Chapter 04 Session 07 Wrap Up
Narrative Recap
The camel caravan crested a low gravel ridge and the desert simply stopped. Below lay a scatter of flat mud-brick buildings the same color as the ground, running down to a sheet of green-blue water where a thin forest of masts stood off the shore. The wind carried salt, coffee, and hides. Welcome to Suez in 1814 — a half-ruined, sand-drifted port city of a few thousand souls that existed purely because the Red Sea had to be met somewhere, and where every drop of drinking water was hauled in by camel from wells miles away. Hassan al-Rashidi halted the caravan at the edge of town, collected his money, and parted ways without ceremony, leaving the party standing in the heat like lost luggage.
With Mancini’s suggestion to seek the Frankish waterfront ringing in their ears, the group made their way to the East India Company office — a whitewashed building flying the company flag near the harbor. Inside, a young clerk named Sam sat fully buttoned up in his suit and cravat, sweating rivers in the oppressive heat, while his colleague George lounged with his sleeves rolled up in the back. Freddy Cavendish presented his Board of Control paperwork and dropped the name of his cousin Hugh Cavendish, which proved to be the magic words. George and Sam arranged for the party to be split between two company houses, each offering a whitewashed room and a real bed — modest by any standard, but a luxury after days on camelback in the desert.
While the others settled in, Nathaniel Holt made his way down to the waterfront to scout for a vessel capable of carrying them across the Indian Ocean to Calcutta. What he found was discouraging: the harbor was crowded with small coastal craft suited only for grain and pilgrim runs up to Jeddah, and the two most seaworthy hulls in the bay were already under charter to the Pasha’s military commissariat and unavailable at any price. Language barriers and a general lack of naval expertise among the soldiers stationed there made gathering useful information nearly impossible. He returned to the group empty-handed, resolving to try again the following day.
That evening, George and Sam led the group to a subterranean tavern in the Frankish quarter — a vaulted basement carved out of the ruins of a former two-story building, its bars fashioned from lashed barrels and planks, its floor packed dirt, its chairs a chaotic collection of furniture scavenged from half a dozen cultures. The place was owned by a Portuguese man who had gotten stuck in Suez twenty years ago and had been trying to drink himself to death ever since, eventually giving up and opening a bar instead. The crowd was a vivid mix of Europeans, Asians, and Africans, and the party was welcomed warmly by the East India Company men who were starved for news from home. Georgiana surprised a small contingent of Russian travelers by drinking vodka and raising a toast, while musicians played flutes, fiddles, and jew’s-harps, and Emma led the group into a raucous, arm-linking, knees-up style of dancing that bore no resemblance to any ballroom the party had previously attended.
It was over drinks that Elizabeth Ashby drew Adrien aside and, with quiet candor, told him the full weight of her story. She had been born in Calcutta to Silas Ashby, a British indigo trader, and his Bengali companion Sarala Dasi — a woman who had been his partner for eighteen years but could never be his wife under English law. When Gerald Hewitt destroyed her father’s business, Silas drank himself to death, and Elizabeth was shipped off to England by a well-meaning cousin as an act of charity she had never asked for, leaving her mother and younger sister Malati behind in Calcutta. She had spent fifteen years in England — a country she had never considered home — training, waiting, and planning, until she finally had her moment on the desert crossing. Now, with Hewitt dead, she was simply finishing the journey she had always intended to make: going home.
It was also at the bar that a man named Alan, nursing a drink in the back corner, provided the tip that changed everything. A merchantman called the Shah Alam was due to arrive the following morning — a Bombay-built vessel of around 350 tons that ran the Red Sea coffee route up to Mocha and Jeddah on one monsoon and returned to Bengal on the other. She answered to no company officer, which was precisely why she was available. The catch was that the party would need to reach her before the Ottoman military could commandeer her for their own purposes.
At dawn, Nathaniel spotted the Shah Alam’s tall masts entering the bay and roused the group. Adrien, Nathaniel, and Elizabeth Ashby hurried to the docks as a column of Ottoman soldiers began peeling away from the military encampment and marching in the same direction. They reached the gangplank first, where Captain Manoug Aratoon stood watching his crew tie up with a stern, practiced eye. He spoke English, he was amenable to negotiation, and after a brief exchange, the terms were settled: one hundred pounds for the party’s passage to Calcutta, sharing the ship’s cabin while the captain kept his cargo of coffee and hides. The presence of a Board of Control man among the passengers was enough to discourage the soldiers from pressing their claim.
Life aboard the Shah Alam settled into a rhythm over the following weeks. The party shared a single large cabin with curtained berths, pairing off for sleeping arrangements, while the thirty-strong Lascar crew went about their work with quiet efficiency. Georgiana buried herself in her arcane studies, filling pages with copious notes. Nathaniel practiced knife throwing on deck while Freddy, with characteristic generosity and a complete lack of attention to age, kept the young crewman Jumman well supplied with alcohol. Elizabeth Ashby moved easily among the crew, speaking to them in Bengali, while the helmsman Sona Mia sat outside the cabin polishing his silver navy buckle and telling a different story about where he got it every time anyone asked. The ship’s cook, Faraj, sang low and continuously in the galley and produced a heavily spiced stew that was, against all expectations, genuinely good.
The voyage was not without its entertainments. Thomas and Nathaniel squared off on deck in a friendly duel — saber against cutlass — with a gentleman’s wager attached: the loser would buy the drinks on the first night ashore and owe an apology to the ladies. After a spirited exchange, Thomas slipped inside Nathaniel’s guard, caught his blade, and sent the cutlass clattering to the deck. He stepped back, said “Well thought, sir,” and offered to continue — only for Ismail’s sudden hullabaloo to cut the moment short as the island of Socotra hove into view off the port bow.
The Shah Alam anchored in a sheltered bay of breathtaking beauty: white sand, turquoise water, limestone cliffs, and dragon blood trees silhouetted on the ridge above. The crew needed fresh water, and the spring was a quarter mile inland. The party volunteered to help, joining a steady stream of people carrying empty casks in and full ones out. It was only as the work progressed that anyone noticed the island’s unsettling silence — not a single bird call, not a single animal sound anywhere on the shore. Then Jumman went missing. Katherine Ward had seen the boy resting in the shade of a cave entrance, but when she passed by again, he was gone. In his place was a small puddle of water and the impression of a barrel in the mud — but no barrel, and no footprints. Shortly after, Freddy Cavendish vanished as well, leaving only his unlit torch lying on the ground.
Nathaniel spotted movement disappearing into a cave entrance thirty feet up the cliff face and decided to climb for it, testing the vines before committing his weight. He made it fifteen feet before the vine snapped and he fell, landing hard on the ground below while the crew exchanged money and the lookout in the crow’s nest called down the results. Georgiana, who had no particular fondness for Nathaniel, was nonetheless the only one capable of patching him up, and she did so with brisk efficiency. The crew retrieved ladders and ship’s rigging to scale the cliff properly, and the party organized into two groups — one to climb to the upper cave entrance, one to enter through the lower tunnel — using twine and chalk to mark their path through the dark, damp limestone passages that branched almost immediately.
The two tunnels intersected in a massive underground junction, reuniting the party in a cavern thick with webbing. The crew put torches to the silk and it burned in a sudden whoosh, filling the air with acrid smoke and sending pale, skittering forms retreating to the edges of the torchlight — creatures with far too many legs to be anything a sane person would want to encounter. Adrien pushed forward with his torch, expanding the ring of light, and what it revealed was worse: deeper in the chamber, pony-sized spiders with bloated abdomens crouched over a wall of woven egg sacs, their thick front legs braced against the stone. The sight was enough to shatter something in Adrien’s composure entirely. Rather than retreating, he began walking toward them with an expression of rapt, horrified fascination, and it took a firm intervention from Georgiana to drag him back to his senses.
Suspended from the ceiling above them, wrapped in silk cocoons, were Freddy and Jumman — along with several older bundles that no one looked at too closely. Emma climbed a human pyramid formed by the crew and cut Jumman free, lowering him safely into Thomas’s waiting arms below. Nathaniel scaled another pyramid to reach Freddy, but as he hacked at the webbing, a spider dropped from the ceiling and sank its fangs into his chest. He fought it off, felt a spreading numbness across his ribs, and then the pyramid collapsed beneath him — sending him, Freddy, and the spider all crashing to the cave floor in a heap, the spider squashed flat between them. The party retreated into the sunlight, the spiders unwilling to follow beyond the shadow of the cave mouth. Georgiana administered to Nathaniel’s bite with the same resigned competence she had shown after his fall, and the numbness slowly receded. The crew finished the water run in quick time, the Shah Alam’s lines were cast off, and the island of Socotra — beautiful, silent, and full of things best left undisturbed — fell away behind them as the ship made for open water.