‘By all means,’ said the Dey, and put it into his hands. The gun was much lighter than Stephen had expected, and it came up to his shoulder almost like a fowling-piece, a pretty solid fowling-piece for duck or geese. ‘You are accustomed to guns, I find?’ said the Dey, smiling.
‘Indeed I am, sir,’ replied Stephen. ‘I have shot many and many a creature with them, partly for sport and partly for study.’
The coffee and the pipe came in; and after a longish pause in which they smoked and drank, Stephen said, ‘I do not believe I have ever had better nor more welcome coffee: but now, sir, with your jermission I will deliver the message that His Majesty’s Ministry has entrusted to me. It has come to their knowledge that several numerous Shiite brotherhoods and confederacies along the Adriatic and lonian coast and inland to Serbia who support Bonaparte .
‘Bonaparte, that son of a dog,’ said the Dey, his face clouding with anger and taking on a very wicked look.
‘… have combined to intervene in his favour by doing all they can . . .’ Stephen carried on, although he knew that
he had lost the Dey’s attention and that he was irritating him.
‘Your master must have some very weak advisers,’ said the Dey when Stephen came to an end, ‘very weak, if they can believe that after his Royal Navy has so banged and battered Bonaparte’s friends in the Adriatic. I love the Royal Navy: I knew Sir Smith at Acre . . . but I leave all these things to my Vizier: he understands politics. For my part I understand soldiers: soldiers and their fate. And I know that this Bonaparte must fall. Whether there is any truth in this alleged plot and whether it succeeds or fails is of no consequence: this Bonaparte must fall. It is written. He has gone beyond what is allowed and he must therefore necessarily fall: it is written.’ He jerked his head and muttered, looking intensely disagreeable; but presently his eye fell on the guns once more, and with a far more amiable expression he said, ‘So you are interested in animals, sir, in the hunting and study of animals?’
‘Very much so indeed, sir.’
‘Then should you like to hunt a lion with me? I mean to lie in wait for one tomorrow evening.’
‘I should like it of all things, sir; but I have not so much as a fowling-piece with me.’
‘As for that, you may choose either of these and grow used to it, shooting all-through the afternoon – there is no want of powder and shot in this camp, I do assure you –
and then in the evening, with your gun still warm and supple, we will walk along the river-bank in blood-soaked shoes.’
‘Blood-soaked shoes, Pasha?’
‘Why, yes: did you not know that blood – swine’s blood, deer’s blood – does away with human scent? Along the bank until we are under Ibn Haukal’s crag: a few feet up this crag there is a hollow called Ibn Haukal’s cave, since he meditated there for a while during his travels: it is large enough for two men and it is somewhat hidden by tall grass and plants hanging from above. Some way farther up the stream, in the same kind of rock, there is a much larger and deeper cave where this lion Mahmud and his mate have their young. Although the cubs are quite large by now he still feeds them and of course his lioness; and it is his custom to walk down to the stream to some scattered bushes near a common watering-place and there to wait for a boar or a deer or whatever offers – last year he took one of my men who was trapping porcupines. I mean to wait for him on his way home, since he carries his prey hanging to the left. This allows one to shoot him behind the right ear and perhaps to kill him with the first shot. We shall, God willing, have the kindest moon for both his journeys.’
‘Indeed we shall, with the blessing.’
‘So if by the end of tomorrow afternoon you are pleased with the gun, and if you feel equal to waiting in silence, scarcely even drawing breath for half an hour and then perhaps as long again for his return, let us draw straws for the first to fire.’
Straws were brought, and Omar, with barely concealed
-pleasure, drew the longer. He at once began showing Stephen the management of the rifle – an American weapon unfamiliar to Stephen – and when they walked into the open, first to fire some random shots into the sky and then to shoot deliberately at a candle, a lion far down, perhaps on the lake shore itself, began series of great coughing roars that carried wonderfully on the still evening air.
The next morning Stephen and Jacob, taking some bread and mutton with them, spent most of their time on the bank of the Shatt, Jacob improving Stephen’s rudimentary Arabic, Berber and Turkish, Stephen telling him the elements of ornithology, illustrated by what few birds they had at hand. Clearly there were the myriads of splendid flamingos, but very few other waders; and the odd falcon or passerine fowl did not stay long enough for anything like close observation. The flamingos however were a feast in themselves, and they showed all their phases, feeding, preening, rising in great squadrons for no apparent cause, wheeling in splendour, coming down again, dashing the surface wide, and some placidly swimming. And in the course of the day Amos Jacob grew perfectly familiar with the griffon, Egyptian and black vultures, with a possible sight of the lappet-faced bird.
But their main business was learning the nature, temper and power of the gun: Stephen shot at fixed marks far and near, and he declared that ‘this was the truest, sweetest gun he had ever handled’. ‘I can make no such claim,’ said Jacob, ‘having had
so very little experience, and that only with fowling-pieces; but I did hit what I intended to hit several times, and once at a considerable distance.’ He paused and then went on, ‘I would not ask many people, but I am sure that you will not make game of me if I beg you to tell me
the reason for these spiral grooves, the rifling, inside the – barrels.’
‘They give a twist to the bullet, so that it flies out spinning about its axis at a prodigious rate: this evens out the inevitable minute inequalities of weight and of surface in the bullet, giving its flight an extraordinary accuracy. The Americans shoot their squirrels, a small and wary prey, from quite remarkable distances – shoot them with the light squirrel-rifles they have known from childhood – and in the War of Independence they were the most deadly marksmen. I have no doubt that these of Omar Pasha’s are squirrel-rifles writ large.’
On their way back at dusk they met Ibrahim, sent to look for them. ‘Omar Pasha was afraid you might have lost your way, and that the lamb might be overcooked,’ he said.
‘Please to step out. May I carry the gun?’
‘There you are,’ cried the Dey as they came down into the deli and its scent of wood-smoke and roasting mutton. ‘I have not heard’ you shooting this half hour and more.’
‘No, sir,’ replied Stephen through Jacob, ‘we were contemplating a band of apes, Barbary apes, and they persecuting a young and foolish leopard, leaping from branch to branch and pelting it, gibbering and barking, until the animal fairly ran from them in open country.’
‘Well, you have been able to study animals, I find,’ said Omar. ‘I am glad of it: there are not so many apes about, in these degenerate days. But come and wash your hands and we will eat at once, to digest before it is time to leave. Tell me, how did you find the gun?’
‘I have never fired with a better,’ said Stephen. ‘I believe that in a good light on a windless day, I could hit an egg at two hundred and fifty paces. It is a beautiful gun.’
The Dey laughed with pleasure. ‘That is what Sir Smith said about my sword,’ he observed. Three men brought three basins; they washed their hands, and the Dey went on, ‘Now let us sit down, and while we eat I will tell you about Sir Smith. You remember the siege of Acre, of course? Yes: well, on the fifty-second day of the siege, when reinforcements under Hassan Bey were just in sight, Bonaparte’s artillery increased its fire enormously, and before dawn his infantry attacked, thrusting into the breach across the dry moat, half-choked with fallen battlements, and there was furious hand-to-hand fighting on each side of the pile of ruins. Sir Smith was with us together with close on a thousand seamen and Marines from his ships, and they were in the thick of the fight. My uncle Djezzar Pasha was sitting on a rock a little way behind the battle, handing out musket cartridges and rewarding men who brought him an enemy’s head, when suddenly it came to him that if Sir Smith were killed his men would turn and all would be lost. As I brought him a head he told me to require the English officer to withdraw and he came down with me to compel him to do so, taking him by the shoulder. And while he was held, a Frenchman, breaking through the press, cut at him. I parried the blow and with my backhand took the man’s head clean off his shoulders. Between us we led Sir Smith back to my uncle’s station, and it was as he sat down that he took my hand, and pointing to my scimitar, said, “It is a beautiful sword”. But come, let us eat: tepid mutton is worse than a luke-warm girl.’