Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “How did he account for your not seeing this?” asked Grim.

  “He said that, the vision not being intended for me, the presence of the angel overpowered me and the man who was with me and we swooned. I accused him of having drugged us, but he answered that we must have dreamed that. The dog of a thief!”

  “Well, go on. What next?”

  “He said that the angel beckoned and he and his sixteen rascals followed into the tomb of Abraham, where a spirit came and breathed on them and they all received the gift of fire. In proof of it every one of the sixteen eggs of Satan belched fire from his mouth as the father of thieving spoke.

  “You should have summoned your seven men, and have sent them for others, and have had Ali Baba and his thieves jailed for sacrilege,” said Grim.

  “But I tell you the seven men slept! I opened the door and shouted for them, but none came; and Ali Baba and his sixteen dogs pushed past me through the door and were gone! So after we had locked the door again I and the other man who was with me took counsel together and I was for sending for the Governor of Hebron; but he said that would be to make a public scandal, which it were well to avoid.

  “He said that the Moslems of Hebron would not be pleased with us if it were known that we had let ourselves be tricked in such a matter and that they would be yet less pleased with us if we should appeal to foreigners. Moreover, he confessed himself afraid. He said that after all the story of the angel might be true and that if we denied it there might be a tumult. There are many wild fools in El-Kalil!”

  “But you, not he, are the Sheikh of the mosque,” said Grim.

  “Truly. Yet he refused to follow the course I favored. He vowed that he would tell what he had seen with his own eyes and no more: to wit, the broken masonry and seventeen men all breathing fire in this place where we sit. He insisted that the wisest course for both of us would be to say nothing and to wait and see what Ali Baba and his sons might have to say first; to that course he was willing to agree.

  “There is wisdom in silence; so he and I carried in cement and replaced the broken masonry with great care, agreeing to tell no word of it to any man until circumstances should reveal to us the right course. And the day following he ran away, Allah knows whither; so I am all alone to bear the brunt of this matter. Allah send a poor man wisdom that I may avoid disgrace!”

  “Well — what account has Ali Baba given of it?”

  “Have you not heard? He and his brood go belching Hell-fire through the streets, saying they went into the cave and have a gift of prophecy. When men came to see the entrance of the cave and found it sealed up, that old father of lies declared that one angel had broken the masonry, and afterwards another came and closed it. They could see that the cement was fresh and the stones slightly disarranged and that convinced them! Do you realize my predicament? My choice lay between confession that I had not guarded the cave faithfully, or saying nothing. I have said nothing. I continue to say nothing. Let Allah speak, or the spirit of Abraham, for I am dumb!”

  “I find that you have been unwise,” said Grim after a minute’s pause; and for half a minute after that the Sheikh battled with his own priestly pride. For many and many a year he had been fault-finder-in-chief in Hebron, and the licensed critic of others seldom suffers judgment dociley. However, he swallowed the verdict, Grim watching him as if a chemical experiment were taking place in a test-tube.

  “But not unfaithful,” Grim added, when the right second seemed to have come to drop that new ingredient into the mixture of emotions.

  The Sheikh’s eyes that had been blazing grew as grateful as a dog’s.

  “Moreover, I find that the wisdom of your subsequent silence offsets the former foolishness and I shall say so to Seyyid Omar when I go back to El-Kudz.”

  “Istarfrallah! [I beg God’s pardon!]”

  “In silence there is dignity, and out of dignity may come deliverance,” said Grim.

  “Inshallah! [If God wills!]”

  “Those seventeen thieves are not men of keen intellect, are they?” Grim asked him suddenly.

  “Allah! They are rogues with the brains of foxes — no better and no less.”

  “How should they have thought of such a scheme as this?”

  “Shi ajib. [It is a strange thing.] Who can fathom it?”

  “There must be a brain behind them.”

  “Perhaps the brain of Satan! Who knows?”

  “Think!” said Grim. “Is there any foreigner in Hebron who might have put them up to it?”

  “I know of none.”

  “Has there been no stranger here, who perhaps took a particular interest in the entrance to the cave?”

  “Ah! There was one, yes — about a month ago. But he was a dervish out of Egypt — a mere fanatic — a fool who did tricks with coins and eggs to amuse folk and begged his living.”

  “Where is he now?” asked Grim.

  “They say he lives in a cave near Abraham’s Oak.”

  “You say a mere mountebank?”

  “No better.”

  Grim proceeded to dismiss that subject as beneath consideration. If I had dared air my Arabic I would have urged him to follow it up further and by the look in Cohen’s eye he felt the same about it; but the most that either of us dared do was to sit still and call as little attention to ourselves as possible. Nothing but the fact that Grim had forced the Sheikh on the defensive from the start was preserving us from being questioned in a way that would have exposed me certainly, and Cohen probably.

  “And this fire-gift — they are going to display it now?” asked Grim, as if he did not know.

  “Aye, now. And I, who am Sheikh of this mosque, must eat humility and watch them. Truly are the ways of Allah past discerning. Verily dust is dust.”

  “Amen!” said Grim. “But did you never see a vision? May the Sheikh of a mosque such as this not talk with spirits now and then?”

  The Sheikh stared back at him with his jaw down. You could have put anything into his mouth that you cared to and he wouldn’t have known it; the suggestion had hit home.

  “If seventeen thieves can see an angel,” Grim went on, as if propounding a conundrum, “how many can the Sheikh of this mosque see?”

  “But the fire-gift? These men show a miracle. How to answer that?”

  “With another.”

  “But — but — I am no mountebank. I can do no tricks with fire.”

  “New tricks would do no good without a prophecy,” said Grim. “In a matter of prophecy, whose word would be listened to, yours or theirs?”

  “Inshallah, mine!”

  “And which is wiser: to confound your adversary with his own arguments, or yours?”

  “With his. Surely with his, for then he has no retort.”

  “So then — these seventeen thieves say that the fire-gift came out of the tomb of Abraham. If you were to say that because they are thieves the fire-gift must return again; if you were to say that an angel had appeared to you and told you that, would not all Hebron listen?”

  “It might be. But Ali Baba and his sixteen sons have preached a killing of the Jews. The swords of El-Kalil are sharpened. They are ready to begin.”

  “Yes, and if they do begin all Hebron will say afterwards that the fire-gift and the prophecy were true. Ali Baba will be reckoned a true prophet and you will have a competitor on your hands.”

  “Truly.”

  “Therefore the massacre must not begin. Therefore you must stand up in the mosque now, and say you have seen a vision.”

  “But if I tell them there must be no massacre they will hurry all the faster to begin it; for that is the way of the men of El-Kalil.”

  “Not if you promise the chance of a greater miracle.”

  “But what then? What shall I promise?”

  “Say that the angel said to you, ‘These seventeen men are thieves and stole the fire-gift. Therefore there is a condition made. Not one Jew must be slain until the Jews shall have their chance to bring the
fire-gift back. If they do bring it back, well; they are reprieved. They have one day and night in which to do it, and if a Jew is slain meanwhile there will be a vengeance on El-Kalil such as never yet befell — a vengeance of wrath and death and ruin. But if the Jews shall fail to bring it back, let them take the consequences!’”

  “These are dark words,” said the Sheikh.

  “They are wise words.”

  “Inshallah, the plan can do no harm. If the Jews can make no miracle, at least I shall have taken something of the influence away from Ali Baba. This massacre is not good; delay might prevent it and avoid the punishment the British would mete out afterwards. Good. I will stand in the mosque and say I have seen a vision!”

  “Better do it now,” said Grim. “It’s getting late.”

  “Come ye, and sit in the mosque then, and listen!”

  CHAPTER VI. “Fortune favors the man who favors fortune.”

  VIEWED in the light of what subsequently happened it seems possible that Grim’s whole plan might have ended in disaster, if at that critical moment circumstances out of his control had not shaped themselves to aid him. But after a deal of blundering and being blundered up and down the world’s by-ways I have learned and know by heart now these two fundamentals: there is nothing so unprofitable as to speculate in terms of “might have been;” and fortune favors the man who favors fortune.

  That last sounds like heresy, or one of those Delphic deliveries that can be read in any of a dozen ways. Well, so it is and so it can be. All accepted doctrine was heresy at some time; and since no two men are quite alike, no two interpretations match exactly. If you call fortune “luck,” luck is a chancy entity, and you will govern yourself and be governed accordingly.

  I have heard of Washington and Lincoln both described as lucky, yet take leave to doubt that either of them gave a fig for luck. Both men, according to my reading of events, were fortunate. Fortune is fair and absolute and kind and generous. They favored her and so she favored them. In all the intimate and various relations that I had with Grim he never once referred to luck in terms of envy or esteem, but very often did describe himself as fortunate. Luck was the other fellow’s talisman — the enemy’s; fortune, his.

  When luck came his way he laughed and mistrusted it. On the other hand, when fortune met him in the way he seemed to know the lady at the first glance, which is a rather rare advantage and accounts, I suspect, for some men being senators while others clean the streets.

  So, as the old tale-craftsmen used to phrase it in the days when men thought more and squandered less, it fortuned that those camel-men returned from Jerusalem while we were entering the Mosque of Abraham. They went first to the Governorate and it fortuned that de Crespigny advised them to keep the camels until morning for their better convenience in spreading the news. So they lost no time; and being Hebron men with an inborn understanding of the city’s ways, they came straight to the Haram where they felt sure in a time of excitement of finding the greatest possible number of men assembled in one place.

  They gave their news to the crowd outside and entered the mosque by the south door exactly at the moment when the Sheikh at the opposite end turned into the center aisle with his mind made up to ascend the pulpit and tell his story of having seen a vision.

  So he waited until they had done unburdening themselves of tidings to the swarm that closed around them. An Arab would rather have news to tell than a bellyful, and he likes his meal at that; so the two men made quite a ceremony of it, neither of them feeling inconvenienced or disappointed by being the center of attention. You could hear every word as they made the most of brief importance; and they were not unconscious of the obligation they owed to be accurate, since it was no small honor to have been selected to be witnesses of grave events.

  “The story of a massacre by Jews is not true. There has been fighting. The Jews started it by insulting Moslems. A few were killed. Many hundred of both sides have been wounded. But the troops are now in control. There are barriers across the streets. The city gates are shut. We saw the administrator and he assigned an officer to show us all we cared to see. The Moslem holy places are intact and guarded by British troops.

  “We asked the administrator whether troops would be sent to Hebron and he said no, there was no need; but we think that is because there are no troops that can be spared. He said there are plenty of troops, but we did not believe him; there are enough to hold the City quiet but no more. It is our belief that there is no further danger of the Jews massacring Moslems in Jerusalem. Moreover, that administrator is a man to be reckoned with, with whose wrath it is not wisdom to take chances.”

  Grim began whispering to the Sheikh, who was stroking that sacerdotal beard of his in a conflict of emotions. It was a serious enough crisis in his affairs, for if he should give the wrong advice or make the unacceptable statement at that moment it was likely his own influence would be gone forever, and possibly the salaried position with it.

  It was by Grim’s urging that he mounted the ancient pulpit — a marvel of a thing, made of Cedar of Lebanon for a Christian bishop in crusader times.

  We three squatted in darkness by the wall and watched him. I thought Grim looked worried. The worst kind of fool on earth and the likeliest to make irreparable blunders is the man who is thinking of his own position first, as that Sheikh was undoubtedly. He stood stroking his beard, sharp-eyed and hook-nosed as an eagle, peering this and that way into all the shadows until the crowd became aware of him and spread itself to squat down on the mats to listen to him.

  There is a peculiar democracy about the Moslem faith. Their whole law is religious, and they recognize no other legislation if they can help it. Once let him convince them that a given course is indicated in the Koran and any one can do almost as he likes with them. Anyone can get a hearing; but they usually concede to their appointed officials the right to speak first, after which they are ready to argue endlessly, so that the first speaker does well to be primed with something solid that can stand the devastating discussion which is sure to follow.

  The Sheikh was an old hand at making an impression. He let the silence settle down and grow intense before he spoke and then began acridly with an accusation.

  “Ye listen to this and that man and the latest comer has your ear. The wind brings dust and ye call that news. A camel coughs in the suk, and ye say a prophet speaks. The breath of your mouthings fills the air like bad smells from a dung-heap, and ye call that wisdom. Ye pray, and to what end? That your vain imaginings may take form. Ye ask Allah, the all-wise, to change the universe to suit your foolishness, imagining that fools are competent to give advice to the Creator. It is written that the fool shall rue his folly, and the headstrong man shall dread the day of reckoning!”

  He had their attention pretty thoroughly by that time, for nothing takes hold of the mind of a crowd so quickly as a string of platitudes, especially when they sting. Flattery is the weapon for the demagogue who seeks to stir a crowd to action; if he would rather hold them and win delay, a dozen acid generalities about their sins work wonders. But those are rules that all the mob-leaders understand.

  “While ye looked for wisdom in the cesspools,” he went on scornfully, “I turned to the Book. And while I read and prayed there came an angel and I saw a vision — here in this place where the footstep of the Prophet is imprinted in the stone on which he stood. Here above the tomb of Abraham I saw a true vision!”

  There was silence for a moment in which you could hear one man cracking the joints of his toes nervously. Then a voice cried out that Allah is all- powerful, and one after another repeated it until they were all chanting the first principles of Moslem faith, whose repetition seems to prepare them to believe anything — do anything — submit to anything.

  “God is God. There is no God but God. Mahommed is his prophet.”

  The great roof hummed with the chant for about two minutes, until it suddenly occurred to them that they had not heard the details of the vision
yet, and they ceased as suddenly as the frogs cease piping when a stone is thrown into the pond.

  “The angel who appeared to me was angry. I was afraid and my bones shook,” the man in the pulpit snarled; for he was one of those who take religion without sugar and grow nasal as they speak of sacred things. “He told me that the fire that came forth from the tomb of Abraham is in the hands of thieves, who took it in order to stir strife against the Jews. Because they are thieves,” said he, “they are unfit to return it; yet unless it be returned there will be a judgment on El-Kalil. So I laid my forehead on the floor and prayed to know by whose hand that fire may be returned, that the city may be saved from judgment. And he said, ‘Lo: against the Jews it was taken. Therefore let the Jews return it and they shall save themselves. For a day and a night let them have time given them; and if they return it, well, they have saved themselves and are reprieved. For a day and a night let not a Jew in El-Kalil be slain. But if they do not return it, then shall their blood be on their own heads.’

  “Then the angel left me and my strength returned so that the bones of my legs no longer shook; but for a little while my eyes were still dazed by the brightness, so that I could neither see nor grope my way. After certain minutes my sight came again and then I lost no time, but came hither; and now ye know the vision I have seen. I have not kept it secret from you. As for him who chooses not to listen, let his blood be on his head. My hands are henceforth clean in this matter.”

  “For a leader he’s easily led,” Grim whispered. “But for a liar he’s not half bad. Now if Ali Baba ben Hamza has only done his end of the talking too, we ought to manage nicely. Drat him! Is he going to read to them? This session’ll last all night if we don’t look out.”