tion>H. Bedford-Jones
Down the Coast of Barbary
Published by Good Press, 2020
EAN 4064066422288
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I.
“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say
What manner of man art thou?”
IN In the grounds of a villa outside Algiers, in the year 1730, two men were sitting on a low stone garden seat beneath an orange tree.
“A horse’s head?” said Patrick Spence, and frowned. “With no inscription?”
“It needs none.”
Dr. Shaw peered at the bronze coin in his hand, brushing the fresh earth from it lovingly. As his spade and the dirt on his strong brown forearms testified, Spence had been at work in the garden when the coin turned up. He drew at his pipe with the quiet satisfaction of one who has labored hard. He had the piercing, far-seeing eyes of a sailor.
Dr. Shaw had walked from the city. He wore a camel-hair burnoose, which kept the intense sunlight from his lean, spare frame; he was a tall man, erect and muscular. One sensed something sweet and kindly in his smile as he regarded the coin.
“This horse’s head is inscription enough, Patrick,” he mused. “It shows the coin to be of Punic times. I have not a few of them. You will recall the lines:
“Locus in urbe fuit media, laetissimus umbra,
Quo primum jactati undis—”
The younger man broke in upon the sonorously rolling lines with a laugh.
“No, no, doctor! The little Latin I ever knew was forgot in the vortex of navigation. You Oxford men always seem ready to spout Greek and Latinity—but we haven’t time for much of that in America. And you’d better take off that burnoose or you’ll sweat to death before you know it.”
Absent-mindedly, Dr. Shaw loosened his garment. His eyes lifted to the sea.
“A sweet spot, Patrick!”
The American nodded. Well outside the tottering walls of Algiers, along the pleasant northern hill-slopes, the white blaze of sunlight was here broken by gardens and villas bordering a winding road. The scent of orange-flowers clustered thickly, the flashing red of pomegranates glimmered among the greenery; here were groves and fountains, flowers and running brooks, in sharp contrast to the squalid heat and crowded city streets.
“Something like this had Virgilius in mind,” observed Shaw, “when he spoke of the old Corycian gardener and his wondrous fruit! By the way”—he glanced at his burnoose—“this garment is most interesting, Patrick!
“It must have been shaped after the cloak of the little god Telesphorus, straight about the neck, with a Hippocrates’s sleeve for cowl. It answers, I take it, to the pallium, or the cucullus of the Gauls, mentioned by Martial, or to the cloaks wherein the Israelites folded up their kneading troughs, as do the Moors to this day—”
The younger man leaped to his feet.
“Hello!” he cried sharply. “Shaw, something’s happened! Here’s one of the consulate Negroes on the run!”
A man became visible running along the road. He was a black man. His nearly naked skin glistened with sweat. Panting, he turned in at the gate and came to them with a hasty salutation. He addressed Shaw in a chatter of Arabic.
“Bless my soul!”
The good doctor turned. He acted as interpreter, chaplain, and general factotum to the English consulate.
“They want me at once—I know not what has happened! Patrick, remain here, if you will. I am most anxious to have those specimen roots from Egypt laid under the soil before the sun withers them, if it be not imposing on your—”
“It’s the least I can do,” said Patrick Spence. “I’ll be glad to keep busy. Don’t forget the tobacco you promised to bring me! Be sure to get Virginia leaf from that shop next the consulate. All the others sell only Turkish, and I like not the stuff.”
The Rev. Thomas Shaw, D.D., F. R. S., fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, strode away hastily with the Negro. He turned to wave his hand, then vanished from sight.
Patrick Spence knocked out his pipe and leisurely refilled it. He strolled down to the open gates, where the bale of Egyptian roots had been left by a muleteer, and smiled to himself at thought of his friend.
“A rare man enough,” he mused. “Except when the classics fasten on his tongue, he has no more of the parson about him than I have. Lord knows that’s little enough, at present!”
He stood between the open gates and looked out at the sea, in sight over the winding road. A wistful hunger grew in his eyes at sight of a speck of white far out.
