Free In High Places by Arthur Hailey Page A

the sun-baked coastal city whose fish-smelling alleyways and salt-encrusted wharves he had thought of as his birthplace and his only home.
    'Suddenly the desert ahead seemed familiar and inviting ground. And like a creature drawn by some primeval instinct to the place of its birth and mother love, so he longed to return to Djibouti, but now it was out of reach, as so much else was out of reach and would remain so for always.
    Then, thirst and hunger at last stirring him, he rose. He turned from the forbidden country, heading north, because he had to head somewhere, towards Eritrea and the Red Sea...

The journey into Eritrea, west coast territory of Ethiopia, was one that he remembered clearly. He remembered, too, that on this journey he first began to steal systematically. Previously he had stolen food, but only in desperation when begging or work had failed. Now he no longer sought work and lived by thievery alone. He still stole food whenever there was an opportunity, and also goods or trinkets which could be sold for small amounts. What little money he got seemed to disappear at once, but always in back of his mind was the thought of accumulating enough to buy a passage on a ship - to some place where he could belong and could begin life again.
    In time he had come to Massawa, port of coral and gateway from Ethiopia to the Red Sea.
    It was in Massawa that retribution for stealing came close to overtaking him. Mingling in the crowd near a fishmonger's stall, he had purloined a fish, but the keen-eyed merchant had observed and given chase. Several others in the crowd, including a policeman, had joined in and within seconds Henri Duval was being pursued by what, to his youthful frightened ears, sounded like an angry mob. At a desperately fevered pace he had led them around Massawa's coral buildings and through tortuous back streets of the native quarter. Finally, having gained enough headway to reach the docks, he had hidden himself amid bales of ship's cargo awaiting loading. From a peephole he had watched his pursuers search, then eventually give up and go away.
    But the experience had shaken him and he resolved to quit Ethiopia by any means he could. In front of his hiding place a freighter was moored and after nightfall he crept aboard, stowing in a dark locker which he stumbled into from a lower deck. The vessel sailed next morning. Two hours later he was discovered and brought before the captain.
    The' ship was an antiquated Italian coal burner, plying leakily between the Gulf of Aden and the eastern Mediterranean.
    The languid Italian captain boredly scraped dirt from beneath his fingernails as Henri Duval stood, trembling, before him.
    After several minutes had passed the captain asked a sharp question in Italian. There was no response. He tried English, then French, but without result. Duval had long forgotten the little French he had learned from his mother and his speech was now a polyglot hodgepodge of Arabic, Somali, and Amharic, interspersed with stray words from Ethiopia's seventy languages and twice as many dialects.
    Finding he could not communicate, the captain shrugged indifferently. Stowaways were no novelty on the ship and the captain, unhampered by tiresome scruples about maritime law, ordered Duval put to work. His intention was to dump the stowaway at the next port of call.
    What the captain had not foreseen, however, was that Henri Duval, a man without a country, would be firmly rejected by immigration officials at every port of call, including Massawa, to which the ship returned several months later.
    With the increasing time that Duval spent aboard, the captain's anger increased in ratio until, after ten months had gone by, he called his bosun into conference. Between them they devised a plan - which the bosun obligingly explained to Duval through an interpreter - whereby the stowaway's life was to be made so untenable that sooner or later he would be glad to jump ship. And eventually, after