entirely and now the sun was lighting first the mountains behind the town and on either side – brilliant green after the spring rains – and then in a few moments the splendid topmost buildings on the tall, symmetrically rounded hill upon which the city was built.
‘That is the Kasbah, the Dey’s palace,’ said Jack.
Minute by minute the brilliant light moved down, showing innumerable white flat-roofed houses built very close together; towering minarets; occasional alleys, barely a single street; some blanks that would probably be great squares if one could see them from above. Row after row of houses going down and down to the prodigious great stone wall, the port, the huge mole and the inner harbour.
‘It is exceedingly impressive: there is a strange beauty here,’ said Stephen. ‘I long to be better acquainted with it.’
‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘And when we are a little closer I shall ask Dr Jacob to go ashore, wait on the British consul to make sure that if, in command of a King’s ship, I salute the castle, the salute will be returned. And if the answer is yes, which is close on certain, whether he can arrange for you to see the Dey as soon as possible.’
‘If you do not mind, brother, I had rather go myself, with Dr Jacob to show me the way. I have a note that must be delivered into the consul’s own hands. You will let me have Ringle, for greater stateliness?’
‘Of course I shall: but in that case you may have to wait for the land-breeze in the evening, to carry you out again. Algiers bay is almost always a lee-shore.’
In spite of Jack’s words, it was the stately Ringle that bore them in, on the understanding that her jolly-boat should pull out as early as possible with the consul’s answer about the salute, Ringle waiting at the mole for Stephen and a favourable wind.
Very fine she was as she stood in, came sweetly against the mole and moored there to the admiration of all beholders:
but there the stateliness of the mission stopped. Dr Maturin had eluded the vigilance of Killick, who supposed that the two doctors were gone aboard the schooner merely to see their friends and who had taken no notice of his rusty old black coat, his breeches unbuttoned at the knee or his crumpled neck-cloth, spotted with blood from a recent shaving. Besides, Killick had had a most indifferent morning. Presuming on his status as captain’s steward he had given Billy Green, armourer’s mate, a shove as he went aft along the gangway, a shove that Green had returned with such force that Killick plunged between the skid-beams to the deck below, falling on two men at work there and scattering their tools; and when Killick directed a reproof at Green, who replied ‘You and your God-damned unicorn’s horn’, they set about him with jerks and cuffs and one threatened him with a marlin-spike, calling him ‘abject reptile’ and desiring him to pipe down and stop his gob for an unlucky, unlucky son of a rancid bitch. And although the officer of the watch very soon put a stop to this unpleasantness, Killick realized that the feeling of all those present was still very much against him.
He was grieved and angry; and he would have been even more grieved and angrier by far if he had seen Dr Maturin walking along the mole with Jacob and one of the Ringle’s boys, walking along in the comfortable, shabby, down-atheel shoes that had been taken from him but not hidden well enough. He was a disreputable object, with his wig awry and blue spectacles on his nose; and his companion was not much better either. Dr Jacob was
dressed in rather old clothes that might belong to the east or west of the Mediterranean – a grey caftan with many cloth-covered buttons, a grey skull-cap, and grey heelless slippers.
‘It is indeed a most prodigious wall,’ said Stephen.
‘Forty feet high,’ said Jacob. ‘I measured it twice, long ago, with a string.’
They entered the town through a heavily-fortified gate, and to Stephen’s surprise there were no formalities: the
Turkish guards looked at them curiously, but at Jacob’s brief statement that they were from the English ship they nodded and stood aside. A few narrow streets, a small square with an almond-tree, and the Ringle’s boy cried, ‘Oh sir, sir! There is a camel!’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Jacob. ‘A she-camel,’ and he led them round the creature, through yet another maze to a larger square: it was the slave-market, he observed in a matter-of-fact tone, but there would be neither merchants nor wares until later in the day: and the boy was to take particular notice of all the turnings they took, since he would have to find his way back alone. ‘Yes, sir,’ said the boy; but at almost the same moment, in spite of Jacob’s assertion, they did see one weary old man, slowly carrying his chain as he walked across the market to the fountain, and this so struck the boy, who stared with all his might, even walking backwards to see more, that Stephen resolved to ask the consul to let a servant show him the way back to the mole. Another broad rectangle, and Jacob pointed out the house where he had lived. ‘I shared it with a friend, the daughter of the last descendant of a very ancient family of Grey Huns: but unhappily we neither of us quite answered the other’s expectations. In the corner on the left there is a shaded coffeehouse, where we might well be advised to drink a cup, because our next stage is a climb of some five hundred steps almost to the Kasbah itself. Shall we walk in?’
They walked in, and after civil greetings Jacob and Stephen were given leather cushions by the side of a table nine inches high, near the front of the well-filled shop (which also sold hashish and tobacco), while the delighted boy sat on the ground.
‘Perhaps the young man would prefer sherbet?’ suggested Jacob. ‘Oh yes, sir, if you please,’ said the young man, and he drank with ecstasy, gazing at a whole train of camels that passed slowly by, laden with dates, pliable baskets crammed with dates and covered with palm-leaves.
People were now passing in greater numbers: mostly
Moors, but many black Africans, and some that Jacob pointed out as Jews of different kinds, Greeks and Lebanese. But when, having finished their second cups of coffee and another bowl of sherbet, they declined the proffered hookah and began their climb, they did not find the path at all crowded.
‘Is this a Muslim holy day, or a fast, that so many people stay at home?’ asked Stephen. ‘I had always thought of Algiers as a teeming, densely-populated town.’
‘So it is, at ordinary times,’ replied Jacob. ‘I think that all who can have moved into the country or the surrounding villages. I heard the men sitting behind us speak of an English bombardment as very probable indeed; and the emptiness of the markets is something I have never known before, even in times of plague.’ He was already gasping when he said this, and a few steps further on he pointed to a recess and said, ‘This is where I usually sit when I am going to the Kasbah.’
They all rested on the stone bench, worn smooth with innumerable weary hams, and presently the boy cried, ‘Oh sir! Do you see them enormous great huge birds?’
‘Certainly,’ said Stephen. ‘They are vultures, you know, the ordinary fulvous . . .’ He stopped short, not wishing to disappoint, and added, ‘But they are very splendid on the wing. See how they turn!’
‘I have seen a vulture, said the boy, more or less to himself, with infinite satisfaction.
Another two hundred steps and Jacob turned off righthanded. ‘There is the consulate,’ he said, pointing to a considerable house with a garden full of date-palms.
‘Should you like to draw breath again before going in?’
Stephen felt in his pocket for the ministerial letter, heard the reassuring crackle, and said, ‘Never in life: let us not lose a minute. Boy, will you wait here, sitting in the shade of a palm-tree?’
He and Jacob walked through the side-door obviously
intended for business, and in the office they found a young man sitting with his feet on the desk. ‘Who the Devil are you?’ he asked. ‘And what do you want? Distressed British subjects, I suppose.’
‘My name is Maturin, Dr Stephen Maturin, surgeon in HMS Surprise, and I wish to see the consul, for whom I have a letter and a verbal message.’
‘You can’t see the consul. He is sick. Give me the letter and tell me the message,’
said the young man; but he did not take his feet off the desk.
‘The letter is from the Ministry and can be delivered only into the consul’s own hands. The message is equally private. If you wish you may show him my card: and he will decide whether to receive me or not.’ He brought out a card, pencilled some words on the back, and laid it on the desk. The young man changed colour and said, ‘I will speak to her ladyship.’