by Talbot Mundy
“It occurred to me I’d be invisible inside the car then, but the car itself would be standing in a flood of light so that nobody could approach unseen, and I could watch the house conveniently.
“Well, he put the top up — sulkily muttering to himself; and he’d just finished when the auto that I had thought was following dashed up from the opposite direction — must have driven around several blocks to take me by surprise. Did it too. I was caught napping.
“The four men jumped out and into my car, knocking my chauffeur aside. Two of them sat on the seat in front of me with pistols pointed at my head, one man drove the car, and the other sat beside him. They weren’t native Egyptians; they were Cairene dudes with polished finger-nails, physically contemptible, and out of breath from excitement and the mere jumping from one car into the other. But they had business-like guns, and I sat still, and I didn’t make any motion that would suggest I had a gun of my own.
“I’m not given to making a fuss. The other fellow’s sure to say something if you keep still long enough. The dude who sat on my left had a long, inquisitive, triangular nose with a smart smile underneath it, and he couldn’t keep silent to save his soul.
“ ‘Let us hope for your sake that you have the ring with you, Mr. Meldrum Strange — the ring of Madame Poulakis,’ he said. ‘We are working on the theory that you have decided to be sensible. We are willing to pretend to believe that you came to Egypt for the sole purpose of capitulating. We are generous enough to suppose that you accumulated all those nice liquid resources in America, and arranged with bankers here, in order to be able to contribute substantially to our funds. At the house to which we will escort you, you will find all facilities in readiness for writing instructions to your bank; we even have a gold pen for you with a diamond on the end to scratch your nose with.’
“Well, as soon as he said that, of course, I realized that the odds were in my favor. A dead man can’t write checks; they wanted me alive and fit for business. The car wasn’t going fast; the driver didn’t seem to know his business very well, and they were running every corner they came to, with the idea, I suppose, of confusing my sense of direction; and as luck would have it we ran right into an accident. Two huge limousines with women in them had collided and were swung across the street. There were two Egyptian policemen, about eight extravagantly dressed females, two chauffeurs, and two footmen all arguing at the top of their lungs, and a crowd was collecting to watch the fun.
“The driver of my car tried to pass on the sidewalk, and he used the crowd as if they were weeds and he driving a mower. But a lamp-post stopped him, and I just opened the door and stepped out. I guess they’d have used their guns in that pinch, but you see the cops were sore with them for disobeying the order to stop. They’d come near hurting quite a bunch of people. Maybe the cops wanted a change of argument anyway. They had to put their guns out of sight in a hurry, and I was glad I hadn’t exhibited mine.
“I cleared out, as you may suppose. Didn’t run. No need to. Simply walked back in the direction we’d come from. Hadn’t much notion where I was, but guessed I’d find my way to somewhere if I kept on walking. I had it in mind to ask for police headquarters and start a hue and cry for you fellows, but hadn’t much faith in the police after that talk with the High Commissioner.
“Walked along weighing the pros and cons of it, keeping to the broadest streets and out of the shadows as much as possible.
“I can’t have been far away from the house you fellows entered — I knew I was heading toward the Nile — when my four friends turned up again in the same car, overtaking me; and although there were two or three carriages in sight, and half a dozen pedestrians, they slowed down while three of them opened fire.
“They made poor shooting, Lord be praised. Broke a window and splintered a painted wooden gate, but missed me by yards. However, I made believe I was mortally hit. Spun round once, and fell, as I once saw a man do on Fourteenth Street New York when the gangsters were fighting outside Sharkey’s Bar. And same as he did, I got up as soon as their backs were turned.
“Nobody inquired whether I was hurt or not. The carriages hurried by. The people on foot ran for cover, and no one seemed to be home in the house with the broken window. Not a cop in sight. I walked on, cursing the authorities and everybody. My dress suit was in a beastly mess.
“However, I came on an auto that had just brought someone home, and the chauffeur had a whisk-broom. Made him brush me down, and hired him for the night at any price he asked. Then, as it wasn’t yet midnight, I drove to a street corner near the end of the bridge and waited. Didn’t have to wait long. Saw that unmistakable carriage go by with the doors open and two of you fellows rubbering — waited a while longer to find out whether you were being followed — came after you — saw you standing on the bridge — and there you are. Now tell me what happened to you, and after that whether you won’t all three help me bring these swine to book.”
We had told him about half of our experience, first Jeremy, then I taking up the tale, with Grim tossing in a word or two at intervals, when I noticed a disturbance among the Arabs who were watching us. Desert moonlight outlines everything sharply, yet conceals all details; at a fair distance you can see a man distinctly, but can’t tell his face from the back of his head. However, it seemed to me that some of that gang of licensed freebooters had turned about and were looking the other way. At the end of a couple of minutes I was sure of it.
Jeremy bit off a word mid-way. All four of us froze motionless in answer to that eerie thrill that warns you of something that is going to happen in the dark. It was absurd to imagine danger out in that place, for those Arabs would be deprived of their perquisites if visitors should come to serious harm. Yet danger frequently is absurd. Absurdity makes it dangerous. You refuse to believe in it, and it gets you while you laugh.
But we were in no mood to feel safe anywhere that night. If those pyramid custodians had suddenly attacked us none of us would have been surprised. But as a matter of fact it was their business alertness that saved our skins whole, and when it came to settling with them I never paid extravagant largess more willingly.
Their claim is, and they enforce it chiefly by grace of clamor and importunity, that no man may approach those pyramids without their escort and without paying them for the privilege. It’s a sure thing nobody gets by them.
The hotel, near which we had left our car, was well beyond normal earshot, as well as out of sight, so we had heard no other car come to a stand there. However, a car had come. During the interval while our chauffeur was being interrogated, the Arabs sat still, with some of them facing toward us and the rest turned about on the alert for new arrivals. So that, although six men presently came creeping uphill, avoiding the white road, the Guardians of Gizeh spotted them as owls spot mice; only, unlike owls, they promptly made a noise about it, not swooping down on silent wing, but setting up a view-halloo as they leapt to their feet and ran to meet the intruders half-way.
Quite a number of them — four or five at any rate — continued to watch us, and even came closer, lest in the disturbance we should escape without paying our scot.
About twelve of then pounced on the newcomers, and the cat-and-dog-fight argument that followed was typical of Egypt — wonderful, colorful calm slit to tatters by foul cursing that sounds like smashing dishes!
I don’t care how phlegmatic you are by temperament, you’ll hate that voice of Egypt, cursed and cursing. It’s the mother of bad tempers and the poisoner of judgment, and how the British have lived and ruled in the midst of it these fifty years passes understanding. Though I am told there are idiots who envy them and want to grab their heritage.
“Hell! Let’s get out of this!” exclaimed Jeremy. “Tourists, I’ll bet you, come to knock souvenirs off monuments! Rammy, you pay the holdup men. Jim, I’ll give you and Strange a minute’s start and race you to the car.”
Instead, we laughed. Danger had announced itself, incongruous again. As if
answering Jeremy’s proposal for a race, the starting shot rang through the stillness and a nickel bullet clicked on the ancient stone behind us, neatly bisecting the distance between Meldrum Strange and me.
CHAPTER VII. “We’re invading the United States this year, you know!”
You couldn’t pick a worse place in which to attack four able-bodied men possessed of repeating pistols — provided they know the Great Pyramid intimately, as we did not. We’d all of us read about the thing, and seen pictures of it; I had even been inside it twenty years before, and had a rather hazy memory of the entrance passage. I knew it led upward at a sharp angle, after first starting downward, but forgot all about Al Mamoun’s forced opening that leads into the ascending passage, enabling you to reach the so-called King’s Chamber without first tackling the rather difficult descent.
The Mamoun opening was before us. In the dark I mistook it for the proper one, which is several courses higher up; and the others clambered up to it after me. Imagining ourselves well in the mouth of the only entrance, peering out like insects from ninety million cubic feet of granite and limestone, we laughed to another tune, minded to stay there until morning if necessary.
But again the unexpected happened. The pyramid Arabs decamped.
I suppose that having no firearms they preferred to watch the battle from a distance, and I’d be hard put to it to say why they should have risked being shot in order to prevent strangers of an alien race from shooting one another.
The Arabs had hardly vanished before the game, whatever the game might he, was on in deadly earnest.
The enemy were not using pistols after the first few rounds. They had rifles fitted with Maxim silencers, and made damned straight shooting. Out of seven shots, for instance, they put three through Jeremy’s tuxedo jacket; he was propping it on a stick and fooling them beautifully, but there aren’t many men who could beat that shooting at three hundred yards by moonlight, especially when you consider we were fifty feet above ground level. These evidently weren’t the dudes with polished finger-nails who had missed Strange in the street. They were gunmen.
Because of the silencers we couldn’t tell for a long time how many men there were. They were behind some débris thrown out of a newly excavated tomb, but the clip-clip of bullets kept up so steadily all around us that we supposed at least six men were blazing away. It was Grim who spotted there were only three of them.
“I’ve been watching the flash. Three men shooting to keep us occupied. What are the other three up to?”
“Laying a blasting charge under the Pyramid!” suggested Jeremy. “Who cares what they’re up to? I like to see ’em work!”
I had said we were safe in the only entrance, and we had all been intent on watching the shadow creep slowly sidewise as the moon pursued her destiny, inch by inch uncovering the ground our enemy had chosen. They lay at last distinctly visible — three men crouching on a heap of broken rock — three parallel dark blots. And there had certainly been six men.
“I counted six,” said Meldrum Strange. His voice sounded nervous.
“Six there surely were,” said Grim. “If they’re active men they may have climbed on the pyramid somewhere behind us. They could come along one of the upper courses and then jump on us from above.”
“If that’s all, we needn’t worry,” I answered. “Dropping down on top of us in face of their friends’ fire would be a bit too dangerous for men who’re not committing suicide. All we need do is retire farther into the hole whenever there’s a pause in the shooting.”
It was conjurer Jeremy who saved that night for us, and only in the nick of time.
“The hand deceives the eye,” he said, and whistled. “There’s a game on. We’ve watched three. The other three worked it. We didn’t build this pyramid. Who said it’s solid? Jim, you’re skipper; shoot!”
“All right. Back into the hole!” Grim answered. “The light’ll be in our favor if they try to rush the entrance.”
Strange struck a match, but the draft blew it out. We entered in single file, Grim leading, all bending low because the bullets coming upward at an angle threatened nothing but our heads. It’s no use trying to tell how dark it was. Each kept one hand on the shoulder of the man in front and we did a lockstep into the womb of dreadful night, pursued by bullets that clicked overhead and sent noises like the ticking of an enormous mechanism along into the dark ahead of us. Those sounds and their echoes were almost our undoing, for they prevented our hearing others that were less assertive and more deadly.
Mamoun’s forced entrance that we were in isn’t very long. We began to see ahead of us a patch of darkness less opaque. Whereas we might have been blind before, there was proof now that we had eyes; we could actually see the darkness, which was puzzling because the farther we advanced the less light there ought to have been. But we had forgotten about Mamoun’s passage. It was Grim, groping the way in the lead, who first got the hang of things and realized that our passage was a false one, leading at an angle into the real.
“Something wrong,” he said. “The stone’s all rough.”
His voice went booming away ahead of us until the echoes died in a gurgle somewhere. Then suddenly he shouted:
“Down everybody! Flat down!”
If our nerves hadn’t been strung to the jumping point, that would have been our last experience in this world. But we went down like a set of ninepins all together, just as two pistols each flashed three times, and I swear I could feel the wind of a bullet breathe along my backbone as I fell prone alongside Jeremy.
I’ve never been able to believe those tales about taking in a whole situation by pistol-flash. I think they’re usually what the French call l’esprit d’escalier — the things that occur to a man on the way down-stairs, that he might have thought of at the time if he’d had wit enough. The first and only instinct aroused by a pistol flash a few yards from my face is the necessity to fight like two men and a boy; and I’ll answer for four men on that occasion — Grim, who has met as many emergencies as any fellow living; Strange, a millionaire, whose fighting had all been done hitherto in law-courts and on the Stock Exchange; Jeremy, self-trained for the love of it in the art of legerdemain, which means swift hand, swifter eye, and swiftest wit; and myself. Not one of us knew quite what had happened. Not one of us failed to fight back instantly.
Our antagonists came on before we had time to draw our own pistols. Having the advantage of surprise they made the most of it, and were on top of us before the after-flash had left our eyes. But they were on top of the wrong outfit for what you’d call a comfortable time, and three to four in the bargain, which is awkward odds.
I don’t know what the others did. I got a man’s leg in both hands, and a kick in the teeth from Grim’s heel that didn’t pacify me any to speak of; and I’d hate to have to go through life with what was left of the fellow’s leg when I had finished with it. We weren’t fighting in the dark any more, for they loosed their pistols off like fireworks; but a gunman is at a disadvantage at close range, for he puts faith in his weapon and is just that much handicapped. There’s a little nick in my right ear that I came by that night, and Jeremy’s cheek got hurried a bit; Grim’s left hand was barked by a bullet; Strange got a kick in the stomach that took his wind and made him vomit, and a bullet through the skin under his lower left rib. Otherwise, although they had emptied their pistols before we really got going, those three men had nothing much to brag about.
SO FAR so good. I dare say thirty seconds saw the end of them with my great rump planted firmly on the stomach of a man too stunned to squirm much, and Strange close beside me making noises like a sea-sick excursionist. Jeremy was holding down two men — the one whose leg I’d twisted and another, and Grim was already scouting forward to see whether by any chance the enemy had reserves in hiding around the corner in the other passage.
I guess we should have been caught again, and done for this time, if one of Jeremy’s prisoners hadn’t started screaming.
Funny, isn’t it, how old memories crop up. The only man I ever had heard scream that way was a tramp, who was being washed against his will in a small-town lock-up; you could hear him all over town, and the women sent a committee of twenty to investigate. That was forty years ago, but the whole picture came to mind that instant; the tramp was given ham and eggs for supper and five dollars, which at the time impressed my schoolboy mind in a way no scream ever did.
Yet I don’t believe I recalled the incident for thirty-five years until that fellow started screaming in the pyramid passage, and I knew he wasn’t hurt but merely summoning the neighbors.
They came with rifles, in place of ham and eggs — three of them, scrambling up the rough stone blocks outside — and I heard them, thanks to that uncleanly but strategic tramp, whose shade may Allah bless!
“Out of this!” I shouted. “Straight on — up the ramp — into the King’s Chamber — we can hold out up there till Christmas!”
Grim led the way with a hand on the wall; Jeremy pulled Strange along, half-supporting half-dragging him until his wind should recover; and having nothing else to do with one hand, I seized the fellow who was doing all the screaming and dragged him last.
I was possessed of a good notion and a bad one, although opinions may differ as to which was which.
I thought that a man who could feel so sorry for himself, if made a mite more sorry, could be induced to tell tales out of school. And it further seemed to me that, since he had been so keen to summon the riflemen, he might as well act as a shield between us and their bullets. He wasn’t much of a shield, for he wriggled like an eel and didn’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds or so; moreover, he managed to draw an ordinary pocket-knife and tried to stab me with it, neglecting fortunately in his panic to open the blade. If I had let him have his way and break free he would have been shot dead by his friends, for we were hardly around the bend in the passage before the three riflemen stopped to fire a volley, and I guess they fired low by the way the bullets acted.