Secret of the Sands Read Online Free Page B

carcasses than their European cousins and are surprisingly tasty. A chap never knows what might prove a useful piece of information – which shrub will turn out to hold a priceless secret that can be used in British industry, or the understanding of which local custom will endear a later British delegation to an emir or a caliph and secure a lucrative trade agreement. Dr Jessop, unlike Lieutenant Jones, is focussed clearly on what the East India Company requires of him. He notes each twenty-four hours the mileage they have managed to cover and estimates that a thirsty camel can drink twenty gallons in less than three minutes.
    As they make camp in the middle of the morning and settle down to sleep for the hottest part of the day under a hastily erected tent that provides shade probably only a degree or two cooler than the baking sand adjacent to it, the doctor dresses a burn on the older Dhofari ’s hand. The wound was acquired in the service of the British Empire, after all. He daubs lavender ointment across the skin. Kindness, the doctor always thinks, is terribly important to a patient. When he first qualified, many of his patients healed all the quicker, he’s sure, for his attention, rather than simply his medical knowledge.
    ‘I don’t know why you bother, old chap,’ Jones mumbles sleepily to his companion.
    ‘I have the ointment with me, it costs me nothing,’ the doctor points out.
    Jones turns over. ‘Night night,’ he murmurs like a child rather than one of His Majesty’s finest.
    Jessop burrows himself an indent in the sand. It is really very telling, he muses. Jones didn’t seem – he angles for the right word – so very ungentlemanly when they were aboard ship . He glances at the blinding orb that is reaching its height. The doctor prefers travelling by the stars. Night in the desert is quite the most extraordinary spectacle.
    ‘Good night,’ he returns, rather more formally, and settles down to sleep for a few hours before they get on their way.

Chapter Seven
    It feels to Zena as if she has walked into a nightmare. In the low-ceilinged hold of the Arab dhow there are eighty prisoners shackled. Seventy-one of them are still alive though the shit swills around their chapped ankles and all still living are so faint from hunger and thirst that they scarcely feel it sting. Most have never before seen so many people as they are now crammed up against and for all it is an abomination not to bury the dead before sundown. They have been eleven days on board the mashua . It is this that worries her most. The majority of the slaves are ignor ant of the geography both of where they came from and where they might be going, but Zena lived for six years with her grandmother, high in the cool, emerald hills of northern Abyssinia, less than two hundred miles from the cosmopolitan and bustling trading town of Bussaba. The old lady was respected and her house was a prosperous staging post of some renown for travelling caravans and pilgrims. Within its compound, Zena’s grandmother’s rules were simple and absolute: no weapons, no theft of either person or property.
    It was in that place of safety that Zena learnt about faraway lands and the limits of the slave routes. She heard tell of a variety of gods and legends – all of which seemed merely curious to her, for her grandmother believed in nothing except, she always said, the goodness of people as long as you were firm. The travellers talked about where they had been and where they were going to and, though Zena has never seen a map, it is as a result of these many conversations that it is clear to her that eleven days on a ship is further than these men really need to go simply to sell her.
    At the port she was separated from everyone she knew and marched aboard another vessel with strangers hand-picked from other slave raids, for it seems, though the slavers clearly prefer the young, the different quality of human cargo merits different destinations. At