Night Passage to Kano by John Glasby

Author:John Glasby [Glasby, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2017-08-23T22:00:00+00:00

*

Carradine woke early in his room to the harsh cries of the pedlars in the street outside. Swinging his feet to the floor, he padded over to the window and drew the heavy curtains, letting in the grey light of the early dawn. Already, the city seemed to be awake, but he soon realised that the faint, high-pitched piping cries of the pedlars came from much further away than he had thought. Far off, in the distance, he could just make out the sounds of the racecourse, one of the social centres in the city. The residential area here was, like the other smaller one in the north, isolated from the rest of the city by an area where no building was allowed.

Going over to the other side of the room, he could just make out the old city of Kano in the distance, away to the west. While he had been in Tripoli, he had learned all he could about the city, the biggest and most flourishing settlement of the West African Sudan zone. It had a population of over a hundred and thirty thousand, the centre of the Nigerian groundnut belts from which it gained most of its wealth, being the cultural and economic heart of Hausaland.

Even a cursory glance at the old city, enclosed within the twelve-mile circuit of its walls, centring upon the great marketplace which had replaced the ancient sacrificial grove of pre-Islamic days, it was obvious that everything about it was old, from the flat-roofed houses, a closely-congested pattern of compounds, each surrounded by high mud walls, to the complete absence of planned layout to the winding labyrinths of narrow alleyways and paths.

Turning, he went into the bathroom, ran the hot water, washed and shaved and then dressed quickly. Scarcely was he ready, knotting his tie as he stood in front of the mirror, when there came a soft tap his door. Gently, he slid the Luger from its leather holster, holding it bounced lightly in his hand. Turning the key in the lock, he pulled the door open sharply.

Teratha gave a slightly startled glance at the gun held unwaveringly on her, then smiled as she stepped past him into the room. “Now I call that a very unfriendly greeting, even at this hour of the morning,” she said quietly.

“Sorry. I guess it’s my suspicious nature that sometimes gets the better of me. It could have been one of our friends standing there instead of you.”

The girl crossed over to the room and sat down in the chair by the window, crossing her legs in a nonchalant pose. “Still no sign of any of them. I took the liberty of checking through the register a little while ago. They aren’t here, or if they are, then they’re registered under false names. Somehow, I doubt that. No one came here either two or three days ago. We’re the first visitors for almost a week.”

“Let’s hope to God they haven’t moved on. We’d never have a chance of following them if they left here soon after arriving.

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