Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  There was no moon when Jim led the way between the whickering horse- lines, followed by Catesby, Narayan Singh and Suliman. They were all dressed as Arabs, so that every sentry challenged them, and once a bayonet point pierced through Jim’s garments to his skin before he could reply; for the Sikh on duty likes his ceremony swift, and takes no chances.

  Each time that Jim whispered the password the four were followed into the shadows by wondering, suspicious eyes; then, as if afterthought increased suspicion, the sentry’s voice would call out harshly to the next ahead, and three times before they reached the camp gate an officer was fetched to quiz them.

  In no single instance did Jim give the names of his party, not even when the guard at the gap in a barb wire fence that they called the south gate held them up for five minutes and scoffed at the slip of paper he produced. He did not want his movements gossiped all over the camp.

  So they were all four submitted to search at the gate as presumptive thieves, by a Sikh jemadar who feared no writing nor regarded words.

  His disrespectful fingers uncovered naturally three loaded automatic pistols; and — ace of unexpectedness — a Gurkha kukri from under Suliman’s shirt. That settled it, of course.

  “Into the lock-up with them until morning!” he ordered, being one of those priceless guardians who are not afraid of responsibility.

  “The luck’s not running my way,” grunted Catesby. “This’ll give Jinks the finest chance the brute could ask for to show me up in a bad light. My name’s Walker!”

  “Don’t you believe it. Cut loose, Narayan Singh,” Jim whispered.

  There followed an interlude in the Jat dialect that restored Catesby’s normal high spirits, it being one of the conventions of the British Army that an officer of Sikhs must understand the language of his men, whereas the men’s knowledge of English is optional and rather rare. It ended in Narayan Singh disrobing in the guardroom light to show his steel bracelet, the steel dagger in his hair, and certain other peculiarities of Sikh attire to which he is more loyal than a Scotsman to his kilts. Those, the language, and an intimate knowledge of he jemadar’s own personal, private and amusing immortal history proved at last convincing.

  But the jemadar kept the kukri. There was not explaining that away.

  “How shall I hunt an iblis without that thing?” demanded Suliman, appealing to Jim in the shadow much too wise to argue with the Sikh.

  “Where did you get it? Did a Gurkha lend it to you?”

  “No. The fool refused. So I stole it while he drank.”

  “Come on. We’ve wasted time enough. You must face the iblis with bare hands.”

  * * * * *

  Now Catesby led, for he knew the lie of the land. Jim followed him, and Narayan Singh brought up the rear in darkness so deep that it was all one could do to keep the leading man in sight. The sky overhead was clear, and the stars shone like scattered diamonds, but they were following a shallow wady (valley) between cactus, and the gloom of the night before the worlds were made seemed to have gathered in it. They went nearly a mile at a slow pace before Catesby stopped to take his bearings. Then Jim missed Suliman.

  He did not dare shout for him, for that would have brought to the scene every scrub-haunting thief in the neighborhood. He called once in a low voice, but all the answer was the ghoul-like laugh of a hyena, and a moment later he made out the brute’s green eyes, very low to the ground and moving the way a lantern swings.

  “I rather thought it was a mistake to bring that kid,” said Catesby. “Didn’t like to question your judgement of course, but—”

  “He comes. I hear him, sahib,” Narayan Singh whispered.

  A moment later the hyena snarled and scampered off, looking as big as a lion when his outline showed against the sky. Then they heard whimpering and hard breathing. Something or somebody stumbled, sobbed, and hurried on again toward them. Then Suliman burst into their midst and threw himself face foremost on the earth, heaving for lack of breath. He had something heavy in his hand. Jim picked it up.

  “The kukri again! You young luss (robber)! How did you get it?”

  “That jemadar gave it to a sentry to hold, and the sentry laid it beside him on the ground where he could feel it with his foot. So I pulled the skirt of his overcoat and took the kukri when he turned. Then I ran.”

  “And he didn’t shoot?”

  “No, for I took care that he saw me. Sikhs don’t shoot at men of my size, for I have tried before.”

  “Now,” said Jim, do you still think I was wrong to bring the kid? Lead on, Catesby.”

  * * * * *

  They took to the top of a sandy ridge that lead gradually upward to a low hill covered with cactus, from which by daylight there would be a fair view of half the camp, although now they could see little more than scattered lights that made the darkness more confusing. There was a short bare ridge on the hilltop, sandy like the rest but free from cactus.

  “Suppose we lie here till moonrise,” Catesby proposed. “Last time I saw the iblis was from just this place. I was waiting for a chance at a leopard and friend leper came instead, scaring everything away for miles around. He pretty nearly scared me stiff. Most awful looking brute you ever saw.

  “You see that hill opposite? You can just make out the outline of it against the sky. He danced on that and made me feel so creepy I vowed I’d never dance again. Later he passed along this ridge so close that I thought he’d trip over me. Ugh! I was glad he didn’t. He’s leprous from head to foot. It beats me how he holds together when he dances.”

  They lay down on a shoulder of sand that overhung the shallow valley; and now the Arab costume they were wearing proved its virtue, for they could cover faces, hands and ankles from the mosquitoes that attacked in mass formation. Hooded like that under loose robes they looked like dead men. A badger came and sniffed them, then a hyena, then several jackals, remembering perhaps the fat times when men were fighting and the carrion lay thick.

  They lay an hour until the moon rose, like a huge blotched lamp beyond the other hill, and by that time Suliman was fast asleep and snoring. Narayan Singh shook him awake — lest he frighten the iblis away, as the Sikh was careful to explain. The notion that the iblis might be afraid of himself was new to Suliman, and he sat up to consider it, fingering the edge of the heavy, curved Gurkha blade.

  “The game is to catch this beauty alive if we can,” said Jim, “but above all we mustn’t scare him and let him get away from us. Better watch him for a week than rush in and fail. The next most important thing is not to kill him — bear that in mind, Narayan Singh; even you can’t make a dead man talk, you know!”

  “I will plunge this kukri in his belly and discover whether an iblis has entrails if he comes near me!” vowed Suliman.

  But a moment later he returned the great knife to its sheath and crept up close to Jim, with the hair raising so that his turban actually lifted.

  “Look, Jimgrim! Look! The iblis!”

  Naked in the reddish moonlight — framed, in fact, exactly in the middle of the orb that rose behind him, about two hundred yards distant from where they lay across the wady — glistening here and there as if his carcass had been smeared with whitish slime, a tall, lean, muscular man stood motionless, gazing toward the lights that indicated Ludd encampment.

  The turban on his head but emphasized the nakedness of all the rest of him. Nowhere in the East is the mere absence of clothes remarkable as a rule, although the Arab likes to drape himself in amble, loose array for the sake of dignity and comfort. But the man’s nakedness was ghastly — impudent — a calculated, sheer affront — deliberate indecency so flaunted that the moonlight and the loneliness could not absorb it, and it shocked grown men.

  He was well shaped. No crippled limbs or unnatural abortion helped to horrify. It was an arrogance of nakedness, made monstrous by the will to assert itself. If he had stood among a hundred naked men, he alone would have seemed unclothed, and if you had clothed him he might likely hav
e seemed naked still because of the outrageous insolence that owned him.

  For minute after minute he stood gazing at the camp, with his stomach thrust out in an attitude of self-complacency and his arms folded across his chest. Then, as if the turban on his head were too much concession to the prejudice of other folk, he began to unwind the thing, coiling the yards of cloth around his arm.

  “What did I tell you?” whispered Catesby. “Isn’t he a horror? Isn’t he a gruesome swine?”

  “In my land there are millions with no more than a yard or two of rag apiece; but that thing there is an insult to the gods, and he should die!” declared Narayan Singh.

  “Nevertheless, remember what I said. Don’t kill him,” Jim answered. “He thinks he knows something or he wouldn’t like himself so much. Let’s find out.”

  The man began to posture on the hilltop, taking attitudes suggestive of the figures on Egyptian temple walls. He seemed conscious of the fact that the rising moon served to spotlight as well as background, for his movements were deliberately calculated to show up in silhouette. They were slow and strong and snakelike, but little by little the snake idea gained ascendancy until his whole body writhed in serpentine contortions.

  Then he began to dance. You could not watch the man and tear yourself away or make a move against him. He had the faculty of stirring curiosity and holding it, so that each move was a fascinating prelude to the next and you had to wait to see.

  The dance began with a rapid repetition of the Egyptian poses, so skillfully done that the infinitely tiny pause between each movement served to fix each posture in the watchers’ vision, and the whole became a motion picture in staccato time.

  All that while he kept the turban draped about his arm and it looked like an excrescence — something or other horrible — sometimes as if he had three arms on his right side, two growing out of one. But all at once he began to whirl the thing about him like a lariat until it formed a Saturn ring, in the midst of which he spun like a top on tiptoe, dervish fashion.

  Whoever on the countryside saw that would understand the meaning of it. The whirling turban was only an added stroke of genius to emphasize his eminence among his kind.

  The dancing dervish claims that by spinning for a length of time on tiptoe he can rid himself of human limitations and see clearly into the infinite. The ordinary dervish apes an arrogant humility before he starts; this fellow was assuming to confer with spiritual essences with banner whirling in the breeze — that was the only difference. There might be Moslems after that who would question his claim to miraculous vision and sanctity, but not many of them, and they would be kept in order by the rest.

  Suliman, with the creed of his ancestors half-learned and wholly in his veins, was quite convinced.

  “That is truly an iblis,” he whispered with chattering teeth. “There is nothing for us to do but leave him, Jimgrim.”

  But Jim was thinking then too busily to quiet the superstitious qualms of a small boy.

  “Narayan Singh!”

  The Sikh crept closer.

  “Do you know the lie of the land here?”

  “No, sahib. But I could crawl up close and rush the brute. If I may not slay, I could hold him until you come and bind him with the turban.”

  “Catesby!”

  The three laid their heads together.

  “Is there any way of coming up behind him?”

  “No. Not without making a circuit of more than a mile. This hill we’re on juts out from a ridge that leads in a curve to his hill. There’s a thirty- foot cliff of sand on this side of him, too steep to climb in the dark. If we follow the ridge he’d see us coming, unless we could get there before he stops spinning, and at that he has likely got a spy or two on the watch. To come up from behind him through the cactus would take twenty minutes.”

  “Jimgrim, sahib!”

  Narayan Singh laid a hand on Jim’s sleeve.

  “If I steady this automatic on my forearm,” the Sikh continued, “resting my elbow on the ground — thus — in three or four shots I can hit him in the leg with certainty. Then he will limp, and we can catch him. Only say the word.”

  “No.”

  “The last time I saw him he came straight along the ridge and passed me after he’d finished the ballet,” whispered Catesby.

  “Give him a chance to do it again.”

  The iblis pirouetted interminably, gaining rather than losing speed, the ring of cloth spreading out around him in an ever widening circle. If he really was a leper, then the disease had made strangely little inroad on his stamina.

  And for all that whoever watched grew giddy, the iblis himself retained full consciousness. For there came cloaked figures of men, who dodged in the shadows from bush to bush; and as they drew near he was aware of them and began to slow down gradually, letting the turban droop in ever narrowing curves, until he stood stock-still again, back to the moon, like a statue, glistening with sweat that made him shine now from head to foot instead of showing sliminess in patches.

  After standing rigid for about two minutes he stretched out his right arm toward the camp, and suddenly his voice boomed like a tenor bell, cursing in Arabic, cursing in the name of Allah the Lord of Creatures, the Prince of the Day of Judgment, cursing man and beast and tent and mechanism — eye, hand, ear and brain.

  “What do you make of him?” he whispered.

  “I’ve seen his kind in the mosques of Mosul and Marash,” Catesby whispered. “I think he’s simply a dancing dervish from up north, driven away very likely because of his leprosy.”

  But Jim, too, had been in Mosul and Marash and seen the dancing dervishes. He reserved judgment.

  The iblis turned at last toward the hooded figures that were crouching near him; and now he stretched out both arms, but whether or not he blessed them was not clear, for he lowered his voice. However, after a minute or two it was quite plain that he urged them to a certain course, for he flung his right hand out like an emperor ordering armies, and his chin went up so imperiously high that he moonlight sheened on his fierce eyes.

  The hooded figures vanished. They had come from different directions, but as far as one could judge in the uncertain light they were headed one way in single file when they disappeared into the cactus.

  “ — !” Jim muttered suddenly, and Narayan Singh crept close again.

  “Yes, sahib? What is it?”

  “Can’t you see? The iblis has gone too — and the wrong way for us, durn him! — toward the moon — due east. If we chase him now he’ll simply run.”

  “I can stalk him, sahib. He will never see me.”

  “No. The others are coming straight along the ridge in the shadows.”

  “We can do better than that. Catesby?”

  Once again you might have laid a handkerchief on all three heads.

  “They’re coming one by one. Bag the last one alive. Narayan Singh, gag him; take Suliman’s turban — have it ready in your hand. I’ll pin his arms and get his knife away. I’ll whistle to startle him, and then all three of us spring together, downing him at once in the shadow where his friends can’t see.”

  They stowed Suliman in a hollow just over the shoulder of the hill, and crawled into position where a foot-track passed between an anthill and a big cactus in a shallow, spoon-shaped depression of the hilltop. They had hardly hidden themselves when the first man came swinging along at a sort of dog-trot, the pace common to most savage and nearly savage people bent on adventure. He passed so close that they might have touched him, and the reek of cotton clothing soaked in oil was unmistakable.

  Six men passed, all going at the same pace, all smelling strongly of the same rancid unguent, with about ten yards between each, dog-trotting to the night’s work and in no particular concern just yet to conceal themselves. The seventh man lagged a little, being heavier than the rest and not so free- breathing.

  As he drew abreast of them Jim whistled. But instead of checking his pace to look about him the man sprang
into the air like a shot buck, and landed in his stride intent on sprinting.

  Jim, Catesby and Narayan Singh all sprang at the same instant, and crashed their heads together. But for Catesby’s Rugby football days they would have missed their man; but instinct, born of following the ball though a whole pack pounce on him, sent Catesby’s right arm shooting out of the scrimmage. Groping wildly at the air, he caught the Arab’s ankle. It was greased, but the check before the Arab freed it tripped him, and before he could recover balance all three captors were on top of him, crashing together into the cactus bush.

  The Arab could not yell with agony, because Narayan Singh’s steely wrist clapped on the cotton gag and held it in place, come life come judgment day. And the Sikh, being topmost, got fewest of the cactus stabs, so swore least. Catesby, underneath, with his arms about the fellow’s legs, cursed like a wet cat, hissing canteen blasphemy between his teeth; and Jim, side by side with the prisoner in a bed of inch-long thorns, kept at his task in panting speechlessness that was just as eloquent. There are few points that hurt more acutely than those of a Holy Land cactus.

  Jim got the fellow’s knife at last, and dropped it in the murderous mess of pikes they fought among. But to hold his arms was another matter. The Arab was greased from head to foot, and his clothes, which might otherwise have served to hold him by were rotten with the oil, tearing whenever they were seized. As the clothing came away from him in rags his naked skin slipped from the grasp more readily than ever; and he was stronger than a bear — sinewy and lithe and, for all his weight, able to wriggle any section of himself that wasn’t pegged down tight.

  Three or four times he seemed about to slip away from them, struggling like an eel. But Narayan Singh’s knee in his stomach combined with the unyielding gag to rob him of breath, so that at last they all rolled out into the open and Jim gasped out a request to Catesby to take his girdle off and bind the fellow’s hands and feet.