by Talbot Mundy
Mujrim was more annoyed than anyone. He had had all the exercise he needed, and lay on his back with his brothers all about him sluicing him with water from one of the camel-bags. He sent them to sluice me, too, and called out to me between gasps for breath to be good enough to believe that the wound was none of his doing.
Ayisha was perfectly unconcerned about it. Beyond demanding the dagger back from Grim she made no comment. He gave it to her with the remark that if she should play a trick like that again he would have her hanged to the nearest tree; but she didn’t believe him any more than I did, and showed her teeth in as merry a smile as ever lone bachelor set eyes on.
Jael, on the other hand, was indignant — not at my being wounded, for she wasn’t exactly a stickler for ethics, and my welfare was no concern of hers — but because Grim should neglect such an obvious chance.
“The least you might do is to have the hussy beaten,” she insisted. “You’ll never make a leader of men, my friend. You don’t know enough to be drastic. You’re weak!”
Yet, if you ask me, I think Grim came out of it pretty well. There wasn’t another word from the defaulters. Mujrim had been wrenched and bruised too badly to be fit for much for an hour or two, and it was out of the question to make him walk back. But Grim tossed the amber necklaces to one of the others, pointed with his stick toward the three camel-loads of miscellaneous “presents,” and said his final say on that subject.
“Back you go now! Take those loads and walk!”
They went off without a murmur. And bear in mind if there is one thing on earth that Arabs of their stamp consider beneath their dignity, it is to carry loads. They expect their women-folk to do that when camels or asses are not available.
Mujrim got to his feet after they had gone, and apologized to Grim handsomely.
“Wallahi, Jimgrim, you were in the right! There should be but one captain — and his word law, even when he says that white is black!”
It was pretty safe to say that looting was at an end as far as that expedition was concerned. And if you think, as I have heard some say, that it wasn’t Grim, but I who pulled off that affair, I don’t agree with you. You might just as well say that the cards had won a game, rather than the player of the hand; or that Bill Adams won the battle of Waterloo by killing eighteen Frenchmen with his sabre. Hats off to Bill Adams, certainly; but the old Iron Duke was the boy who led trumps when the right time came. I hate this modern craze for taking credit from every leader. Believe me, it takes a good man to persuade me to risk hair and hide in his behalf, as one or two of Grim’s jealous critics might discover if they had the guts to try.
We sat down all together in the shadow of a great rock, women included, and discussed the fight from start to finish, each of the brothers claiming to know a hold that would have beaten me — which might easily be true, for I am no Gotch or Hagenschmidt — yet all equally averse to testing it. And presently Narayan Singh cut loose and told us wonderful lies about the wrestlers of Bihar and feats he had seen them perform at the marriage feasts of Indian rajahs. A first-class romancer is my friend Narayan Singh, as well as a good soldier.
The rift in our lute was mended, not a doubt of it. That party under the rock in the Valley of Moses, where we drank warm water out of goatskin bags, smoked powdery imported cigarettes, and bayed about our reminiscences like dogs over a kill, is one of the pleasantest I can remember.
It was nearly high noon, and the sun beat down on the floor of the gorge between ragged cliffs, making the air suffocating. Every once in a while a gust of hot wind would pick up a cloud of dust and take it waltzing along the valley, spreading a gritty mixture of air and dirt that you could hardly breathe. One or two eagles soared sleepily against the turquoise sky, but the kites appeared to have had enough of the heat and were hiding somewhere. Only the centipedes and scorpions beside ourselves seemed satisfied with conditions as they were; and they were about the only trouble we had. Narayan Singh said that it was the blood from the scratch in my leg that attracted them, and it may be that he knew; but, as I have remarked before, he doesn’t need much fact to weave a tale from.
The part I liked best was Grim’s whole attitude. He might easily have spoiled the fun by doing what so many asses do — smothering with flubdub whoever happens to have done his bit. He knew exactly how useful in a pinch my strength and willingness to fight had been, and in case I didn’t know it, too, he made one comment, and let it go at that:
“If Mujrim had beaten you we’d have had to call this expedition off. There’d have been no holding them. But we’re all set now.”
All the same, I thought that an exaggeration, unless he excluded Ayisha from the reckoning. The gang now referred to her constantly in her presence as “the woman Ayisha”; whereas before her swift divorce from Ali Higg in Petra she had always been “The Lady Ayisha” and “Princess.” If she was “set” on any purpose, then it was on snatching her own chestnuts from the fire of fate; and whoever should seek to prevent her was going to suffer unless he watched his step.
I would have excluded Jael Higg, too, from the “all set” reckoning. She was devoting herself rather cautiously just then, in that thin-lipped way of hers, to being a good fellow, joining in the conversation and laughing readily in a rather pleasant voice, with no more than a symptom of underlying harshness. But her eyes were hard — iron-hard, and they glittered whenever she looked at Grim. I think she regarded me, along with the Arabs and Narayan Singh, as a man whom she could find a way of managing in her own good time. But she was about as empty of forgiveness as a Red Sea shark. In my judgment, nothing less than Grim’s utter ruin would ever satisfy her for capture and defeat at his hands, although she undoubtedly proposed to make the utmost use of his brains and altruism until her time should come.
They made a wonderful contrast, those two, sitting side by side under the rock — she with her freckled, smooth face, and reddish hair showing under a black shawl; he with that ready smile, the puzzling, almost bookworm eyes, and the expression, even with his face framed in an Arab headdress, of a forceful, imaginative business man.
“You are a fool, James Grim,” I heard her say to him. “You don’t know which side your bread is buttered on. If you would cross the Jordan for good and all I could make you king of all this country in a year!”
“That, or vulture-food?” he asked her; and laughed, and lit a cigarette.
CHAPTER IV. “A cent for your sympathy!”
Well, our ruffians turned up at last, and brought back news with them. Ali Higg, they said, was on the rampage. He had left his eerie of a cave, and was superintending the saddling of a score of camels in front of “Pharaoh’s Treasury.”
“But not good camels, Jimgrim. Mangy, miserable beasts. His men are using all the best ones, and those six splendid ones that we borrowed just now are all that were left of his private string. If he means to follow he will have hard work. He has collected a handful of men, but they are hardly better than the camels — fit food for kites — sick men, wounded men, men afraid of their own shadows — scarcely able to lift a camel-pack between them. We walked up to the Treasury and flung the plunder down, saying that our Sheikh Jimgrim declined to burden camels with such miserable stuff. He ordered his party of crows’ meat to open fire on us; but one of them swore that our return with that loot must be a trick to start trouble. He said that you and the rest of our party were doubtless waiting close at hand to make reprisals, and the sound of the first shot would certainly bring you hurrying. The others, being all afraid, agreed with the first man. So we behaved like men who have been found out in a trick, carrying on scornfully and saying it was a pity nobody in Petra was brave enough to fight, since our Sheikh Jimgrim took no pleasure in defeating cowards. And what with one hot word and another we made our escape safely.”
But that talk might have been a trick to cover up another one and Grim made sure.
“Men who speak truth,” he laughed, “are never afraid to prove it. Let’s see how muc
h loot you’ve still got hidden in your clothes.”
They submitted to be searched with entire good humor, and Grim displayed an intricate knowledge of their ways of hiding things that made them laugh. But he had had his way; there wasn’t as much as a woman’s ear-ring or a brooch among them, and they were all the better-tempered for having proved it, considering now that the joke was as much on him as on themselves.
That is a great point, by the way, which some men fail to understand. When disobedience doesn’t really matter much you can now and then afford to overlook it — especially if it would be easy to enforce discipline; because discipline that is easy to enforce doesn’t make a lasting impression on naturally lawless men. But in a tight place, when men disobey because they think they have you at a disadvantage, and to force the issue looks like sure disaster, then you can’t afford to yield one jot or tittle of authority. Better die there with your boots on than give way; because if you fail then, you’ll never regain their respect.
And having won your point, by hook or crook, brute force, profanity or argument, be sure you have the whole of it. To use Narayan Singh’s expression: “Milk the udders of obedience dry.” Thereafter, whenever you concede a point or two you’ll find it safe enough, because they will realize it is concession, and not anarchy.
We were all in a rare good temper now, Jael Higg not least of us. I suppose the news that Ali Higg was on the move was what raised her spirits. Grim asked her what she supposed the Lion intended, but she shook her head and laughed.
“You’re worse than a divorce court! You separate a man and wife, and ask the wife to account for her husband’s doings?”
“I know nothing of lions,” Narayan Singh commented. “Mine is a land of tigers. When a tiger keeps quiet he is difficult and dangerous to trap. When he prowls he is easy.”
At that Mahommed piped up, Ali Baba’s youngest son, poet to the gang, and bard, and arch-inventor of impracticable plans.
“I say let us lie in ambush in this hot jahannum of a valley, and catch the Lion as he ventures out. Let us take him back with us to El-Kalil and lodge him in the gaol for folk to make songs about.”
The notion was not impossible on the face of it. There were plenty of suitable places for ambush, as Alexander of Macedon found out, for instance, when he tried to force that gorge. But it would only have entailed the breaking of Grim’s promise and the absolute reversal of his stubborn principle, that he had no right to, and therefore would not move a finger toward imposing alien rule on Arabia, even in the interest of peace, and indirectly. It was Grim’s notion of duty and enjoyment — and a good one, too, in my opinion — to prevent that very thing by drawing the teeth of contention and giving the Arabs a chance to work out their own destiny.
“Let’s go,” he said; and the only members of the party to grumble at that suggestion were the camels, who object to everything.
When you bear in mind that none of us — not even the women — had slept a wink the previous night, and that we had to face the hot south wind that withers the Arabian desert and, impinging on the northern wall of that gruesome Valley of Moses, blows like a furnace blast down the ever-narrowing funnel, our high spirits were a thing to wonder at.
None of us had more than a vague idea of the danger into which Grim was leading us. My only objection to him is that exasperating way he has of never discussing difficulties until after he has thought out their solution. In my own way I’m rather a cautious man. I like adventure, but I also like to puzzle out the chances in advance, both of risk and profit, and so be prepared for them. Having anticipated ten percent or so of the possibilities, I can then devote more attention to the unexpected when it happens.
But the very method that annoyed me was like meat and drink to our rogues of followers. What they did not know didn’t trouble them over much. Weaned on knavery, and used to haphazard devilment of any kind at all, all they asked of life was meat and drink, a chance to get away with other men’s belongings, and something new as often as might be to make up songs about.
To them Grim’s very reticence was all in his favour, since it suggested mystery. And remember, that is the land where the tales now known in the West as the Arabian Nights first stirred men’s imagination. They wouldn’t have enjoyed things half as much if they had known exactly what was going to happen next.
Nor were they the only ones, who enjoyed Grim’s method. There was Narayan Singh. He rode his camel beside mine, and occasionally leaned across to boom remarks through the cloth that covered nose and mouth with the unaccomplishable purpose of defeating the hot wind.
“Hah! sahib, this suits me! This is the true way of a soldier! Here today and gone tomorrow — today a bellyful, tomorrow a fight, and the day after God knows what! I have no quarrel with the law of destiny!”
I may have felt like a man on a wild-goose chase. In fact, I know I did. But you couldn’t for the life of you escape the spirit of the game; and even with bones and muscles sore from Mujrim’s racking, and a cut in the calf of my leg that was beginning to smart unmercifully as it grew stiff and the hot wind dried the bandage, I felt about as merry as the rest did.
That Valley of Moses is as savage and as endless as the Khyber; but we emerged from it at last into a waste of hot rock, deep wady, and oleander scrub, with rounded, rolling foothills all about us, and in places great heaps of human bones all cracked up by the jackals — bones, I dare say, of the Turkish soldiers who had tried to turn Lawrence out of Petra during the Great War, the skulls persisting, as usual, long after the other bones had lost their shape. (I wonder why a man’s rib-bones disappear first. Has it anything to do with Eve?) [ Ravine or valley]
Grim called never another halt until near evening, when we found a thing they call a fiumara, which is a dried-up watercourse that winds between hills and widens until it reaches the sea. There isn’t any one word in the English language that translates it nor for that matter any exactly similar formation elsewhere. Excepting for a week or two in odd seasons of heavy rain they use those fiumaras as roads and camping-places, their winding habit suiting the Bedouin’s wandering taste, and the curves between high banks providing shelter both from hot wind and observation.
Our protesting camels (they always protest at downhill work) stumbled into the fiumara at a point where a peculiar, flat-topped island split the course in two and storm-water had hollowed out a deep, curving cliff in the near bank. It was a fine place to camp in, for there were three deep holes in the bed of the fiumara with two or three feet of dirty water in the bottom of them; and in a land where no Bedouin will lead you to water at any price, stuff of the color of soup and the flavor of stale cabbage is a great discovery. Besides, the camels like it better than the sort that bubbles from a clear spring, and after all, the animal that carries you in the teeth of the simuum deserves to be considered first. [ Hot wind]
The tents were pitched in a jiffy, for everybody craved sleep, and there seemed to be a pretty general impression that whoever would hurry first into the land of dreams would be considered unfit for grand duty when Grim should get around to making his selections. But I glanced at Narayan Singh, and Narayan Singh smiled at me; we both knew Grim by that time. He doesn’t find soft billets for his friends when the watch needs keeping, any more than the wise banker pledges questionable credits.
So the mess of dates and rice was hardly eaten before the tents resounded with snores, those who were not yet really asleep pretending to be with all the more fervor. But as the moon rose over the rim of the hills of Edom, Grim called a conference of Jael Higg, Narayan Singh, himself, and me, up on the flat-topped island, from which we had a fair view in the mellow moonlight of most of the country round about for a radius of nearly a mile. The desert reflected so much of the moon’s rays that at a hundred yards you could actually distinguish the tufts of hair and markings on a scavenging hyena. But down in the hollow where the tents were, all was dark.
We sat facing, in a square, on prayer mats. Jael Higg at first co
uld hardly keep awake; but hers was the kind of intellect that drives its owner weasel-fashion, and it did not take a dozen words to make her forget sleep.
“Now, Jael,” Grim began, and I have heard a doctor lecturing in just the same tone of voice a patient who can pull through if he will hear and use horse-sense, “we’re within five miles of the place where we’re to pick up Ali Higg’s hundred and forty men. Twenty miles farther to the south of that is the Avenger at Abu Lissan with eight hundred. If it comes to a fight you can guess as well as anyone what our chance is worth. Something less than ten cents, eh?”
She nodded, every faculty alert. I rather liked her just then, for she was brave, whatever conventions she had broken. I know how necessary some conventions are, but Lord! I do admire courage in man or woman; and I never worry much about another fellow’s morals, having all my work cut out to manage my own. I have met many a worse and more merciless woman than Jael Higg in what is called civilized society.
“You understand, don’t you?” Grim went on. “I’m not interested in destroying you and Ali Higg. If the Arabs hereabouts would like you two for rulers, that’s their affair. I’ll not prevent. I’m hired by the British to help keep the peace. They couldn’t hire me for any other purpose. I want to see Arabia rule itself. That’s my particular bug. It’s too late to argue whether I’m right or wrong. We’re facing facts. I’m hell-bent on just that. And the Arabs haven’t a chance unless they quit cutting up — not one chance in a hundred million. I happen to know that the British don’t want to come over here and govern this country, for one reason because they can’t afford it; but you all are busy fixing it so they’ll have to come, because they can afford still less to have a constant state of war along their border. D’you get me?”
She nodded again — hard-eyed. She understood him perfectly. What most altruists don’t understand is that the people they would benefit rather resent it than otherwise, and after profiting as much as possible intend to ditch them at the first chance. But Grim knew all about that.