked with a very serious air: ‘That is undoubtedly the case, M. Gauche, if one takes the oriental viewpoint on life, as existence at a single point of reality in an eternal present. But there is also another way of reasoning which regards a man’s life as a unified work which can only be judged when the final page has been read. Moreover, this work may be as long as a tetralogy or as short as a novella. And yet who would undertake to assert that a fat, vulgar novel is necessarily of greater value than a short, beautiful poem?’ The funniest thing of all was that our rentier, who is indeed both fat and vulgar, did not even understand the reference to himself. Even when Miss Stamp (by no means stupid, but a strange creature) giggled and I gave a rather loud snort, the Frenchie failed to catch on and stuck with his own opinion, for which all credit to him.

It is true, however, that in the conversation that followed over dessert, M. Gauche demonstrated a degree of common sense that quite amazed me. There are, after all, certain advantages in not having a regular education: a mind unfettered by authorities is sometimes capable of making interesting and accurate observations.

Judge for yourself. The amoeba-like Mrs Truffo, the wife of our muttonhead of a doctor, started up again with her mindless prattle about the joy and delight Mme Kleber will bring to her banker with her ‘tiny tot’ and ‘little angel’. Since Mrs Truffo does not speak French, the task of translating her sickly sentiments on the subject of family happiness being inconceivable without ‘baby babble’, fell to her unfortunate husband. Gauche huffed and puffed and then suddenly declared: ‘I cannot agree with you, madam. A genuinely happy married couple have no need whatsoever of children, for husband and wife are perfectly sufficient for each other. Man and woman are like two uneven surfaces, each with bumps and indentations. If the surfaces do not fit tightly against each other, then glue is required, otherwise the structure - in other words the family - cannot be preserved. Children are that selfsame glue. If, however, the surfaces form a perfect fit, bump to indentation, then no glue is required. Take me and my Blanche, if you like. Thirty-three years we’ve lived in perfect harmony. Why would we want children? Life is splendid without them.’ I am sure you can imagine, dear Emily, the tidal wave of righteous indignation that came crashing down on the head of this subverter of eternal values. The most zealous accuser of all was Mme Kleber, who is carrying the little Swiss in her womb. The sight of her neat little belly so carefully exhibited at every opportunity sets me writhing. I can just see the miniature banker nestled inside with his curly moustache and puffy little cheeks. In time the Klebers will no doubt produce an entire battalion of Swiss Guards.

I must confess to you, my tenderly adored Emily, that the sight of pregnant women makes me feel sick. They are repulsive! That inane bovine smile, that disgusting manner of constantly listening to their own entrails. I try to keep as far away from Mme Kleber as possible.

Swear to me, my darling, that we shall never have children. The fat bourgeois is right a thousand times over! Why do we need children when we are already boundlessly happy without them? All we need to do is survive this forced separation.

But it is already two minutes to 11. Time to take a reading.

Damnation! I have turned the whole cabin upside down. My sextant has disappeared. This is no delusion! It was lying in the trunk together with the chronometer and the compass, and now it is not there! I am afraid, Emily! O, I had a premonition of this. My worst suspicions have been confirmed!

Why? What have I done? They are prepared to commit any vileness in order to prevent our reunion! How can I check now that the ship is following the right course? It is that Renier, I know! I caught the expression in his eyes when he saw me handling the sextant on deck last night! The scoundrel!

I shall go to the captain and demand retribution. But what if they are in

it together? My God, my God, have pity

On Me.

I had to pause for a while. I was so agitated that I was obliged to take the drops prescribed for me by Drjenkinson. And I did as he told me, and started thinking of pleasant things. Of how you and I will sit on a white veranda and gaze into the distance, trying to guess where the sea ends and the sky begins. You will smile and say: ‘Darling Reggie, here we are together at last.’ Then we will get into a cabriolet and go for a drive along the seashore.

Lord, what nonsense is this! What cabriolet?

I am a monster, and there can be no forgiveness for me.