Sharpe 23 Sharpes Devil Bernard Cornwell by Bernard Cornwell 9780061834134, 0061834130 instant download after payment.

There were sixteen men and only twelve mules. None of the men was willing
to abandon the journey, so tempers were edgy and not made any better by
the day’s oppressive and steamy heat. The sixteen men were waiting by the
shore, where the black basalt cliffs edged the small port and where there
was no wind to relieve the humidity. Somewhere in the hills there sounded
a grumble of thunder.
All but one of the sixteen men were uniformed. They stood sweltering and
impatient in the shade of heavily branched evergreen trees while the twelve
mules, attended by black slaves, drooped beside a briar hedge that was
brilliant with small white roses. The sun, climbing toward noon, shimmered
an atmosphere that smelled of roses, pomegranates, seaweed, myrtle and
sewage.
Two warships, their square-cut sails turned dirty gray by the long usage
of wind and rain, patroled far offshore. Closer, in the anchorage itself, a
large Spanish frigate lay to twin anchors. It was not a good anchorage, for
the ocean’s swells were scarcely vitiated by the embracing shore, nor was
the water at the quayside deep enough to allow a great ship to moor
alongside, and so the sixteen men had come ashore in the Spanish frigate’s
longboats. Now they waited in the oppressive, windless heat. In one of the
houses just beyond the rose-bright hedge a baby cried.