Читать книгу Two Dianas in Somaliland: The Record of a Shooting Trip - Agnes Herbert - Страница 5

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All is uneven,

And everything left at six and seven

Richard II

By this time the weekly steamer had sailed to Berbera, across the Gulf, but we arranged to paddle our own canoes, so to speak, and the two sportsmen, still, I suppose, in fear and trembling lest we should clamour to form a part of their caravan, went shares with us in hiring at an altogether ridiculous sum, almost enough to have purchased a ship of our own, a small steamer to transport us and our numerous belongings across the Gulf.

Here I may as well say that it is possible for two women to successfully carry out a big shoot, for we proved it ourselves, but I do not believe it possible for them to do it cheaply. I never felt the entire truth of the well-known axiom, “The woman pays,” so completely as on this trip. The women paid with a vengeance—twice as much as a man would have done.

The getting of our things aboard was a scene of panic I shall never forget. It was, of anything I have ever had to do with, the quaintest and most amusing of sights. Each distinct package seemed to fall to the ground at least twice before it was considered to have earned the right to a passage at all. The men engaged by us to do the transporting of our goods were twins to the porters engaged by our friends, the opposition shoot. They did not appear to reason out that as the mountain of packages had to be got aboard before we could sail, it did not matter whose porter carried which box or kit. No, each porter must stick to the belongings of the individual who hired him to do the job. Naturally, this caused the wildest confusion, and I sat down on a packing case that nobody seemed to care much about and laughed and laughed at the idiocy of it. To see the leader of the opposition shoot gravely detach from my porter a bale of goods to which their label was attached, substituting for it a parcel from our special heap, was to see man at the zenith in the way of management.

It was very early, indeed, when we began operations, but not so early by the time we sailed, accompanied by a rabble of Somalis bent on negotiating the voyage at our expense. It was useless to say they could not come aboard, because come they would, and the villainous-looking skipper seemed to think the more the merrier. Our warrior friends were all for turning off the unpaying guests, but I begged that there should be no more delay, and so, when we were loaded up, like a cheap tripping steamer to Hampton Court, we sailed. It was a truly odious voyage. The wretched little craft rolled and tossed to such an extent I thought she really must founder. I remember devoutly wishing she would.

The leader brought out sketching materials, and proceeded to make a water-colour sketch of the sea.

It was just the same as any other sea, only nastier and more bumpy. We imagined—Cecily and myself—that the boat would do the trip in about sixteen hours. She floundered during twenty-four, and I spent most of the time on a deck-chair, “the world forgetting.” At intervals Somalis would come up from the depths somewhere, cross their hands and pray. I joined them every time in spirit. Cecily told me that the little cabin was too smelly for words, but in an evil minute I consented to be escorted thither for a meal.

“She’s not exactly a Cunarder,” sang out the younger officer, my kinsman, from the bottom of the companion, “but anyway they’ve got us something to eat.”

They had. Half-a-dozen different smells pervaded the horrid little cabin, green cabbage in the ascendant. The place was full of our kit, which seemed to have been fired in anyhow from the fo’castle end. With a silly desire to suppress the evidence of my obvious discomfort, I attacked an overloaded plate of underdone mutton and cabbage. I tried to keep my eyes off it as far as possible; sometimes it seemed multiplied by two, but the greasy gravy had a fatal fascination for me, and at last proved my undoing. The elder warrior supplied a so-called comfort, in the shape of a preventative against sea-sickness, concocted, he said, by his mother, which accelerated matters; and they all kindly dragged me on deck again and left me to myself in my misery. All through the night I stayed on my seat on deck, not daring to face the cabin and that awful smell, which Cecily told me was bilge water.

It was intensely cold, but, fortunately, I had a lot of wraps. The others lent me theirs too, telling me I should come below, as it was going to be “a dirty night,” whatever that might mean. It seemed a never-ending one, and my thankfulness cannot be described when, as the dawn broke, I saw land—Somaliland. We made the coast miles below Berbera, which is really what one might have expected. However, it was a matter of such moment to me that we made it at last that I was not disposed to quibble we had not arrived somewhere else.

I managed to pull myself together sufficiently to see the Golis Range. The others negotiated breakfast. They brought me some tea, made of some of the bilge water I think, and I did not fancy it. Then came Berbera Harbour, with a lighthouse to mark the entrance; next Berbera itself, which was a place I was as intensely glad to be in as I afterwards was to leave it. I should never have believed there were so many flies in the whole world had I not seen them with mine own eyes. In fact, my first impression of Berbera may be summed up in the word “flies.” The town seemed to be in two sections, native and European, the former composed of typical Arab houses and numerous huts of primitive and poverty-stricken appearance. The European quarter has large well-built one-storied houses, flat-roofed; and the harbour looked imposing, and accommodates quite large ships.

Submerged in the shimmering ether we could discern, through the parting of the ways of the Maritime Range, the magnificent Golis, about thirty-five miles inland from Berbera as the crow flies.

The same pandemonium attended our disembarking. All our fellow voyagers seemed to have accompanied the trip for no other reason than to act as porters. There were now more porters than packages, and so the men fought for the mastery to the imminent danger of our goods and chattels. Order was restored by our soldier friends, who at last displayed a little talent for administration; and sorting out the porters into some sort of system, soon had them running away, like loaded-up ants, with our packages and kit to the travellers’ bungalow in the European square, whither we speedily followed them, and established ourselves. It was quite a comfortable auberge, and seemed like heaven after that abominable toy steamer, and we christened it the “Cecil” at once.

Cecily began to sort our things into some degree of sequence. I could not help her. I was all at sea still, and felt every toss of the voyage over. These sort of battles fought o’er again are, to say the least, not pleasant.

We had not arrived so very long before our master of the ceremonies came to discover us, with my uncle’s letter clasped in his brown hand. I shall never forget the amazement on the man’s face as we introduced ourselves. I could not at first make out what on earth could be the matter, but at last the truth dawned on me. He had not expected to find us of the feminine persuasion.

Our would-be henchman’s name was unpronounceable, and sounded more like “Clarence” than anything, so Clarence he remained to the end—a really fine, handsome fellow, not very dark, about the Arab colour, with a mop of dark hair turning slightly grey. His features were of the Arab type, and I should say a strong Arab strain ran in his family, stronger even than in most Somali tribes. I think the Arab tinge exists more or less in every one of them. Anyhow, they are not of negritic descent.