MERSA NASI QI 



again and then the architect and builder of houses for him- 

 self and for others. Nasi had built half of Massawa, had 

 organized and owned the pearl-fishing, shark-fishing and 

 sardine-fishing, had probably trafficked with guns or tanks 

 and had certainly been the 'Sponge King' or the 'Mother- 

 of-Pearl King' (Mersa Nasi, named by him, is the centre of 

 these industries). Nasi, with a face burnt and desiccated by 

 fifty years of tropical sun, an aquiline nose and grey eyes, had 

 had the oddest experiences, both passive and active that could 

 ever befall anyone. He was a man of the most amazing 

 vitality. 



Now, this extraordinary gentleman, the type who would be 

 the central character in a novel of the tropics or a film about 

 the South Seas, opened the hingeless door of his villa to us, 

 with a large smile. The villa had, in fact, been sold to the 

 Governor of the island. Sheik Serag (an intimate friend, 

 naturally, of Nasi), but its builder and former landlord 

 quietly considered it his again, for his occasional guests. On 

 these occasions Sheik Serag avowed that he was only too 

 happy. 



This white house, which was pleasantly situated on a 

 hump, commanded boundless horizons: the desert lay be- 

 hind, and in front there were the gulfs of the coast, the bluest 

 pools locked in by burnt land, the Channel of Nocra at its 

 feet and beyond, the island of Nocra itself and other smaller 

 ones lost in the distance. Down on the left the great bay of 

 Ghubbet Mus Nefit opened out 



Nasi talked with both nonchalaixce and pride of what had 

 been one of his four hundred activities — the fishing, working 

 and marketing of mother-of-pearl. All round the house and 

 its broken-down garden wall lay thousands of shining frag- 

 ments of trochus shells, hundredweights of bulk mother-of- 

 pearl, dazzling on the ground like mountains of mirrors; and 



