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

There was hardly a breath of wind, so they forewent the sail and motored north for half an hour before turning into Mkanda Channel, which separates Manda Island from the mainland. It was just a few dozen metres wide in places and they negotiated it slowly, passing smaller vessels being poled along. Husni told Paul the channel was used by nakhodas trying to avoid the open-ocean route around Manda. ‘It’s very shallow here. At low tide elephants, even antelope and leopards, cross over to the island from the mainland.’

As Jamal emerged from the channel, they passed a yellow beach beside the upmarket Manda Bay Lodge. This was the site of the famous Manda ruins, reputedly the birthplace of the Swahili. In a wealthier country, they would be fenced off and there’d be entrance fees, manicured pathways, dioramas and tour guides. But all Paul could see were a few overgrown mounds in the bush. His imagination would have to do all the work.

The ruins stretched across a small peninsula — an easily defensible position with a mangrove creek on either side and a good anchorage in front. Paul had read about Manda. Settled in the ninth century by Shirazis from Iran, it had been a wealthy city for centuries, its inhabitants known as the ‘wearers of gold’. Manda’s merchants prospered from the export of ivory, mangrove poles, rhino horn, leopard skins, slaves. Archaeologists had uncovered quantities of Islamic pottery from the Persian Gulf, even objects from China.

But other than a few piles of rubble, very little remained of the town’s patrician homes and towering baobabs hid most of the ruins. Paul spotted one fairly intact mosque and, as they passed a small beach, a line of coral blocks half buried in the sand.

‘What’s that?’ asked Paul.

‘It was a wall. Those blocks weigh more than a ton each,’ said Husni. ‘Some people think they were used to reclaim bits of the shore when sea levels rose.’

‘How did they move such huge stones?’

‘I do not know, but it’s just like the pharaohs, don’t you think?’

The story of Manda was the story of the coast. A merchant from Arabia starts a trading station, raises a multicoloured family with a local woman, begins to thrive. Friends and family from his homeland join him. A makeshift mosque is erected. More countrymen arrive on the dhows: perhaps young imams seeking converts or acolytes, maybe men who’d fallen on hard times or who needed to run from something.

Settlements grew or decayed and were refounded elsewhere, up a more promising mangrove creek or on some secure atoll. Wattle and daub were replaced by coral rag. A sultan rose to power; patrician families grew into a ruling elite. Manda is where it all began, on this very beach, with that first Shirazi footprint in the sand.

The Swahilis of old were tantalisingly close. Manda’s past seemed palpable, shimmering behind a veil so thin Paul could make out the crowded streets, fishermen unloading nets, children splashing each other in the shallows, their happy cries echoing down the centuries. He could almost smell the kingfish, grilling on charcoal fires, just a wafted breath away.

A gentle breeze had begun to blow, so Husni switched off the engine. Tall Latif and short Taki raised the yardarm, pulling hand over hand on the thick halyard, helped by Paul. Taki kept up a string of jokes that all but derailed a giggling Latif from the job at hand. The sail was released and filled magnificently as Jamal set off on a long reach towards Pate. The three kikoi-clad deckhands then took to snoozing on the foredeck while the doc peeled potatoes down in the galley and Nuru and Husni had turns at the helm.

A moustache of white water frothing at the bows, the creaking of ropes and a giant lateen angled like a wing overhead — for Paul these elements had become a kind of mantra. He asked Nuru if he could steer for a while and Jamal’s helmsman was happy to oblige. The worn mangrove tiller fitted Paul’s hand perfectly. He bore off in the gusts, letting the dhow surge on the short swells of a choppy sea.

‘We’re sailing against the tide,’ said Husni, ‘so stick close to the Pate shore when you get nearer to avoid the worst of it. But watch for sandbanks.’

Paul scanned the ocean ahead for the pale blues of the shallows. As the wind increased, squalls began racing across the scalloped water towards them. Paul bore off just before they hit. Nuru, the most experienced crewman, was on the main sheet, ready to pay off if the gust was too strong. Some of the heavier squalls enveloped Jamal in warm rain, the sea hissing around them and whiting out the land. Moments later, they’d emerge into blazing sunshine and the decks would steam with the evaporation.

Nuru took the helm again and Paul sat on the foredeck with Husni. ‘How fast do you think we’re going?’ he asked.

‘I suppose about eight knots,’ said the skipper. ‘This is still a small Kusi sail we’re using. It’s only twelve cotton panels. In summer, we bend a much bigger one — fifteen panels — for the Kaskazi.’

Although most dhows are essentially open boats, Jamal had an inboard engine under the afterdeck and a roofed galley before the mast. It was there that the doc — Omar Yusuf — prepared his dishes, usually fresh fish, prawns or goat, flavoured from jars of cardamom, cumin and cinnamon. The doc was sage-like with greying hair in a horseshoe around his bulbous skull. The aromas of his cooking wafted over them as they sailed, accompanied by the doc’s gruff voice singing in Arabic as he balanced the pots on a heaving deck. Lunch that afternoon, eaten between squalls, comprised a vegetable curry with chapattis. Once Husni and Paul had dished