The Night Language by David Rocklin

Author:David Rocklin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2017-10-17T23:37:11+00:00

Chapter Ten

6 November 1868

The castle coach brought Alamayou and Philip to the docks at Wapping for the auction of Abyssinian treasures. By the time they arrived there was a line stretching past the shops, down to the street.

The water turned below them as they entered from the Thames at Shadwell. A high wall surrounded the auction site, thirty-five hectares in all and nearly four kilometers of it quay and jetty. Warehouses lined the docks. Stone plinths carved from top to bottom in ammonites and other castoffs from the sea decorated their walls.

The courts, alleys, and the low-lodging houses of London’s waterside poor shone in the new light. Ramshackle storefronts studded the path from Shadwell. Every one of them catered to the sailors and the ships that took them away. Their windows brimmed with quadrants, brass sextons, chronometers, and compasses. Meat was tinned and men were in waistcoats, with canvas trousers and black dreadnaughts. They came from everywhere, down to the slowly rolling sea.

A forest of masts rose in the distance. Tall ship chimneys belched coal smoke clouds that drifted over the many-colored flags of nations. Men with painted faces mixed with fine English gentlemen and ladies, with flaxen-haired Germans and Negroes in a pungent haze of tobacco, spice, coffee, and sweat. Around the perimeter of the queues, benches filled with women and children preparing themselves for voyages away from their husbands and fathers, having been found out as immigrants unwelcome in London.

To live in the city, Alamayou thought, is to risk being sent away.

They made their apologies as they moved between bodies to the front of the queue, where they presented a letter of introduction from Her Majesty to the nearest uniformed man. Then they were escorted through the rest of the line, to the annoyance of the lords and ladies at two Negroes given priority.

Ahead of them was an enormous stage at the edge of the dock, filled from one end to the other with Abyssinian antiquities. A placard soared above it, some forty feet long and at least as high, showing maps of the landscapes, roads, bridges, and rails England had built from Annesley to Meqdala to find its way through the country.

Alamayou recognized a photograph of Sooroo Pass. He and his mother had trekked it on their weeklong journey from Debre Tabor to Meqdala. Over the course of three long days, they ran out of paths and had to cross the Sooroo over ridges of scrap rock so narrow that they were forced to walk in a single snaking line, with thousand-foot drops on either side of them.

As he walked beneath the image, Alamayou felt the whipping winds all over again, the thorny branches of unyielding trees, the stunned peels of pack animals tumbling over craggy cliffs and down through oceans of cloud to die on the hard earth, amid the pale flowering lichen and stone-splitting tendrils that grew from the cracks toward the sun.

At the sign’s bottom was a broad and stunning panoramic photo from the war of the encamped invasion force at Zoola.

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