The Book of Secrets Read Free

orientalness, stayed with you like the strong lines of a deceptively simple masterwork. White houses shimmered on a hill rendered lush green with vegetation. A fringe of palm trees decorated the shoreline, a white road came up to the beach where a restless waving crowd awaited. The waters were dark blue but choppy, the sky spotless that day. Even before they entered the southern harbour, dhows and bagalas hailed them, smaller craft hustled cheerfully alongside with expectations of business.
    On the ship, his fellow passengers would have noticed a man of medium build and average height; he had fair hair and a thick moustache, droopy eyes. He would have been observed as being somewhat shy.
    Alfred Corbin had spent his childhood days with governesses and in schools in Stockholm and Prague and Hamburg, speaking more of the languages of these foreign lands — at least in his youth — than he did his mother tongue. His father, Charles, after a stint at cattle farming in Argentina, had settled on a career in the Consular Service. The family had a house in Devon, and the only claim to distinction it could make was through relation to Sir George Corbin-Brown of the Punjab, and through a vague connection on his mother’s Scottish side to William Pitt’s war minister, Dundas. Of his two brothers, Robert was an officer in the Indian army and Kenneth was an Area Commissioner in Nyasaland. To start off his youngest son in a different direction, Charles Corbin found for Alfred a post at the Hamburg agents of the Union Mail Shipping Lines. This job was not without interest for Alfred — it was in Hamburg harbour that he first laid eyes upon natives of Africa, ship hands conscripted from the west coast of the continent — but Alfred was soon eyeing other opportunities. A chance came when he was returning from London to Hamburg via Paris.
    Years later, in his published memoirs, he would describe how he was conscripted into the Colonial Service. In Paris he’d been told the undersecretary for the colonies, Mr. Winston Churchill, was resting in a local hotel, having returned from a trip to East Africa. On an impulse he went and presented his card at the hotel, noting his relation to Sir George. “If he is related to Kenneth Corbin, send him up,” came the reply. Mr. Churchill, it seemed, had met his brother in British East Africa (as Kenya was then called). In a room strewn with paper and filled with cigarette smoke, the undersecretary, in the midst of a late breakfast, accepted Alfred Corbin’s application for a job, which would require from him, as he put it, “his whole life and soul.”
    Even though it would be a few years later that he took up the offer (having become involved with a woman in the meantime), Alfred Corbin would always consider it propitious to have been initiated into the Colonial Service with these credentials, whose value would grow with the years. And he never left the Service until he retired.
    2 March, 1913
    We were taken into dugout boats, called “ngalawas,” and were rowed to the shore by boisterous boatmen who sang in clear voices to each other. As soon as we stepped on solid ground we were completely taken over by a surge of porters wearing that white Swahili cotton smock so popular here and called “kanzu.” Cranstone the surveyor, who had been chattering so tiresomely since Port Said about Mombasa, the eye in a socket, the leafy hiding place where Sinbad must surely have wandered through and perhaps seen the roc’s egg, began muttering now about the den of forty thieves, saying “apana-apana, enda-enda” and more. Two Indian policemen in enormous beards and red turbans watched the scene calmly; a group of scantily dressed Indian men searched nervously among their arriving compatriots whom we had picked up in Aden. Many of the Europeans on the boat were metor knew their way about. It was unbearably hot and noisy, the clamour contagious and unsettling. As I looked around me uncertainly, the focus