Patrick O'Brian - The Hundred Days

‘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.’

‘I had not notion that Sir Sidney spoke Turkish,’ said Stephen aside to Jacob, while Omar was tearing the sheep apart.

‘He was in Constantinople with his brother Sir Spencer, the minister; indeed I believe they were joint-ministers.’

When the lamb was no more than a heap of well-cleaned bones, and when Omar, his chief huntsman and the two guests had eaten cakes made of dried figs and dates, moistened with honey and followed by coffee, and when the glow of the moon was just beginning to tinge the sky behind the mountain, the Dey stood up, uttered a formal prayer, and called for bowls of blood. ‘Goat, not swine,’ he said emphatically, patting Stephen’s shoulder to encourage him: and so, armed and red-footed, they set off, first climbing from the dell, then dropping by Wednesday’s path to the stream and its almost bare, well-trodden bank. By now Stephen’s eyes were accustomed to the dimness and he might have been walking along a broad highway, with Omar Pasha close before him. For so big a man he moved with an easy, supple pace, making barely a sound: twice he stopped, listening and as it were taking the scent of the air like a dog. He never spoke, but sometimes he turned his head, when the gleam of his teeth could be seen in his beard. He would have been the very model of a hunter, thought Stephen, with his silent tread and his subfusc clothes, but for the fact that as the rising moon shed an even greater light through the trees so it shone on the steel of the rifle slung over his shoulder. Stephen’s was under his light cloak, its butt far down below his knee: he had lived so long in cold, wet countries that the duty of keeping his powder dry had assumed religious proportions. He was thinking of other expeditions by night for the dawn-fighting and at the same time reflecting with pleasure that he was keeping up without much effort, though the six-foot Dey had a much longer stride, when Omar stopped, looked round, and pointing to a mass of bare rock emerging from the trees he whispered, ‘Ibn Haukal.’ Stephen nodded, and with infinite precaution they crept up to the small, low-ceilinged cave. With infinite precaution, but even so Omar, the leader, dislodged a little heap of shale that rattled down to the path, a very small but very shocking avalanche. They were still standing motionless when a very small-eared owl, known to Stephen from his childhood by the name of gloc, Athena’s owl, uttered its modest song, ‘Tyu, tyu’, answered almost at once by another, a quarter of a mile away. ‘Tyu, tyu.’