“You believe the tales are true?”
“Believe? How can I doubt the stony fact of it, heart of my heart? There was never one, these many years, of our own men nor of the Chartered Company, could get the proper twist and password of the trade up in the Waranga country, though our wares are good and honestly priced, though there is rubber up there and the warm, red trickle of gold-dust and enough ivory to fill seventeen times seventeen laps of greed.”
“I know,” cut in the other, disagreeably. “But to whose profit?”
“The Darwaysh’s and half a dozen stinking Waranga chiefs’, and never an attempt at proper organization and proper trade! It is Darwaysh Ukkhab rules up there—always the Darwaysh, for some hidden reason—and it is his matted, yellow beard which is the great juju of the outer kraals—Allah kureem!”
“But—why does he—how—”
“How am I to know, little brother? Only the fact of it remains—the fact that, up yonder, his word is law and his gesture a command. And now it seems that he is here, slinking into town in the thick of night like a dog that has been well beaten with thorn-sticks—and afraid of—”
“What?”
“What indeed? I tell you, heart o’ me, here is the final chance of Double-Dee—a sweeping expanse of virgin soil to be exploited—and as for the Chartered Company—wah!” He snapped his fingers derisively.
“Maybe you’re right.” The other rose. “No harm in trying at all events. I’ll come with you, Mahmoud.”
“No. I shall go alone. Remember, there are certain bonds that hold Darwaysh Ukkhab tight and fast to the sweep of my sword-arm and the clear ringing metal of my soul—certain bonds whose strength I would have tested before, had I ever had the opportunity of coming face to face with him up there in the Waranga country. And as to Leopoldo de Sousa—” he paused, chuckled reminiscently, and went on—“he, too—”
“I don’t care to know, Mahmoud, what unholy bond there is between you and that Portuguese rogue. I do not altogether approve of some of your methods, you know.”
“Then stay here, O man blessed in the sweet scent of your own righteousness!”
And the Arab smiled affectionately at the Scot, who smiled back.
CHAPTER III.
NAVARRO D’ALBANI.
Ten minutes later, in his stockinged feet, his yellow leather babouche slippers in his hand, Mahmoud Ali Daud stepped noiselessly on the back veranda of the Grand Hotel; then, as the great steel hilt of his dagger scraped crackingly against the stucco wall, he raised his sjambok and brought it down, with the full strength of his lean, muscular arm, on the kinky head of the Galla houseboy, the night watchman, who had loomed up from somewhere out of the dark at the sound. The man dropped with a guttural sob of pain, immediately scotched into breathless silence, as he heard the Arab’s low, even, passionless voice:
“Be quiet, dog and son of many dogs. Be quiet, nameless thing without morals or pedigree. Or—”
Faintly the answering whisper brushed up from the ground as the Galla kissed the Arab’s foot:
“My life in thy hand, O Inkos!”
“It is indeed! Here—lest thou forget it!” And even Donachie, who knew Africa, who knew the Arabs, and who especially knew his partner, would have been shocked could he have seen the latter again raise his sjambok and bring it down on the negro’s unprotected head.
Without paying any further attention to the groveling houseboy, Mahmoud Ali Daud walked up to the locked back door and knocked at it imperiously. Twice he knocked; and, when no answer came, when there was no sound, no movement, no sign of life, nothing except the thick African night that folded about him like the slimy tentacles of some evil, half-fluid monster of the swamps and, far in the distance, the staccato thumping of a signal drum sending the coast gossip to the outer kraals, he drew his dagger, calmly inserted the broad blade between the door and the jamb, pushed, pressed, forced open—and jumped rapidly back as, out of the sudden orange glare from within, a knife whizzed past his right ear and buried itself inch-deep in the door.
The Arab smiled quizzically, and bowed with an ironic “Salaam aleykhum.”
“Is that the way to greet a friend?” he went on, his hand reaching neither for dagger nor automatic. “Chiefly—” and there was a minatory, feline purr in his words—“a friend such as I who holds your life by the string of his tongue? And, remember, it has been said that we Arabs are blessed with leaky, clever, twisting tongues, that we are babblers of babblings. And, perhaps, a little word of mine—flying on winged feet to the ear of the governor of the colony—” He paused, and continued, “Wah, friend of my soul, you are rash and wanting in caution—and—”
“Peace, Mahmoud!” cut in the Portuguese whose right hand, which had thrown the knife, was still drawn back across the shoulder with the fingers crooked and slightly apart as if petrified in the act of speeding its sharp message that quivered in the door.
“Peace, indeed, Leopoldo of my soul!” replied the other; and he drew the door shut, stepped fully into the room and surveyed the scene in front of him with bright, mocking eyes—nor did it need a detective trained in analytical ratiocination to interpret it.
For, sprawled across the table, his bearded face buried in his arms, breathing stertorously, his lungs working with a heavy, staccato thump that caused the shoulders, from which the Galla blanket had slipped, to move rhythmically up and down, lay the stranger from the jungle whom M’Kindi had described. The acrid, sickening odor that filled the room gave silent testimony to the nature of the influence that had sent the man into such heavy slumber.
“You do not know how to prepare a proper opium pill, my Leopoldo,” smiled the Arab sarcastically. “You mix the poppy-juice too thoroughly, far too thoroughly, with the deadening juice of the asclepias plant.”
“Well—” The Portuguese gave a short, shameless laugh. “I—”
“I know!” Daud indicated a pouch of leopard-skin with a handful, dozens and dozens of uncut, large-sized diamonds rolling from it, that must have dropped to the floor as the hotel-keeper, at the sound of the door bursting open, had thrown the knife.
“You are right,” agreed the other, again smiling shamelessly, “there is the reason. And—” a greedy glint eddied up in his blue-black eyes—“they are mine—mine—I—”
“Wait!” Mahmoud Ali Daud picked up the stones, took two, gave them to De Sousa, returned the others to the pouch which he put back on the table. “That is enough for you.”
“No, no, no! We split even! I was the first to—”
“Silence, dog!” broke in the Arab contemptuously. “I do not want any of these diamonds. I am stalking for bigger game—silence!” he thundered as the Portuguese tried to expostulate. “And—” suddenly he stared straight at the other—“remember, I am a babbler of babblings and the governor’s very good friend. And so—tell me—the truth!”
“What?” The word came like the snarl of a wildcat, afraid of the trainer’s whip, more afraid of the trainer’s stony, merciless, compelling eye.
“Do you know this man?”
“No.”
The Arab took a step nearer. His eyes contracted to narrow slits. He thrust out his chin so that the short, well-cropped beard jutted out like a battering ram. His nervous fingers toyed with the thong of the sjambok.
“Are you telling the truth?” he demanded.
“Yes, yes, yes!” There was no doubt now of the man’s sincerity.
“How then,” came the next rapid question, “did he happen to come to you?”
“I don’t know. I only know that—he told me so!—he had heard of me—”
“Who hasn’t—on the west coast?” came the sarcastic rejoinder.
“And—” continued De Sousa with rather a pleased smile at the Arab’s interruption—“he offered me some of these stones if I would hide him here, get him clothes, and then smuggle him, unbeknown to all, aboard the first ship that made port. And—well—”
“I understand. You, being a dog
without honor or faith or morals, thought it more profitable to drug the little, little opium pills with which he wanted to sooth his frayed nerves, and to rob him of all he has!”
“Naturally!” came the callous rejoinder.
“Naturally, indeed! A vulture back to the reek of carrion, and a dog back to the dung-heap! Go, now. This man is a friend of mine. I shall talk with him and attend to his wants. And—once more—remember my so distressingly leaky tongue. Remember that the governor is my friend. Remember that once, when the English fought the Bayakas, in the interior, I ran across a certain Portuguese pig selling stolen rifles and ammunition to—”
“Yes, yes! I remember!” said the hotel-keeper with a crooked, nervous smile and left, while Mahmoud Ali Daud stood still for several minutes, listened close, opened the door suddenly to find out if De Sousa was eavesdropping, then returned to the table, where he busied himself over the drugged man with skilled hands, pressing the glassy eyeballs, rubbing the throat and neck, massaging the sinewy arms, pulling the fingers one by one, and working up and down the spine; until finally the man gave a deep, gurgling sob, sat up with a jerky start, blinked against the light, and, at once, burst into laughter and shook the other’s hands with every indication of pleased surprise.
“Daud!” he cried. “Mahmoud Ali Daud!”
“Heart of my heart!”
The two embraced each other after the exaggerated manner of the Orient, hugging like wrestlers, blowing kisses into the air with the tips of their fingers, pressing cheek daintily against cheek and flat palm against flat palm, then holding each other at arm’s length and beginning the whole process all over again, with evidently a great deal of relish; and, finally, they sat down, and the Arab having produced tobacco and cigarette-papers, they talked at length, reminiscently, with the little incongruous pauses, the little chokings of voice and heavy pulsings of heart, the sudden, queer, groping gestures of two men who read in each other the tale—the swing, the drama, the comedy, the splendid, shining, never-to-be-realized ambitions—of their past youth.
Nor, straight through, was it by the name of Darwaysh Ukkhab that the Arab addressed his friend, but by another name—limpid, soft, metallic, Latin—“Navarro d’Albani! Heart of my dead youth! Navarro d’Albani!”
The other, smoothing his yellow, matted beard with his hand, laughed in his throat. “Twenty years,” he said, “since I’ve heard the name!”
“Thirty—thirty-one or two!” gently corrected Mahmoud.
“What difference? Years enough to have forgotten the very sound of it! But—by the God of Abraham and of Jacob—it does sound sweet!”
“Ahee!” sighed the Arab. “Sweet in the nostrils of memory!”
CHAPTER IV.
SHADOWS FROM THE PAST.
And again reminiscences—the talk of the dead years—of the days when Navarro d’Albani, a Turkish Jew of ancient Moorish-Spanish descent, whose ancestors had occupied high seats of honor at Granada during the days of the Abencerrage Caliphs, had followed the call of adventure in his own wild heart, and had gone to Egypt, thence to Tunis, the Sahara, the Sudan, deeper and deeper into the brooding heart of the Black Continent, keen and flushed with the enthusiasm of youth, thirsting for the spoil and color and thrill of the far places.
His life had been a fantastic, incredible odyssey, a twisted, scrolled page torn out of Africa’s unwritten, never-to-be-written annals, and it had peaked acridly into blood and torture and slavery when the Mahdi swept out of the south to the gates of Egypt and blazed a crimson trail across the Sudan, with flame and torch and hangman’s noose—and the Moslem priests’ nasal incantations.
It was then that Navarro d’Albani, being an opportunist, had for safety’s sake embraced Islam—little difference to him if he called his god Jehovah or Allah—including the brand-new name of Darwaysh Ukkhab. Even so, the Mahdi had never quite trusted that great, yellow beard of his and that coldly ironic eye and, for years, his life had swung by a gossamer thread.
Once he had been sentenced to death, the scarlet-cloaked Nubian executioner had already bared the two-handed sword graved with the name of Allah the All-Merciful—the which was not Moslem sarcasm, but Moslem piety—when, dressed rather foppishly in a pistache-and-lavender silk djebaa, a voluminous dulband of orange-colored gauze twisted coquettishly about his head, a sprig of wild basil stuck above his right ear, Mahmoud Ali Daud, then a youth of twenty who had but recently bidden farewell to his family in Damascus, had ridden into camp atop a slim, creamy-white dromedary, and followed by some ruffianly servant-retainers.
For some vague reason, psychological or—for Allah alone knows how, in the swing of the centuries, families that once were friends, have drifted apart to the far lands—perhaps atavistic, hereditary, reaching back to the days when the d’Albanis and the Dauds were both sitting beside the lion fountain in Granada’s Alhambra and sipping their musk-scented coffee, Mahmoud had taken an immediate fancy to the other youth, and, secure in his spiritual position and privileges as a kinsman of the Prophet, had given imperious orders that his life be spared.
Hereafter, for years, the two had traded and fought and laughed and ridden and swaggered together, throughout north and Central Africa, until, one year, Navarro d’Albani had gone on a visit to his home in Smyrna. He had gone with a laugh on his lips. But he had returned to Africa, three months later, a changed man, weary, bitter, sardonic, hard, a confirmed cynic and misanthrope.
The rich sweetness of his soul had turned to vinegar, the honey of his words to gall, his love of mankind to brooding hatred. He had not vouchsafed an explanation, nor had the Arab, with the delicacy, perhaps the intuitive, almost feminine knowledge of the race of Shem, asked for one.
And then one day—and well Mahmoud Ali Daud remembered the scene, the house in Tunis where they lived at the time, with the covered portico of small Moorish arches, round like the horn of the crescent moon, upheld by slender pillars of rose marble, the tinkling fountain, the flaunting rose garden, and his friend jumping to his feet from his couch, the precious, jade-tipped pipe splintering on the ground, his great hands stabbing up and out, his yellow beard flinging to the breeze like a battle-flag—then one day his friend had cried out, suddenly, without warning or cause, that he was going away, into the heart of Central Africa, that—he had sworn it, by the God of Abraham and of Jacob—never again did he want to see a white face, of Arab or European, of man or woman or child, that he would hereafter throw in his lot with the blacks.
“Fantee! I shall go, Fantee! I shall turn native!”
Deliberately! Not because of drugs or drink! There had been no arguing with him, no reasoning. And he had gone that same night, Africa had swallowed him—to appear, years later, in the reports that filtered through occasionally to the coast, as a legendary figure, a yellow-bearded white man whose word in the Waranga country was law, whose gesture was a command, whom the natives obeyed with superstitious awe, and who would let no white man enter the country which he ruled—France and England had not yet divided the whole hinterland into spheres of interest—though it was rich in gold and ivory and rubber and though many were the indirect offers made him both by independent traders and by the Chartered Company—
* * * *
“Not even me,” said the Arab with gentle reproach, “me, thy friend, wouldst thou allow to come face to face with thee these many years.”
D’Albani smiled.
“Tell me,” he asked. “Was it the memory of thy old friendship which made thee send messages to me back yonder, or perhaps—for thou art an Arab—thy greed for trade and the profit of trade?”
“I am an Arab and thou art a Jew,” replied the other. “We understand each other. And”—with sweeping honesty—“it was both! Greed—and friendship. But, by Allah and by Allah, it was chiefly and foremost the latter, my friendship. I did want to see thee!”
“Remember—I had given an oath that—”
“That—yes, yes—that thou wouldst never want to see again a white fa
ce, of man or woman or child. But—now—here—” and the Arab’s lean hand shot out eloquently.
“Now,” replied the other, “it appears that my oath is broken and shivered, and perhaps the God of Abraham and of Jacob will understand—and forgive. Now I am back among the whites. And—” his voice dropped, and he leaned across the table so that his face jutted into the full radiance of the lamp—“there is in my soul a great fear—and a great, sweet hope.”
“Tell me!”
“The hope is—”
The Arab’s hand cut mockingly through the sentence, and he laughed.
“I know the hope,” he said. “A woman! The same woman who, years back, when thou hadst been home on a visit, changed thy heart and sent thee to the far places. That I guessed—long ago. A woman who—”
“Who trampled on my heart!”
“And who now again, somehow, across the dead years and the great distance, has called thee to her—”
“How dost thou know?”
“Am I a prattling babe not to know? Have there not been many soft, henna-stained feet that used my soul for a tasseled rug to step on—many little hands that twined about my foolish heart—Zoleikha and Ayesha and Nadja and Soltana and Zorah and—I have forgotten the names—but never the words. They were always the same—soft, silken, gliding, lying—”
He paused, smiled reminiscently, and went on:
“But the fear? What, little brother, is the fear which has sent thee here, slinking, furtive, in the dead of night, like a dog that has been well beaten with thorn sticks?”
“Mahmoud!” came the counter query. “Dost thou believe in—” d’Albani’s voice trembled, shivered, peaked to a strange, eerie note—“in evil influences—in witchcraft—in devils—”
The Arab did not look up. Nervously he fingered his amber rosary.
“My friend,” he replied Jesuitically, “there are indeed—so the learned doctors of the Faith have told me—certain references, in the Koran as well as in the sacred Hadith, to devils—djinni. Even the great king of the Jews, Solomon the Magnificent, is said to have—”
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 26