by Sax Rohmer
“The sudden heat has affected your friend,” he said, stepping up to them. “My name is Dr. Sime; may I offer you my assistance?”
The offer was accepted, and with the three he passed out on to the terrace, where the dust grated beneath the tread, and helped the fainting girl into an arabîyeh. The night was thunderously black, the heat almost insufferable, and the tall palms in front of the hotel bowed before the might of the scorching wind.
As the vehicle drove off, Sime stood for a moment looking after it. His face was very grave, for there was a look in the bright eyes of the girl in the yashmak which, professionally, he did not like. Turning up the steps, he learnt from the manager that several visitors had succumbed to the heat. There was something furtive in the manner of his informant’s glance, and Sime looked at him significantly.
“Khamsîn brings clouds of septic dust with it,” he said. “Let us hope that these attacks are due to nothing more than the unexpected rise in the temperature.”
An air of uneasiness prevailed now throughout the hotel. The wind had considerably abated, and crowds were leaving, pouring from the steps into the deserted street, a dreamlike company.
Colonel Royland took Sime aside, as the latter was making his way back to the buffet. The Colonel, whose regiment was stationed at the Citadel, had known Sime almost from childhood.
“You know, my boy,” he said, “I should never have allowed Eileen” (his daughter) “to remain in Cairo, if I had foreseen this change in the weather. This infernal wind, coming right through the native town, is loaded with infection.”
“Has it affected her, then?” asked Sime anxiously.
“She nearly fainted in the ball-room,” replied the Colonel. “Her mother took her home half an hour ago. I looked for you everywhere, but couldn’t find you.”
“Quite a number have succumbed,” said Sime.
“Eileen seemed to be slightly hysterical,” continued the Colonel. “She persisted that someone wearing a crocodile mask had been standing beside her at the moment that she was taken ill.”
Sime started; perhaps Cairn’s story was not a matter of imagination after all.
“There is someone here, dressed like that, I believe,” he replied, with affected carelessness. “He seems to have frightened several people. Any idea who he is?”
“My dear chap!” cried the Colonel, “I have been searching the place for him! But I have never once set eyes upon him. I was about to ask if you knew anything about it!”
Sime returned to the table where Cairn was sitting. The latter seemed to have recovered somewhat; but he looked far from well. Sime stared at him critically.
“I should turn in,” he said, “if I were you. Khamsîn is playing the deuce with people. I only hope it does not justify its name and blow for fifty days.”
“Have you seen the man in the mask!” asked Cairn.
“No,” replied Sime, “but he’s here alright; others have seen him.”
Cairn stood up rather unsteadily, and with Sime made his way through the moving crowd to the stairs. The band was still playing, but the cloud of gloom which had settled upon the place, refused to be dissipated.
“Good-night, Cairn,” said Sime, “see you in the morning.”
Robert Cairn, with aching head and a growing sensation of nausea, paused on the landing, looking down into the court below. He could not disguise from himself that he felt ill, not nervously ill as in London, but physically sick. This superheated air was difficult to breathe; it seemed to rise in waves from below.
Then, from a weary glancing at the figures beneath him, his attitude changed to one of tense watching.
A man, wearing the crocodile mask of Set, stood by a huge urn containing a palm, looking up to the landing!
Cairn’s weakness left him, and in its place came an indescribable anger, a longing to drive his fist into that grinning mask. He turned and ran lightly down the stairs, conscious of a sudden glow of energy. Reaching the floor, he saw the mask making across the hall, in the direction of the outer door. As rapidly as possible, for he could not run, without attracting undesirable attention, Cairn followed. The figure of Set passed out on to the terrace, but when Cairn in turn swung open the door, his quarry had vanished.
Then, in an arabîyeh just driving off, he detected the hideous mask. Hatless as he was, he ran down the steps and threw himself into another. The carriage-controller was in attendance, and Cairn rapidly told him to instruct the driver to follow the arabîyeh which had just left. The man lashed up his horses, turned the carriage, and went galloping on after the retreating figure. Past the Esbekîya Gardens they went, through several narrow streets, and on to the quarter of the Mûski. Time after time he thought he had lost the carriage ahead, but his own driver’s knowledge of the tortuous streets enabled him always to overtake it again. They went rocking along lanes so narrow that with outstretched arms one could almost have touched the walls on either side; past empty shops and unlighted houses. Cairn had not the remotest idea of his whereabouts, save that he was evidently in the district of the bazaars. A right-angled corner was abruptly negotiated — and there, ahead of him, stood the pursued vehicle! The driver was turning his horses around, to return; his fare was disappearing from sight into the black shadows of a narrow alley on the left.
Cairn leaped from the arabîyeh, shouting to the man to wait, and went dashing down the sloping lane after the retreating figure. A sort of blind fury possessed him, but he never paused to analyse it, never asked himself by what right he pursued this man, what wrong the latter had done him. His action was wholly unreasoning; he knew that he wished to overtake the wearer of the mask and to tear it from his head; upon that he acted!
He discovered that despite the tropical heat of the night, he was shuddering with cold, but he disregarded this circumstance, and ran on.
The pursued stopped before an iron-studded door, which was opened instantly; he entered as the runner came up with him. And, before the door could be reclosed, Cairn thrust his way in.
Blackness, utter blackness, was before him. The figure which he had pursued seemed to have been swallowed up. He stumbled on, gropingly, hands outstretched, then fell — fell, as he realised in the moment of falling, down a short flight of stone steps.
Still amid utter blackness, he got upon his feet, shaken but otherwise unhurt by his fall. He turned about, expecting to see some glimmer of light from the stairway, but the blackness was unbroken. Silence and gloom hemmed him in. He stood for a moment, listening intently.
A shaft of light pierced the darkness, as a shutter was thrown open. Through an iron-barred window the light shone; and with the light came a breath of stifling perfume. That perfume carried his imagination back instantly to a room at Oxford, and he advanced and looked through into the place beyond. He drew a swift breath, clutched the bars, and was silent — stricken speechless.
He looked into a large and lofty room, lighted by several hanging lamps. It had a carpeted divan at one end and was otherwise scantily furnished, in the Eastern manner. A silver incense-burner smoked upon a large praying-carpet, and by it stood the man in the crocodile mask. An Arab girl, fantastically attired, who had evidently just opened the shutters, was now helping him to remove the hideous head-dress.
She presently untied the last of the fastenings and lifted the thing from the man’s shoulders, moving away with the gliding step of the Oriental, and leaving him standing there in his short white tunic, bare-legged and sandalled.
The smoke of the incense curled upward and played around the straight, slim figure, drew vaporous lines about the still, ivory face — the handsome, sinister face, sometimes partly veiling the long black eyes and sometimes showing them in all their unnatural brightness. So the man stood, looking towards the barred window.
It was Antony Ferrara!
“Ah, dear Cairn—” the husky musical voice smote upon Cairn’s ears as the most hated sound in nature— “you have followed me. Not content with driving me from Lon
don, you would also render Cairo — my dear Cairo — untenable for me.”
Cairn clutched the bars but was silent.
“How wrong of you, Cairn!” the soft voice mocked. “This attention is so harmful — to you. Do you know, Cairn, the Sudanese formed the extraordinary opinion that I was an efreet, and this strange reputation has followed me right down the Nile. Your father, my dear friend, has studied these odd matters, and he would tell you that there is no power, in Nature, higher than the human will. Actually, Cairn, they have ascribed to me the direction of the Khamsîn, and so many worthy Egyptians have made up their minds that I travel with the storm — or that the storm follows me — that something of the kind has really come to pass! Or is it merely coincidence, Cairn? Who can say?”
Motionless, immobile, save for a slow smile, Antony Ferrara stood, and Cairn kept his eyes upon the evil face, and with trembling hands clutched the bars.
“It is certainly odd, is it not,” resumed the taunting voice, “that Khamsîn, so violent, too, should thus descend upon the Cairene season? I only arrived from the Fayûm this evening, Cairn, and, do you know, they have the pestilence there! I trust the hot wind does not carry it to Cairo; there are so many distinguished European and American visitors here. It would be a thousand pities!”
Cairn released his grip of the bars, raised his clenched fists above his head, and in a voice and with a maniacal fury that were neither his own, cursed the man who stood there mocking him. Then he reeled, fell, and remembered no more.
“All right, old man — you’ll do quite nicely now.”
It was Sime speaking.
Cairn struggled upright ... and found himself in bed! Sime was seated beside him.
“Don’t talk!” said Sime, “you’re in hospital! I’ll do the talking; you listen. I saw you bolt out of Shepheard’s last night — shut up! I followed, but lost you. We got up a search party, and with the aid of the man who had driven you, ran you to earth in a dirty alley behind the mosque of El-Azhar. Four kindly mendicants, who reside upon the steps of the establishment, had been awakened by your blundering in among them. They were holding you — yes, you were raving pretty badly. You are a lucky man, Cairn. You were inoculated before you left home?”
Cairn nodded weakly.
“Saved you. Be all right in a couple of days. That damned Khamsîn has brought a whiff of the plague from somewhere! Curiously enough, over fifty per cent. of the cases spotted so far are people who were at the carnival! Some of them, Cairn — but we won’t discuss that now. I was afraid of it, last night. That’s why I kept my eye on you. My boy, you were delirious when you bolted out of the hotel!”
“Was I?” said Cairn wearily, and lay back on the pillow. “Perhaps I was.”
CHAPTER XIV
DR. CAIRN ARRIVES
Dr. Bruce Cairn stepped into the boat which was to take him ashore, and as it swung away from the side of the liner sought to divert his thoughts by a contemplation of the weird scene. Amid the smoky flare of many lights, amid rising clouds of dust, a line of laden toilers was crawling ant-like from the lighters into the bowels of the big ship; and a second line, unladen, was descending by another gangway. Above, the jewelled velvet of the sky swept in a glorious arc; beyond, the lights of Port Said broke through the black curtain of the night, and the moving ray from the lighthouse intermittently swept the harbour waters; whilst, amid the indescribable clamour, the grimily picturesque turmoil, so characteristic of the place, the liner took in coal for her run to Rangoon.
Dodging this way and that, rounding the sterns of big ships, and disputing the water-way with lesser craft, the boat made for shore.
The usual delay at the Custom House, the usual soothing of the excited officials in the usual way, and his arabîyeh was jolting Dr. Cairn through the noise and the smell of those rambling streets, a noise and a smell entirely peculiar to this clearing-house of the Near East.
He accepted the room which was offered to him at the hotel, without troubling to inspect it, and having left instructions that he was to be called in time for the early train to Cairo, he swallowed a whisky and soda at the buffet, and wearily ascended the stairs. There were tourists in the hotel, English and American, marked by a gaping wonderment, and loud with plans of sightseeing; but Port Said, nay all Egypt, had nothing of novelty to offer Dr. Cairn. He was there at great inconvenience; a practitioner of his repute may not easily arrange to quit London at a moment’s notice. But the business upon which he was come was imperative. For him the charm of the place had not existence, but somewhere in Egypt his son stood in deadly peril, and Dr. Cairn counted the hours that yet divided them. His soul was up in arms against the man whose evil schemes had led to his presence in Port Said, at a time when many sufferers required his ministrations in Half-Moon Street. He was haunted by a phantom, a ghoul in human shape; Antony Ferrara, the adopted son of his dear friend, the adopted son, who had murdered his adopter, who whilst guiltless in the eyes of the law, was blood-guilty in the eyes of God!
Dr. Cairn switched on the light and seated himself upon the side of the bed, knitting his brows and staring straight before him, with an expression in his clear grey eyes whose significance he would have denied hotly, had any man charged him with it. He was thinking of Antony Ferrara’s record; the victims of this fiendish youth (for Antony Ferrara was barely of age) seemed to stand before him with hands stretched out appealingly.
“You alone,” they seemed to cry, “know who and what he is! You alone know of our awful wrongs; you alone can avenge them!”
And yet he had hesitated! It had remained for his own flesh and blood to be threatened ere he had taken decisive action. The viper had lain within his reach, and he had neglected to set his heel upon it. Men and women had suffered and had died of its venom; and he had not crushed it. Then Robert, his son, had felt the poison fang, and Dr. Cairn, who had hesitated to act upon the behalf of all humanity, had leapt to arms. He charged himself with a parent’s selfishness, and his conscience would hear no defence.
Dimly, the turmoil from the harbour reached him where he sat. He listened dully to the hooting of a syren — that of some vessel coming out of the canal.
His thoughts were evil company, and, with a deep sigh, he rose, crossed the room and threw open the double windows, giving access to the balcony.
Port Said, a panorama of twinkling lights, lay beneath him. The beam from the lighthouse swept the town searchingly like the eye of some pagan god lustful for sacrifice. He imagined that he could hear the shouting of the gangs coaling the liner in the harbour; but the night was full of the remote murmuring inseparable from that gateway of the East. The streets below, white under the moon, looked empty and deserted, and the hotel beneath him gave up no sound to tell of the many birds of passage who sheltered within it. A stunning sense of his loneliness came to him; his physical loneliness was symbolic of that which characterised his place in the world. He, alone, had the knowledge and the power to crush Antony Ferrara. He, alone, could rid the world of the unnatural menace embodied in the person bearing that name.
The town lay beneath his eyes, but now he saw nothing of it; before his mental vision loomed — exclusively — the figure of a slim and strangely handsome young man, having jet black hair, lustreless, a face of uniform ivory hue, long dark eyes wherein lurked lambent fires, and a womanish grace expressed in his whole bearing and emphasised by his long white hands. Upon a finger of the left hand gleamed a strange green stone.
Antony Ferrara! In the eyes of this solitary traveller, who stood looking down upon Port Said, that figure filled the entire landscape of Egypt!
With a weary sigh, Dr. Cairn turned and began to undress. Leaving the windows open, he switched off the light and got into bed. He was very weary, with a weariness rather of the spirit than of the flesh, but it was of that sort which renders sleep all but impossible. Around and about one fixed point his thoughts circled; in vain he endeavoured to forget, for a while, Antony Ferrara and the things connected with
him. Sleep was imperative, if he would be in fit condition to cope with the matters which demanded his attention in Cairo.
Yet sleep defied him. Every trifling sound from the harbour and the canal seemed to rise upon the still air to his room. Through a sort of mist created by the mosquito curtains, he could see the open windows, and look out upon the stars. He found himself studying the heavens with sleepless eyes, and idly working out the constellations visible. Then one very bright star attracted the whole of his attention, and, with the dogged persistency of insomnia, he sought to place it, but could not determine to which group it belonged.
So he lay with his eyes upon the stars until the other veiled lamps of heaven became invisible, and the patch of sky no more than a setting for that one white orb.
In this contemplation he grew restful; his thoughts ceased feverishly to race along that one hateful groove; the bright star seemed to soothe him. As a result of his fixed gazing, it now appeared to have increased in size. This was a common optical delusion, upon which he scarcely speculated at all. He recognised the welcome approach of sleep, and deliberately concentrated his mind upon the globe of light.
Yes, a globe of light indeed — for now it had assumed the dimensions of a lesser moon; and it seemed to rest in the space between the open windows. Then, he thought that it crept still nearer. The realities — the bed, the mosquito curtain, the room — were fading, and grateful slumber approached, and weighed upon his eyes in the form of that dazzling globe. The feeling of contentment was the last impression which he had, ere, with the bright star seemingly suspended just beyond the netting, he slept.
CHAPTER XV
THE WITCH-QUEEN
A man mentally over-tired sleeps either dreamlessly, or dreams with a vividness greater than that characterising the dreams of normal slumber. Dr. Cairn dreamt a vivid dream.