The Isle of Blood

He turned again toward the horizon. “On those days when I am at my lowest, when it is all I can do to raise my head from my pillow, and all the world seems black and life itself the idiot’s tale, I think of Africa. And the dark tide as if in fear recedes—it has no answer for Africa.”

“‘The dark tide’?”

He shook his head sharply. He seemed chagrinned to have brought it up.

“My name for something that can’t be named, Will Henry. Or that I am too frightened to name. A part of me and somehow not. It is not unlike a tide—it withdraws gently, it roars back in. Yet not predictable like the tides. Governed, though, as the moon guides the tides…” He shook his head in frustration; the monstrumologist was not accustomed to inarticulateness. “On my better days I am able to drive back the dark tide. On my worst, I am overwhelmed—it drives me. I would flee from it, but it is a part of me, and so where might I run? Oh, never mind. It is impossible to say exactly what I mean.”

“That’s all right, sir. I think I understand.”

I closed my eyes and lifted my nto the hot Mediterranean wind. I wanted very badly to know the smell of Africa.

Our stopover in Port Said, at the northern terminus of the Suez Canal, would be brief—two hours for the ship to take on coal and supplies and transfers. The maelstrom that was a steamer’s coaling operation was enough to drive most passengers ashore for the duration, my master and I among them, though his goal was not so much to escape than to arrange a rescue.

We stopped at the telegraph office first, where Warthrop sent this curt missive to von Helrung:

ARRIVED EGYPT. SHOULD ARRIVE

ADEN BY THE 19TH, INSTANT. WIRE

THERE IF NEWS.

And then this, to the one who had saved him in Venice:

RESPOND TO PORT AUTHORITY

OFFICE ADEN WHEN YOU RECEIVE

THIS. PELLINORE.

The office was hot and stuffy and crowded, mostly with Europeans (the telegraph operator himself was German), and most of them were on their way home from India, already having had their continental fill of exotic lands and the romance of foreign travel. We went outside, where it was not quite as stuffy and crowded but was much hotter, a blast-furnace heat to which I, a boy from New England, was wholly unaccustomed. It felt as if my lungs were being slowly crushed.

“Where is your hat, Will Henry?” the doctor asked. “You can’t go anywhere in Africa without a hat.”

“I left it on the boat, sir,” I gasped.

“Come along, then, but we must hurry. There is someone I must see before we depart.”

He led me down a series of narrow, winding streets, a confusion of intersecting lanes hardly wider than forest paths, except here the trees were thin-trunked and branchless, and the dust puffed and boiled beneath our feet.

We turned a corner and came into an open-air market called a souq, a kind of bazaar where one might find practically anything—candies and curiosities (I saw more than one vendor hawking shrunken heads), liquor, tobacco, coffee, and clothing—including a variety of boater hats, though we could not find one that wasn’t at least three sizes too big for me. There was some comment made that the sun must have boiled all the moisture from my head. I didn’t care. The brim rested on my eyebrows, and the thing jiggled annoyingly when I made the slightest movement, but it blocked the hateful sun.

We left the market and retraced our steps to a smoky café not far from the docks. The patrons—they were all male—sat about in small groups, smoking sisha, a fruit-flavored tobacco, from ornate water pipes. Upon seeing my master, the proprietor rushed forward, clapping his hands furiously and shouting the name “Mihos! Mihos!” He wrapped the doctor in a tremendous rib-cracking hug.

“Look what the wind has blown in from the desert! Hullo, hullo, my old friend!” the man cried in nearly unaccented English.

“Fadil, it is good to see you again,” returned Warthrop warmly. “How is business?”

“As bad as that?”

“Worse! It is terrible! But it is always terrible, so what can I complain? But who is this hiding under the big white umbrella?”

“This is Will Henry,” replied the monstrumologist.

“Henry! James’s boy? But where is James?”

“Gone.”

“Gone?”

“Dead,” I put in.

“Dead! Oh, but that is terrible! Terrible!” Tears welled in his mud-colored eyes. “When? How? And you are his son?”

I nodded, and the hat bounced back and forth upon my heat-shrunken head.

“And now you take his place. Very large shoes to fill, little William Henry. Very large indeed!”

“Yes,” said Warthrop. “Fadil, my ship leaves in less than an hour, and there is something I must—”

“Oh, but that is terrible! You will come to my house for dinner, Mihos; take the next boat. Say yes; you will wound my feelings if you say no.”

“Then, I’m afraid I must wound them. Perhaps when—or if—I return…”

“If you return? If? What does this mean, if?”

The doctor peered about in the fragrant haze. Fadil’s customers seemed oblivious to our presence. Still…

“I will explain everything—in private.”