by Talbot Mundy
They were outrageous hussies. They wore more clothes than a Broadway chorus lady, and rather less paint, but if they were symbols of the Moslem paradise (as a learned Arab once assured me that they are meant to be) then, as I answered the Arab on that occasion, “me for hell.” But none of those sheikhs had ever seen Broadway, so you could hardly blame them.
Abdul Ali of Damascus seemed to have his arrangements with the men in his corner cinched at last to his satisfaction. He walked a little unsteadily across the room, apparently to make his peace with Suliman ben Saoud. He held brazenly in one hand a leather wallet that bulged with paper money — doubtless the “documents” that he had sent for. He nodded to me as he passed with more familiarity than he had any right to, since he had so ostentatiously dismissed me to the dogs. I suppose he felt so sure of “convincing” Suliman ben Saoud, and was so bent on offsetting the reaction caused by Anazeh’s behavior that he had been reviving that project about the school and therefore chose to appear on intimate terms with me. I met him more than half-way; any one who cared to might believe I loved him like a brother.
He stood in front of Suliman ben Saoud, rocking just a trifle from the effects of alcohol and smoke, and there was about five minutes’ conversation of which, although I missed a lot of it, I caught the general drift. The men who had come under the Ichwan’s influence kept joining in and raising objections. I gathered that they expected a proportionate percentage of the bribe for which Suliman ben Saoud was supposed to be maneuvering.
But even Abdul Ali, with a pouch of paper money in his hand, was not quite so barefaced as to bribe the Ichwan publicly. At the end of five minutes he suggested a private talk on the parapet. Suliman ben Saoud rose with apparent reluctance. Abdul Ali of Damascus took his arm. It was Suliman ben Saoud who opened the narrow door, and Abdul Ali who went through first. I did not wait for any invitation, but let my snoring neighbor fall on his side, hurried through after them, and closed the door behind me. Groping for the stick in the dark, I jammed it into the notches. It fitted perfectly. It held the door immovable and barred that stairway against all-comers. Then I followed them to the parapet.
The moon was about full and bathing the whole roof, and all the countryside in liquid light. There was a certain amount of mist lower down, and you could only make out the Dead Sea through it here and there; but up where we were, and even in the moat eighty feet below us, it was almost like daylight without the glare and heat. I leaned over, but could see nobody in the moat, and there was no sign of Mahommed ben Hamza.
Abdul Ali led the way toward the corner where Grim had given his orders to ben Hamza that afternoon. Abdul Ali did not seem to realize that I was following. When he turned at last, with his back to the parapet and the moonlight full in his face, he demanded in German:
“Wass machen Sie hier?”
I was about to answer him when there came a noise like subterranean thunder from the mouth of the stairway. They were trying to force that door below and follow us. The first words I used were in English, for Grim’s benefit:
“I stuck a stick in the door. I should say it’s good for ten or fifteen minutes unless they use explosives.”
That gave the whole game away at once.
“So!” said Abdul Ali. He thrust the wallet into his bosom. With the other hand he pulled out a repeating pistol. “So!”
Grim said never a word. He closed with him. In a second we were all three struggling like madmen. The pistol was not cocked; I managed to get hold of Abdul Ali’s wrist and wrench the weapon away before he could pull back the slide. Then we all three went down together on the stone roof, Abdul Ali yelling like a maniac, and Grim trying to squeeze the wind out of him. Even then, as we rolled and fought, I could still hear the thundering on the door. No doubt the noise they made prevented them from hearing Abdul Ali’s yells for help.
The man’s strength was prodigious, although he was puffy and short-winded. It began to look as if we would have to knock him on the head to get control of him. But even so, there was no rope — no sign of Mahommed ben Hamza and his men. You can think of a lot of things while you fight for your life eighty miles away from help. I wondered whether Grim would throw him over the parapet, and whether we two would have to take our chance of mountaineering down that ragged corner of the wall.
But suddenly about a hundred and eighty pounds of human brawn landed feet-first on my back. A voice said “Taib,* Jimgrim!” and two other men jumped after him from somewhere on the ruined wall above us. In another second Abdul Ali was held hand and foot, tied until he could not move, and then a wheat-sack was pulled down over his head and made fast between his legs. [*All right.]
“You’re late!” said Grim. “Quick! Where’s the rope? Are your men below?”
The thundering on the door had ceased. Either they were coming up the steps already, or had gone to reach the parapet some other way. It did not occur to me, or for that matter to any of us in the excitement of the minute, that they might be holding a consultation below, or might even have abandoned the idea of following, although I think now that must be the explanation, for what we did took more time than it takes to set it down.
Ben Hamza made one end of the rope fast around Abdul Ali’s feet. He would not listen to argument. He said he knew his business, and certainly the knot was workmanlike. Then he called over the parapet (an Arab never whistles) and a voice answered from the southern side of the moat, where some fallen stones cast a shadow. Then the three of them lifted Abdul Ali over, and lowered him head-first.
It was a slow business, for otherwise he would have been stunned against the first projection. I thought that Grim looked almost as nervous as I felt, but Mahommed ben Hamza was having the time of his life, and could not keep his tongue still.
“Head upwards a man can yell,” he explained to me, grinning from ear to ear. “Feet upwards, too afraid to yell!” Then the thundering on the door began again, louder than before it seemed to me. They were using a battering-ram. But they were too late. After what seemed like a long-drawn hour we saw shadowy arms below reach up and seize our prisoner. Then the loose rope came up again hand over hand.
“You next!” said Grim quietly. He pushed me forward, after carefully examining the loop Mahommed ben Hamza tied in the end of the rope.
Chapter Ten
“Money doesn’t weigh much!”
Well — you don’t stand on precedence or ceremony at times like that. Over I went in the bight of the rope. They let me fall about fifteen feet before they seemed to realize that I had let go of the parapet. Added to all that had gone before, that made about the climax of sensation. The pain of barking the skin of knees and elbows against projecting angles of stone was a relief.
I am no man of iron. I haven’t iron nerves. Not one second of that descent was less than hell. I could hear the thunder of some kind of battering-ram on the door at the foot of the stair. I could imagine the rope chafing against the sharp edge of the parapet as they paid it out hand over hand. The only thing that made me keep my head at all was knowledge that Abdul Ali had had to do the trip feet-upward, with his head in a bag. When they let go too fast it was rather like the half-way stage of taking chloroform. When they slowed up, there was the agonizing dread of pursuit. And through it all there burned the torturing suggestion that the rope might break.
Mother Earth felt good that night, when strong hands reached up and lifted me out of the noose that failed of reaching the bottom by about a man’s height. Come to think of it, it wasn’t mother earth at that. It was the stinking carcass of a camel only half autopsied by the vultures, that my feet first rested on — brother, perhaps, to the beast I had put out of his agony that afternoon.
The others came down the rope hand-over-hand, Grim last. I suppose he stayed up there with his pistol, ready for contingencies. He had his nerve with him, for he had fastened the upper end of the rope to a piece of broken stone laid across a gap that the crusaders had made in the ramparts, centuries ago, for the Chr
istian purpose of pouring boiling oil and water on their foes. It did not take more than a minute’s violent shaking after he got down to bring the rope tumbling on our heads.
Then the next thing he did was to take a look at the prisoner. Finding him not much the worse for wear, barring some bruises and a missing inch or two of skin, he ordered the bag pulled over his head again and gave the order for retreat. Mahommed ben Hamza went scouting ahead. The others picked up Abdul Ali as the construction gangs handle baulks of timber — horizontal — face- downward. When he wriggled they cuffed him into good behaviour.
You have to get down into an Arab moat before you can realize what the Hebrews meant by their word Gehenna. The smell of rotting carrion was only part of it. One stumbled into, and through, and over things that should not be. Heaps, that looked solid in the moonlight, yielded to the tread. Whatever liquid lay there was the product of corruption.
Yet we did not dare to climb out of the moat until we reached the shadows at the northern angle. Though the moonlight shone almost straight down on us it was a great deal brighter up above, and the walls cast some shadow. There was nothing for it but to pick our way in the comparative gloom of that vulture’s paradise, praying we might find a stream to wade in presently.
Once, looking up behind me, I thought I saw men’s heads peering over the parapet, but that may have been imagination. Grim vowed he did not see them, although I suspected him of saying that to avoid a panic. He shepherded us along, speaking in a perfectly normal voice whenever he had to, as if there were no such thing as hurry in the world. When we reached the farther corner of the moat it was he who climbed out first to con the situation. A look-out in a bastion on the ruined town wall promptly fired at him.
I expected him to fire back. I climbed up beside him to lend a hand with the pistol I had filched from Abdul Ali. But Grim shouted something about taking away for burial the corpse of a man who had died of small-pox. The man on the wall commanded us to Allah’s mercy and warned us to beware lest we, too, catch that dreaded plague.
“Inshallah!” Grim answered. Then he summoned our men from the moat.
They passed up Abdul Ali, dragging him feet-first again with one man keeping a clenched fist ready to strike him in the mouth in case he should forget that corpses don’t cry out. He looked like a corpse half-cold, as they carried him jerkily along a track that roughly followed the line of the wall. I don’t suppose that anything ever looked more like an Arab funeral procession than we did. The absence of noisy mourners, and the unusual hour of night, were plausibly accounted for by the dreaded disease that Grim had invented for the occasion. My golf-suit was the only false note, but I kept in shadow as much as I could, with the unseemly burden between me and the ramparts.
It was a long time before we had the town wall at our backs. A funeral, in the circumstances, might justifiably be rapid; but we could hardly run and keep up the pretense. But at last we passed over the shoulder of a hill into shadow on the farther side, and there was no more need of play-acting.
“Yalla bilagel!” [Run like the devil.] Grim ordered then, and we obeyed him like sprinters attempting to lower a record.
Twelve men running through the night can make a lot of noise, especially when they carry a heavy man between them. Our men were all from Hebron. Hebron prides itself on training the artfullest thieves in Asia. They boast of being able to steal the bed from under a sleeper without waking him. But even the stealthiest animals go crashing away from danger, and, now that the worst of the danger lay behind, more or less panic seized all of us.
Mahommed ben Hamza refused to follow the regular track, for fear of ambush or a chance encounter in the dark. Grim let him have his way. They dragged the wretched Abdul Ali like a sack of corn by a winding detour, and wherever the narrow path turned sharply to avoid great rocks they skidded him at the turn until he yelled for mercy. Grim pulled off the sack at last, untied his arms and legs, and let him walk; but whenever he lagged they frog-marched him again.
At last we reached a brook where we all waded to get rid of the filth and smell from that infernal moat, and Abdul Ali seized that opportunity to play his last cards. Considering Ben Hamza’s reputation, the obvious type of his nine ruffians, the darkness and rough handling, it said a lot for Grim’s authority that Abdul Ali still had that wallet-full of money in his possession. Sitting on a stone in the moonlight, he pulled it out. His nerve was a politician’s, cynical, simple. Its simplicity almost took your breath away.
“How many men from Hebron?” he demanded.
“Ten. Well and good. I have here ten thousand piastres — one thousand for each of you, or divide it how you like. That is the price I will pay you to let me go. What can these other two do to you? Take the money and run. Leave me to settle with these others.”
Ben Hamza, knee-deep in the brook, laughed aloud as he eyed the money. He made a gesture so good-humoured, so full of resignation and regret and broad philosophy that you would have liked the fellow even if he hadn’t saved your life.
“Deal with those two first!” he grinned. “I would have taken your money long ago, but that I know Jimgrim! He would have made me give it up again.”
“Jimgrim!” said Abdul Ali. “Jimgrim? Are you Major James Grim? A good thing for you I did not know that, when I had you in my power in the castle!”
Grim laughed. “Are we all set? Let’s go.”
We hurried all the faster now because our legs were wet. The night air on those Moab heights is chilly at any season. Perhaps, too, we were trying to leave behind us the moat-stench that the water had merely reduced, not washed away. A quarter of a mile before we reached the place appointed we knew that Anazeh had not failed to keep his tryst. Away up above us, beside the tomb, like an ancient bearded ghost, Anazeh stood motionless, silent, conning the track we should come by — a grand old savage keeping faith against his neighbours for the sake of friendship.
He did not challenge when he heard us. He took aim. He held his aim until Grim called to him. When our goat track joined the main road he was there awaiting us, standing like a sentinel in the shadow of a fanged rock. And there, if, Abdul Ali of Damascus could have had his way, there would have been a fresh debate. He did not let ten seconds pass before he had offered Anazeh all the money he had with him to lend him a horse and let him go. Anazeh waived aside the offer.
“You shall have as much more money as you wish!” the Damascene insisted. “Let me get to my house, and a messenger shall take the money to you. Or come and get it.”
All the answer Anazeh gave him was a curt laugh — one bark like a Fox’s.
“Where are all the horses?” Grim demanded. I could only see five of six.
“I wait for them.”
“Man, we can’t wait!”
“Jimgrim!” said the old sheikh, with a glint of something between malice and amusement in his eyes, “I knew you in the mejlis when you watched me read that letter! One word from me and—” He made a click between his teeth suggestive of swift death. “I let you play your game. But now I play my game, Allah willing. I have waited for you. Wait thou for me!”
“Why? What is it?”
Anazeh beckoned us and turned away. We followed him, Grim and I, across the road and up a steep track to the tomb on the overhanging rock, where he had stood when we first saw him.
He pointed. A cherry-red fire with golden sparks and crimson- bellied sulphur smoke was blazing in the midst of El-Kerak.
“The home of Abdul Ali of Damascus,” said Anazeh with pride in his voice. It was the pride of a man who shows off the behaviour of his children. “My men did it!”
“How can they escape?” Grim asked him.
“Wallah! Will the gate guards stand idle? Will they not run to the fire — and to the looting? But they will find not much loot. My men already have it!”
“Loot,” said Grim, “will delay them.”
“Money doesn’t weigh much,” Anazeh answered. “Here my men come.”
Somebody was coming. There came a burst of shooting and yelling from somewhere between us and El-Kerak, and a moment later the thunder of horses galloping full-pelt. Anazeh got down to the road with the agility of a youngster, ordered Abdul Ali of Damascus, the shivering Ahmed and me under cover. He placed his remaining handful of men at points of vantage where they could cover the retreat of the fifteen. And it was well he did.
There were at least two score in hot pursuit, and though you could hardly tell which was which in that dim light, Anazeh’s party opened fire on the pursuers and let the fifteen through. I did not get sight of Grim while that excitement lasted, but he had two automatics. He took from me the one that I had taken from Abdul Ali, and with that one and his own he made a din like a machine-gun. He told me afterward that he had fired in the air.
“Noise is as good as knock-outs in the dark,” he explained, while Anazeh’s men boasted to one another of the straight shooting that it may be they really believed they had done. An Arab can believe anything — afterward. I don’t believe one man was killed, though several were hit.
At any rate, whether the noise accomplished it or not, the pursuers drew off, and we went forward, carrying a cashbox now, of which Abdul Ali was politely requested to produce the key. That was the first intimation he had that his house had been looted. He threw his bunch of keys away into the shadows, in the first exhibition of real weakness he had shown that night. It was a silly gesture. It only angered his captors. It saved him nothing.
Four more of Anazeh’s men had been wounded, all from behind, two of them rather badly, making six in all who were now unfit for further action. But we did not wait to bandage them. They affected to make light of their injuries, saying they would go over to the British and get attended to in hospital. Abdul Ali was put on Ahmed’s miserable mount, with his legs lashed under the horse’s belly. Ahmed, with Mahommed ben Hamza and his men were sent along ahead; being unarmed, unmounted, they were a liability now. But those Hebron thieves could talk like an army; they put up a prodigious bleat, all night long, about that cash-box. They maintained they had a clear right to share its contents, since unless they had first captured Abdul Ali, Anazeh’s men could not have burned his house and seized his money. Anazeh’s men, when they had time to be, were suitably amused.