Chapter 18

By the time the Nile flooded next, we had eight miles of the Cairo Canal cleared and repaired. It took an entire ship to transport my wives, consorts, and children there to witness nearly a hundred-fifty square miles of parched desert surrounding the repaired canal being inundated by the floodwaters. Each town was ready to plant rice nearest to the town (and their water source), and then various vegetables, many of which Baha had obtained seeds for, as well as wheat, oats, millet, and alfalfa. There was a second raised area near the village, where cattle, camels, goats, chickens, and even horses were kept.

The following year they had pressed on beyond the twenty-three-mile mark where they veered off and built a smaller canal south to the new limestone quarry. That canal would also be one of the irrigation canals, but we immediately lined it with limestone cut from the new quarry it accessed. Camels pulled barges eight miles from the quarry to the Cairo Canal. The Quarry Canal was only fifty feet wide and fifteen feet deep, but two camel-drawn barges could pass each other easily. Camels traveling north used the east bank and those traveling south used the west bank.

By the third year, the canal had reached Lake Timseh, and a set of locks had been installed to allow ships into the canal without emptying too much fresh water into the salt-water lake. We also completed a canal from Lake Timseh to the Bitter Lakes, leaving only a fifteen-mile stretch to complete from the southern end of the Bitter Lakes to the Red Sea. Since work on the last section could continue through the flood season, it was finished completely by the end of the fourth year.

Al-Nasir and several of his wives accompanied my family and me on a very large ship for the three-day, wind-driven trip from Cairo to the Red Sea. The return trip against the prevailing winds took a week but was still faster, safer, more comfortable, and easier than crossing the desert on foot or using camels. Each trip brought out everyone now living in the province as the people lined the canal banks waving at us along much of the route. Once back in Cairo, Al-Nasir held a ceremony officially making me Emir of the new Tumilat Canal Province.

Since we now had so much land along the canal, I traded him back the original section of land we used to grow cotton in exchange for making the Province thirty miles wide all along the length of the canal. He got valuable, prime agricultural land in exchange for nearly worthless, mostly arid desert that we could now turn into productive agricultural land, from which he would enjoy the increased taxes.

While digging the irrigation canals, we came across the ruins of a large city buried by the desert sands. Located along the route of the ancient canal, it was only a short distance from Lake Timseh. Further digging indicated that, at the time, it had been a large port on the shore of Lake Timseh, which was obviously much bigger back then. The fact that the old canal ended nearby instead of continuing on to the current location of the lake was further proof of the larger size of the lake back then.

Even before the Cairo Canal had been finished, we turned our attention to the ancient port. Workers dug a large basin fifty feet deep and a mile in diameter, making dikes along the edges of the basin with the soil they dug out of it. We hoped to re-shape the lake during the next flood cycle and bring the old port back to life.

When the plan worked, we were ecstatic, and work began immediately to repair the ancient docks. We had previously stockpiled plenty of stone there in case our plan worked. The inside of the city was surprisingly cool since it was well below ground level. We raised the ancient walls another twenty feet to keep the wind and sand from burying the city again and set about rebuilding or repairing the buildings.

The walls were also re-shaped so one corner faced southwest, the most common direction the Khamaseen winds blew from. The corner was elongated much like the prow of a ship in hopes that it would split the wind. Also like the prow of a ship, the top of the wall curved slightly outwards in hopes of using the force of the wind against itself. Since nobody is interested enough to stand out in a sandstorm to watch, we don’t really know if it works or not. Several people who have previously experienced the winds claim that they are far less severe in the city of Timseh than in other walled cities.

Shortly after the canal was finished, the rebuilt port of Timseh opened, allowing ships to drop off their cargo there if they chose, rather than having to continue through the canal. It was an immediate hit and became the new capital of my Emirate. Baha excitedly accepted my offer to become my Earl there, passing his previous trade responsibilities on to his vast army of capable assistants.

The engineers built a second set of docks along the north side of the city where the newly widened Canal allowed ships to dock without blocking the canal. That way, cargo was easy to transfer from the larger ocean-going vessels to river craft that could immediately use the canal without having to go through the locks into the lake. We could handle much bigger and deeper draft ships at the port, ships that would have a difficult or impossible time getting into the canal. The ships for the canal were built so they could be rowed by oarsmen or pulled by camels and horses if they were traveling into the wind.

While extending the irrigation canals the last five miles, the ones to the south of the Cairo Canal frequently ended up running into the stony hills in the area. While the rocky hills limited agriculture, we opened two more limestone quarries, a quarry with rare purple granite, a moderate gold mine, and an emerald mine. Most villages that had the stony area as part of their territory moved their livestock to the stony section, building walls with the stone to keep the livestock from straying. Instead of artificially raising an area to house the animals like the other areas did, they used that area to grow crops.

The sea expeditions along the west coast of Africa had not only discovered a way around Africa by sea, but they opened up trading with a dozen different kingdoms along the west coast, securing land and permission to build twenty trading posts along the west coast. The final one, Sanville, was at the base of a small promontory about a hundred miles from the southern tip of the continent. By always obtaining permission and paying the existing tribes for the right to build the outposts, we avoided trouble with the natives in the area. In fact, many of the natives came to join the communities we set up, awed by the abundance and variety of foods we grew, the steel tools we used, as well as the comparative safety of our walled forts and our well-armed troops. The influx of new people frequently required us to buy even more land from the local tribes to support the larger population.

The trading post Khoi at the mouth of the Khoi River is about four hundred miles north of Sanville. We named it Khoi after the nomadic tribe in the area that we purchased the land from. We had originally purchased an area five miles on either side of the river and ten miles upriver to ensure adequate arable and irrigated land in the hostile environment, as well as an adequate water supply for farming, drinking, and re-supplying our ships. Several months after building the outpost, the influx of natives living with us required us to purchase the rights along the river for an additional ten miles upstream, as well as five more miles north of the river.

We also kept several large pastures planted in alfalfa just for the local nomadic tribes to use for grazing their animals when they were in the area, a gesture they greatly appreciated. In addition, we shared our extra food in times of need.

One of the men in the town found a rough diamond while they were digging an irrigation canal. Within a month, they had found over three hundred rough diamonds to ship back to Rouen. Needless to say, agriculture quickly became a secondary consideration to everyone there, at least until the people started going hungry. We finally worked out a schedule where each man worked five days at their regular job and one day looking for diamonds. Even the troops from the garrison were given this privilege. Nobody was allowed to look for diamonds on their one day off.

To keep the diamonds secure, we built a special two-story, thick-walled building inside the city walls with one sturdy door and no windows. The door was made of solid stone and required at least six men to open it each evening when the diamonds were put away. Inside the building, located in the very center of town, each family had a niche, a place on a sturdy shelf holding a wooden box with an Egyptian padlock of sorts on it. If someone were determined, the locks wouldn’t deter them for long, but they were impossible to re-lock without the key so we would know that someone had broken in.

Every day, they logged each new diamond. The town’s bailiff weighed it, measured it, and described anything he could about each stone before it was locked up. Mining was only allowed from sunrise to sunset and every diamond had to be “logged and locked” before a miner could go home. Generally, the bailiff had a logbook at the river from noon to sunset, resting in the shade of a tree or a pavilion. Like everyone else, he was only allowed to mine the diamonds one day a week, and the captain of the garrison took over the bailiff’s position on his mining day as well as his day off.

Anybody caught hiding even one tiny diamond, caught mining a second day during a week, caught mining between sunset and sunrise, or breaking any of the other mining laws forfeited everything. They spent at least a week shackled in the dungeon to make sure they hadn’t swallowed any diamonds and were then sent to Rouen on the next ship with only one set of clothes provided for them by the captain of the ship. If a woman was involved, the bailiff’s wife or concubine was required to perform a more “in depth” search for diamonds before she was jailed.

With so much to lose, very few people try to cheat, only three to date. A man (or woman) could earn £200 to £300 a year, easily as much or more than many nobles made in a year. To ensure that all dealings were honest and above-board, I, or Henna Neale if I wasn’t available, personally selected two gem cutters to travel to Khoi every three months to buy the gems.

The same men never went more than once every three years. We immediately placed the two selected men aboard separate ships bound for Khoi. Once there, the men stayed in houses on opposite sides of town, under guard. Everyone selling diamonds visited one buyer one day and the second buyer on a different day. Afterwards, the diamonds were purchased by the captain of the primary ship for the average of the two appraisals.

Each man (or woman) received one third of the value of their diamonds in gold. Many chose to keep part of the gold with them and have part kept in the Rouen Treasury in their name. We filled one room in the basement of the treasury in the new palace with alcoves covering every inch of wall space. Each alcove was eight feet wide and eight feet deep. It contained sixty-four niches on each of the three alcove walls. Niches were about one foot deep, one foot high, and one foot wide. A wooden box with a lid fit snugly into each niche and had a person’s name engraved on the box along with their city of residence. Mostly gemstones, ingots of precious metal, and coins of gold or silver filled the boxes, and every transaction was carefully noted in a ledger by the treasurer and witnessed by someone else.

There were two guards posted outside the door day and night, with nobody allowed in without a witness, not even me. We quickly outgrew the original room housing the niches. We remodeled the room, making a doorway in the back wall of the original room. In addition, we filled the previously open center of the two rooms with more walls and niches, leaving only a three-foot wide corridor around the perimeter of the room to access the niches. The niches in the middle of the room were actually just forty-foot-long hallways running from one side of the room to the other between thick walls filled with more niches. Merchants who routinely use the niches usually have their niches near the main doorway, while those who had never been there and who sent their goods via ship or courier were in the second room.

After the excitement of their first diamond transaction, most people chose to send a significant portion of their gold to Rouen for safekeeping. The bailiff kept a record of what they had in Rouen and the people were able to sign a note to the bailiff if they needed to borrow against what they had until the next purchasing week. Since I own the land and pay their salary while they search for diamonds, half of what the diamonds were worth goes to me. Five percent goes for taxes (standard trading taxes for GRTC and among the lowest anywhere), and ten percent is tithed to any religion they choose (also standard). The finder keeps a third of the value. The remaining one and a fraction percent I keep just to make the calculations easier. I call it a shipping fee for transporting the stones to Rouen.

Gem cutters from all over the world wait anxiously in Rouen for the gems to arrive. Up to ten percent of the best stones are kept separate from the others, usually chosen due to their color, quality, large size, or some other unique characteristic. The rest are sold in lots ranging from five carats for better stones to twenty carats for lesser quality stones. Most lots are a hair over their designated weight since it is nearly impossible to weigh out exact amounts.

The person selected to choose the lots has become quite proficient at it, keeping hundreds of smaller stones aside to meet the right weight. He carefully weighs each of the smaller stones and arranges them on his workbench according to ascending weights. If his initial lot is a little overweight, he substitutes a slightly smaller stone until the scale shows the lot to be as close as humanly possible to the chosen weight without being short weight. Since he is paid daily, he won’t profit in any way from short weighting the batches. Besides, every batch is re-weighed publicly right before it’s auctioned.

For two weeks, each interested gem buyer may check every lot they are interested in, which is usually most of them. Each lot is set out on a sturdy table three feet square with partitions screening each table from the one next to it. Each gem buyer receives a permanent number upon registration at their first auction. An artist does a quick sketch of them to prevent anyone from using someone else’s number.

Each person has to divest themselves of their clothing and don a simple white cotton robe with no sleeves or pockets. Viewing is allowed from shortly after breakfast until sunset. Each table has two guards assigned the entire time. The gem buyers sign in at the log on each table with their number and signature. The diamonds are counted and weighed when each buyer arrives, and again when they leave the table.

After two weeks, the bidding begins. The two men who went to Khoi choose the first twenty lots to be bid on and are allowed to make the opening bid on alternating lots. Generally, the best stones go first and fetch the highest prices. When all is said and done, the two men who went to Khoi each receive two Maggies for their trouble (odd that so many of them apply each time for the “trouble”). A good auction can easily bring in £250,000. Between the quarterly auctions and the fact that Rouen is easily the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, Africa, or the Arab world, most of the gem cutters, as well as the best craftsmen of all types, gravitate to Rouen.

Many exotic things are grown at our African trading posts, depending on the soil and climate. Spices, coconuts, sugar cane, bananas, and an assortment of other tropical fruits thrive, as does a new plant previously grown only in Ethiopia and Persia. At first, it frightened people, but the drink made with coffee beans quickly grew in popularity. Natives from many areas adjacent to our trading posts have taken to growing the same cash crops that we do, selling them to us to re-sell at a profit in Europe. Our “blue fleet” of twenty ships trades exclusively along the west coast of Africa.

Our explorers have discovered four groups of islands off the West African coast. The Dog Islands (Canary Islands), so named because of the large dogs found there, were inhabited. The people living there were interested in trade but had nothing worthwhile to trade for our iron tools. They agreed to grow sugar and coffee. On each of the six largest islands, we built a stone warehouse for them to store the sugar and coffee, and a small stone wharf big enough to accommodate two ships.

The natives of the Dog Islands actually told us about the next group of islands. The second group of islands had evidently been known and forgotten about for centuries, being called “the Purple Islands” at one point. Located about three hundred fifty miles directly offshore from the port of Anfa, the islands (the Madeiras) are uninhabited and are a valuable source of timber. There is lots of water available, but it is on the wrong end of the island for agriculture. Efforts are underway even now to build hundreds of miles of small stone and mortar irrigation ditches along the sides of the mountains there to bring water to the part of the island suitable for agriculture. In some places, clay tubes are used instead of ditches.

The Kongo Islands (Sao Tome, Principe, Annobon, and Bioko) are an uninhabited group of four main islands near where the coast of West Africa stops curving east and turns south, what I like to call the armpit of West Africa. They lie in a straight line headed southwest starting less than fifty miles offshore. Sugar and coffee grow exceptionally well on three of the islands and all four islands produce good quality timber.

The final discovery was the Mali Islands (Cape Verde Islands), another uninhabited group ranging from three to six hundred miles off the coast of the Mali Empire and about halfway between Agadir and Margaretville. Four of the islands are big enough to support agriculture. A fifth has extensive salt deposits, the result of the natural evaporation of seawater. Aside from mining the existing salt, we have created large evaporation ponds to extract even more salt from the seawater. Roughly a thousand pounds of recovered salt a month is transported from there to Margaretville for transport north to Europe or the Mediterranean. The Mali Kingdom has recently discovered coffee beans and has begun importing them almost faster than we can grow them.

The Rouen Palace was completed a year ago and is unanimously hailed as by far the most magnificent in the world. Even before it was finished, though, the plans had to be modified. The Holy Roman Empire fell apart, slowly at first. Most of the former members are now members of the Kings’ Council. Generally, the farther east the country was located, the less inclined they were to join. A second palace the same size as the main palace was added and has five smaller palaces surrounding it. One of those five smaller attached palaces is shared with the original palace (O-o-O). While the interior of the second main palace is different, the exterior is identical. The second palace is now the meeting place for the Kings’ Council. The meeting room is twenty times the size of the original one in the old castle. The surrounding palaces provide housing and everything visiting nobles need. Every member has their own private suite available to them anytime they are in Rouen. If they aren’t here, their suite remains empty aside from our cleaning staff. We frequently learn of a member’s arrival only when their ship docks, barely time enough to have snacks and beverages taken to the suite.

One of the original attached palaces became the treasury. The two floors below ground are filled with gold, silver, pearls, gems, and ivory. We would keep copper there, but all copper is sent immediately to Agadir. The three upper floors are offices for Henna’s army of workers who process the requests for money (mainly mine) and keep track of the flow of valuables into and out of the treasury. Henna has her own seal, one much more widely recognized than my own or that of any monarch in Europe.

Even Al-Nasir and the Pope requested and received membership in the Council. Watching old adversaries shake hands and put the past behind them still gives me goose bumps. The only drawback is that everyone insisted that I also become a full member since I was the Sultan of much of North Africa. They did have me continue as host and chairman of the Council. They also whined, insisting that I let them trade with the nations of Western Africa. I reminded them that I never refused anyone the right to explore or trade with West Africa, I simply didn’t tell anyone about what we found until word finally leaked out. By then, the nations of West Africa were our allies and trading partners.

If the others had done the same exploration we did, they might have found the same things. Our ports are open to all trading partners for the normal port fees charged in our other ports, fees usually lower than port fees charged by other countries. Aside from Khoi and Agadir, which are closed ports, the only time a foreign ship would be refused a berth at one of the trading posts was if our ships were using all three available dock spaces. The ports are relatively small, dock space is extremely limited, and our ships take precedence. Ports that warrant it are seeing their harbors and docks enlarged. I also reminded them that the nations I trade with in Africa are allies so I expected no heavy-handed tactics, and I expected the people to be treated fairly. Anyone upsetting the locals would have to deal with me.

I also never refused to let the ships of any country use the Cairo Canal.

All they had to do to use the canal was pay the same small fee everyone else did to help me recoup some of what it cost to build and what it cost for the annual dredging. The fee is relatively small, less than a third of what it would cost to haul everything overland, and the canal cuts two weeks off the overland trip.

The remnants of the Holy Roman Empire tried, unsuccessfully, to regroup. I guess the fact the Pope no longer recognized them hindered their attempt. Now they spend much of their time fighting each other, trying to form themselves into a single entity by force of arms.