The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes (20 page)

             
"Then it happened. Connie had never stopped watching the sea astern, and he shipped his oar inboard in one easy motion. I was still pulling but I stopped slack-jawed and the boat poised on a tall wave crest.

             
"Illumined by a strong lightning flash, what Connie had seen emerged from the crest of the next big wave but one from us."

             
Ffellowes was silent for a moment and seemed reluctant to continue, staring at the floor. Then he looked soberly at us and went on.

             
"I am not quite certain to this day exactly what it was I saw or what sensations I felt. Something enormous rose and broke the surface, something like a great rounded mass of long pieces of seaweed, many yards across in area. Only the separate seaweed fronds were
moving
!
And under the weed mass I thought I could see two great round eyes, eyes which had their own luminescence and glowed under the water with a baleful light.

             
"At the same time, the strength left my hands, indeed left me completely. I simply sat, gaping at the thing which had arisen from the ocean depths to pull us down.

             
"Connie was made of sterner stuff. In the next flash of lightning I saw him kneeling at the stern and the roar of the big Belgian pistol blasted out over the noise of the storm. He emptied the magazine and then, he told me later, hurled the empty gun at the creature. Whether or not it did any good we will never know.

             
"Because the next flash of lightning almost struck the boat. There was an ear-splitting crack of sound, a blinding glare and a sudden stink of ozone, all together, and just as suddenly the sea behind us was empty. Whatever it was had gone, and somehow one
knew
inside that it had gone and that it would not, or better yet, could not, harm us again.

             
"Well, we started to row again. The storm died, the seas moderated and the stars came out so we rowed northwest as well as we could. At dawn we were almost run down by a Turkish freighter, neutral of course, and in two
weeks time
we were back in Cairo. Turkey's 'neutrality' was useful. All in all a very peculiar experience.

             
"What had we seen on the island to make us run so? What happened to the German?

             
"Well, he's crouching still there, I expect. In that bright moonlight, he, his clothes and gun, everything in fact, had turned into nice white stone, probably marble. Very ornamental if you're in a mood to appreciate it. We weren't.

             
"I can still hear Connie's last words when we talked over what had happened.

             
" 'I don't think one pierces the barrier around that island very often, which is just as well. The Ancients,' he continued, 'made it very plain, that of the Three Sisters, Medusa was the only mortal.' "

-

             
We had gotten ourselves on the subject of secret societies one day at the club, although how exactly I forget.

             
The
Carbonari
, the Black Hand, the Illuminati,
Rosicrucians
(the real ones, not the modern newspaper ad people), all had been argued over. From them, we had gone on to the Leopard and Hyena societies of Africa, the Thugs of Nineteenth-Century India (a case was made, by the way, for their continued existence) and the various Chinese secret societies, of which the tongs are but a part.

             
We ended up with the medieval German
Vehmgericht
,
the recent Balkan murder groups such as
IMRO
, the Inner Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, and of course, the Ku Klux Klan.

             
With the latter, it was agreed we were approaching political parties too closely, which were not really the same thing at all. The discussion began to peter out into an argument about continental European Freemasonry, particularly so-called Grand Orient lodges, and whether or not the South and Central American lodges were still connected with them.

             
I didn't even know Brigadier Ffellowes, late of Her Majesty's forces, was in the club until he got up and came over. He'd been sitting in an alcove of the library behind us, reading the London
Times,
and had overheard us talking.

             
"I've heard," he said quietly, in a pause in the conversation, "that every member of the Mexican Cabinet still must be a Grand Orient Mason, in order to prove that he will make no later concessions to the Roman Church. Mexico is the only Latin country to have disestablished the church, severed it from the state, you know, and Rome is still violently opposed to Freemasonry."

             
"What we were really after," I said, "was the origin of secret societies and fraternities, which are the oldest still going, and when they started."

             
He looked thoughtful, his ruddy, smooth-shaven face turned to the window. "Well, the Masons are pretty old, certainly," he said at length.

             
"Their early periods are somewhat confused, but they run in a continuous line from at least 1400 and probably a good deal earlier. There are records in the British Museum. The chaps who were sent to England from the Continent to build our cathedrals seem to have been some kind of Masons, I believe, but the Craft died out there until we re-introduced it, beginning with the formation of the first British Grand Lodge in 1717."

             
"Are you a Mason?" I asked.

             
"Not at all," he said quickly. "This is all a matter of public record. I'm giving away no one's secrets, I assure you. But you know, the Masons are not really competitors for your early date.

             
"The Chinese secret societies you mentioned go back to the Han dynasty at least. That's 206
b.c.,
so you see they have a long lead on the Masons. Confucius was a secret society member, and so was Mencius and probably
Laotze
as well."

             
"What about the Near East?" said someone else. "Do any modern groups come down from Babylon or Sumer? What about ancient Egypt?"

             
"Yeah, and what about the Mafia?" came another question.

             
"Aren't they pretty damned old?"

             
"I say, not so fast," said Ffellowes. He sat down in a vacant chair and took up the thread of his lecture again.

             
"Near Eastern societies are all relatively pretty modern, like the Arab Brotherhood types who are always trying to do Nasser in. They're usually religious and semi-mystical, like old
Ibn
Saud's
Wahabis
, who are sort of Moslem monks, really. But very few, if any, date from earlier than six or seven hundred
a.d.

             
"The sect of the Assassins is gone in its original sense, although a few villages in northern Persia call themselves that, I think.

             
"And finally, the Mafia, although nasty, probably goes back to around 1700 in Sicily, its place of origin, and so isn't really very old at all."

             
There was a silence while we all tried to think of any group we might have missed, but none of us could.

             
"That means, then, that the Chinese are the oldest?" I finally said.

             
Ffellowes was now looking vacantly out of the window at the evening traffic and appeared not to hear me, so I repeated my question.

             
"I do beg your pardon," he said, coming back to earth. "What did you say?"

             
For the third time I asked if the Chinese had the oldest secret societies.

             
"Yes, I think so," said the brigadier, "with one exception, that is. Yes, with one exception."

             
There was something almost teasing in the tone of his voice, although his face was as expressionless as ever. But I knew and so did the others, that he had sprung a trap on us and was waiting for a question.

             
1 couldn't resist saying, not maliciously, but for fun, "I suppose you're the only guy who knows the exception?"

             
His blue eyes twinkled for a second, but his face remained immobile.

             
"I don't know how you guessed it, but that's so. As a matter of fact, there's a story connected."

             
There was a scraping of chairs as we closed in around him. His stories were like that. When we were settled, he began in his flat, clipped tones.

             
"In the spring of 1939, I went, for a vacation of two weeks, to a place in the Spanish Pyrenees, It's a very small place and its name will not appear in my story. Lovely clean air and pine-clad mountains.

             
"My hobby, or one of them, is bird-watching, and it's a grand area for birds. I saw the short-toed eagle my first day out, and all sorts of rare species nested there. I was staying at a little mountain village inn, and except for a few scattered cottages, this tiny hamlet of some hundred-odd souls was the only inhabited place for miles.

             
"The ghastly havoc of the Civil War was only just over, of course, but I was in such a remote area that even that had had very little visible effect. The people were very poor and life was hard, but that had always been the case.

             
"They were interesting people. They were Basques, but not the big, burly seamen one finds around Bilbao and on the
Asturian
coast. This was a shorter, darker race, very curt in speech, and impassive in appearance. Mind you, they were kind and gentle as well, but they had a great capacity for minding their own business.

             
"Now I speak a little Basque. It's a hard tongue to grasp, but I've lived in northern Spain at various times and I can make myself understood. As most of you know, I'm sure (this was flattery, pure and simple), the Basque language has no relatives in any other tongue in the world. This is one reason it's so hard to learn.

             
"And it's a funny language in other ways. All the words for cutting implements, such as scissors or knives, mean 'the stone which does such and such,' when translated literally. As I say, an odd speech."

             
He leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling as if to marshal his thoughts.

             
"When I said that there was no trace of the Civil War in the village, I overlooked something. Three members of Franco's
Guardia Civil,
his state police, were stationed there. To be precise, two privates and a sergeant.

             
"The privates were decent enough sorts, but the sergeant was 'something else,' as you say over here. He was a
Navarrese
city tough named Sandoval, who hated his exile to the mountains and was damned well going to take it out on someone.

             
"He tried to bully me at first, and when that didn't work, tried to cadge drinks and use me as
a wailing wall. I soon choked him on that tack and as a result he hated me like poison. But then, he hated everyone.

             
"The Spanish Government at this time was still flushing out enemies all over the country. They saw Communists under every rug and were especially suspicious of the Basques and the Catalans, since the two large minorities had been pillars of the late, unhappy Republic. Hence the presence of the sergeant and his men, even in this remote backwater of a village.