Shout at the Devil

Wilbur Smith - Shout At The Devil

PART ONE

Flynn Patrick O'Flynn was an ivory poacher by profession, and modestly he admitted that he was the best on the east coast of Africa.

Rachid El Keb was an exporter of precious stones, of women for the harems and great houses of Arabia and India, and of illicit ivory. This he admitted only to his trusted clients; to the rest he was a rich and respectable owner of coastal shipping.

In an afternoon during the monsoon of 1912, drawn together by their mutual interest in pachyderms, Flynn and Rachid sat in the back room of El Keb's shop in the Arab quarter of Zanzibar, and drank tea from tiny brass thimbles.

The hot tea made Flynn O'Flynn perspire even more than usual. It was so humid hot in the room that the flies sat in languid stupor upon the low ceiling.

"Listen, Kebby, you lend me just one of those stinking little ships of yours and I'll fill her so high with tusks, she'll damn nigh sink."

"Ah!" replied El Keb carefully, and went on waving the palm-leaf fan in his own face a face that resembled that of a suspicious parrot with a straggly, goatee beard.

"Have I ever let you down yet?" Flynn demanded aggressively, and a drop of sweat fell from the tip of his nose onto his already damp shirt.

"Ah!" El Keb repeated.

This scheme has a flair. It has the touch of greatness to it. This scheme..." Flynn paused to find a suitable adjective, "... this scheme is Napoleonic. It is Caesarian!"

"Ah!" El Keb said again, and refilled his tea cup. Lifting it delicately between thumb and forefinger, he sipped before speaking. "It is necessary only that I should risk the total destruction of a sixty-foot dhow worth..." prudently he inflated the figure.".. two thousand English pounds?"

"Against an almost certain recovery of twenty thousand, Flynn cut in quickly, and El Keb smiled a little, almost dreamily.

"You'd put the profits so high? "he asked.

"That's the lowest figure. Good God, Kebby! There hasn't been a shot fired in the Rufiji basin for twenty years. You know damn well it's the Kaiser's private hunting reserve.

The Jumbo are so thick in there I could round them up and drive them in like sheep." Involuntarily Flynn's right forefinger crooked and twitched as though it were already curled a round a trigger.

"Madness hispered El Keb, with the gold gloat softening the shape of his lips. "You'd sail into the Rufiji river from the sea, hoist the Union Jack on one of the islands in the delta and fill the dhow with German ivory. Madness."

"The Germans have formally annexed none of those islands. I'd be in and out again before Berlin had sent their first cable to London. With ten of my gun-boys hunting, we'd fill the dhow in two weeks."

"The Germans would have a gunboat there in a week.

They've got the Blacher lying at Dares Salaam under steam, heavy cruiser with nine-inch guns."

"We'd be under protection of the British flag. They couldn't dare touch us not on the high seas not with things the way they are now between England and Germany."

"Mr. O'Flynn, I was led to believe you were a citizen of the United States of America."

"You damn right I am." Flynn sat up a little straighter, a little more proudly.

"You'd need a British captain for the dhow," El Keb mused, and stroked his beard thoughtfully.

"Jesus, Kebby, you didn't think I was fool enough to sail that dhow in myself? "Flynn looked pained. "I'll find someone else to do that, and to sail her out again through the Imperial German navy. Me, I'm going to walk in from my base camp in Portuguese Mozambique and go out the same way."

"Forgive me." El Keb smiled again. "I underestimated you."

He stood up quickly. The splendour of the great jewelled dagger at his waist was somewhat spoiled by the unwashed white of his ankle-length robe. "Mr. O'Flynn, I think I have just the man to captain your dhow for you. But first it is necessary to alter his financial circumstances so that he might be willing to accept employment."

The leather purse of gold sovereigns had been the pivot on which the gentle confusion of Sebastian Oldsmith's life turned. It had been presented to him by his father when Sebastian had announced to the family his intention of sailing to Australia to make his fortune in the wool trade. It had comforted him during the voyage from Liverpool to the Cape of Good Hope where the captain had unceremoniously deposited him after Sebastiah's misalliance with the daughter of the gentleman who was proceeding to Sydney to take up his appointment as Governor of New South Wales.

In gradually dwindling quantity the sovereigns had remained with him through the series of misfortunes that ended in Zanzibar, when he awoke from heat drugged sleep in a shoddy room to find that the leather purse and its contents were gone, and with them were gone the letters of introduction from his father to certain prominent wool brokers of Sydney.

It occurred to Sebastian as he sat on the edge of his bed that the letters had little real value in Zanzibar, and with increasing bewilderment, he reviewed the events that had blown him so far off his intended COUrse. Slowly his forehead creased in the effort of thought. It was the high, intelligent forehead of a philosopher crowned by a splendid mass of shiny black curls; his eyes were dark brown, his nose long and straight, his jaw firm, and his mouth sensitive. In his twenty-second year, Sebastian had the face of a young Oxford don; which proves, perhaps, how misleading looks can be. Those who knew him well would have been surprised that Sebastian, in setting out for Australia, had come as close to it as Zanzibar.

Abandoning the mental exercise that was already giving him a slight headache, Sebastian stood up from the bed and, with the skirt of his nightshirt flapping around his calves, began his third minute search of the hotel room.

Although the purse had been under his mattress when he went to sleep the preceding evening, this time Sebastian emptied the water jug and peered into it hopefully. He unpacked his valise and shook out each shirt. He crawled under the bed, lifted the coconut matting and probed every hole in the rotten flooring before giving way to despair.

Shaved, the bed-bug bites on his person anointed with saliva, and dressed in the grey three-piece suit which was showing signs of travel fatigue, he brushed his derby hat and placed it carefully over his curls, picked up his cane in one hand, and lugging his valise in the other, he went down the stairs into the hot noisy lobby of the Hotel Royal.

"I say," he greeted the little Arab at the desk with the most cheerful smile he could muster. (I say, I seem to have lost my money."

A silence fell upon the room. The waiters carrying trays out to the hotel veranda slowed and stopped, heads turned towards Sebastian with the same hostile curiosity as if he had announced that he was suffering from a mild attack of leprosy.

"Stolen, I should imagine," Sebastian went on, grinning.

"Nasty bit of luck, really."

The silence exploded as the bead curtains from the office were thrown open and the Hindu proprietor erupted into the room with a loud cry of, "Mr. Oldsmith, what about your bill?"

"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.

"It's not really my fault, you know." Sebastian wriggled with embarrassment under the stare. Then once again he produced his Admiralty chart, spread it on the deck, and placed his finger on the island which Flynn O'Flynn had ringed in blue pencil as the rendezvous. "I mean, it is rather your cup of tea, finding the place. After all, you are the navigator, aren't you?"

The captain spat fiercely on his deck, and Sebastian flushed.

"Now that sort of thing isn't going to get us anywhere.

Let's try and behave like gentlemen."

This time the captain hawked it up from deep down in his throat and spat a lump of yellow phlegm into the blue pencil circle on Sebastian's map, then he rose to his feet and stalked away to where his crew squatted in a group under the poop.

In the short dusk, while the mosquitoes whined in a thin mist about Sebastian's head, he listened to the Arabic muttering and saw the glances that were directed at him down the length of the dhow. So when the night closed over the ship like a bank of black steam, he took up a defensive position on the foredeck and waited for them to come. As a weapon he had his cane of solid ebony. He laid it across his lap and sat against the rail until the darkness was complete, then, silently, he changed his position and crouched beside one of the water barrels that was lashed to the base of the mast.

They were a long time coming. Half the night had wasted away before he heard the stealthy scuff of bare feet on the planking. The absolute blackness of the night was filled with the din of the swamp; the boom and tonk of frogs, the muted buzz of insects and the occasional snort and splash of a hippo, so that Sebastian had difficulty in deciding how many they had sent against him. Crouching by the water barrel he strained his eyes unavailingly into the utter blackness and tuned his hearing to filter out the swamp noises and catch only those soft little sounds that death made as it came down the deck towards him.

Although Sebastian had never scaled any academic heights, he had boxed light heavyweight for Rugby, and fast-bowled for Sussex the previous cricket season when he had led the county bowling averages. So, although he was afraid now, Sebastian had a sublime confidence in his own physical prowess and it was not the kind of fear that filled his belly with oily warmth, nor turned his ego to jelly, but rather, it keyed him to a point where every muscle in his body quivered on the edge of exploding. Crouching in the night he groped for the cane that he had laid on the deck beside him. His hands fell on the bulky sackful of green coconuts that made up part of the dhow's deck cargo. They were carried to supplement, with their milk, the meagre supply of fresh water on board. Quickly Sebastian tore open the fastenings of the sack and hefted one of the hard round fruits.

"Not quite as handy as a cricket ball, but-" murmured Sebastian and came to his feet. Using the short run up he delivered the fast ball with which he had shattered the Yorkshire first innings the previous year. It had the same effect on the Arab first innings. The coconut whirred and cracked against the skull of one of the approaching assassins and the rest retired in confusion.

"Now send the men," roared Sebastian and bowled a short lifter that hastened the retreat.

He selected another coconut and was about to deliver that also when there was a flash and a report from aft, and something howled over Sebastian's head. Hastily he ducked behind the sack of coconuts.

"My God, they've got a gun up there!" Sebastian remembered then the ancient muzzle-loading Jezail he had seen the captain polishing lovingly on their first day out from Zanzibar, and he felt his anger rising in earnest.

He jumped to his feet and hurled his next coconut with fury.

"Fight fair, you dirty swine! "he yelled.

There was a delay while the dhow captain went through the complicated process of loading his piece. Then a cannon report, a burst of flame, and another pot leg howled over Sebastian's head.

Through the dark hours before dawn the lively exchange of jeers and curses, of coconuts and pot legs continued.

Sebastian more than held his own for he scored four howls of pain and a yelp, while the dhow captain succeeded only in shooting away a great deal of his own standing rigging.

But as the light of the new day increased, so Sebastian's advantage waned. The Arab captain's shooting improved to such an extent that Sebastian spent most of his time crouching behind the sack of coconuts. Sebastian was nearly exhausted. His right arm and shoulder ached unmercifully, and he could hear the first stealthy advance of the Arab crew as they crept down towards his hide. In daylight they could surround him and use their numbers to drag him down.

While he rested for the final effort, Sebastian looked out at the morning. It was a red dawn, angry and beautiful through the swamp mists so the water glowed with a pink sheen and the mangroves stood very dark around the ship.

Something splashed farther up the channel, a water bird perhaps. Sebastian looked for it without interest, and heard it splash again and then again. He stirred and sat up a little straighter. The sound was too regular for that of a bird or a fish.

Then around the bend in the channel, from behind the wall of mangroves, driven on by urgent paddles, shot a dug-out canoe. Standing in the bow with a double-barrelled elephant gun under his arm and a clay pipe sticking out of his red face, was Flynn O'Flynn.

"What the hell's going on here?" he roared. "Are you fighting a goddamned war? I've been waiting a week for you lotV

"Look out, Flynn!" Sebastian yelled a warning. "That swine has got a gun!"

The Arab captain had jumped to his feet and was looking around uncertainly. Long ago he had regretted his impulse to rid himself of the Englishman and escape from this evil swamp, and now his misgivings were truly justified. Having committed himself, however, there was only one course open to him. He lifted the Jezail to his shoulder and aimed at O'Flynn in the canoe. The discharge blew a long grey spurt of powder from the Muzzle, and the pot leg lifted a burst of spray from the surface of the water beyond the canoe. The echoes of the shot were drowned by the bellow of O'Flynn's rifle. He fired without moving the pipe from his mouth and the narrow dug-out rocked dangerously with the recoil.

The heavy bullet picked up the Arab captain's scrawny body, his robe fluttered like a piece of old paper and his turban flew from his head and unwound in mid-air as he was flung clear of the rail to drop with a tall splash alongside.

He floated face down, trapped air ballooning his robe about him and then he drifted away slowly on the sluggish Current.

His crew, stunned and silent, stood by the rail and watched him depart.

Dismissing the neat execution as though it had never happened, O'Flynn, glared up at Sebastian and roared, "You're a week late. I haven't been able to do a goddamned thing until you got here. Now let's get the flag up and start doing some workV

The formal annexation of Flynn O'Flynn's island took place in the relative cool of the following morning. It had taken some hours for Flynn to convince Sebastian of the necessity of occupying the island for the British crown, and he succeeded only by casting Sebastian in the role of empire builder. He made some flattering comparisons between Clive of India and Sebastian Oldsmith, of Liverpool.

The next problem was the choice of a name. This stirred up a little Anglo-American enmity, with Flynn O'Flynn campaigning aggressively for "New Boston'. Sebastian was horrified, his patriotic ardour burned brightly.

"Now hold on a jiffy, old chap," he protested.

"What's wrong with it? You just tell me what's wrong with id'

"Well, first of all this is going to be one of His Britannic Majesty's possessions, you know."

"New Boston," O'Flynn repeated. "That sounds good.

That sounds real good."

Sebastian shuddered. "I think it would be well, not quite suitable. I mean, Boston was the place where they had that tea thing, you know."

The argument raged more savagely as Flynn lowered the level in the gin bottle, until finally Sebastian stood up from the carpet on the floor of the dhow cabin, his eyes blazing with patriotic outrage. "If you would care to step outside, sir," he enunciated with care as he stood over the older man, "we can settle this matter." The dignity of the challenge was spoiled by the low roof of the cabin which made it necessary for Sebastian to stoop.

, I'd eat you without spitting out the bones."

"That, sir, is your opinion. But I must warn you I was highly thought of in the light heavyweight division."

"Oh, goddamn it." Flynn shook his head wearily and capitulated. "What difference does it make what we call the mother-loving place. Sit down, for God's sake. Here! Let's drink to whatever you want to call it."

Sebastian sat on the carpet and accepted the mug that Flynn handed him. "We shall call it-" he paused dramatically, "we shall call it New Liverpool," and he lifted the mug.

"You know, said Flynn, "for a limey, you aren't a bad guy," and the rest of the night was devoted to celebrating the birth of the new colony.

In the dawn the empire builders were paddled ashore in the dug-out by two of Flynn's gun-bearers.

The canoe ran aground on the narrow muddy beach of New Liverpool, and the sudden halt threw both of them off-balance. They collapsed gently together on to the floor of the dug-out, and had to be assisted ashore by the paddlers.

Sebastian was formally dressed for the occasion but had buttoned his waistcoat awry and he kept tugging at it as he peered about him.

Now at high tide, New Liverpool was about a thousand yards long and half as broad. At the highest point it rose not more than ten feet above the level of the Rufiji river.

Fifteen miles from the mouth the water was only slightly tainted with salt and the mangrove trees had thinned out and given way to tall matted elephant grass and slender bottle palms.

Flynn's gun-bearers and porters had cleared a small opening above the beach, and had erected a dozen grass huts around one of the palm trees. It was a dead palm, its crown leaves long gone, and Flynn pointed an unsteady finger at it.

"Flag pole," he said indistinctly, took Sebastian's elbow and led him towards it.

Tugging at his waistcoat with one hand and clutching the bundled Union Jack that Flynn had provided in the other, Sebastian felt a surge of emotion within him as he looked up at the slender column of the palm tree.

"Leave me," he mumbled and shook off Flynn's guiding hand. "We got to do this right. Solemn occasion very solemn."

"Have a drink." Flynn offered him the gin bottle, and when Sebastian waved it away, he lifted it to his own lips.

"Shouldn't drink on parade." Sebastian frowned at him.

"Bad form."

Flynn coughed at the vicious sting of the liquor and smote himself on the chest with his free hand.

"Should draw the men up in a hollow square," Sebastian went on. "Ready to salute the flag."

"Jesus, man, get on with it," grumbled Flynn.

"Got to do it right."

"Oh, hell," Flynn shrugged with resignation, then issued a string of orders in Swahili.

Puzzled and amused, Flynn's fifteen retainers gathered in a ragged circle about the flag pole. They were a curious band, gathered from half a dozen tribes, dressed in an assortment of cast-off Western clothing, half of them armed with ancient double-barrelled elephant rifles from which Flynn had carefully filed the serial numbers so they could never be traced back to him.

"Fine body of men," Sebastian beamed at them in alcoholic goodwill, unconsciously using the words of a Brigadier who had inspected Sebastian's cadet parade at Rugby.

"Let's get this show on the road," Flynn suggested.

"My friends," Sebastian obliged, "we are gathered here today..." It was a longish speech but Flynn weathered it by nipping away quietly at the gin bottle, and at last Sebastian ended with his voice ringing and tears of great emotion prickling his eyelids, In the sight of God and man, I hereby declare this island part of the glorious Empire of His Majesty, George V, King of England, Emperor of India, Protector of the Faith..." His voice wavered as he tried to remember the correct form, and he ended lamely, and all that sort of thing."

A silence fell on the assembly and Sebastian fidgeted with embarrassment. "What do I do now?" he enquired of Flynn O'Flynn in a stage whisper.

"Get that goddamned flag up."

"Ah, the flag!" Sebastian exclaimed with relief, and then uncertainly, "How?"

Flynn considered this at length. "I guess you have to climb up the palm tree."

With shrill cries of encouragement from the gun-bearers, and with Flynn shoving and cursing from below, the Governor of New Liverpool managed to scale the flag pole to a height of about fifteen feet. There he secured the flag and descended again so swiftly he tore the buttons off the front of his waistcoat, and twisted his ankle. He was borne away to one of the grass huts singing, "God save our Gracious King" in a voice broken with gin, pain and patriotism.

For the rest of their stay on the island, the Union Jack flew at half mast above the encampment.

Carried initially by two Wakamba fishermen, it took fully ten days for the word of the annexation to reach the outpost of the German Empire one hundred miles away at Mahenge. - Mahenge was in the bush country above the coastal lowlands. It consisted, in its entirety, of four trading posts owned by Indian shopkeepers and the German boma.

The German boma was a large stone building, thatched, set about with wide verandas over which purple bougainvillea climbed in profusion. Behind it stood the barracks and parade ground of the African Askari, and before it a lonely flag pole from which streamed the black, red and yellow of the empire. A speck in the vastness of the African bush, seat of government for an area the size of France. An area that spread south to the Rovurna river and the border of Portuguese Mozambique, east to the Indian Ocean, and west to the uplands of Sao Hill and Mbeya.

From this stronghold the German Commissioner

(Southern Province) wielded the limitless powers of a medieval robber baron. One of the Kaiser's arms, or, more realistically, one of his little fingers, he was answerable only to Governor Schee in Dares Salaam. But Dares Salaam was many torturous miles away, and Governor Schee was a busy man not to be troubled with trivialities. just as long as the Herr Commissioner Herman Fleischer collected the taxes, he was free to collect them in his own sweet way;

though very few of the indigenous inhabitants of the southern province would have described Herman Fleischer's ways as sweet.

At the time that the messenger, carrying the news of the British annexation of New Liverpool, trotted up over the last skyline and saw through the acacia Thorn trees ahead of him the tiny clustered buildings of Mahenge, Herr Fleischer was finishing his midday meal.

A man of large appetite, his luncheon consisted of

20 approximately two pounds of Eisbein, as much pickled cabbage, and a dozen potatoes, all swimming in thick gravy.

Having aroused his taste-buds, he then went on to the sausage. The sausage came by weekly fast-runner from Dodoma in the north, and was manufactured by a man of emus, a Westphalian immigrant who made sausages with the taste of the Black Forest in them. The sausage, and the Hansa beer cooling in its earthenware jug, aroused in Herr Fleischer a delicious nostalgia. He ate not quietly but steadily, and these quantities of food confined within the thick grey corduroy of his tunic and breeches, built up a pressure that squeezed the perspiration from his face and neck, forcing him to pause and mop up at regular intervals.

When he sighed at last and sagged back in his chair, the leather thongs squeaked a little under him. A bubble of trapped gas found its way up through the sausage and passed in genteel emption between his lips. Tasting it, he sighed again in happiness and squinted out from the deep shade of the veranda into the flat shimmering glare of the sunlight.

Then he saw the messenger coming. The man reached the steps of the veranda and squatted down in the sun with his loin-cloth drawn up modestly between his legs. His body was washed shiny black with sweat but his legs were powdered with fine dust to the knees, and his chest swelled and subsided as he drank the thin hot air. His eyes were downcast, he could not look directly at the Bwana Mkuba until his presence was formally acknowledged.

Herman Fleischer-watched him broodingly, his mood evaporating for he had been looking forward to his afternoon siesta and the messenger had spoiled that. He looked away at the low cloud above the hills in the south and sipped his beer. Then he selected a cheroot from the box before him and lit it. The cheroot burned slowly and evenly, restoring a little of his good humour. He smoked it short before flicking the stub over the veranda wall.

"Speak," he grunted, and the messenger lifted his eyes, and gasped with wonder and awe at the beauty and dignity of the Commissioner's person. Although this was ritual admiration, it never failed to stir a faint pleasure in Herr Fleischer.

"I see you, Bwana Mkuba Great Lord," and Fleischer inclined his head slightly. "I bring you greetings from Kalani, headman of Batja, on the Rufiji. You are his father, and he crawls on his belly before you. Your hair of yellow, and the great fatness of your body, blind him with beauty."

Herr Fleischer stirred restlessly in his chair. References to his corpulence, however well-intentioned, always annoyed him. "Speak," he repeated.

"Kalani says thus: "Ten suns ago, a ship came into the delta of the Rufiji, and stopped by the Island of the Dogs, Inja. On the island, the men of this ship have built houses, and above the houses, they have placed on a dead palm tree the cloth of the Insingeese which is of blue and white and red, having many crosses within crosses."

Herr Fleischer struggled upright in his chair and stared at the messenger. The pink of his complexion slowly became cross-veined with red and purple.

"Kalani says also: "Since their coming the voices of their guns have never ceased to speak along the Rufiji river, and there has been a great killing of elephants so that in the noonday the sky is dark with the birds that come for the meat."

Herr Fleischer was thrashing around in his chair, speech was locked in his throat and his face had swollen so it threatened to burst like an over-ripe fruit.

"Kalani says further: "Two white men are on the island.

One is a man who is very thin and young and is therefore of no account. The other white man Kalani has seen only at a great distance but by the redness of this man's face, and by his bulk, he knows in his heart it is Fini.

At the name Herr Fleischer became articulate, if not coherent he bellowed like a bull in rut. The messenger winced, such a bellow from the Bwana Mkuba usually preceded a multiple hanging.

"Sergeant!" The next bellow had form, and Herr Fleischer was on his feet, struggling to clinch the buckle of his belt.

"Rasch!" he roared again. O'Flynn was in German territory again; O'Flynn was stealing German ivory once more and compounding the insult by flying the Union Jack over the Kaiser's domain.

"Sergeant, where the thunder of God are you?" With incredible speed for a fat man Herr Fleischer raced down the long length of the veranda. For three years now, ever since his arrival in Mahenge, the name of Flynn O'Flynn had been enough to ruin his appetite, and produce in him a condition very close to epilepsy.

Around the corner of the veranda appeared the sergeant of the Askari, and Herr Fleischer braked just in time to avert collision.

"A storm patrol," bellowed the Commissioner, blowing a cloud of spittle in his agitation. "Twenty men. Full field packs, and one hundred pounds of ammunition. We leave in an hour."

The sergeant saluted and doubled away across the parade ground. A minute later a bugle began singing with desperate urgency.

Slowly, through the black mists of rage, reason returned to Herman Fleischel. He stood with shoulders hunched, breathing heavily through his mouth, and mentally digested the full import of Kalani's message.

This was not just another of O'Flynn's will-o'-the-wisp forays across the Rovuma from Mozambique. This time he had sailed brazenly into the Rufiji delta, with a full-scale expedition, and hoisted the British flag. A queasy sensation, not attributable to the pickled pork, settled on Herr Fleischer's stomach. He knew the makings of an international incident when he saw one.

This, perhaps, was the goad that would launch the fatherland on the road to its true destiny. He gulped with excitement. They had flapped that hated flag in the Kaiser's face just once too often. This was history being made, and Herman Fleischer stood in the centre of it.

Trembling a little, he hurried into his office, and began drafting the report to Governor Schee that might plunge the world into a holocaust from which the German people would rise as the rulers of creation.

An hour later, he rode out of the boma on a white donkey with his slouch uniform hat set well forward on his head to shield his eyes from the glare. Behind him his black Askari marched with their rifles at the slope. Smart in their pillbox kepis with the back flaps hanging to the shoulder, khaki uniforms freshly pressed, and put teed legs rising and falling in unison, they made as gallant a show as any commander could wish.

A day and a half march would bring them to the confluence of the Kilombero and Rufiji rivers where the Commissioner's steam launch was moored.

As the buildings of Mahenge vanished behind him, Herr Fleischer relaxed and let his ample backside conform to the shape of the saddle.

have you got it straight?" Flynn asked without conviction. The past eight days of hunting together had given him no confidence in Sebastian's ability to carry out a simple set of instructions without introducing some remarkable variation of his own. "You go down the river to the island, and you load the ivory onto the dhow. Then you come back here with all the canoes to pick up the next batch." Flynn paused to allow his words to absorb into the spongy tissue of Sebastian's head before he went on. "And for Chrissake don't forget the gin."

Right you are, old chap." With eight days" growth of black beard, and the skin peeling from the tip of his sunburned nose, Sebastian was beginning to fit the role of ivory poacher. The wide-brimmed terai hat that Flynn had loaned him came down to his ears, and the razor edges of the elephant grass had shredded his trouser legs and stripped the polish from his boots. His wrists and the soft skin behind his ears were puffy and speckled with spots of angry red where the mosquitoes had drunk deep, but he had lost a little weight in the heat and the ceaseless walking, so now he was lean and hard-looking.

They stood together under a monkey-bean tree on the bank of the Rufiji, while at the water's edge the bearers were loading the last tusks into the canoes. There was ale-greenish smell hanging over them in the steamy purp heat, a smell which Sebastian hardly noticed now for the last eight days had seen a great killing of elephant and the stink of green ivory was as familiar to him as the smell of the sea to a mariner.

"By the time you get back tomorrow morning the boys will have brought in the last of the ivory. We'll have a full dhow-load and you can set off for Zanzibar."

"What about you? Are you staying on here?"

"Not bloody likely. I'll light out for my base camp in Mozambique."

"Wouldn't it be easier for you to come along on the dhow? It's nearly two hundred miles to walk. "Sebastian was solicitous; in these last days he had conceived a burning admiration for Flynn.

"Well, you see, it's like this..." Flynn hesitated. This was no time to trouble Sebastian with talk of German gunboats waiting off the mouth of the Rufiji. "I have to get back to my camp, because..." Suddenly inspiration came to Flynn O'Flynn. "Because my poor little daughter is there all alone."

"You've got a daughter?" Sebastian was taken by surprise.

"You damn right I have." Flynn experienced a sudden rush of paternal affection and duty. "And the poor little thing is there all alone."

"Well, when will I see you again? "The thought of parting from Flynn, of being left to try and find his own way to Australia saddened Sebastian.

"Well," Flynn was tactful. "I hadn't really given that much thought." This was a lie. Flynn had thought about it ceaselessly for the last eight days. He was eagerly anticipating waving farewell to Sebastian Oldsmith for all time.

"Couldn't we..." Sebastian blushed a little under his sun-reddened cheeks. "Couldn't we sort of team up together?

I could work for you, sort of as an apprentice?"

The idea made Flynn wince. He almost panicked at the thought of Sebastian permanently trailing along behind him and discharging his rifle at random intervals. "Well now, Bassie boy," he clasped a thick arm around Sebastian's shoulders, "first you sail that old dhow back to Zanzibar and old Kebby El Keb will pay you out your share. Then you write to me, hey? How about that? You write me, and we'll work something out."

Sebastian grinned happily. "I'd like that, Flynn. I'd truly like that."

"All right, then, off you go. And don't forget the gin."

With Sebastian standing in the bows of the lead canoe, the double-barrelled rifle clutched in his hands, and the terai hat pulled down firmly over his ears, the little flotilla of heavily laden canoes pulled out from the bank and caught the current. Paddles dipped and gleamed in the evening sunlight as they arrowed away towards the first bend downstream.

Still standing unsteadily in the frail craft, Sebastian looked back and waved his rifle at Flynn on the bank.

"For Chrissake, be careful with that goddamn piece,"

Flynn bellowed too late. The rifle fired, and the recoil toppled Sebastian sprawling onto the pile of ivory behind him. The canoe rocked dangerously while the paddlers struggled to keep it from capsizing, and then disappeared around the bend.

Twelve hours later, the canoes reappeared around the same bend, and headed towards the lone monkey-bean tree on the bank. The canoes rode lightly, empty of ivory, and the paddlers were singing one of the old river chants.

Freshly shaved, wearing a clean shirt and his other pair of boots, a case of Flynn's liquor between his knees, Sebastian peered eagerly ahead for his first glimpse of the big American.

A fine blue tendril of camp-fire smoke smeared out across the river, but there were no figures waving a welcome from the bank. Suddenly Sebastian frowned as he realized that the silhouette of the monkey-bean tree had altered. He wrinkled his eyes, peering ahead uncertainly.

Behind him rang the first cry of alarm from his boatmen.

"Allemand!"And the canoe swerved under him.

He glanced back and saw the other canoes wheel away in tight circles aime downstream, the boatmen jabbering in terror as they leaned forward to thrust against the paddles.

His own canoe was in swift pursuit of the others as they darted beyond the bend.

"Hey!" Sebastian shouted at the sweat-shiny backs of his paddlers. "What do you think you're doing?"

They gave him no answer but the muscles beneath their black skins bunched and rippled in their frantic efforts to drive the canoe faster.

"Stop that immediately!" Sebastian yelled at them. "Take me back, dash it all. Take me to the camp."

In desperation Sebastian lifted the rifle and aimed at the nearest man. "I'm not joking," he yelled again. The native glanced over his shoulder into the gaping twin muzzles and his face, already twisted with fear, now convulsed into a mask of terror. They had all developed a healthy reverence for the way Sebastian handled that rifle.

The man stopped paddling, and one by one the others followed his example. Sitting frozen under the hypnotic eyes of Sebastian's rifle.

"Back!" said Sebastian and gestured eloquently upstream.

Reluctantly the man nearest him dipped his paddle and the canoe turned broadside across the current. "Back!" Sebastian repeated and the men dipped again.

Slowly, warily, the single canoe crept upstream towards the monkey-bean tree and the grotesque new fruit that hung from its branches.

The hull slid in onto the firm mud and Sebastian stepped ashore.

"Oud" he ordered the boatmen and gestured again. He wanted them well away from the canoe for he knew that, otherwise, the moment his back was turned they would set off downstream again with renewed enthusiasm. "Oud" and he herded them up the steep bank into Flynn O'Flynn's camp.

The two bearers who had died of gunshot wounds lay beside the smouldering fire. But the four men in the monkey bean tree had been less fortunate. The ropes had cut deeply into the flesh of their necks and their faces were swollen, mouths wide in the last breath that had never been taken. On the lolling tongues the flies crawled like metallic green bees.

"Cut them down!" Sebastian roused himself from the nausea that was bubbling queasily up from his stomach. The boatmen stood paralysed and Sebastian felt anger now mixed with his revulsion. Roughly he shoved one of the men towards the tree. "Cut them down," he repeated, and thrust the handle of his hunting knife into the man's hand.

Sebastian turned away as the native shinned up into the fork of the tree with the knife blade clamped between his teeth. Behind him he heard the heavy meaty thuds as the dead men dropped from the tree. Again his stomach heaved, and he concentrated on his search of the trampled grass around the camp.

"Flynn!" he called softly. "Flynn. I say Flynn! Where are you?" There were the prints of hobnailed boots in the soft earth, and at one place he stooped and picked up the shiny brass cylinder of an empty cartridge case. Stamped into the metal of the base around the detonator cap were the words Mauser Fabriken.

"Flynn!" more urgently now as the horror of it came home to him. "Flynn!" and he heard the grass rustle near him. He swung towards it, half raising the rifle.

"Master!" and Sebastian felt disappointment swoop in his chest.

"Mohammed. Is that you, Mohammed?" and he recognized the wizened little figure with the eternal fez perched on the woolly head as it emerged. Flynn's chief gun-boy, the only one with a little English.

"Mohammed," with relief, and then quickly, Fini? Where is Fini?"

"They shot him, master. The Askari came in the early morning before the sun. Fini was washing. They shot him and he fell into the water."

"Where? Show me where."

Below the camp, a few yards from where the canoe was drawn up, they found the pathetic little bundle of Flynn's clothing. Beside it was a half-consumed cake of cheap soap and a metal hand-mirror. There were the deep imprints of naked feet in the mud, and Mohammed stooped and broke off one of the green reeds at the water's edge. Wordlessly he handed it to Sebastian. A drop of blood had dried black on the leaf, and it crumbled as Sebastian touched it with his thumb-nail.

"We must find him. He might still be alive. Call the others. We'll search the banks downstream."

In an agony of loss, Sebastian picked up Flynn's soiled shirt and crumpled it in his fist.

Flynn shucked off his pants and the filthy bush-shirt.

Shivering briefly in the chill of dawn, he hugged himself and massaged his upper arms while he peered into the shallow water, searching the bottom for the telltale chicken-wire pattern that would mean a crocodile was buried in the mud waiting for him.

His body was porcelain-white where clothing had protected it from the sun, but his arms were chocolate-brown, and a deep vee of the same brown dipped down from his throat onto his chest. Above it the battered red face was creased and puffy with sleep, and his long, greying hair was tangled and matted. He belched thunderously, and grimaced at the taste of old gin and pipe tobacco, then, satisfied that no reptile lay in ambush, he stepped into the water and lowered his massive hams to sit waist-deep. Snorting, he scooped water with his cupped hands over his head, then lumbered out onto the bank again. Sixty seconds is a long time to stay in a river like the Rufiji, for the crocodiles come quickly to the sound of splashing.

Naked, dripping, hair plastered down across his face, Flynn began to soap himself, working up a thick lather at his crotch and tenderly massaging his abundant genitalia, he washed away the sloth of sleep and his appetite stirred.

He called up at the camp, "Mohammed, beloved of Allah and son of his prophet, shake your black arse out of the sack and get the coffee brewing." Then as an afterthought, he added, "And put a little gin in it."

Soapsuds filled Flynn's armpits, and coated the melancholy sag of his belly when Mohammed came down the bank to him. Mohammed was balancing a large enamel mug from which curled little wisps of aromatic steam, and Flynn grinned at him, and spoke in Swahili. "Thou art kind and merciful; this charity will be writ against your name in the Book of Paradise."

He reached for the mug but before his fingers touched it, there was a fusillade of gun-fire above them and a bullet hit Flynn high up in the thigh. It spun him sideways so he sprawled half in mud and half in water.

Lying stunned with the shock, he heard the rush of Askari into the camp, heard their shouted triumph as they clubbed with the gun-butt those who had survived the first volley. Flynn wriggled into a sitting position.

Mohammed was coming to him anxiously.

"Run," granted Flynn. "Run, damn you."

"Lord..

"Get out of here." Savagely Flynn lashed out at him, and Mohammed recoiled. "The rope, you fool. They'll give you the rope and wrap you in a pigskin."

A second longer Mohammed hesitated, then he ducked and scampered into the reeds.

"Find Fini," roared a bull voice in German. "Find the white man."

Flynn realized then that it was a stray bullet that had hit him perhaps even a ricochet. His leg was numb from the hip down, but he dragged himself into the water. He could not run, so he must swim.

"Where is he? Find him!" raged the voice, and suddenly the grass on the bank burst open and Flynn looked up.

For the first time they confronted each other. These two who had played murderous hide-and-seek for three long years across ten thousand square miles of bush.

"Ja!" Fleischer's jubilant bellow as he swung and sighted the pistol at the man in the water below him. "This time!"

aiming carefully, steadying the Luger with both hands.

The brittle snapping sound of the shot, and the slap of the bullet into the water a foot from Flynn's head were followed by Fleischer's snarl of disappointment.

Filling his lungs, Flynn ducked below the surface. Frogkicking with his good leg, trailing the wounded one, he turned with the current and swam. He swam until his trapped breath threatened to explode his chest, and coloured lights flashed and twinkled behind his clenched eyelids. Then he clawed to the surface. On the bank Fleischer was waiting for him with a dozen of his Askari.

"There he is!" as Flynn blew like a whale thirty yards downstream. Gun-fire crackled and the water whipped and leaped and creamed around Flynn's head.

"Shoot straightr!" Howling in frustration and blazing wildly with the Luger, Fleischer watched the head disappear and Flynn's fat white buttocks break the surface for an instant as he dived. Sobbing with anger and exertion, Fleischer turned his fury on the Askari around him. "Pigs!

Stupid black pig dogs!" And he swung the empty pistol against the nearest head, knocking the man to his knees.

Intent on avoiding the flailing pistol, none of them were ready when Flynn surfaced for the second time. A desultory volley kicked fountains no closer than ten feet to Flynn's bobbing head, and he dived again.

"Come on! Chase him!" Herding his Askari ahead of him, Fleischer trotted along the bank in pursuit. Twenty yards of good going, then they came to the first swamp hole and waded through it to be confronted by a solid barrier of elephant grass. They plunged into it and were swallowed so they no longer had sight of the river.

"Schnell! Schnell! He'll get away," gasped Fleischer and the thick stems wrapped his ankles so that he fell headlong in the mud. Two of his Askari dragged him up and they staggered on until the thicket of tall grass ended, and they stood on the elbow of the river bend with a clear view a thousand yards downstream.

Disturbed by the gun-fire, the birds were up, milling in confused flight above the reed-beds. Their alarm cries blended into a harsh chorus that spoiled the peace of the brooding dawn. They were the only living things in sight.

From bank to far bank, the curved expanse of water was broken only by a few floating islands of papyrus grass; rafts of matted vegetation cut loose by the current and floating unhurriedly down towards the sea.

Panting, Herman Fleischer shook off the supporting hands of his two Askari and searched desperately for a glimpse of Flynn's bobbing head. "Where did he go?" His fingers trembled as he fitted a new clip of ammunition into the Luger. "Where did he go?"he demanded again, but none of his Askari drew attention to himself by venturing a reply.

"He must be on this side! "The Rufiji was half a mile wide here, Flynn could not have crossed it in the few minutes since they had last seen him. "Search the bank!" Fleischer ordered. "Find him!"

With relief the sergeant of his Askari turned on his men, quickly splitting them into two parties and sending them up and downstream to scour the water's edge.

Slowly Fleischer returned the pistol to its holster and fastened the flap, then he took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his face and neck.

"Come on!" he snapped at his sergeant, and set off back towards the camp.

When he reached it, his men had already set out the folding table and chair. New life had been stilled into Flynn's camp-fire, and the Askari cook was preparing breakfast.

Sitting at the table with the front of his tunic open, % spooning up oatmeal porridge and wild honey, Fleischer was soothed into a better humour by the food, and by the thorough manner in which the execution of the four captives was conducted.

When the last of them had stopped twitching and kicking and hung quietly with his comrades in the monkey bean tree, Herman wiped up the bacon grease in his plate with a hunk of black bread and popped it into his mouth.

The cook removed the plate and replaced it with a mug of steaming coffee at the exact moment when the two parties of searchers straggled into the clearing to report that a few drops of blood at the water's edge was the only sign they had found of Flynn O'Flynn.

"Ja," Herman nodded, "the crocodiles have eaten him."

He sipped appreciatively at his coffee mug before he gave his next orders. "Sergeant, take this up to the launch." He pointed at the stack of ivory on the edge of the clearing.

"Then we will go down to the Island of the Dogs and find this other white man with his English flag." -here was only the entry wound, a dark red hole from which watery blood still oozed slowly. Flynn could have thrust his thumb into it but instead he groped gently around the back of his leg and located the lump in his flesh where the spent slug had come to rest just below the skin.

"God damn it, God damn it to hell," he whispered in pain, and in anger, at the unlikely chance which had deflected the ricochet downwards to where he had stood below the bank, deflecting it with just sufficient velocity to lodge the bullet in his thigh instead of delivering a clean in-a nd out wound.

Slowly he straightened his leg, testing it for broken bone.

At the movement, the matt of drifting papyrus on which he lay rocked slightly.

"Might have touched the bone, but it's still in one piece,"

he grunted with relief, and felt the first giddy swing of weakness in his head. In his ears was the faint rushing sound of a waterfall heard far off. "Lost a bit of the old juice," and from the wound a fresh trickle of bright blood broke and mingled with the waterdrops to snake down his leg and drip into the dry matted papyrus. "Got to stop that," he whispered.

He was naked, his body still wet from the river. No belt or cloth to use as a tourniquet but he must staunch the bleeding. His fingers clumsy with the weakness of the wound, he tore a bunch of the long sword blade leaves from the reeds around him and began twisting them into a rope.

Binding it around his leg above the wound, he pulled it tight and knotted it. The dribble of blood slowed and almost stopped before Flynn sank back and closed his eyes.

Beneath him the island swung and undulated with the eddy of the current and the wavelets pushed up by the rising morning wind. It was a soothing motion, and he was tired terribly, achingly, tired. He slept.

The pain and the cessation of motion woke him at last.

The pain was a dull persistent throb, a pulse that beat through his leg and groin and his lower belly. Groggily he pulled himself on to his elbows and looked down on his own body. The leg was swollen, bluish-looking from the constriction of the grass rope. He stared at it dully, without comprehension, for a full minute before memory flooded back.

"Gangrene!" he spoke aloud, and tore at the knot. The rope fell away and he gasped at the agony of new blood flowing into the leg, clenching his fists and grinding his teeth against it. The pain slowed and settled into a steady beat, and he breathed again, wheezy as a man with asthma.

The change of his circumstances came through to the conscious level of his mind and he peered around shortsightedly. The river had carried him down into the mangrove swamps again, down into the maze of little islands and water-ways of the delta. His raft of papyrus had been washed in and stranded against a mud bank by the falling tide. The mud stank of rotting vegetation and sulphur. Near him a gathering of big green river crabs were clicking and bubbling over the body of a dead fish, their little eye-stalks raised in perpetual surprise. At Flynn's movement they sidled away towards the water with their red4ipped claws raised defensively.

Water! Instantly Flynn was aware of the gummy saliva that glued his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Reddened by the harsh sunlight, heated by the first fever of his wound, his body was a furnace that craved moisture.

Flynn moved and instantly cried out in pain. His leg had stiffened while he slept. It was now a heavy anchor, shackling him helplessly to the papyrus raft. He tried again, easing himself backwards on his hands and his buttocks, dragging the leg after him. Each breath was a sob in his dry throat, each movement a white-hot lance into his thigh.

But he must drink, he had to drink. Inch by inch, he worked his way to the edge of the raft and slid from it on to the mud bank.

The water had receded with the tide, and he was still fifty paces from the edge. With the motion of a man swimming on his back, he moved across the slimy evil, smelling mud, and his leg slithered after him. It was beginning to bleed again, not copiously but a bright wine drop at a time.

He reached the water at last, and rolled onto his side with the bad leg uppermost in an attempt to keep the wound out of the mud. On one elbow he buried his face in the water, drinking greedily. The water was warm, tainted with sea salt, and musky with rotted mangroves so it tasted like animal urine. But he gulped it noisily with his mouth and his nostrils and his eyes below the surface. At last he must breathe, and he lifted his head, panting for breath, Coughing so the water shot up his throat, out through his nose and dimmed his vision with tears. Gradually his breathing steadied and his eyes cleared. Before he bowed his head to drink again, he glanced out across the channel and saw it coming.

It was on the surface, still a hundred yards away but swimming fast, driving towards him with the great tail churning the water. A big one at least fifteen feet of it showing like the rOLIgh bark of a pine log, leaving a wide wake across the SUrface as it came.

And Flynn screamed, just once, but shrill and high and achingly clear. Forgetting the wound in his panic, he tried to get to his feet, pushing himself up with his hands but the leg pinned him. He screamed again, in pain and in fear.

Belly down, he wriggled in frantic haste from the shallow water back onto the mud bank, dragging himself across the glutinous slime, clawing and threshing towards the papyrus raft where it lay stranded among the mangrove roots fifty yards away. Expecting each moment to hear the slithering rush of the huge reptile across the mud behind him, he reached the first of the mangroves and rolled on his side, looking back, coated with black mud, his face working in his terror and the sound of it spilling in an incoherent babble through his lips.

The crocodile was at the edge of the mud bank, still in the river. Only its head showed above the surface and the little piggy bright eyes watched him un winkingly each set on its knot of horny scale.

Desperately Flynn looked about him. The mud bank was a tiny island with this grove of a dozen mangroves set in the centre of it. The trunks of the mangroves were twice as thick as a man's chest, but without branches for the first ten feet of their height; smooth bark slimy with mud and encrusted with little colonies of fresh-water mussels.

Unwounded Flynn would not have been able to climb any of them with his leg those branches above him were doubly inaccessible.

Wildly now he searched for a weapon anything, no matter how puny to defend himself. But there was nothing. Not a branch of driftwood, not a rock only the ck'black sheet of mud around him.

He looked back at the crocodile. It had not moved. His first feeble hope that it might not come out onto the mud bank withered almost before it was born. It would come.

Cowardly, loathsome creature it was but in time it would Father its courage. It had smelled his blood; it knew him to be wounded, helpless. It would come.

Painfully Flynn leaned his back against the roots of mangrove, and his terror settled down to a steady, pulsing fear as steady as the pain in his leg. During the frantic flight across-the bank, stiff mud had plugged the bullet hole and stopped the bleeding. But it does not matter now, Flynn thought, nothing matters. Only the creature out there, waiting while its appetite overcomes its timidity, swamps its reluctance to leave its natural element. It might take five minutes, or half a day but, inevitably, it will come.

There was a tiny ripple around its snout, the first sign of its movement, and the long scaly head inched in towards the edge. Flynn stiffened.

The back showed, its scales like the patterned teeth of a file, and beyond it, the tail with the coxcomb double crest.

Cautiously, on its short bowed legs, it waddled through the shallows. Wet and shiny, as broad across the back as a percher on stallion, more than a ton of cold, armoured flesh, it emerged from the water. Sinking elbow-deep into the soft mud, so its belly left a slide mark behind it. Grinning savagely, but with the jagged, irregular teeth lying yellow and long on its lips, and the small eyes watching him.

It came so slowly that Flynn lay passively against the tree, mesmerized by the deliberate waddling approach.

When it was half-way across the bank, it stopped crouching, grinning and he smelled it. The heavy odour of stale fish and musk on the warm air.

"Get away!" Flynn yelled at it, and it stood unmoving, unblinking. "Get away!" He snatched up a handful of mud and hurled it. It crouched a little lower on its stubby legs and the fat crested tail stiffened, arching slightly.

Sobbing now, Flynn threw another handful of mud. The long grinning jaws opened an inch, then shut again. He heard the click as its teeth met, and it charged. Incredibly fast through the Mud, grinning still, it slithered towards him.

This time Flynn's voice was a lunatic babble of horror and he writhed helplessly against the mangrove roots.

The deep booming note of the gun seemed not part of reality, but the crocodile reared up on its tail, drowning the echoes of the shot with its own hissing bellow, and above the next boom of the gun, Flynn heard the bullet strike the scaly body with a thump.

Mud sprayed as the reptile rolled in convulsions, and then, lifting itself high on its legs, it lumbered in ungainly flight towards the water. Again and again the heavy rifle fired, but the crocodile never faltered in its rush, and the surface of the water exploded like blown glass as it launched itself from the bank and was gone in the spreading ripples.

Standing in the bows of the canoe with the smoking rifle in his hands, while the paddlers drove in towards the bank, Sebastian Oldsmith shouted anxiously, "Flynn, Flynn did it get you? Are you all right?"

Flynn's reply was a croak. "Bassie. Oh, Bassie boy, for the first time in my life I'm real pleased to see you," and he sagged only half conscious against the mangrove roots.

The sun burned down on the dhow where it lay at anchor off the Island of the Dogs, yet a steady breeze came down the narrow waterway between the mangroves and plucked at the furled sail on the boom.

With a rope sling under his armpits, they lifted Flynn from the canoe and swung him, legs dangling, over the bulwark. Sebastian was ready to receive him and lower him gently to the deck.

"Get that goddamn sail up, and let's get the hell out of the river," gasped Flynn.

"I must tend to your leg."

"That can wait. We've got to get out into the open sea.

The Germans have got a steam launch. They'll be looking for us. We can expect them to drop in on us at any minute."

"They can't touch us we're under the protection of the flag, Sebastian protested.

"Listen, you stupid, bloody limey," Flynn's voice was a squawk of pain and impatience. "That murderin Hun will give us a rope dance with or without the flag. Don't argue, get that sail up!"

At al They laid him on a blanket in the shadow of the high poop before Sebastian hurried forward to release the Arab crew from the hold. They came up shiny with sweat and blinking in the dazzle of the sun. It took perhaps fifteen seconds for Mohammed to explain to them the urgency of the situation, and this invoked a few seconds of paralysed horror before they scattered to their stations. Four of them were hauling ineffectively at the anchor rope, but the great lump of coral was buried in the gluey mud of the bottom.

Sebastian pushed them aside impatiently and with one knife stroke, severed the rope.

The crew, with the enthusiastic assistance of Flynn's bearers and gun-boys, ran up the faded and patched old sail.

The wind caught it and bellied it. The deck canted slightly and two Arabs ran back to the tiller. From under the bows came the faint giggle of water, and from the stern spread a wide oily wake. With a cluster of the Arabs and bearers calling directions in the bows to the steersman at the rudder, the ancient dhow pointed downstream and ambled towards the sea.

When Sebastian went back to Flynn, he found old Mohammed squatting anxiously beside him and watching, as Flynn drank from the square bottle. Already a quarter of its contents had disappeared.

Flynn lowered the gin bottle, and breathed heavily through his mouth. "Tastes like honey," he gasped.

"Let's look at that leg." Sebastian stooped over Flynn's naked, mud-besmeared body. "My God, what a mess!

Mohammed, get a basin of water and try and find some clean cloth."

With the coming of evening, the breeze gathered strength, kicking up a chop on the widening

"water-ways of the delta. All afternoon the little dhow had butted against the run of the tide, but now began the ebb and it helped push her down towards the sea.

"With any luck we'll reach the mouth before sunset."

Sebastian was sitting beside Flynn's blanket-wrapped form under the poop. Flynn grunted. He was weak with pain, and groggy with gin. "If we don't, we'll have to moor somewhere for the night. Can't risk the channel in the dark." He received no reply from Flynn and himself fell silent.

Except for the gurgle of the bow-wave and the singsong chant of the pilot, a lazy silence blanketed the dhow. Most of the crew and the bearers were strewn in sleep about the deck, although two of them worked quietly over the open galley as they prepared the evening meal.

The heavy miasma of the swamps blended poorly with the stench of the bilges and the cargo of green ivory in the holds. It seemed to act as a drug, increasing Sebastian's fatigue. His head sagged forward on his chest and his hands slipped from the rifle in his lap. He slept.

The magpie chatter of the crew, and Mohammed's urgent hands on his shoulder, shook him awake. He came to his feet and gazed blearily around him. "What is it? What is the trouble, Mohammed?"

For answer, Mohammed shouted the crew into silence, and turned back to Sebastian. "Listen, master."

Sebastian shook the remnants of sleep from his head, then cocked it slightly. "I can't hear..." He stopped, an expression of uncertainty on his face.

Very faintly in the still of the evening he heard it, a faint huffing rhythm, as though a train passed in the distance.

"Yes," he said, still uncertain. "What is it?"

"The toot-toot boat, she comes."

Sebastian stared at him without comprehension.

"The Allemand. The Germans." Mohammed's hands fluttered with agitation. "They follow us. They chase. They catch. They..." He clutched his own throat with both hands and rolled his eyes. His tongue protruded from the corner of his mouth.

Flynn's entire retinue was gathered in a mob around Sebastian, and at Mohammed's graphic little charade, they burst once more into a Lightened chorus. Every eye was on Sebastian, waiting for his lead, and he felt confused, uncertain. Instinctively he turned to Flynn. Flynn lay on his back, his mouth open, snoring. Quickly Sebastian knelt beside him. "Flynn! Flynn!" Flynn opened his eyes but they were focused beyond Sebastian's face. "The Germans are coming."

"The Campbells are coming. Hurrah! Hurrah!" muttered Flynn and closed his eyes again. His usually red face was flushed hot-scarlet with fever.

"What must I do? "pleaded Sebastian.

"Drink it" advised Flynn. "Never hesitate. Drink it!" his eyes still closed, his voice slurred.

"Please, Flynn. Please tell me."

"Tell you?" muttered Flynn in delirium. "Sure! Have you heard the one about the camel and the missionary?"

Sebastian jumped to his feet and looked wildly about him. The sun was low, perhaps another two hours to nightfall If only we can hold them off until then. "Mohammed.

Get the gun-boys up into the stern," he snapped, and Mohammed, recognizing the new crispness in his voice, turned on the mob about him to relay the order.

The ten gun boys scattered to gather their weapons and then crowded up on to the poop. Sebastian followed them, gazing anxiously back along the channel. He could see two thousand yards to the bend behind them and the channel was empty, but he was sure the sound of the steam engine was louder.

"Spread them along the rail," he ordered Mohammed. He was thinking hard now; always a difficult task for Sebastian.

Stubborn as a mule, his mind began to sulk as soon as he flogged it. He wrinkled his high scholar's forehead and his next thought emerged slowly. "A barricade," he said. The thin planking of the bulwark would offer little protection against the high-powered Mousers. "Mohammed, get the others to carry up everything they can find, and pile it here to shield the steersman and the gun-boys. Bring everything water barrels, the sacks of coconuts, those old fishing nets

While they hurried to obey the order, Sebastian stood in frowning concentration, prodding the mass within his skull and finding it as responsive as a lump of freshly kneaded dough. He tried to estimate the relative speeds of the dhow and a modern steam launch. Perhaps they were moving at half the speed of their pursuers. With a sliding sensation, he decided that even in this wind, sail could not hope to out run a propeller-driven craft.

The word propeller, and the chance that at that moment he was forced to move aside to allow four of the men to drag an untidy bundle of old fishing-nets past, eased the next idea to the surface of his mind.

Humbled by the brilliance of his idea, he clung to it desperately, lest it somehow sink once more below the surface to be lost. "Mohammed..." he stammered in his excitement. "Mohammed, those nets..." He looked back again along the wide channel, and saw it still empty. He looked ahead and saw the next bend coming towards them;

already the helmsman was chanting the orders preparatory to tacking the dhow. "Those nets. I want to lay them across the channel."

Mohammed stared at him aghast, his wizened face crinkling deeper in disbelief

"Cut off the corks. Leave every fourth one." Sebastian grabbed his shoulders and shook him in agitation. "I want the net to sag. I don't want them to spot it too soon."

They were almost up to the bend now, and Sebastian pointed ahead "We'll lay it just around the corner."

"Why, master?" pleaded Mohammed. "We must run. They are close now."

"The propeller," Sebastian shouted in his face. He made a churning motion with his hands. "I want to snag the propeller."

A moment longer Mohammed stared at him, then he began to grin, exposing his bald gums.

While they worked in frantic haste the muffled engine beat from upstream grew steadily louder, more insistent.

The dhow wallowed and balked at the efforts of the helmsman to work her across the channel. Her head kept falling away before the wind, threatening to snarl the net in her own rudder, but slowly the line of bobbing corks spread from the mangroves on one side towards the far bank, while in grim concentration Sebastian and a group led by Mohammed paid the net out over the stern. Every few minutes they lifted their faces to glance at the bend upstream, expecting to see the German launch appear and hear the crackle of Mauser fire.

Gradually the dhow edged in towards the north bank, sowing the row of corks behind her, and abruptly Sebastian realized that the net was too short too short by fifty yards.

There would be a gap in their defence. If the launch cut the bend fine, hugging the bank as it came, then they were lost.

Already the note of its engine was so close that he could hear the metallic whine of the drive shaft.

Now also there was a new problem. How to anchor the loose end of the net? To let it float free would allow the current to wash it away, and open the gap still further.

"Mohammed. Fetch one of the tusks. The biggest one you can find. Quickly. Go quickly."

Mohammed scampered away and returned immediately, the two bearers with him staggering under the weight of the long curved shaft of ivory.

His hands clumsy with haste, Sebastian lashed the end rope of the net to the tusk. Then grunting with the effort, he and Mohammed hoisted it to the side rail, and pushed it overboard. As it splashed, Sebastian shouted at the helmsman, "Go!" and pointed downstream. Thankfully the Arab wrenched the tiller across. The dhow spun on her heel and pointed once more towards the sea.

Silently, anxiously, Sebastian and his gun-boys lined the stern and gazed back at the bend of the channel. In the fists of each of them were clutched the short-barrelled elephant rifles, and their faces were set intently.

The chug of the steam engine rose louder and still louder.

"Shout as soon as it shows," Sebastian ordered. "Shoot as fast as you can. Keep them looking at us, so they don't see the net."

And the launch came around the bend; flying a ribbon of grey smoke from its single stack and the bold red, yellow and black flag of the Empire at its bows. A neat little craft, forty-footer, low in the waist, small deck house aft, gleaming white in the sunlight, and the white mustache of the bow wave curled about her bows.

"Shoot!" bellowed Sebastian as he saw the Askari clustered on the foredeck. "Shoot!" and his voice was lost in the concerted blast of the heavy-calibre rifles around him. One of the Askari was flung backwards against the deck house, his arms spread wide as he hung there a moment in the attitude of crucifixion before subsiding gently on to the deck. His comrades scattered and dropped into cover behind the steel bulwark. A single figure was left alone on the deck;

a massive figure in the light grey uniform of the German colonial service, with his wide-brimmed slouch hat, and gold gleaming at the shoulders of his tunic.

Sebastian took him in the notch of his rear sight, held the bead on his chest, and jerked the trigger. The rifle jumped joyously against his shoulder, and he saw a fountain of spray leap from the surface of the river a hundred yards beyond the launch. Sebastian fired again, closing his eyes in anticipation of the savage recoil of the rifle. When he opened them, the German officer was still on his feet, shooting back at Sebastian with a pistol in his outstretched right hand. He was making better practice than Sebastian.

The fluting hum of his fire whipped about Sebastian's head, or smacked into the planking of the dhow.

Hastily Sebastian ducked behind the water barrel and clawed a pair of cartridges from his belt. Sharper, higher than the dull booming of the elephant rifles, climbed the brittle crackle of the Mauser fire as the Askari joined in.

Cautiously Sebastian lifted his eyes above the water barrel. The launch was cutting the bend fine, and with a sudden swoop of dismay, he knew it was going to clear the fishnet by twenty feet. He dropped his rifle on to the deck and jumped to his feet-A Mauser bullet missed his ear by so little that it nearly burst his eardrum. Instinctively he ducked, then checked the movement and instead ran to the helmsman. "Get out of the way!" he yelled in his excitement and his fear. Roughly he shoved the man aside and, grasping the tiller, pushed it across. Perilously close to the jibe, the dhow veered across the channel, opening the angle between it and the launch. Looking back Sebastian saw the fat German officer turn and shout an order towards the wheelhouse.

Almost immediately the bows of the launch swung, following the dhow's manoeuvre, and Sebastian felt triumph flare in his chest. Now directly in the path of the launch lay the line of tiny black dots that marked the net.

His deep-drawn breath trapped in his lungs, Sebastian watched the launch sweep over the net. His grip on the tiller tightened until his knuckles threatened to push out through the skin, and then he expelled his breath in a howl of joy and relief.

For the line of corks was suddenly plucked below the surface, leaving the small disturbance of ripples where each had stood. For ten seconds the launch sped on, then abruptly the even sound of her passage altered, a harsh clattering intruded, and her bows swung suddenly as she slowed.

The gap between the two craft widened. Sebastian saw the German officer drag a frightened Askari from the wheelhouse and club him unmercifully about the head, but the squeals of Teutonic fury were muted by the swiftly increasing distance, and then drowned by the tumultuous clamour of his own crew, as they pranced and danced about the deck.

The Arab helmsman hopped up on to the water barrel and hoisted the skirts of his dirty grey robe to expose his naked posterior at the launch in calculated mockery.

Long after the dhow had sailed sedately first out of rifle range, and then out of sight, Herman Fleischer gave himself over completely to the epilepsy of frustrated anger. He raved about the tiny deck, lashing out with ham-sized fists while his Askari skittled around him trying to keep out of range. Repeatedly he returned to the unconscious form of his helmsman to kick him as he lay. At last his anger burned itself down to the level where it allowed him to trundle aft and hang over the stern rail peering down at the sodden bundle of netting which was wrapped around the propeller.

"Sergeant!" His voice was hoarse with strain. "Get two men with knives over the side to cut that away!"

And a stillness fell upon them all. Every man tried to shrink himself down into insignificance, so that the choice might not fall on him. Two volunteers were selected, divested of their uniforms and hustled to the stern, despite their terrified entreaties.

"Tell them to hurry," grunted Herman, and went to his folding chair. His personal boy placed the evening meal with its attendant pitcher of beer on the table before him and Herman fell to.

Once from the stern there was a squeak and a splash, following by a furious burst of rifle fire. Herman frowned and looked up from his plate.

"A crocodile has taken one of the men, his sergeant reported in agitation.

"Well, put another one over," said Herman and returned with unabated relish to his meal. This last batch of sausage was particularly tasty.

The netting had wound so tightly about the blades and shaft of the propeller, that it was an hour after midnight when the last of it was hacked away by lantern light.

The drive shaft had twisted slightly and run one of its bearings, so even at quarter speed there was a fearsome clattering and threshing sound from the stern as the Icicle limped slowly down the channel towards the sea.

In the grey and pallid pink of dawn they, crept past the last island of mangroves and the launch lifted her head Lo the sluggish thrust of the Indian Ocean. It was a windless morning of flat calm, and Herman peered without hope into the misty half light that obscured the ocean's far horizon.

He had come this far only on the slight chance that the dhow might have gone aground on a mud bank during her night run down the river.

"Stop!" he shouted at his battered helmsman. Immediately the agonized clatter of the propeller ceased, and the launch rose and fell uneasily on the long oily swells.

So they had got clear away then. He could not risk his damaged launch on the open sea. He must go back, and leave the dhow and its ivory and its many candidates for the rope, to head unmolested for that pest-hole of rogues and pirates on Zanzibar Island.

Moodily he looked out across the sea and mourned that cargo of ivory. There had been perhaps a million Reichsmarks of it aboard, of which his unofficial handling fee would have been considerable.

Also he mourned the departure of the Englishman. He had never hanged one before.

He sighed and tried to comfort himself with the thought of that damned American, now well digested in the maw of a crocodile, but truly it would have been more satisfying to see him kick and spin on the rope.

He sighed again. Ah, well! At least he would no longer have the perpetual worry of Flynn O'Flynn's presence on his border, nor would he have to suffer the nagging of Governor Schee and his endless demands for O'Flynn's head.

Now it was breakfast time. He was about to turn away when something out there in the lightening dawn caught his attention.

A long low shape, its outline becoming crisper as he watched. There were cries from his Askari as they saw it also, huge in the dawn. The stark square turrets with their slim gun-barrels, the tall triple stacks and the neat geometrical patterns of its rigging.

"The Blitcher!" roared Herman in savage elation. The Blucher, by GoD! He recognized the cruiser, for he had seen her not six months before, lying in Dares Salaam harbour.

"Sergeant, bring the signal pistol!" He was capering with excitement. In reply to Herman's hasty message, Governor Schee must have sent the Blitcher racing southwards to blockade the Rufiji mouth. "Start the engine. Schnell! Run out to her," he shouted at the helmsman as he slid one of the fat Verey cartridges into the gaping breech of the Pistol, snapped it closed and pointed the muzzle to the sky.

Beside the tall bulk of the cruiser the launch was as tiny as a floating leaf, and Herman looked up with apprehension at the frail rope ladder he was expected to climb. His Askari assisted him across the narrow strip of water between the two vessels and he hung for a desperate minute until his feet found the rungs and he began his ponderous ascent.

Sweating profusely he was helped on to the deck by two seamen and faced an honour guard of a dozen or more.

Heading them was a young lieutenant in crisp, smart tropical whites.

Herman shrugged off the helping hands, drew himself to attention with a click of heels. "Commissioner Fleischer."

His voice shaky with exertion.

"Lieutenant Kyller. "The officer clicked and saluted.

"I must see your captain immediately. A matter of extreme urgency."

Capitan zur See Count Otto von Kleine inclined his head gravely as he greeted Herman. He was a tall, thin man, who wore a neat, pointed blond beard with just a few threads of grey to give it dignity. "The English have landed a full-scale expeditionary force in the Rufiji delta, supported by capital ships? This is correct?" he asked immediately.

"The report was exaggerated." Herman regretted bitterly the impetuous wording of his message to the Governor; he hadd been fired with patriotic ardour at the time. "In fact, it was only... ah," he hesitated, "one vessel

"Of what strength? What is her armament?" demanded von Kleine.

"Well, it was an unarmed vessel."

And von Kleine frowned. "Of what type?"

Herman flushed with embarrassment. "An Arab dhow.

Of about twenty-two metres."

"But this is impossible. Ridiculous. The Kaiser has delivered an ultimatum to the British Consul in Berlin. He has issued mobilization orders to five divisions." The captain spun on his heel and began to pace restlessly about his bridge, clapping his hands together in agitation. "What was the purpose of this British invasion? Where is this... this dhow? What explanation must I send to Berlin?"

"I have since learned that the expedition was led by a notorious ivory poacher named O'Flynn. He was shot resisting arrest by my Askari, but his accessory, an unknown Englishman, escaped down the river last night in the dhow."

"Where will they be headed?" The captain stopped pacing and glared at Herman.

"Zanzibar."

"This is stupidity, utter stupidity. We will be a laughing stock! A battle cruiser to catch a pair of common criminals!"

"But, Captain, you must pursue them."

"To what purpose?"

"If they escape to tell their story, the dignity of the Emperor will be lowered throughout the length of Africa.

Think if the British Press were to hear of this! Also, these men are dangerous criminals."

"But I cannot board a foreign ship on the high seas.

Especially if she flies the Union Jack. It would be an act of war an act of piracy."

"But, Captain, if she were to sink with all hands, sink without a trace?"

And Captain von Kleine nodded thoughtfully. Then abruptly he snapped his fingers and turned to his pilot. "Plot me a course for Zanzibar Island."

They lay becalmed below a sky of brazen cobalt, and every hour of the calm allowed the Mozambique current to push the little dhow another three miles off its course. Aimlessly she swung her head to meet each of the long swells, and then let it fall away into the troughs.

For the twentieth time since dawn, Sebastian climbed up on to the poop-deck and surveyed the endless waters, searching for a ruffle on the glassy Surface that would herald the wind. But there was never any sign of it. He looked towards the west, but the blue line of the coast had long since sunk below the horizon.

"I'm an old dog, bellowed Flynn from the lower deck. "Hear me laugh," and he imitated faithfully the yammering cry of an hyena. All day Flynn had regaled the labored company with snatches of song and animal imitations. Yet his delirium was inter spaced with periods of lucidity. "I reckon this time old Fleischer got me good, Bassie. There's a sack of poison forming round that bullet. I can feel it there. A fat, hot sack of it. Reckon we've got to dig for it pretty soon. Reckon if we can't make it back to Zanzibar pretty soon, we're going to have to dig for it." Then his mind escaped once more into the hot land of delirium.

My little girl, I'll bring you a pretty ribbon. There, don't cry. A pretty ribbon for a pretty girl." His voice syrupy, then suddenly harsh. "You cheeky little bitch. You're just like that goddamned mother of yours. Don't know why I don't chase you out," this last followed immediately by the hyena imitation again.

Now Sebastian turned away from the poop rail and looked down on Flynn. Beside him the faithful Mohammed was dipping strips of cloth in a bucket of sea water, wringing them out and then laying them on Flynn's flushed forehead in a futile attempt to reduce the fever.

Sebastian sighed. His responsibilities lay heavily. The command of the expedition had devolved squarely upon him. And yet, there was a sneaky sensation of pleasure, of pride in his execution of that command to the present. He went back and replayed in his mind the episode of the fishnet, remembering the quick decision that had altered the launch's course and lured it into the trap. He smiled at the memory, and the smile was not his usual self-effacing grin, but something harder. When he turned away to pace the narrow deck there was more spring in his step, and he set his shoulders square.

Again he stopped by the rail and looked towards the west. There was a cloud on the horizon, a tiny dark figure of it. And he watched it with hope that it might herald the start of the afternoon sea breeze. Yet it seemed unnatural.

As he watched, it moved. He could swear it moved. Now his whole attention was fastened upon it. Realization began to flicker in him, building up until it was certainty.

A ship. By God, a ship!

He ran to the poop ladder, and slid down into the waist, across it to the mast.

The crew and the bearers watched him with awakening interest. Some of them got to their feet.

Sebastian jumped on to the boom, balancing there a moment before he started to shin up the mast. Using the mainsail hoops like the rungs of a ladder, he reached the masthead and clung there, peering eagerly into the west.

There she was no doubt about it. He could see the tips of the triple stacks, each with its feather of dark smoke, and he began to cheer.

Below him the rail was lined with his men, all peering out in the direction they took from him. Sebastian slid down the mast, the friction burning his hands in his haste.

His feet hit the deck and he ran to Flynn. "A ship. A big ship coming up fast." Flynn rolled his head and looked at him vaguely. "Listen to me, Flynn. There'll be a doctor aboard. We'll get you to a port in no time."

"That's good, Bassie." Flynn's brain clicked back into focus. "You've done real good."

She came up over the horizon with astonishing rapidity, and her silhouette changed as she altered course towards them. But not before Sebastian had seen the gun turrets.

"A warship!" he shouted. To his mind this proved her British, only one nation ruled the waves. "They've seen us!" He waved his hands above his head.

Bows on, each second growing in size, grey and big, she bore down upon the little dhow.

Gradually the cheering of the crew faltered and subsided into an uneasy silence. Magnified by the still, hot air, huge on the velvety gloss of the ocean, lifting a bow wave of pear ling white, the warship came on. No check in her speed, the ensign at her masthead streaming away from them so they could not see the colours.

"What are they going to do?" Sebastian asked aloud, and was answered by Flynn's voice. Sebastian glanced around.

Balancing on his good leg with one arm draped around Mohammed's neck, Flynn was hopping across the deck towards him.

"I'll tell you what they're going to do! They're going to hit us smack-bang up the arse!" Flynn roared. "That's the Blitcher! That's a German ship"

"They can't do that!" Sebastian protested.

"You'd like to bet? She's coming straight from the Rufiji delta and my guess is she's had a chat with Fleischer. He's probably aboard her." Flynn swayed against Mohammed, gasping with the pain of his leg before he went on. "They're going to ram us, and then machine-gun anyone still floating."

"We've got to make a life raft."

"No time, Bassie. Look at her come!"

Less than five miles away, but swiftly narrowing the distance, the Blitcher's tall bows knifed towards them. Wildly Sebastian looked around the crowded deck, and he saw the pile of cork floats they had cut from the fish nets.

Drawing his knife, he ran to one of the sacks of coconuts and cut the twine that closed the mouth. He slipped the knife back into its sheath, stooped, and Up-ended the sack, spilling coconuts on to the deck. Then with the empty sack in his hand he ran to the pile of floats and dropped on his knees. In frantic haste he shovelled them into the sack, half filling it before he looked up again. The Blucher was two miles away, a tall tower of murderous grey steel.

With alength of rope Sebastian tied the sack closed and dragged it to where Flynn stood supported by Mohammed.

"What are you doing?" Flynn demanded.

"Fixing you up! Lift your arms!" Flynn obeyed and Sebastian tied the free end of the rope around his chest at the level of his armpits. He paused to unlace and kick off his boots before speaking again. "Mohammed, you stay with him. Hang on to the sack and don't let go." He left them, trotting on bare feet to find his rifle propped against the poop. Buckling on his cartridge belt, he hurried back to the rail.

Sebastian Oldsmith was about to engage a nine-inch battle cruiser with a double-barrelled Gibbs.500.

She was close now, hanging over them like a high cliff of steel. Even Sebastian could not miss a battle cruiser at two hundred yards, and the heavy bullets clanged against the armoured hull, ringing loudly above the hissing rush of the bow wave.

While he reloaded, Sebastian looked up at the line of heads in the bows of the Blitcher; grinning faces below the white caps with their little swallow-tailed black ribbons.

"You bloody swine," he shouted at them. Hatred stronger than he had ever dreamed possible choked his voice. "You filthy, bloody swine." He lifted the rifle and fired without effect, and the Blitcher hit the dhow.

It struck with a crash and the crackling roar of rending timber. It crushed her side and cut through in the screaming of dying men and the squeal of planking against steel.

It trod the dhow under, breaking her back, forcing her far below the surface. At the initial shock, Sebastian was hurled overboard, the rifle thrown from his hands. He struck the armoured plate of the cruiser a glancing blow and then dropped into the sea beside her. The thrust of the bow wave tumbled him aside, else he would have been dragged along the hull and his body shredded against the steel plate.

He surfaced just in time to suck a lungful of air before the turbulence of the great screws caught him and plucked him under again, driving him deep so the pressure stabbed like red-hot needles in his eardrums. He felt himself swirled end over end, buffeted, shaken vigorously as the water tore at his body.

Colour flashed and zigzagged behind his closed eyelids.

There was a suffocating pain in his chest and his lungs pumped, urgently craving air, but he sealed his lips " and kicked out with his legs, clawing at the water with his hands.

The churning wake of the cruiser released its grip upon him, and he was shot to the surface with such force that he broke clear to the waist before dropping back to drink air greedily. He unbuckled the heavy cartridge belt and let it sink before he looked about him.

The surface of the sea was scattered with floating debris, and a few bobbing human heads. Near him a section of torn planking rose in a burst of trapped air bubbles. Sebastian struck Out for it and clung there, his legs hanging in the clear green water.

"Flynn," he gasped. "Flynn, where are you?"

A quarter of a mile away, the Blucher was circling slowly, long and menacing and shark-like, and he stared at it in hatred and in fear.

"Master!" Mohammed's voice behind him.

Sebastian turned quickly and saw the black face and the red face beside the floating sack of corks a hundred yards away. "Flynn!"

"Good-bye, Bassie," Flynn called. "The old Hun is coming back to finish us off. Look! They've got machine guns set up on the bridge. See you on the other side, boy:

Quickly Sebastian looked back at the cruiser and saw the clusters of white uniforms on the angle of her bridge. Ja, there are still some of them alive." Through borrowed binoculars, Fleischer scanned the littered area of the wreck.

"You will use the Maxims, of course, Captain? It will be quicker than picking them off with rifles."

Captain von Kleine did not answer. He stood tall on his bridge, slightly round-shouldered, staring out at the wreckage with his hands clasped behind him. "There is something sad in the death of a ship," he murmured. "Even such a dirty little one as this." Suddenly he straightened his shoulders and turned to Fleischer. "Your launch is waiting for you at the mouth of the Rufiji. I will take you there, Commissioner."

"But first the business of the survivors."

Von Kleine's expression hardened. "Commissioner, I sank that dhow in what I believed to be my duty. But now I am not sure that my judgement was not clouded by anger. I will not trespass further on my conscience by machine-gunning swimming civilians."

"You will then pick them up. I must arrest them and give them trial."

"am not a policeman," he paused and his expression softened a little. "That one who fired the rifle at us. I think he must be a brave man. He is a criminal, perhaps, but I am not so old in the ways of the world that I do not love courage merely for its own sake. I would not like to know I have saved this man for the noose. Let the sea be the judge and the executioner." He turned to his lieutenant. Kyller, prepare to drop one of the life rafts." The lieutenant stared at him in disbelief "You heard me?"

"Yes, my Captain."

"Then do it." Ignoring Fleischer's squawks of protest, von Kleine crossed to the pilot. "Alter course to pass the survivors at a distance- of fifty metres."

"Here she comes." Flynn grinned tightly, without humour, and watched the cruiser swing ponderously towards them.

The cries of the swimmers around him, pleading mercy, were plaintive as the voices of sea birds tiny on the immensity of the ocean.

"Flynn. Look at the bridge!" Sebastian's voice floated across to him. "See him there. The grey uniform."

Tears from the sting of sea salt in his wound, and the distortion of fever had blurred Flynn's vision, yet he could make out the spot of grey among the speckling of white uniforms on the bridge of the cruiser.

"Who is it?"

"You were right. It's Fleischer," Sebastian shouted back, and Flynn began to curse.

"Hey, you filthy, fat Blucher," he bellowed, trying to drag himself up onto the floating sack of corks. "Hey, you whore's chamber pot." His voice carried above the murmur of the cruiser's engines running at dead-slow. "Come on, you blood-smeared little pig The tall hull of the cruiser was close now, so close he could see the bulky figure in grey turn to the tall white, uniformed officer beside him, gesticulating in what was clearly entreaty.

The officer turned away, and moved to the rail of the bridge. He leaned out and waved to a group of seamen on the deck below him.

"That's right. Tell them to shoot. Let's get it over with.

Tell them..."

A large square object was lifted over the rail by the gang below the bridge. It dropped and fell with a splash alongside.

Flynn's voice dried up, and he watched in disbelief as the white-clad officer lifted his right arm in a gesture that might have been a salute. The beat of the cruiser's engines mounted as it increased speed, and she swung away towards the west.

Flynn O'Flynn began to laugh, the cackling hysteria of relief and delirium. He rolled off the sack of corks and his head dropped forward, so the warm green water smothered his laughter. Mohammed took a handful of the grey hair and lifted his face to prevent him drowning.

Sebastian reached the raft, and grasped the rope that hung in loops around its sides. He paused to regain his breath before hauling himself up to lie gasping, the blood-warm sea-water streaming from his sodden clothing, and watched the shape of the battle cruiser recede into the west.

"Master! Help me!"

The voice roused him and he sat up. Mohammed was struggling, dragging Flynn and the sack through the water.

Among the floating wreckage a dozen others of the crew and the bearers were flapping their way towards the raft; the weaker swimmers were already failing, their cries becoming more pitiful, and their splashing more frenzied.

There were oars roped to the slatted deck of the raft.

Quickly Sebastian cut one loose with his hunting knife and began rowing towards the pair. His progress was slow, for the raft was an ungainly bitch that balked and swung away from the thrust of the oar.

An Arab crewman reached the raft and scrambled aboard, then another, and another. Each of them freed an oar and helped with the rowing. They passed the body of one of the bearers floating just below the surface, both its legs cut off above the knees and the bones sticking out of the ragged meat of the stumps. This was not the only one there was other human flotsam among the scattered wreckage, and the pinky-brown stains that drifted away on the current attracted the sharks.

The Arab beside Sebastian saw the first one and called out, pointing with the oar.

It came hunting, its fin waggling from side to side as it tacked up against the current, so that they could sense its cold, unthinking excitement.

Below the surface, distorted and dark, showed the tapering length of its body. Not a big one. Perhaps nine feet in length and four hundred pounds in weight, but big enough to chop aleg with one bite. No longer guided by the drift of blood-taste, picking up the vibrations of the swimmers, it straightened and came in on its first run.

"Shark!" Sebastian yelled at Flynn and Mohammed where they floundered ten yards away. And both of them panicked;

no longer making for the raft, they tried to clamber on to the sack of corks. Terror has no logic. Their only concern was to lift their dangling legs from the water, but the sack was too small, too unstable and their panic attracted the shark's attention. It veered towards them, showing the full height of its curved triangular fin, each sweep of its tail breaking the surface as it drove in.

"This way," shouted Sebastian. "Come to the raft!" He was hacking at the water with the oar, while beside him the Arabs worked in equal dedication. "This way, Flynn. For God's sake, this way."

His voice penetrated their panic, and once more they struck out for the raft. But the shark was closing fast, long and dappled by sunlight through the surface ripple.

The sac was still tied to Flynn and its resistance to the water slowed them as it dragged behind. The shark swerved and made its first pass; it seemed to hump up out of the water, and its mouth opened. The upper jaw bulged out, the lower jaw gaped, and the multiple rows of teeth came erect like the quills of a porcupine, and it hit the sack.

Locking its jaws into the coarse jute material, worrying it, still humped out of the water, shaking its blunt head clumsily, scattering a spray of water drops that flew like shattered glass in the sun.

"Grab here!" commanded Sebastian, leaning out to offer the blade of the oar to the pair in the water. They clutched at it with the strength of fear, and Sebastian drew them in.

But the sack and the shark were still attached to Flynn, its threshing threatening to break Flynn's hold on the lifeline around the raft.

Dropping to his knees, Sebastian fumbled the knife from its sheath and sawed at the rope. It parted. The shark, still worrying the sack, worked away from the raft and Sebastian helped the Arabs to drag first Flynn, and then Mohammed, over the side.

They were not finished yet. There were still half a dozen men in the water.

Realizing its error at last, the shark relinquished its hold on the sack. It backed away. For a moment it hung motionless, puzzled, then it circled out towards the nearest sound of splashing. One of the gun-boys, clawing at the water in exhausted dog-paddle. The shark hit him in the side, and pulled him under. Moments later he reappeared, his mouth an open pink cave as he screamed, the water about him clouded dark red-brown by his own blood. Again he was pulled under as the shark hit his legs, but again he floated. This time face down, wriggling feebly, and the shark circled him, dashing in to chop off a mouthful of his flesh, backing away to gulp it down before coming in again.

There was suddenly more sharks and so many that Sebastian could not count them, as they circled and dived in ecstatic greed, until the sea around the raft trembled and swirled in agitation.

Sebastian and his Arabs managed to drag two more of the crew into the raft and they had a third half out of the water when a six-foot white-pointer shot up from the depths, and fastened on his thigh with such violence that it almost jerked all of them overboard. But they steadied themselves and held on to the man's arms, frozen in this gruesome tug-of-war, while the shark worried the leg, so dog-like in its determination that Sebastian expected it to growl.

Little Mohammed staggered to his feet, snatched up an oar and swung it against the pointed snout with all his strength. They had dragged the shark's head from the water, and the oar fell on it with a series of rubbery thumps, but the shark held on. Fresh, bright blood squirted and trickled from the leg in its jaws, running down the shark's glistening snake-like head into the open slits of its gill covers.

"Hold him!" gasped Sebastian, and drew his knife. The raft rocking crazily under him, he leaned over the man's outstretched body and drove the knife blade into the shark's expressionless little eye. It popped in a burst of clear fluid, and the shark stiffened and trembled. Sebastian withdrew the blade and stabbed into the other eye. With a convulsive gulp the shark opened its jaws and slid back into the sea to meander blindly away.

There were no more swimmers. The little group on the raft huddled together and watched the shark pack milling hungrily, seeming to sniff at the tainted water as they gathered the last morsels of meat.

The shark victim hosed the deck with his severed femoral artery and died before any of them could rouse themselves to apply a tourniquet.

"Push him oVer," grunted Flynn.

"No," Sebastian shook his head.

"Chrissake, we're crowded enough as it is. Chuck the poor bastard over."

"Later on, not now." Sebastian could not stand to watch the sharks squabble over the corpse.

"Mohammed, get a couple of your lads on the oars. I want to pick up as many of those coconuts as we can."

By the time darkness stopped them, they had retrieved fifty-two of the floating coconuts, sufficient to keep the seven of them thirst-free for a week.

It was cold that night. They crowded together for warmth and watched the underwater pyrotechnics, as the shark pack circled the raft in phosphorescent splendour.

"You've got to cut for it," Flynn whispered, and he shivered with cold in the burning heat of the midday sun.

"I don't know anything about it," Sebastian protested, yet he could see that Flynn was dying.

"You've got to do it!" Flynn's eyes had sunk into plum-coloured cavities and the smell of his breath was that of something long dead.

Staring at the leg, Sebastian had difficulty controlling his nausea. It was swollen fat and purple. The bullet hole was covered with a crusty black scab, but Sebastian caught a whiff of the putrefaction under it and this time his nausea came up acid sweet into the back of his throat. He swallowed it.

"You've got to do it, Bassie boy."

Sebastian nodded, and tentatively laid his hand on the leg. Immediately he jerked his fingers away, surprised by the heat of the skin.

"You've got to do it," urged Flynn. "Feel for the slug. It's not deep. Just under the skin."

He felt the slug, It moved under his fingers, the size of a green acorn in the taut hot flesh.

"It's going to hurt like Billy-o." Sebastian's voice was hoarse.

The rowers were resting on their oars, watching with frank curiosity, while the raft eddied and swung in the drift of the Mozambique current. Above them the sail that Sebastian had rigged from salvaged planking and canvas flapped wearily, throwing a shadow across the leg.

"Mohammed, you and one other to hold the master's shoulders. Two others to keep his legs still."

Flynn lay quiescent, pinioned beneath them on the slats of the deck.

Sebastian knelt over him, gathering his resolve. The knife he had sharpened against the metal edge of the raft, and then scrubbed clean with coconut fibre and seawater.

He had sluiced the leg also, and washed his hands until the skin tingled. Beside him on the deck stood half a coconut shell containing perhaps an ounce of evaporated salt scraped from the deck and the sail, ready to pack into the open wound. "Ready?"he whispered.

"Ready," grunted Flynn, and Sebastian located the lump of the bullet and drew the edge of the blade across it timidly.

Flynn gasped, but human skin was tougher than Sebastian allowed. It did not part.

"Goddamn you!" Flynn was sweating already. "Don't play with it. Cut, man, cud'

This time Sebastian slashed, and the flesh split open under the blade. He dropped the knife and drew back in horror as the infection bubbled up through the lips of the knife wound. It looked like yellow custard mixed with prune juice and the smell of it filled his nostrils and his throat.

"Go for the slug. Go for it with your fingers." Flynn writhed beneath the men who held him. "Hurry. Hurry. I can't take much more."

Steeling himself, closing his throat against the vomit that threatened to vent at any moment, Sebastian slipped his little finger into the slit. Hooking with it for the bullet, finding it, easing it up although tissue clung to it reluctantly, until it popped from the wound and dropped on to the deck.

A fresh gush of warm poison followed it out, flowing over Sebastian's hand, and he crawled to the edge of the raft, choking and gagging.

"Wished we had some red cloth." Flynn sat against the rickety mast. He was still very weak but four days ago the fever had broken with the release of the poison.

"What would you do with it?" Sebastian asked.

"Catch me one of those dolphins. Man, I'm so god damned hungry I'd eat it raw."

A four-day diet of coconut pulp and milk had left all their bellies grumbling.

"Why red?"

"They go for red. Make a lure."

"You haven't any hooks or line."

"Tie it to a bit of twine from the sack and tease them up to the surface then harpoon one with your knife tied to an oar."

Sebastian was silent, peering thoughtfully over the side at the deep flashes of gold where the shoal of dolphin played under the raft. "It's got to be red, hey?" he asked, and Flynn looked at him sharply;

"Yeah. It's got to be red."

"Well..." Sebastian hesitated, and then flushed with embarrassment under his tropical sunburn.

"What's wrong with you?"

Still blushing, Sebastian stood up and loosened his belt then, shyly as a bride on her wedding night, he drew down his pants.

"MY God," breathed Flynn in shock, as he held up his hand to shield his eyes.

"Haul Haul"was the chorus of admiration from the crew.

"Got them at Harrods," said Sebastian with becoming modesty.

Red, Flynn had asked for but Sebastian's underpants were the brightest, most beautiful red; the most vivid sunset and roses red, he could have imagined. They hung in oriental splendour to Sebastian's knees.

"Pure silk," said Sebastian, fingering the cloth. "Ten shillings a pair."

"Whoa now! Come on, little fishy. Come on there, Flynn whispered as he lay on his belly, head and shoulders over the edge of the raft. On its thread of twine, the scrap of red danced deep in the green water. A long, slithering flash of gold shot towards it, and Flynn jerked the twine away at the last instant. The dolphin swirled and darted back. Again Flynn jerked the twine. Chameleon lines and dots of excitement showed against the gold of the dolphin's body.

"That's it, fishy. Chase it." The other fish of the shoal joined the hunt, forming a sparkling planetary system of movement around the lure. "Get ready!"

"I'm ready." Sebastian stood over him, poised like a javelin thrower. In the excitement he had forgotten to don his pants and his shirt-tails flapped around his thighs in a most undignified manner. But his legs were long and finely muscled, the legs of an athlete. "Get back!" he snapped at the crew who were crowded around him so that the raft was listing dangerously. "Get back give me room," and he hefted the oar with the long hunting knife lashed to the tip.

"Here they come." Flynn's voice trembled with excitement as he worked the scrap of red cloth upwards, and the shoal followed it. "Now!" he shouted as a single fish broke the surface four feet of flashing gold, and Sebastian lunged.

The steady hand and eye that had once clean-bowled the great Frank Woolley directed the oar. Sebastian hit the dolphin an inch behind the eye, and the blade slipped through to lacerate the gills.

For a few seconds the oar came alive in his hands as the dolphin twitched and fought on the blade, but there were no barbs to hold in the flesh, and the fish slipped from the knife.

"God damn it to hell! "bellowed Flynn.

"Dash it all! "echoed Sebastian.

But ten feet down the dolphin was mortally wounded; it jigged and whipped like a golden kite in a high wind while the rest of the shoal scattered.

Sebastian dropped the oar and began stripping his shirt.

"What are you doing? "demanded Flynn.

"Going after it."

"You're mad. Sharks!"

"I'm so hungry, I'll eat a shark also," and he dived over the side. Thirty seconds later he surfaced, blowing like a grampus but grinning triumphantly, with the dead dolphin clasped lovingly to his bosom.

They ate strips of raw fish seasoned with evaporated salt, squatting around the mutilated carcass of the dolphin.

"Well, I've paid a guinea for worse meals than this said Sebastian, and belched softly. "Oh, I beg your pardon."

"Granted," Flynn grunted with his mouth full of fish; and then eyeing Sebastian's nudity with a world-weary eye, "Stop boasting and put your pants on before you trip over. Flynn O'Flynn was slowly, very slowly, revising his estimate of Sebastian Oldsmith.

The rowers had long since lost any enthusiasm they might have had for the task. They kept at it only in response to offers of bodily violence by Flynn and the example set by Sebastian, who worked tirelessly.

The thin layer of fat that had sheathed Sebastian's muscles was long since consumed, and his sun-baked body was a Michelangelo sculpture as he leaned and dug and pulled the oar.

Six days they had dragged the raft across the southward push of the current. Six days of sun-blazing calm, with the sea flattening, until now in the late afternoon, it looked like an endless sheet of smooth green velvet.

"No," said Mohammed. "That means, The two porcupines

:.

make love under the blanket."

"Oh!" Sebastian repeated the phrase without interrupting the rhythm of his rowing. Sebastian was a dogged pupil of Swahili, making Lip in determination what he lacked in brilliance. Mohammed was proud of him, and opposed any attempt by the other members of the crew to usurp his position as chief tutor. "That's all right about the porcupines shagging them selves to a standstill," grunted Flynn. "But what does this mean... and he spoke in Swahili.

"It means, Big winds will blow across the sea," interpreted Sebastian, and glowed with achievement.

"And I'm not joking either." Flynn stood up, crouching to favour his bad leg, and shaded his eyes to peer into the east. "You see that line of cloud?"

Laying aside the oar, Sebastian stood beside him and flexed the aching muscles of his back and shoulders.

Immediately all activity ceased among the other rowers.

"Keep going, me beauties!" growled Flynn, and reluctantly they obeyed. Flynn turned back to Sebastian. "You see it?"

"Yes." It was drawn like a kohl line across the eyelid of a Hindu woman, smeared black along the horizon.

"Well, Bassie there's the wind you've been griping about.

But, my friend, I think it's a little more than you bargained for."

In the darkness they heard it coming from far away, a muted sibilance in the night. One by one, the fat stars were blotted out in the east as dark cloud spread out to fill half the midnight sky.

A single gust hit the raft and flogged the makeshift sail with a clap like a shotgun, and the sleepers woke and sat up.

"Hang on to those fancy underpants, "muttered Flynn, "or you'll get them blown right up your backside."

Another gust, another lull, but already there was the boisterous slapping of small waves against the sides of the raft.

"I'd better get that sail down."

"You had, and all," agreed Flynn, "and while you're at it, use the rope to fix lifelines for us." In haste, spurred on by the rising hiss of the wind, they lashed themselves to the slats of the deck.

The main force of the wind spun the raft like a top, splattering them with spray; the spray was icy cold in the rush of the wind. The wind was steady now and the warm raft moved uneasily like the jerky motion of an animal restless at the prick of spurs.

"At least it will push us towards the land , Sebastian shouted across at Flynn.

"Bassie boy, you think of the cutest things," and the first wave came aboard, smothering Flynn's voice, breaking over their prostrate bodies, and then streaming out through the slatted deck. The raft wallowed in dismay, then gathered itself to meet the next rush of the sea.

Under the steady it" of the wind, the sea came up more swiftly than Sebastian believed was possible. Within minutes the waves were breaking over the raft with such weight as to squeeze the breath from their lungs, submerging them completely, driving the raft under before its buoyancy reasserted itself and lifted it, canting crazily, and they could gasp for air in the smother of spray.

Waiting for the lulls, Sebastian inched his way across the deck until he reached Flynn. "How are you bearing up?" he bellowed.

"Great, just great," and another wave drove them under.

"Your leg?" spluttered Sebastian as they came up.

"For Chrissake, stop yapping, "and they went under again.

It was completely dark, no star, no sliver of moon, but each line of breaking water glowed in dull, phosphorescent malevolence as it dashed down upon them, warning them to suck air and cling with cramped fingers hooked into the slats.

For all eternity Sebastian lived in darkness, battered by the wind and the wild, flying water. The aching chill of his body dulled out into numbness. Slowly his mind emptied of conscious thought, so when a bigger wave scoured them, he heard the tearing sound of deck slats pulling loose, and the lost wail as one of the Arabs was washed away into the night sea but the sound had no meaning to him.

Twice he vomited sea water that he had swallowed, but it had no taste in his mouth, and he let it run heedlessly down his chin and warm on to his chest, to be washed away by the next torrential wave.

His eyes burned without pain from the harsh rake of wind flung spray, and he blinked them owlishly at each advancing wave. It seemed, in time, that he could see more clearly, and he turned his head slowly. Beside him, Flynn's face was aleprous blotch in the darkness. This puzzled him, and he lay and thought about it but no solution came, until he looked beyond the next wave, and saw the faint promise of a new day show pale through the black massed cloud banks

He tried to speak, but no sound came for his throat was swollen closed with the salt, and his tongue was tingling numb. Again, he tried. "Dawn coming," he croaked, but beside him Flynn lay like a corpse frozen in rigor mortis.

Slowly the light grew over that mad, grey sea but the scudding black cloud-banks tried desperately to oppose its coming.

Now the seas were more awesome in their raging insanity. Each mountain of glassy grey rose high above the raft, shielding it for a few seconds from the whip of the wind, its crest blowing off like the plume of an Etruscan helmet, before it slid down, collapsing upon itself in the tumbling roar of breaking water.

Each time, the men on the raft shrank flat on the deck, and waited in bovine acceptance to be smothered again beneath the white deluge.

Once, the raft rode high and clear in a freak flat of the storm, and Sebastian looked about him. The canvas and rope, the coconuts and the other pathetic accumulation of their possessions were all gone. The sea had ripped away many of the deck slats so that the metal floats of the raft were exposed; it had torn the very clothing from them so they were clad in sodden tatters. Of the seven men who had ridden the raft the previous day, only he and Flynn, Mohammed and one more, were left the other three were gone, gobbled up by the hungry sea.

Then the storm struck again, so that the raft reeled and reared to the point of capsizing.

Sebastian sensed it first in the altered action of the waves;

they were steeper, marching closer together. Then, through the clamour of the storm, a new sound, like that of a cannon fired at irregular intervals with varying charges of gunpowder. He realized suddenly that he had been hearing this sound for some time, but only now had it penetrated the stupor of his fatigue.

He lifted his head, and every nerve of his being shrieked in protest at the effort. He looked about, but the sea stood up around him like a series of grey walls that limited his vision to a circle of fifty yards. Yet that discordant boom, boom, boom, was louder now and more insistent.

In the short, choppy waves, a side-break caught the raft and tossed it high lifting him so he could see the land;

so close that the palm trees showed sharply, bending their stems to the wind and threshing their long fronds in panic. He saw the beach, grey-white in the gloom and, beyond it, far beyond it, rose the watery blue of the high ground.

These things had small comfort for him when he saw the reef. It bared its black teeth at bin), snarling through the white water that burst like cannon-fire upon it before cascading on into the comparative quiet of the lagoon. The raft was riding down towards it.

"Flynn," he croaked. "Flynn, listen to me!" but the older man did not move, His eyes were fixed open and only the movement of his chest, as he breathed, proved him still alive. "Flynn." Sebastian released one of his clawed hands from its grip on the wooden slotting. "Flynn!" he said, and struck him across the cheek.

"Flynn!" The head turned towards Sebastian, the eyes blinked, the mouth opened, but no voice spoke.

Another wave broke over the raft. This time the cold, malicious rush of it stirred Sebastian, roused a little of his failing strength. He shook the water from his head. "Land,"

he whispered. "Land," and Flynn stared at him dully.

Two lines of surf away, the reef showed its ragged back again. Clinging with only one hand to the slotting, Sebastian fumbled the knife from its sheath and hacked clumsily at the life-line that bound him to the deck. It parted. He reached over and cut Flynn's line, sawing frantically at the wet hemp. That done, he slid back on his belly until he reached Mohammed and freed him also. The little African stared at him with bloodshot eyes from his wrinkled monkey face.

Swim," whispered Sebastian. "Must swim," and re-sheathing the knife, he tried to crawl over Mohammed to reach the Arab but the next wave caught the raft, rearing up under it as it felt the push of the land, rearing so steeply that this time the raft was overturned and they were thrown from it into the seething turmoil of the reef.

Sebastian hit the water flat, and was hardly under before he had surfaced again. Beside him, close enough to touch, Flynn emerged. In the strength born of the fear of death, Flynn caught at Sebastian, locking both arms around his chest. The same wave that had capsized them had poured over the. reef and covered it completely, so that where the coral fangs had been was now only a frothy area of disturbed water. In it bobbed the debris of the raft, shattered into pieces against the reef. The mutilated corpse of the Arab was still roped to a piece of the wreckage. Flynn and Sebastian were locked like lovers in each other's arms and the next wave, following close upon the first, lifted them, and shot them forward over the submerged reef.

In one great swoop that left their guts behind them, they were carried over the coral which could have minced them into jelly, and tumbled into the quiet lagoon. With them went little Mohammed, and what remained of the raft.

The lagoon was covered by a thick scum of wind spume, creamy as the head of a good beer. So when the three of them staggered waist-deep towards the beach, supporting each other with arms around shoulders, they were coated with white froth. It made them look like a party of drunken snowmen returning home after a long night out.

Mohammed squatted with a pile of madafu, the shiny green coconuts, beside him. The beach was littered with them, for the storm had stripped the trees. He worked in feverish haste with Sebastian's hunting knife, his face frosted with dried salt, mumbling to himself through cracked and swollen lips, shaving down through the white, fibrous material of the shell until he exposed the hollow centre filled with its white custard and effervescent milk. At this point the madafu was snatched from his hands by either Flynn or Sebastian. His despair growing deeper, he watched for a second the two white men drinking with heads thrown back, throats pulsing as they swallowed, spilled milk trickling from the corners of their mouths, eyes closed tight in their intense pleasure; then he picked up another nut and got to work on it. He opened a dozen before he was able to satiate the other two, and he held the next nut to his own mouth and whimpered with eagerness.

Then they slept. Bellies filled with the sweet, rich milk, they sagged backwards on the sand and slept the rest of that day and that night, and when they woke, the wind had dropped, although the sea still burst like an artillery bombardment on the reef.

"Now," said Flynn, "where, in the name of the devil and all his angels, are we?" Neither Sebastian nor Mohammed answered him. "We were six days on the raft. We could have drifted hundreds of miles south before the storm pushed us in." He frowned as he considered the problem.

"We might even have reached Portuguese Mozambique. We Could be as far as the Zambezi river."

Flynn focused his attention on Mohammed. "Go!" he said. "Search for a river, or a mountain that you know.

Better still, find a village where we can get food and bearers."

"I'll go also," Sebastian volunteered.

"You wouldn't know the difference between the Zambezi and the Mississippi," Flynn grunted impatiently. "You'd be lost after the first hundred yards."

Mohammed was gone for two days and a half, but Sebastian and Flynn ate well in his absence.

Under a sun shelter of palm fronds they feasted three times a day on crab and sand-clams, and big green rock lobster which Sebastian fished from the lagoon, baking them in their. shells over the fire that Flynn coaxed from two dry sticks.

On the first night the entertainment was provided by Flynn. For some years now, Flynn's intake of gin had averaged a daily two bottles. The abrupt cessation of supply resulted in a delayed but classic visitation of delirium tremew. He spent half the night hobbling up and down the beach brandishing a branch of driftwood and hurling obscenities at the phantoms that had come to plague him.

There was one purple cobra in particular which pursued him doggedly, and it was only after Flynn had beaten it noisily to death behind a palm tree, that he allowed Sebastian to lead him back to the shelter and seat him beside the campfire. Then he got the shakes. He shook like a man on a jack-hammer. His teeth rattled together with such violence that Sebastian was sure they must shatter.

Gradually, however, the shakes subsided and by the following noon he was able to eat three large rock-lobsters and then collapse into a death-like sleep.

He woke in the late evening, looking as well as Sebastian had ever seen him, to greet the returning Mohammed and the dozen tall Angoni tribesmen who accompanied him.

They returned Flynn's greeting with respect. From Beira to Dares Salaam, the name Fini" was held in universal awe by the indigenous peoples. Legend credited him with powers far above the natural order. His exploits, his skill with the rifle, his volcanic temper and his seeming immunity from death and retribution, had formed the foundation of a belief that Flynn had carefully fostered. They said in whispers around the night fires when the women and the children of listening that Tim" was in truth a reincarnation of the Monomatapa. They said further that in the intervening period between his death as the Great King and his latest birth as "Fini, he had been first a monstrous crocodile, and then Mowana Lisa, the most notorious man-eating lion in the history of East Africa, a predator responsible for at least three hundred human killings. The day, twenty-five years previously, that Flynn had stepped ashore at Port Amelia was the exact day that Mowana Lisa had been shot dead by the Portuguese Chef D'Post at Sofala. All men knew these things and only an idiot would take chances with "Fini. hence the respect with which they greeted him now.

Flynn recognized one of the men. "LUti," he roared, "You scab on an hyena's backsideV

Luti smiled broadly, and bobbed his head in pleasure at being singled out by Flynn.

"Mohammed," Flynn turned to his man. "Where did you find him? Are we near his village?"

"We are a day's march away."

"In which direction?"

"North."

Then we are in Portuguese territory!" exalted Flynn. "We must have drifted down past the Rovuma river."

The Rovuma river was the frontier between Portuguese Mozambique and German East Africa. Once in Portuguese territory, Flynn was immune from the wrath of the Germans.

All their efforts at extraditing him from the Portuguese had proved unsuccessful, for Flynn had a working agreement with the Chef D'Post, Mozambique, and through him with the Governor in Lourenqo Marques. In a manner of speaking, these two officials were sleeping partners in Flynn's business, and were entitled to a quarterly financial statement of Flynn's activities, and an agreed percentage of the profits.

"You can relax, Bassie boy. Old Fleischer can't touch us now. And in three or four days we'll be home."

The first leg of the journey took them to Luti's village.

Lolling in their maschilles, hammock-like litters slung beneath a long pole and carried by four of Luti's men at a synchronized jog trot, Flynn and Sebastian were borne smoothly out of the coastal lowland into the hills and bush country.

The litter-bearers sang as they ran, and their deep melodious voices, coupled with the swinging motion of the maschille, lulled Sebastian into a mood of deep contentment. Occasionally he dozed. Where the path was wide enough to allow the maschilles to travel side by side, he lay and chatted with Flynn, at other times he watched the changing country and the animal life along the way. It was better than London Zoo.

Each time Sebastian saw something new, he called across for Flynn to identify it.

In every glade and clearing were herds of the golden brown impala; delicate little creatures that watched them in wide-eyed curiosity as they passed.

Troops of guinea-fowl, like a dark cloud shadow on the earth, scratched and chittered on the banks of every stream.

Heavy, yellow eland, with their stubby horns and swinging dewlaps, trotting in Indian file, formed a regal frieze along the edge of the bush.

Sable and toon antelope; purple-brown waterbuck, with a perfect circle of white branded on their rumps; buffalo, big and black and ugly; giraffe, dainty little klipspringer, standing like chamois on the tumbled granite boulders of a kopje. The whole land seethed and skittered with life.

There were trees so strange in shape and size and foliage that Sebastian could hardly credit them as existing. Swollen baobabs, fifty feet in circumference, standing awkwardly as prehistoric monsters, fat pods filled with cream of tartar hanging from their deformed branches. "There were forests of rns asa trees, leaves not green as leaves should be, but rose and chocolate and red. Fever trees sixty feet high, with bright yellow trunks, shedding their bark like the brittle parchment of a snake's skin. Groves of mopani, whose massed foliage glittered a shiny, metallic green in the sun;

and in the jungle growth along the river banks, the lianas climbed up like long, grey worms and hung in loops and festoons among the wild fig and the buffalo-bean vines and the tree ferns.

"Why haven't we seen any sign of elephant?" Sebastian asked.

"Me and my boys worked this territory over about six months ago," Flynn explained. "I guess they just moved on a little probably up north across the Rovuma."

In the late afternoon they descended a stony path into a valley, and for the first time Sebastian saw the permanent habitations of man. In irregular shaped plots, the bottom land of the valley was cultivated, and the rich black soil threw up lush green stands of millet, while on the banks of the little stream stood Luti's village; shaggy grass huts, shaped like beehives, each with a circular mud-walled granary standing on stilts beside it. The huts were arranged in a rough circle around an open space where the earth was packed hard by the passage of bare feet.

The entire Population turned out to welcome Flynn.

three hundred souls, from hobbling old white heads with grinning toothless gums, down to infants held on mothers'

naked hips, who did not interrupt their feeding but clung like fat black limpets with hands and mouth to the breast.

Through the crowd that ululated and clapped hands in welcome, Flynn and Sebastian were carried to the chief's hut and there they descended from the maschilles.

Flynn and the old chief greeted each other affectionately;

Flynn because of favours received and because of future favours yet to be asked for, and the chief because of Flynn's reputation and the fact that wherever Flynn travelled, he usually left behind him large quantities of good, red meat.

"You come to hunt elephant?" the chief asked, looking hopefully for Flynn's rifle.

"No." Flynn shook his head. "I return from a journey to a far place."

"From where?"

In answer, Flynn " looked significantly at the sky and repeated, "From a far place."

There was an awed murmur from the crowd and the chief nodded sagely. It was clear to all of them that Fini must have been to visit and commune with his aher ego, Monomatapa.

"Will you stay long at our village?" again hopefully.

"I will stay tonight only. I leave again in the dawn."

"I

"Ah!" Disappointment. "We had hoped to welcome you with a dance. Since we heard of your coming, we have prepared."

"No," Flynn repeated. He knew a dance could last three or four days.

"There is a great brewing of palm wine which is only now ready for drinking," the chief tried again, and this time his argument hit Flynn like a charging rhinoceros. Flynn had been many days without liquor.

"my friend," said Flynn, and he could feel the saliva spurting out from under his tongue in anticipation. "I cannot stay to dance with you but I will drink a small gourd of palm wine to show my love for you and your village." Then turning to Sebastian he warned, "I wouldn't touch this stuff, Bassie, if I were you it's real poison."

"Right," agreed Sebastian. "I'm going down to the river to wash."

"You do that," and Flynn lifted the first gourd of palm wine lovingly to his lips.

Sebastian's progress to the river resembled a Roman triumph. The entire village lined the bank to watch his necessarily limited ablutions with avid interest, and a buzz of awe went up when he disrobed to his underpants.

"Bwana Manali," they chorused. "Lord of the Red Cloth,"

and the name stuck.

As a farewell gift the headman presented Flynn with four gourds of palm wine, and begged him to return soon bringing his rifle with him.

They marched hard all that day and when they camped at nightfall, Flynn was semi-paralysed with palm wine, while Sebastian shivered and his teeth chattered uncontrollably.

From the swamps of the Rufiji delta, Sebastian had brought with him a souvenir of his visit his first full go of malaria.

They reached Lalapanzi the following day, a few hours before the crisis of Sebastian's fever. Lalapanzi was Flynn's base camp and the name meant "Lie Down', or more accurately, "The Place of Rest'.

It was in the hills on a tiny tributary of the great Rovuma river, a hundred miles from the Indian Ocean, but only ten miles from German territory across the river. Flynn believed in living close to his principal place of business.

Had Sebastian been in full possession of his senses, and not wandering in the hot shadow land of malaria, he would have been surprised by the camp at Lalapanzi. It was not what anybody who knew Flynn O'Flynn would have expected.

Behind a palisade of split bamboo to protect the lawns and gardens from the attentions of the duiker and steenbok and kudu, it glowed like a green jewel in the sombre brown of the hills. Much hard work and patience must have gone into damming the stream, and digging the irrigation furrows, which suckled the lawns and flower-beds and the vegetable garden. Three indigenous fig trees dwarfed the buildings, crimson frangipani burst like fireworks against the green kikuyu grass, beds of bright barber ton daisies ringed the gentle terraces that fell away to the stream, and a bougainvillaea creeper smothered the main building in a profusion of dark green and purple.

Behind the long bungalow, with its wide, open veranda, stood half a dozen circular rondavels, all neatly capped with golden thatch and gleaming painfully white, with burned limestone paint, in the sunlight.

The whole had about it an air of feminine order and neatness. Only a woman, and a determined one at that, could have devoted so much time and pain to building up such a speck of prettiness in the midst of brown rock and harsh thorn veld.

She stood on the veranda in the shade like a valkyrie, tall and sun-browned and angry. The full length dress of faded blue was crisp with new ironing, and the neat mends in the fabric invisible except at close range. Gathered close about her waist, her skirt ballooned out over her woman's hips and fell to her ankles, slyly concealing the long straight legs beneath. Folded across her stomach, her arms were an amber brown frame for the proud double bulge of her bosom, and the thick braid of black hair that hung to her waist twitched like the tail of an angry lioness. A face too young for the marks of hardship and loneliness that were chiselled into it was harder now by the expression of distaste it wore as she watched Flynn and Sebastian arriving.

They lolled in their maschilles, unshaven, dressed in filthy rags, hair matted with sweat and dust; Flynn full of palm wine, and Sebastian full of fever although it was impossible to distinguish the symptoms of their separate disorders.

"May I ask where you've been these last two months, Flynn Patrick O'Flynn?" Although she tried to speak like a man, yet her voice had a lift and a ring to it.

"You may not ask, daughter!" Flynn shouted back defiantly.

"You're drunk again!"

"And if I am?" roared Flynn. "You're as bad as that mother of yours (may her soul rest in peace), always going on and on. Never a civil word of welcome for your old Daddy, who's been away trying to earn an honest crust."

The girl's eyes switched to the maschille that carried Sebastian, and narrowed in mounting outrage. "Sweet merciful heavens, and what's this you've brought home with you now?"

Sebastian grinned inanely, and tried valiantly to sit up as Flynn introduced him. "That is Sebastian Oldsmith. My very dear friend, Sebastian Oldsmith."

"He's also drunk!"

"Listen, Rosa. You show some respect." Flynn struggled to climb from his maschille.

"He's drunk," Rosa repeated grimly. "Drunk as a pig. You can take him straight back and leave him where you found him. He's not coming in this house." She turned away, pausing only a moment at the front door to add, "That goes for you also, Flynn O'Flynn. I'll be waiting with the shotgun.

You just put one foot on the veranda before you're sober and I'll blow it clean off."

"Rosa wait he isn't drunk, please," wailed Flynn, but the fly-screen door had slammed closed behind her.

Flynn teetered uncertainly at the foot of the veranda stairs; for a moment it looked as though he might be foolhardy enough to put his daughter's threat to the test, but he was not that drunk.

"Women," he mourned. "The good Lord protect us," and he led his little caravan around the back of the bungalow to the farthest of the rondavel huts. This room was sparsely furnished in anticipation of Flynn's regular periods of exile from the main building.

Rosa O'Flynn closed the front door behind her and leaned back against it wearily. Slowly her chin sagged down to her chest, and she closed her eyes to imprison the itchy tears beneath the lids, but one of them squeezed through and quivered like a fat, glistening grape on her lashes, before falling to splash on the stone floor.

"Oh, Daddy, Daddy," she whispered. It was an expression of those months of aching loneliness. The long, slow slide of days when she had searched desperately for work to fill her hands and her mind. The nights when, locked alone in her room with a loaded shotgun beside the bed, she had lain and listened to the sounds of the African bush beyond the window, afraid then of everything, even the four devoted African servants sleeping soundly with their families in their little compound behind the bungalow.

Waiting, waiting for Flynn to return. Lifting her head in the noonday and standing listening, hoping to hear the singing of his bearers as they came down the valley. And each hour the fear and the resentment building up within her. Fear that he might not come, and resentment that he left her for so long.

Now he had come. He had come drunk and filthy, with some oafish ruffian as a companion, and all her loneliness and fear had vented itself in that shrewish outburst. She straightened and pushed herself away from the door. Listlessly she walked through the shady cool rooms of the bungalow, spread with a rich profusion of animal skins and rough native-made furniture, until she reached her own room and sank down on the bed.

Beneath her unhappiness was a restlessness, a formless, undirected longing for something she did not understand. It was a new thing; only in these last few years had she become aware of it. Before that she had gloried in the companionship of her father, never having experienced and, therefore, never missing the society of others. She had taken it as the natural order of things that much of her time must be spent completely alone with only the wife of old Mohammed to replace her natural mother the young Portuguese girl who had died in the struggle to give life to Rosa.

She knew the land as a slum child knows the city. It was her land and she loved it.

Now all of it was changing, she was uncertain, without bearings in this sea of new emotion. Lonely, irritable and afraid.

A timid knocking on the back door of the bungalow roused her, and she felt aleap of hope within her. Her anger at Flynn had long ago abated now he had made the first overture she would welcome him to the bungalow without sacrifice of pride.

Quickly she bathed her face in the china wash-basin beside her bed, and patted her hair into order before the mirror, before going through to answer the knock.

Old Mohammed stood outside, shuffling his feet and grinning ingratiatingly. He stood in almost as great an awe of Rosa's temper as that of Flynn himself. It was with relief, therefore, that he saw her smile.

"Mohammed, you old rascal," and he bobbed his head with pleasure.

"You are well, Little Long Hair?"

(I am well, Mohammed and I can see you are also."

"The Lord Fini asks that you send blankets and quinine."

Why? "Rosa frowned quickly. "Is the fever on him?"

"Not on him, but on Manali, his friend."

"Is he bad?"

"He is very bad."

The rich hostility that her first glimpse of Sebastian had invoked in Rosa, wavered a little. She felt the woman in her irresistibly drawn towards anything wounded or sick, even such an uncouth and filthy specimen as she had seen Sebastian to be.

"I will come," she decided aloud, while silently qualifying her surrender by deciding that under no circumstances would she let him in the house. Sick or healthy, he would stay out there in the rondavel.

Armed with a pitcher of boiled drinking water, and a bottle of quinine tablets, closely attended by Mohammed carrying an armful of cheap trade blankets, she crossed to the rondavel and entered.

She entered it at an unpropitious moment. For Flynn had spent the last ten minutes exhuming the bottle he had so carefully buried some months before beneath the earthen floor of the rondavel. Being a man of foresight, he had caches of gin scattered in unlikely places around the camp, and now, in delicious anticipation, he was carefully wiping damp earth from the neck of the bottle with the tail of his shirt. So engrossed with this labour he was not aware of Rosa's presence until the bottle was snatched from his hands, and thrown through the open side window to pop and tinkle as it burst.

"Now what did you do that for?" Flynn was hurt as deeply as a mother deprived of her infant.

For the good of your soul." Icily Rosa turned from him to "the inert figure on the bed, and her nose wrinkled as she caught the whiff of unwashed body and fever. "Where did you find this one?" she asked without expecting an answer.

Five grams of quinine washed down Sebastian's throat with scalding tea, heated stones were packed around his body, and half a dozen blankets swaddled him to begin the sweat.

The malarial parasite has a thiry-six-hour life cycle, and now at the crisis, Rosa was attempting to raise his body temperature sufficiently to interrupt the cycle and break the fever. Heat radiated from the bed, filling the single room of the rondavel as though it were a kitchen. Only Sebastian's head showed from the pile of blankets, and his face was flushed a dusky brick colour. Although sweat spurted from every pore of his skin and ran back in heavy drops to soak his hair and his pillow, yet his teeth rattled together and he shivered so that the camp bed shook.

Rosa sat beside his bed and watched him. Occasionally she leaned forward with a cloth in her hand and wiped the perspiration from his eyes and upper lip. Her expression had softened and become almost broody. One of Sebastian's curls had plastered itself wetly across his forehead, and, with her fingertips, Rosa combed it back. She repeated the gesture, and then did it again, stroking her fingers through his damp hair, instinctively gentling and soothing him.

He opened his eyes, and Rosa snatched her hand away guiltily. His eyes were misty grey, unfocused as a newborn puppy's, and Rosa felt something squirm in her stomach.

"Please don't stop." His voice was slurred with the fever, but even so Rosa was surprised at the timbre and inflection.

It was the first time she had heard him speak and it was not the voice of a ruffian. Hesitating a moment, she glanced at the door of the hut to make sure they were alone before she reached forward to touch his face.

"You are kind good and kind."

"Sshh!"she admonished him.

"Thank you."

"Sshh! Close your eyes."

His eyes flickered down and he sighed, a gusty, broken sound.

The crisis came like a big wind and shook him as though he were a tree in its path. His body temperature rocketed, and he tossed and writhed in the camp-bed, trying to throw off the weight of blankets upon him, so that Rosa called for Mohammed's wife to help her restrain him. His perspiration soaked through the thin mattress and dripped to form a puddle on the earth floor beneath the bed, and he cried out in the fantasy of his fever.

Then, miraculously, the crisis was past, and he slumped into relaxation. He lay still and exhausted so that only the shallow flutter of his breathing showed there was life in him. Rosa could feel his skin cooling under her hand, and she saw the yellowish tinge with which the fever had coloured it.

"The first time it is always bad." Mohammed's wife released her grip on the blanket-wrapped legs.

"Yes, said Rosa. "Now bring the basin. We must wash him and change his blankets, Nanny."

She had worked many times with men who were sick or badly hurt; the servants and the bearers and the gun-boys, and, of course, with her father. But now, as Nanny peeled back the blankets and Rosa swabbed Sebastian's uncoiiscions body with the moist cloth, she felt an inexplicable tension within her a sense of dread mingled with tight excitement. She could feel new blood warming her cheeks, and she leaned forward, so that Nanny could not see her face as she worked.

The skin of his chest and upper arms was creamy-smooth as polished alabaster, where the sun had not stained it.

Beneath her fingers it had an elastic hardness, a rubbery sensuality and warmth that disturbed her. When she realized suddenly that she was no longer wiping with the flannel but using it to caress the shape of hard muscle beneath the pale skin, she checked herself and made her actions brusque and businesslike.

They dried his upper body, and Nanny reached to jerk the blankets down below Sebastian's waist.

"Wait!" It came out of Rosa as a cry, and Nanny paused with her hand on the bedclothes and her head held at an angle, quizzical, birdlike. Her wizened old features crinkled in sly amusement.

"Wait," Rosa repeated in confusion. "First help me get the night-shirt on him," and she snatched up one of Flynn's freshly ironed but threadbare old night-shirts from the chair beside the bed.

"It cannot bite you, Little Long Hair," the old woman teased her gently. "It has no teeth."

"You just stop that kind of talk," snapped Rosa with unnecessary violence. "Help me sit him up."

Between them they lifted Sebastian and slipped the nightshirt down over his head, before lowering him to the pillow again.

"And now?" Nanny asked innocently. For answer, Rosa handed her the flannel, and turned to stare fixedly out of the rondavel window. Behind her she heard the rustle of blankets and then Nanny's voice.

"Haul Haul" The age-old expression of deep admiration, followed by a cackle of delighted laughter, as Nanny saw the back of Rosa's neck turning bright pink with embarrassment.

Nanny had smuggled Flynn's cut-throat razor out of the bungalow, and was supervising critically as Rosa stroked it gingerly over Sebastian's soapy cheeks. There was no sound medical reason why a malaria patient should be shaved immediately after emerging from the crisis, but Rosa had advanced the theory that it would make him feel more comfortable and Nanny had agreed enthusiastically. Both of them were enjoying themselves with all the sober delight of two small girls playing with a doll.

Despite Nanny's cautionary clucks and sharp hisses of indrawn breath, Rosa succeeded in removing the hair that covered Sebastian's face like the black pelt of an otter without inflicting any serious wounds. There was a nick on the chin and another below the left nostril, but neither of these bled more than a drop or two.

Rosa rinsed the razor and then narrowed her eyes thoughtfully as she surveyed her handiwork, and that thing squirmed in her stomach again. "I think," she muttered, we should move him into the main bungalow. It will be more comfortable."

"I will call the servants to carry him, "said Nanny.

Flynn O'Flynn was a busy man during the period of Sebastian's convalescence. His band of followers had been seriously depleted during the recent exchange with German Fleischer. So to replace his losses, he press-ganged all the maschille-bearers who had carried them home from Luti's village. These he put through a preliminary course of training and at the end of four days selected a dozen of the most promising, to become gun boys The remainder he despatched homeward despite their protests; they would dearly have loved to stay for the glamour and reward that they were certain would be heaped upon their more fortunate fellows.

Thereafter the chosen few were entered upon the second part of their training. Securely locked in one of the rondavels behind the bungalow, Flynn kept the tools of his trade. It was an impressive arsenal.

Rack upon rack of cheap Martini Henry.450 rifles, a score of Lee-Metfords that had survived the Anglo Boer war, alesser number of German Mausers salvaged from his encounters with Askari across the Rovuma, and a very few of the expensive hand-made doubles by Gibbs and Messrs Greener of London. Not a single weapon had a serial number on it. Above these, neatly stacked on the wooden shelves, were bulk packages of cartridges, wrapped and soldered in lead foil enough of them to fight a small battle.

The room reeked with the slick, mineral smell of gun oil.

Flynn issued his recruits with Mousers, and set about instructing them in the art of handling a rifle. Again he weeded out those who showed no aptitude and he was left finally with eight men who could hit an elephant at fifty paces. This group passed into the third and last period of training.

Many years previously, Mohammed had been recruited into the German Askari. He had even won a medal during the Salito rebellion of 1904, and from there had risen to the rank of sergeant and overseer of the officers" mess.

During a visit by the army auditor to Mbeya, where Mohammed was at that time stationed, there had been discovered a stock discrepancy of some twenty dozen bottles of schnapps, and a hole in the mess funds amounting to a little over a thousand Reichsmarks. This was a hanging matter, and Mohammed had resigned without ceremony from the Imperial Army and reached the Portuguese border by a series of forced marches. In Portuguese territory he had met Flynn, and solicited and received employment from him. However, he was still an authority on German army drill procedure and retained a command of the language.

The recruits were handed over to him, for it was part of Flynn's plans that they be able to masquerade as a squad of German Askari. For days thereafter the camp at Lalapanzi reverberated to Mohammed's Teutonic cries, as he goose stepped about the lawns at the head of his band of nearly naked troopers, with his fez set squarely on the grey wool of his head.

This left Flynn free to make further preparations.

Seated on the stoep of the bungalow, he pored sweatily over his correspondence for many days. First there was a letter to:

His Excellency, The Governor, German Administration of East Africa, Da re Salaam

Sir, I enclose my account for damages, as follows, herewith:

1 Dhow (Market value) 1,500 pounds Rifles 200 pounds. Various stores and provisions et cetera (too numerous to list) 100 pounds.

Injury, suffering and hardships

(estimated) 200 pounds. TOTAL 2,000 pounds.

This claim arises from the snaking of the above-said dhow off the mouth of the RLIfiji, 10th July, 1912, which was in Fact of piracy by your gUnboat, the Blucher.

I would appreciate payment in gold, on or before 25th September, 1912, and I will take the necessary steps to collect same personally.

Yours sincerely, Flynn Patrick O'Flynn, Esq

(Citizen of The United States of America).

After much heavy thought, Flynn had decided not to include a claim for the ivory as he was not too certain of its legality. Best not to mention it.

He had considered signing himself "United States Ambassador to Africa', but had discarded the idea on the grounds that Governor Schee knew damned well that he was no such thing. However, there was no harm in reminding him of Flynn's nationality it might make the old rogue hesitate before hanging Flynn out of hand if ever he got his hooks into him.

Satisfied that the only response to his demands would be a significant increase in Governor Schee's blood pressure, Flynn proceeded with his preparations to make good his threat of collecting the debt personally.

Flynn used this word lightly he had long ago selected a representative debt collector in the form of Sebastian Oldsmith. It now remained to have him suitably outfitted for the occasion, and, armed with a tape-measure from Rosa's work basket Flynn visited Sebastian's sick bed.

These days, visiting Sebastian was much like trying to arrange an interview with the Pope. Sebastian was securely under the maternal protection of Rosa O'Flynn.

Flynn knocked discreetly on the door of the guest bedroom, paused for a count of five, and entered.

"What do you want?" Rosa greeted him affectionately.

She was sitting on the foot of Sebastian's bed.

"Hello, hello," said Flynn, and then again lamely, "Hello."

"I suppose you're looking for a drinking companion,"

accused Rosa.

"Good Lord, no!" Flynn was genuinely horrified by the accusation. What with Rosa's depredations his stock of gin was running perilously low, and he had no intention of sharing it with anyone. "I just called in to see how he was doing." Flynn transferred his attention to Sebastian. "How you feeling, old Bassie boy?"

"Much better, thank you." In fact, Sebastian was looking very chirpy indeed. Freshly shaved, dressed in one of Flynn's best night-shirts, he lay like a Roman emperor on clean sheets. On the low table beside his bed stood a vase of frangipani blooms, and there were other floral tributes standing about the room all of them cut and carefully arranged by Rosa O'Flynn.

He was steadily putting on weight again as Rosa and Nanny stuffed food into him and colour was starting to drive the yellowish fever stains from his skin. Flynn felt a prickle of irritation at the way Sebastian was being pampered like a stud stallion, while Flynn himself was barely tolerated in his own home.

The metaphor which had come naturally into Flynn's mind now sparked a further train of thought, and a sharper prickle of irritation. Stud stallion! Flynn looked at Rosa with attention, and noticed that the dress she wore was the white one with gauzy sleeves, that had belonged to her mother a garment that Rosa usually kept securely locked away, a garment she had worn perhaps twice before in her life.

Furthermore, her feet, which were usually bare about the house, were now neatly clad in store-bOLight patent leather, and, by Jesus, she was wearing a sprig of bougainvillaea tucked into the shiny black slick of her hair. The tip of her long braid, which was usually tied carelessly with a thong of leather, flaunted a silk ribbon.

Now, Flynn O'Flynn was not a sentimental man but suddenly he recognized in his daughter a strange new glow, and a demure air that had never been there before, and within himself he became aware of an unusual sensation, so unfamiliar that he did not recognize it as paternal jealousy.

He did, however, recognize that the sooner he sent Sebastian on his way, the safer it would be.

"Well, that's fine, Bassie," he boomed genially. "That's just fine. Now, I'm sending bearers down to Beira to pick up supplies, and I just thought they might as well get some clothes for you while they were there."

"Well, thank you very much, Flynn." Sebastian was touched by the kindness of his friend.

"Might as well do it properly." Flynn produced his tape measure with a flourish. "We'll send your measurements down to old Parbhoo and he can tailor-make some stuff for you.

I say, that is jolly decent of you."

And completely out of character, thought Rosa O'Flynn as she watched her father carefully noting the length of Sebastian's legs and arms, and the girth of his neck, chest and waist.

"The boots and the hat will be a problem," Flynn mused aloud when he had finished. "But I'll find something."

"And what do you mean by that, Flynn O'Flynn?" Rosa demanded suspiciously.

"Nothing, just nothing at all." Hurriedly Flynn gathered his notes and his tape, and fled from further interrogation.

Some time later, Mohammed and the bearers returned from the shopping expedition to Beira, and he and Flynn immediately closeted themselves in secret conclave in the arsenal.

"Did you get it? "demanded Flynn eagerly.

"Five boxes of gin I left in the cave behind the waterfall at the top of the valley," whispered Mohammed, and Flynn sighed with relief. "But one bottle I brought with me."

Mohammed produced it from under his tunic. Flynn took it from him and drew the cork with his teeth, before spilling a little into the enamel mug that was standing ready.

"And the other purchases?"

"It was difficult especially the hat."

"But did you get it?" Flynn demanded.

"It was a direct intervention of Allah." Mohammed refused to be hurried. "In the harbour was a German ship, stopped at Beira on its way north to Dares Salaam. On the boat were three German officers. I saw them walking upon the deck." Mohammed paused and cleared his throat portentously. "That night a man who is my friend rowed me out to the ship, and I visited the cabin of one of the soldiers."

"Where is it?" Flynn could not hold his patience.

Mohammed stood up, went to the door of the rondavel and called to one of the bearers. He returned and set a bundle on the table in front of Flynn. Grinning proudly, he waited while Flynn unwrapped the bundle.

"Good God Almighty," breathed Flynn.

"Is it not beautiful?"

"Call Manali. Tell him to come here immediately."

Ten minutes later Sebastian, whom Rosa had at last reluctantly placed on the list of walking wounded, entered the rondavel, to be greeted effusively by Flynn. "Sit down, Bassie boy. I've got a present for you."

Reluctantly, Sebastian obeyed, eyeing the covered object on the table. Flynn stood over it and whisked away the cloth. Then, with the same ceremony as the Archbishop of Canterbury placing the crown, he lifted the helmet above Sebastian's head and lowered it reverently.

On the summit a golden eagle cocked its wings on the point of flight and opened its beak in a silent squawk of ineriace, the black enamel of the helmet shone with a polished gloss, and the golden chain drooped heavily under Sebastian's chin.

It was indeed a thing of beauty. A thing of such presence that it completely overwhelmed Sebastian, enveloping his head to the bridge of his nose so that his eyes were just visible below the jUtting brim.

"A few sizes too large," Flynn conceded. BUt we can stuff some cloth into the crown to keep it up." He backed away a few paces and cocked his head on one side as he examined the effect. "Bassie boy, you'll slay them."

"What's this for?" Sebastian asked in concern from under the steel helmet.

"You'll see. Just hold on a shake." Flynn turned to Mohammed who was cooing with admiration in the doorway. "The clothes?" he asked, and Mohammed beckoned imperiously to the bearers to bring in the boxes they had carried all the way from Beira.

Parbhoo, the Indian tailor, had obviously laboured with dedication and enthusiasm. The task set him by Flynn had touched the soul of the creative artist in him.

Ten minutes later, Sebastian stood self-consciously in the centre of the rondavel while Flynn and Mohammed circled him slowly, exclaiming with delight and self congratulation

Below the massive helmet, which was now propped high with a wad of cloth between steel and scalp, Sebastian was dressed in the sky-blue tunic and riding breeches. The cuffs of the jacket were ringed with yellow silk a stripe of the same material ran down the outside of the breeches and the high collar was covered with embroidered metal thread.

Complete with spurs, the tall black boots pinched his toes so painfully that Sebastian stood pigeon-toed and blushed with bewilderment. "I say, Flynn," he pleaded, what's all this about?"

"Bassie boy." Flynn laid a hand fondly on his shoulder.

"You're going to go in there and collect hut tax for..." he almost said me, but altered it quickly to.. us."

"What is hut tax?"

"Hut tax is the annual sum of five shillings, paid by the headmen to the German Governor for each hut in his village." Flynn led Sebastian to the chair and seated him as gently as though he were pregnant. He lifted a hand to still Sebastian's further enquiries and protests. "Yes, I know you don't understand. But I'll explain it to you carefully. just keep your mouth shut and listen." He sat down opposite Sebastian and leaned forward earnestly. "Now The Germans owe us for the dhow and that, like we agreed right?"

Sebastian nodded, and the helmet slid forward over his eyes. He pushed it back.

"Well, you are going to go across the river with the gun and bearers dressed as Askari. You are going to visit each of the villages before the real tax-collector gets there and pick up, the money that they owe us. Do you follow me so far?"

"Are you coming with me?"

"Now, how can I do that? Me with my leg not properly healed yet?" Flynn protested impatiently. "Besides that, every headman on the other side knows who I am. Not one of them has ever laid eyes on you before. You just tell them you're a new officer straight out from Germany. One look at that uniform, and they'll pay up sharpish."

"What happens if the real tax-inspector has already been there?"

"They don't start collecting until September usually and then they start in the north and work down this way.

You'll have plenty of time."

Frowning below the rim of the helmet, Sebastian brought forward a series of objections each one progressively weaker than its predecessor, and, one by one, Flynn annihilated them. Finally there was a long silence while Sebastian's brain ground to a standstill.

Well? "Flynn asked. "Are you going to do it?"

And the question was answered from an unexpected quarter in feminine, but not dulcet tones. "He is certainly not going to do it!"

Guiltily as small boys caught smoking in the school latrines, Flynn and Sebastian wheeled to face the door which had carelessly been left ajar.

Rosa's suspicions had been aroused by all the surreptitious activity around the rondavel, and when she had seen Sebastian join in, she had not the slightest qualms about listening outside the window. Her active intervention was not on ethical grounds. Rosa O'Flynn had acquired a rather elastic definition of honesty from her father. Like him, she believed that German property belonged to anybody who could get their hands on it. The fact that Sebastian was involved in a scheme based on dubious moral foundations in no way lowered her opinion of him rather, in a sneaking sort of way, it heightened her estimate of him as a potential breadwinner. To date, this was the only area in which she had held misgivings about Sebastian Oldsmith.

From experience she knew that those of her father's business enterprises in which Flynn was not eager to participate personally always involved a great deal of risk.

The thought of Sebastian Oldsmith dressed in a sky-blue uniform, marching across the Rovuma and never coming back, roused in her the same instincts as those of a lioness shortly to be deprived of her cubs.

"He is certainly not going to do it," she repeated, and then to Sebastian. "Do you hear me? I forbid it. I forbid it absolutely."

This was the wrong approach.

Sebastian had, in turn, acquired from his father very Victorian views on the rights and privileges of women. Mr. Oldsmith, the senior, was a courteous domestic tyrant, a man whose infallibility had never been challenged by his wife. A man who regarded sex deviates, Bolsheviks, trade union organizers, and suffragettes, in that descending order of repugnance.

Sebastian's mother, a meek little lady with a perpetually harassed expression, would no more have contemplated absolutely forbidding Mr. Oldsmith a Course of action, than she would have contemplated denying the existence of God.

Her belief in the divine rights of man had extended to her sons. From a very tender age Sebastian had grown accustomed to worshipful obedience, not only from his mother but also from his large flock of sisters.

Rosa's present attitude and manner of speech came as a shock. It took him but a few seconds to recover and then he rose to his feet and adjusted the helmet. "I beg your pardon? "he asked coldly.

"You heard me," snapped Rosa. "I'm not going to allow this."

Sebastian nodded thoughtfully, and then hastily grabbed at the helmet as it threatened to spoil his dignity by blind, folding him again. Ignoring Rosa he turned to Flynn. "I will leave as soon as possible tomorrow?"

"It will take a couple more days to get organized," Flynn demurred.

"Very well then." Sebastian stalked from the room, and the sunlight lit his uniform with dazzling splendour.

With a triumphant guffaw, Flynn reached for the enamel mug at his elbow. "You made a mess of that one," he gloated, and then his expression changed to unease.

Standing in the doorway, Rosa O'Flynn's shoulders had sagged, the angry line of her lips drooped.

"Oh, come on now!"gruffed Flynn.

"He won't come back. You know what you are doing to him. You're sending him in there to die."

"Don't talk silly. He's a big boy, he can look after himself."

"Oh, I hate you. Both of you I hate you both!" and she was gone, running across the yard to the bungalow.

In a red dawn Flynn and Sebastian stood together on the stoep of the bungalow, talking together quietly.

"Now listen, Bassie. I reckon the best thing you can do is send back the collection from each village, as you make it. No sense in carrying all that money round with you." Tactfully Flynn refrained from pointing out that by following this procedure, in the event of Sebastian running into trouble half-way through the expedition, the profits to that time would be safeguarded.

Sebastian was not really listening he was more preoccupied with the whereabouts of Rosa O'Flynn. He had seen very little of her in the last few days.

"Now you listen to old Mohammed. He knows which are the biggest villages. Let him do the talking those headmen are the biggest bunch of rogues you'll ever meet. They'll all plead poverty and famine, so you've got to be tough. Do you hear me? Tough, Bassie, tough!!"

"Tough," agreed Sebastian absentmindedly, glancing surreptitiously into the windows of the bungalow for a glimpse of Rosa.

"Now another thing," Flynn went on. "Remember to keep moving fast. March until nightfall. Make your cooking fire, eat, and then march again in the dark before you camp.

Never sleep at Your first camp, that's asking for trouble.

Then get away again before first light in the morning."

There were many other instructions, and Sebastian listened to them without attention. "Remember the sound of gunfire carries for miles. Don't use your rifle except in emergency, and if you do fire a shot, then don't hang about afterwards. Now the route I've planned for you will never take you more than twenty miles beyond the Rovuma. At the first sign of trouble, you run for the river. If any of your men get hurt, leave them. Don't play hero, leave them and run like hell for the river."

"Very well," muttered Sebastian unhappily. The prospect of leaving Lalapanzi was becoming less attractive each minute. Where on earth was she?

"Now remember, don't let those headmen talk you out of anything. You might even have to..." Here Flynn paused to find the least offensive phraseology, you might even have to hang one or two of them."

"Good God, Flynn. You're not serious." Sebastian's full attention jerked back to Flynn.

"Ha! Ha!" Flynn laughed away the suggestion. "I was joking, of course. But..." he went on wistfully, the Germans do it, and it gets results, you know."

"Well, I'd better be on my way." Sebastian changed the subject ostentatiously and picked up his helmet. He placed it upon his head and descended the steps to where his Askari, with rifles at the slope, were drawn up on the lawn.

All of them, including Mohammed, were dressed in authentic uniform, complete with puttees and the little pillbox kepis. Sebastian had prudently refrained from asking Flynn how he had obtained these uniforms. The answer was evident in the neatly patched circular punctures in most of the tunics, and the faint brownish stain around each mend.

In single file, the blazing eagle on Sebastian's headpiece leading like a beacon, they marched past the massive solitary figure of Flynn O'Flynn on the veranda. Mohammed called for a salute and the response was enthusiastic, but ragged. Sebastian tripped on his spurs and with an effort, regained his equilibrium and plodded on gamely.

Shading his eyes against the glare, Flynn watched the gallant little column wind away down the valley towards the Rovuma river. Flynn's voice was without conviction as he spoke aloud, "I hope to God he doesn't mess this one up."

out of sight of the bungalow, Sebastian halted the column. Sitting beside the footpath, he sighed with relief as he removed the weight of the metal helmet from his head and replaced it with a sombrero of plaited grass, then he eased the spurred boots from his already aching feet, and slipped on a pair of rawhide sandals.

He handed the discarded equipment to his personal bearer, stood up, and in his best Swahili ordered the march to continue.

Three miles down the valley the footpath crossed the stream above a tiny waterfall. It was a place of shade where great trees reached out towards each other across the narrow watercourse. Clear water trickled and gurgled between a tumble of lichen-covered boulders, before jumping like white lace in the sunlight down the slippery black slope of the falls.

Sebastian paused on the bank and allowed his men to proceed. He watched them hop from boulder to boulder, the bearers balancing their loads without effort, and then scramble up the far bank and disappear into the dense river bush. He listened to their voices becoming fainter with distance, and suddenly he was sad and alone.

Instinctively he turned and looked back up the valley towards Latapanzi, and the sense of loss was a great emptiness inside him. The urge to return burned up so strongly, that he took a step back along the path before he could check himself.

He stood irresolute. The voices of his men were very faint now, muted by the dense vegetation, overlaid by the drowsy droning of insects, the wind murmur in the top branches of the trees, and the purl of falling water.

Then the soft rustle beside him, and he turned to it quickly. She stood near him and the sunlight through the leaves threw a golden dapple on her, giving a sense of unreality, a fairy quality, to her presence.

"I wanted to give you something to take with you, a farewell present for you to remember," she said softly. "But there was nothing I could think of," and she came forward, reached up to him with her arms and her mouth, and she kissed him.

Sebastian Oldsmith crossed the Rovuma river in a mood of dreamy goodwill towards all men.

Mohammed was worried about him. He suspected that Sebastian had suffered a malarial relapse and he watched him carefully for evidence of further symptoms.

Mohammed at the head of the column of Askari and bearers had reached the crossing place on the Rovuma, before he realized that Sebastian was missing. In wild concern he had taken two armed Askari with him and hurried back along the path through the thorn scrub and broken rock expecting at any moment to find a pride of lions growling over Sebastian's dismembered corpse. They had almost reached the waterfall when they met Sebastian ambling benignly along the path towards them, an expression of ethereal contentment lighting his classic features. His magnificent uniform was not a little rumpled;

there were fresh grass stains on the knees and elbows, and dead leaves and bits of dried grass clung to the expensive material. From this Mohammed deduced that Sebastian had either fallen, or in sickness had lain down to rest.

"Manali," Mohamed cried in concern. "Are you well?"

"Never better never in all my life," Sebastian assured him.

"You have been lying down, "Mohammed accused.

"Son of a gun," Sebastian borrowed from the vocabulary of Flynn O'Flynn. "Son of a gun, you can say that again and then repeat id" and he clapped Mohammed between the shoulder blades with such well-intentioned violence that it almost floored him. Since then, Sebastian had not spoken again, but every few minutes he would smile and shake his head in wonder. Mohammed was truly worried.

They crossed the Rovurna in hired canoes and camped that night on the far bank. Twice during the night Mohammed awoke, slipped out of his blanket, and crept across to Sebastian to check his condition. Each time Sebastian was sleeping easily and the silver moonlight showed just a suggestion of a smile on his lips.

In the middle of the next morning, Mohammed halted the column in thick cover and came back from the head to confer with Sebastian. "The village of M'tapa lies just beyond," he pointed ahead. "You can see the smoke from the fires."

There was a greyish smear of it above the trees, and faintly a dog began yapping.

"Good. Let's go." Sebastian had donned his eagle helmet and was struggling into his boots.

"First I will send the Askari to surround the village."

Why? "Sebastian looked up in surprise.

"Otherwise there will be nobody there when we arrive."

During his service with the German Imperial Army, Mohammed had been on tax expeditions before.

"Well if you think it necessary," Sebastian agreed dubiously.

Half an hour later Sebastian swaggered in burlesque of a German officer into the village of M'tapa, and was dismayed by the reception he received. The lamentations of two hundred human beings made a hideous chorus for his entry.

Some of them were on their knees and all of them were wringing their hands, smiting their breasts or showing other signs of deep distress. At the far end of the village M'tapa, the headman, waited under guard by Mohammed and two of his Askari.

M'tapa was an old man, with a cap of pure white wool, and an emaciated body covered with a parchment of dry skin. One eye was glazed over with tropical ophthalmia, and he was clearly very agitated. "I crawl on my belly before you, Splendid and Merciful Lord," he greeted Sebastian, and prostrated himself in the dust.

"I say, that isn't necessary, you know," murmured Sebastian.

"My poor village welcomes you," whimpered M'tapa.

Bitterly he recriminated. himself for thus being taken unawares. He had not expected the tax expedition for another two months, and had taken no pains with the disposal of his wealth. Buried under the earthen floor of his hut was nearly a thousand silver Portuguese escudos and half again as many golden Deutschmarks. The traffic of his villagers in dried fish, netted in the RoVUma river, was highly organized and lucrative.

Now he dragged himself pitifully to his old knees and signalled two of his wives to bring forward stools and gourds of palm wine.

"It has been a year of great pestilence, disease and famine," M'tapa began his prepared speech, when Sebastian was seated and refreshed. The rest of it took fifteen minutes to deliver, and Sebastian's Swahili was now strong enough for him to follow the argument. He was deeply touched.

Under the spell of palm wine and his new rosy outlook on life, he felt his heart going out to the old man.

While M'tapa spoke, the other villagers had dispersed quietly and barricaded themselves in their huts. It was best not to draw attention to oneself when candidates for the rope were being selected. Now a mournful silence hung over the village, broken only by the mewling of an infant and the squabbling of a pair of mangy mongrels, contesting the ownership of a piece of offal.

"Manali," impatiently Mohammed interrupted the old man's catalogue of misfortune. "Let me search his hut."

Wait," Sebastian stopped him. He had been looking about, and beneath the single baobab tree in the centre of the village he had noticed a dozen or so crude litters. Now he stood up and walked across to them.

When he saw what they contained, his throat contracted with horror. In each litter lay a human skeleton, the bones still covered with a thin layer of living flesh and skin. Naked men and women mixed indiscriminately, but their bodies so wasted that it was almost impossible to tell their sex. The pelvic girdles were gaunt basins of bone, elbows and knees great deformed knobs distorting the stick-like limbs, each rib standing out in clear definition, the faces were skulls whose lips had shrunk to expose the teeth in a perpetual sardonic grin, But the real horror was contained in the sunken eye cavities; the lids were fixed wide open and the eyeballs glared like red marbles. There was no pupil nor iris, just those polished orbs the colour of blood.

Sebastian stepped back hurriedly, feeling his belly heave and the taste of it in his throat. Not trusting himself to speak, he beckoned for M'tapa to come to him, and pointed at the bodies in the litters.

M'tapa glanced at them without interest. They were so much part of the ordinary scene that for many days he had not consciously been aware of their existence. The village was situated on the edge of a tsetse fly belt, and since his childhood there had always been the sleeping sickness cases lying under the baobab tree, deep in the coma which precedes death. He could not understand Sebastian's concern.

"When... Sebastian's voice faltered, and he swallowed before going on. "When did these people last eat? "he asked.

"Not for a long time." M'tapa was puz led by the question.

Everybody knew that once the sleeping time came they never ate again.

Sebastian had heard of people dying of starvation. It happened in places like India, but here he was confronted with the actual fact. A revulsion of feeling swept over him.

109 This was irrefutable proof that all M'tapa had told him was true. This was famine as he had not believed really could exist and he had been trying to extort money from these people!

Sebastian walked slowly back to his stool and sank down upon it. He removed the heavy helmet from his head, held it in his lap and sat staring miserably at his own feet. He was helpless with guilt and compassion.

Flynn O'Flynn had reluctantly provided Sebastian with one hundred escudos as travelling expenses to meet any emergency that might arise before he could make his first collection. Some of this had been expended on the hire of canoes to cross the Rovuma, but there was still eighty escudos left.

From his hip-pocket, Sebastian produced the tobacco pouch containing the money and counted out half of it.

tapa," his voice was subdued. "Take this money. Buy food for them."

"Manali," screeched Mohammed in protest. "Manali. Do not do it."

"Shut up!" Sebastian snapped at him, and prodded the handful of coins towards M'tapa. "Take it!"

M'tapa stared at him as though he offered a live scorpion.

It was as unnatural as though a man-eating lion had walked up and rubbed itself against his leg.

"Take it," Sebastian insisted impatiently, and in disbelief, M'tapa extended his cupped hands.

"Mohammed," Sebastian stood up and replaced his helmet, "we'll move on immediately to the next village."

Long after Sebastian's column had disappeared into the bush again, old M'tapa squatted alone, clutching the coins, too stunned to move. At last he roused himself and shouted for one of his sons.

"Go quickly to the village of Saali, who is my brother.

Tell him that a madman comes to him. A German lord who comes to collect the hut tax and stays to offer gifts.

Tell him -." here his voice broke as though he could not believe what he was about to say,"... tell him that this lord should be shown the ones who sleep, and that the madness will then come upon him, and he will give you forty escudos of the Portuguese. And, furthermore, there will be no hangings."

saali, my uncle, will not believe these things."

"No," M'tapa admitted. "It is true that he will not believe.

But tell him anyway."

Saali received the message from his elder brother, and it induced in him a state of terror bordering on

1)paralysis- M'tapa, he knew, had a vicious sense of humour and there was between them that matter of the woman Gita, a luscious little fourteen-year-old who had deserted the village of M'tapa within two days of taking up her duties as M'tapa's junior wife, on the grounds that he was impotent and smelled like an hyena. She was now a notable addition to Saali's household. Saali was convinced that the true interpretation of his brother's, message was that the new German commissioner was a rampaging lion who would not be content with merely hanging a few of the old men but who might extend his attentions to Saali himself. Even should he escape the noose, he would be left destitute; his carefully accumulated hoard of silver, his six fine tusks of ivory, his goat herd, his dozen bags of white salt, the bar of copper, his two European-made axes, the bolts of trade cloth all of his treasures gone! It required an heroic effort to rouse himself from the stupor of despair and make his few futile preparations for flight.

Mohammed's Askari caught him as he was heading for the bush at a trot, and when they led him back to meet Sebastian Oldsmith, the tears that coursed freely down his cheeks and dripped on to his chest were genuine.

Sebastian was very susceptible to tears. Despite the protests of Mohammed, Sebastian pressed upon Saali twenty silver escudos. It took Saali about twenty minutes to recover from the shock, at the end of which time he, in turn, shocked Sebastian profoundly by offering him on a temporary basis the unrestricted services of the girl, Gita. This young lady was witness to the offer made by her husband, and was obviously wholeheartedly in favour of it.

Sebastian set off again hurriedly, with his retinue straggling along behind him in a state of deep depression.

Mohammed now had a bad case of the mutters.

Drums tap-tap-tapped, runners scurried along the network of footpaths that crossed and crisscrossed the bush; from hilltop to hilltop men called one to the other in the high pitched wail that carries for miles. The news spread. Village after village buzzed with incredulous excitement, and then the inhabitants flocked out to meet the mad German commissioner.

By this time Sebastian was thoroughly enjoying himself.

He was carried away with the pleasure of giving, delighted with these simple lovable people who welcomed him sincerely and pressed humble little gifts upon him. Here a scrawny fowl, there a dozen half-incubated eggs, a basin of sweet potatoes, a gourd of palm wine.