I staggered back to my room, bruised and chastened, and fell asleep.
The next morning, in order to carry out my plan, I said farewell to the Boisvains and took a train for Marseilles. I had on me the six months’ expense money my father had provided before I left London, two hundred pounds in French francs. That was a lot of money in the year 1912. At Marseilles, I booked a passage for Alexandria on a French steamship of nine thousand tons called L’lmpératrice Josephine, a pleasant little passenger boat that ran regularly between Marseilles, Naples, Palermo, and Alexandria.
The trip was without incident except that I encountered on the first day out yet another tall female. This time she was a Turk, a tall dark-skinned Turkish lady who was so smothered in jewellery of all sorts that she tinkled as she walked. My first thought was that she would have worked wonders on top of a cherry tree to keep the birds away. My second thought, which followed very soon after the first, was that she had an exceptional shape to her body. The undulations in the region of her chest were so magnificent that I felt, as I gazed at them across the boat deck, like a traveller in Tibet who was seeing for the first time the highest peaks in the Himalayas. The woman returned my gaze, her chin high and arrogant, her eyes travelling slowly down my body from head to toe, then up again. A minute later, she calmly strolled across and invited me to her cabin for a glass of absinthe. I’d never heard of the stuff in my life, but I went willingly, and I stayed willingly and I did not emerge again from that cabin until we docked at Naples three days later. I may well, as Mademoiselle Nicole had said, have been in the kindergarten and Mademoiselle Nicole herself was perhaps in the sixth form, but if that was so then the tall Turkish lady was a university professor.
Things were made more difficult for me during this encounter by the fact that all the way between Marseilles and Naples, the ship seemed to be battling against a terrible storm. It pitched and rolled in the most alarming manner and more than once I thought we were going to capsize. When at last we were safely anchored in the Bay of Naples, and I was leaving the cabin, I said, “Well by gosh, I’m glad we made it. That was some storm we went through.”
“My dear boy,” she said, hanging another cluster of jewellery round her neck, “the sea has been calm as glass all the way.”
“Oh no, madame,” I said. “It was a tremendous storm.”
“That was no storm,” she said. “It was me.”
I was learning fast. I had learned above all–and I have confirmed this many times since–that to tangle with a Turk is like running fifty miles before breakfast. You have to be fit.
I spent the rest of the voyage getting my wind back and by the time we docked at Alexandria four days later, I was feeling quite bouncy again. From Alexandria I took a train to Cairo. There I changed trains and went on to Khartoum.
By God, it was hot in the Sudan. I was not dressed for the tropics but I refused to waste money on clothes that I would be wearing only for a day or two. In Khartoum, I got a room at a large hotel where the foyer was filled with Englishmen wearing khaki shorts and topis. They all had moustaches and magenta cheeks like Major Grout, and every one of them had a drink in his hand. There was a Sudanese hall porter of sorts lounging by the entrance. He was a splendid handsome fellow in a white robe with a red tarboosh on his head, and I went up to him.
“I wonder if you could help me?” I said, taking some French banknotes from my pocket and riffling them casually.
He looked at the money and grinned.
“Blister Beetles,” I said. “You know about Blister Beetles?”
Here it was, then. This was le moment critique. I had come all the way from Paris to Khartoum to ask one question, and now I watched the man’s face anxiously. It was certainly possible that Major Grout’s story had been nothing more than an entertaining hoax.