Hashish: A Smuggler's Tale by Henry de Monfreid

a strong arm always ready to back up the Governor. These were fundamental principles and it was criminal to forget it.
    Monsieur Poilut was an old servant of his company. I don’t mean old in years, for he was a Creole who boasted of eternal youth. But he belonged to the heroic days when lieutenants of the Royal Navy commanded the company’s liners, haughty and supercilious creatures who did not deign to be aware of anything that went on lower than the bridge. In those happy times there was a constellation of pursers of a race now, alas, extinct, but whose memory will live for ever. The private trading in which the crew was allowed to indulge had become a regular and carefully organized traffic. The most profitable deals were carriedthrough under the cloak of the sale of Japanese tea-services, glass-ware, canaries and aspidistras for landladies. The facts that the Far Eastern and Indian Ocean liners called in at Egyptian ports, and that they docked at Marseilles beside ships from the Near East, were marvellously helpful to sundry small transhipments and to the smuggling of hashish. The deck, restaurant and engine-room staffs had the monopoly of this smuggling. The pursers put on smoked glasses and suddenly lost all sense of smell, and everything was for the best in the best of all possible companies. So really it was hardly surprising if Monsieur Poilut grumbled a little at the way I was upsetting such hoary customs. I was very glad that my unexpected return had permitted me to learn about the hue and cry that he was starting after me. The echoes might get as far as Egypt and might make a devil of a lot of trouble for me. It behoved me to be on my guard, and especially to try to avert suspicion.
    The only thing that might save me was the extreme improbability of anyone’s making the long voyage from Djibouti to Suez in such a small sailing-ship. Then, too, Monsieur Poilut declared that this open announcing of my intentions was just a bluff to provide an alibi, and that I was really engaged on very different business in a very different place. Other people might be taken in, but he was too old a fox to be deceived by such tricks.
    I had the luck to meet young Ali Coubeche on the quay. It was he who supplied the company’s liners with meat and vegetables. Naturally, then, he was on very friendly terms with all the pursers. With Monsieur Poilut his friendship was specially warm, not to say tropical, so I had only to give him to understand that my ship and cargo were really going in quite a different direction to be quite sure that Monsieur Poilut would be informed of it that very evening.

FOURTEEN
The Turtle Fisher
     
    I set sail just before nightfall, and thanks to exceptionally good weather out at sea, did not put in at Obock. A fair south-west wind brought merapidly in sight of the Swaba islands at sunrise. This is a chain of six volcanic islets which were probably thrown up by the same commotion as opened up the Red Sea in the Quaternary period. Two of these islets are about three hundred feet above sea-level and golden-brown in colour. In the strait between them, the current makes formidable eddies, which in places break and swirl in dangerous fashion. This strait is a perpetual battlefield, where the fishes devour each other in the struggle for life.
    As we approached, schools of tiny fish pursued by carnivorous monsters bounded out of the water with the unanimous rhythm of a troop of ballet-dancers, as if moved by a single spring. Flocks of birds hovering in the air pounced on them with a deafening screaming and beating of wings, and the clamour re-echoed from the steep cliffs of the island on either side. Hundreds of little holes were hollowed in the rocky walls, making them look like gigantic sponges. In these holes the sea-birds build their nests. You can see them at the entrance to their dwellings, generally the males, which bring fish to feed the young, or the female sitting on her eggs. If you fire a shot into