Whoever Fears the Sea by Justin Fox (english novels to improve english txt) 📕

Paul smiled to himself. A Lamu sailor needed no excuse to bring racing into a conversation. The passion was there in their eyes, these men of the sea.

Arriving off Shela, they anchored in green shallows and waded ashore. Kijani House lay a few metres from the water’s edge. It was a Swahili-style inn with courtyards and terraces set in a tropical garden. Paul found a doorway in a whitewashed wall overflowing with pink bougainvillaea. He passed a couple of guests with American accents relaxing under palm trees beside a pool.

‘Hi, I’m Pierre Oberson, welcome to Kijani,’ said the lanky fellow at reception, handing Paul a coconut with a straw poking out the top.

After Paul had signed in, Pierre led him down the steps and across a lawn. ‘You sound German,’ said Paul.

‘Swiss, actually.’

‘How did you end up in Shela?’

‘I was an engineer back home. Fell in love with the archipelago — and with a local girl. Packed up my life and moved to Lamu fifteen years ago. Nothing would lure me back to Europe.’

Kijani comprised a cluster of Swahili houses. It was obvious that Pierre’s precise skills had been brought to bear: the detailing and finishes were all Swiss standard. The proud owner led him up a flight of stairs and through a set of rooms, pointing out architectural idiosyncrasies. Some of the walls were over a metre thick. ‘In the olden days, many of Shela’s inhabitants came from places where they had been forced out, or had to have defences,’ said Pierre. ‘So the early structures were built very strong. When we dug the foundations, we found all sorts of things: chinaware, an amphora, even a cannonball.’

In the renovation, he’d insisted on using local materials — mangrove and coral. The walls were waxed once a year to create the traditional shiny effect.

‘Sometimes we had to strike a compromise between authentic Swahili and making it comfortable for guests,’ explained Pierre.

‘Swiss Swahili,’ said Paul.

Pierre said that they’d mostly opted for traditional over mod cons. Paul noticed that all the rooms were long and narrow. The length of a mangrove roof-pole is only about two-and-a-half metres, so this has always determined the size of Swahili rooms.

The spaces were decorated with bright fabrics, antiques from Arabia and studded doors. ‘There’s an old chap in town who used to be a dhow merchant when the booms still came from the Gulf,’ said Pierre. ‘I was looking everywhere for antiques and I knew this guy still had lots of stuff. He’s got two ceramic bowls from the sultan’s palace in Zanzibar hanging on the wall of his office. Apparently the Aga Khan offered him a fortune for them — enough to buy half the town — but he refused. He wouldn’t tell me what else he had.

‘Anyway, so, I kept going to him. I’d buy the odd brass lock for a door, get chatting, pass the time of day. I always dropped in a question about whether he had more stock hidden away somewhere, and he would chuckle and say no. Then, out of the blue one day, as I was leaving, he says, “Mistah Pierre, you still looking for an old bed?”

‘“Of course,” I say.

‘“I think I might just have one somewhere,” he says.

‘He led me up an alley to a warehouse, pulled out one of those big, old-fashioned keys, and opened the door. There were about a hundred antique beds inside and much, much more. I couldn’t believe my eyes.’

Pierre ran his hand over a finely engraved dressing table. ‘This mahogany piece is from him, made a hundred years ago in the archipelago. Most of the teak and rosewood pieces in our guestrooms came on the boats from India.’

He led Paul out on to a balcony, where they watched two dhows fetching towards the horizon. ‘You know, this is where the Battle of Shela took place,’ said Pierre. ‘Pate’s soldiers were slaughtered right here on our beach.’

Paul had read about this bloody battle. Pate Island and their Mombasa allies had tried to overrun Lamu. The Nabhani of Pate, however, had fatally miscalculated the tides and the dhows were stranded, leaving the men to be butchered with no means of escape. Shela’s beach had run with blood and, for years after, was littered with the bones of the dead.

‘You can learn a lot about Lamu history by studying the buildings of Kijani,’ said Pierre. ‘Maybe you could put us in your movie?’

Each morning in Shela, Paul followed the same routine he had in Lamu, walking the streets and waterfront with notebook and camera. He’d grown more gregarious during his time on the island, less wrapped up in his own concerns, and chatted to whoever felt like passing the time of day with him. He befriended a skipper who’d recently bought a bright yellow dau. Paul would sit in the shade watching the sailor, crouched and shirtless under a tattered straw hat, hammering cotton dipped in sesame-seed oil into the seams of his new boat. Paul noticed that, rather than being hung on gudgeons and pintles, the dau’s rudder was lashed to the stern — just like a mtepe. He loved finding these archaic throwbacks.

On the third morning, Paul tagged along when the man visited a group of sail makers in a square just behind the beach, to monitor the progress of a new cotton lateen. The shape of the sail was outlined with rope pegged to the ground. Every lateen is slightly different and tailored to the specifications of the owner, who chooses the kind of cloth, width of sail panel, type of rope and the cut of head, foot and leech best suited to his dhow and the conditions he expects to sail her in. Paul took photographs of each step in the process.

That afternoon, he joined the Dutch for a swim on Shela beach. They