Treasure Hunt Tales: The Star of the South & Captain Antifer. Жюль Верн
and found himself on the quay.
He looked to the right, to the left, in front of him, behind him, puffing jerkingly and furiously at his pipe. Every now and then he had to return a salute, for he was one of the notables of St. Malo, a man of consideration. But many were the salutes he did not return, owing to his not noticing that they were addressed to him.
In the harbour were a number of ships, sailing-vessels, and steamers, brigs, schooners, luggers, chasse-marées. The tide was then low, two or three hours having to elapse before the ships reported by the semaphore to be in the offing, could enter.
Antifer thought it would be wisest to go off to the railway-station, and await the arrival of the express. Would he be more fortunate on this occasion, than he had been during so many weeks?
How easily the human machine can go wrong! Antifer, occupied in watching the passers-by, did not notice that for twenty minutes he had been followed by somebody well worth his attention.
Here was a foreigner—a foreigner with a red fez and a black tassel, wearing a long, loose coat, fastened with a long single row of buttons right up to the neck, with a pair of baggy trousers, below which was a pair of big shoes like Turkish slippers. He was anything but young, perhaps sixty, perhaps sixty-five, stooping rather, and holding his long, bony fingers spread across his chest. If this good man were not the expected Levantine, there could be no doubt that he came from some land bordered by the Eastern Mediterranean—an Egyptian, an Armenian, a Syrian, an Ottoman.
In short, the stranger followed Captain Antifer in a hesitating way, sometimes on the point of accosting him, sometimes stopping for fear of making a mistake. At length at the corner of the quay he quickened his step, caught up Antifer, and then turned so suddenly as to run against him.
“Confound you, you clumsy brute!” exclaimed the captain, shaken by the collision.
Then, rubbing his eyes, and holding his hand to his eyebrows to shade his sight, he exclaimed,—
“Eh! Ah! Oh! He! Can it be? This must be the messenger of the double K.”
If it were the said envoy he certainly did not look promising, with his smooth face, his fat cheeks, his pointed nose, his big ears, his thin lips, his huge chin, his furtive eyes—anything but a physiognomy that inspired confidence.
“Have I not the honour of addressing Captain Antifer, as an obliging sailor has just told me?” said the stranger, in a most deplorable accent.
“Antifer, Pierre Servan Malo!” was the reply; “and you?”
“Ben Omar.”
“An Egyptian?”
“Notary at Alexandria, just come from the Hôtel de l’Union, Rue de la Poissonneau.”
A notary with a red hat! Evidently notaries in Oriental countries were not of the French type, with white cravat, black clothes, and gold spectacles; and it was just as astonishing to find that there were notaries at all in the country of the Pharaohs.
Antifer no longer doubted that he had before him the mysterious messenger, the bearer of the famous longitude announced twenty years before in Kamylk’s letter. But instead of giving himself away, as might be supposed, instead of asking Omar questions, he had sufficient control over himself to await events, for the duplicity betrayed on the visage of the living mummy warned him to be circumspect. Never would Tregomain have believed his excitable friend capable of such prudence.
“Well, what do you want with me, Mr. Ben Omar?” he asked, noticing that the Egyptian looked embarrassed.
“A few minutes’ conversation, Mr. Antifer.”
“Do you mean at my house?”
“No—and it would be better to be somewhere where no one can overhear us.”
“It is a secret then?”
“Yes and no—or rather a bargain.”
Antifer started at this. Evidently if this individual had brought the longitude he had no intention of delivering it gratis, and yet the letter signed with the double K said nothing about a bargain.
“Take care of the helm,” he said to himself, “and keep an eye on the way the wind blows!”
Then addressing himself to his interviewer, and pointing to a lonely corner at the end of the harbour, he said,—
“Come there! we shall be quite enough alone to talk of secret matters. But let us make haste, for it is cold enough to cut you through.”
They had not more than twenty yards to go. No one was on the vessels moored to the quay. The custom-house officer on duty was half a cable-length away.
In a minute or so they were at the spot, and seated on the end of a spar.
“Will this place suit you, Mr. Ben Omar?” asked Antifer.
“Oh, very well.”
“Then speak out, and speak clearly, and not like your sphinx, which amuses itself by offering conundrums to the poor world.”
“There will be no concealment, and I will speak frankly,” replied Ben Omar, in a tone which had little appearance of frankness.
He coughed two or three times, and said,—
“You had a father?”
“Yes, as is customary in our country. Well?”
“I hear that he is dead?”
“Eight years ago. Well?”
“He had made several voyages?”
“I believe so, considering that he was a sailor. Well?”
“In several seas?”
“In all. Well?”
“He once happened to go into the Levant?”
“Yes. Well?”
“During these voyages,” continued the notary, to whom these brief replies gave no loophole, “during these voyages, he was about sixty years ago on the coast of Syria.”
“Perhaps so; perhaps not. Well?” These “wells” were as so many digs in the ribs to Ben Omar.
“You will have to try another tack, my good man,” said Antifer to himself, “if you want me to pilot you.”
The notary saw that he would have to attack him more straight-forwardly.
“Have you any knowledge,” said he, “that your father had occasion to render a service, an immense service—to some one—on the coast of Syria?”
“I cannot say that I have. Well?”
“Ah!” said Ben Omar, much astonished at the reply. “And you do not know that he received a letter from a certain Kamylk Pasha?”
“A Pasha?”
“Yes.”
“Of how many tails?”
“It does not matter, Mr. Antifer. The point is, Did your father receive a letter containing information of great value?”
“I know nothing of it. Well?”
“Have you not looked over his papers? It is not possible that such a letter would have been destroyed. It contained, I repeat, information of extreme importance.”
“To you, Mr. Ben Omar?”
“To you also, Mr. Antifer, for—in short, it is that letter I am commissioned to get back again, and which might be the object of our bargain.”
In an instant it became clear to Antifer that the people who had sent Ben Omar wanted to get hold of the longitude, to find the place where the millions were concealed.
“The