by Talbot Mundy
I don’t like lying as a general thing, but taking one consideration with another and the fact that we were burgling Hun property, I wouldn’t have minded swearing that was an accident. However, there was no trap-door, so I was saved from perjury. The chimney was the only thing for it, and the top of that was barred across with an iron grille; but the job had been done hastily and the ends of the iron weren’t set deep in the masonry. Mujrim, Ali Baba’s oldest and biggest son, fetched a long piece of wood, and the grille came loose in about two minutes when we used that as a lever and he, the Sikh, and I exerted our combined strength. Those expert thieves would have gone down the chimney like rats into a hole, but as I would have to show them which was the mercury and how to get it, I decided to go first; and not being an old-timer at their trade, they had to lower me. So they made a long rope of their waist-cloths, making one end fast under my arms, and I went down feet first — slowly, because the big knots in the rope didn’t render freely over the chimney coping, which was about a foot higher than the head of a man standing on the roof. In fact, you had to stand on a man’s shoulders in order to get into the chimney to begin with.
It was an idiotic thing to go first. We should have sent the smallest man to prospect for us. I am bigger than Narayan Singh, and even than Mujrim, and although what isn’t bone in my great bulk is mostly muscle, sheer strength doesn’t fit a man, any more than wealth is said to, for passing through the needle’s eye. In addition to getting stuffier and rougher as I went down, the chimney narrowed, for some ultra-scientific reason known best to the Germans who designed it, and I stuck twice and nearly suffocated before reaching a queerly shaped black hole at the bottom, lined with soot. By that time I had lost a lot of skin off my knees and elbows and was about two-thirds choked in the bargain. Hardly any light came down the chimney, of course, but by groping I discovered that the only opening into the factory was a slot about six inches deep and two feet wide on about a level with my waist as I stood on a deep cushion of soot.
I hated to be hauled up again. It was going to hurt for one thing, and for another such soot as I hadn’t scraped off on the way down was going to fall on my head. However, there seemed nothing else for it, so I shook the rope to call their attention above, and the whole thing fell down on top of me. A moment later the square of blue sky overhead was shut off by Narayan Singh’s head and shoulders, leaning over to inquire if I was all right. I wouldn’t be surprized to hear that I used bad language. However, that wasn’t the end of the world, of course. They could get another rope and lower it, and no doubt there was air enough down there to keep a man alive indefinitely, although it did not feel like it; my lungs, in fact, felt full of soot already, and the sensation was of having been buried alive.
Narayan Singh kept asking idiotic questions, and one way and another my temper got the better of me. I could have thrashed the fools who dropped that rope, and killed the men who designed such a trap of a chimney. I shouted to Narayan Singh to take his wooden head out of the light, and in a huge rage at the notion of having to be hauled up empty-handed, grimy as a sweep, to be laughed at by those Arabs, I began to grope about with my fingers in the dark.
The hole I stood in was so small that I could run my hands over every inch of the walls without shifting my feet, and I scraped the soot off, thinking that perhaps the miscreants who built it might have left a man-hole somewhere.
But all I discovered was a round iron plate that covered a hole about large enough to admit a man’s arm. It was fixed in place as firmly as a strong-room door, being bolted apparently to another plate on the outside. My wrath boiled over entirely at that discovery. You know how unreasonable a man can be in a tight place, when he feels he has brought his trouble on himself and would rather pass the blame along? I don’t get that way often, but when I do I see fire.
I wanted to do damage — began to grope with my fingers for something I could seize on and break; and I found a crack in the masonry extending from the bottom of that iron plate all the way down in a zigzag to the level of my feet, where the piled-up soot had filled and covered it.
It wasn’t reason, but downright savagery that made me set my shoulder against that crack, brace both feet against the opposite wall, and exert every ounce of strength I had in me. I thought of Samson among the Philistines breaking down the galleries on his tormentors; of Horatius holding the bridge over the Tiber in ancient Rome — Oh, of loads of splendid things that had no conceivable bearing on my predicament; and with the fury of the Berserker that lives somewhere underneath my normal calm I shoved until my muscles swelled and cracked and crimson fire blazed under my shut eyelids.
Something had to give, or I should have been lamed for life by my own exertion. I came within an ace of serious injury as it was; for suddenly the whole wall of the chimney below that iron plate and to one side of the crack gave outward, and I shot my full length on to a smooth stone floor all mixed up with the falling masonry. And there I lay for I dare say sixty seconds, wondering whether I were dead, and if not, why?
Narayan Singh’s excited booming down the chimney made me begin to think again like a more or less rational being. Alive or dead, there will always be something to do I reckon. I wasn’t bruised worth mentioning, but I had made a hole in that chimney wall that you could have wheeled a barrow into, so either the manufacturers’ tables of the tensile strength of cement are away off the mark, or else that was local stuff put up without analysis or guarantee. I yelled up the chimney to the gang to get another rope, and set about exploring.
There was the new-fangled furnace sure enough, and it did not seem to have been used much. In front of it, protruding from a neck-like tube was the steel ball Grim had spoken of — not much bigger than a good-sized coconut, which it furthermore resembled, in that its only opening connected with the stem, or neck. There was a sledge-hammer near by, and I might possibly have broken the ball off; but it occurred to me that people with enough ambition to import that furnace would be likely to provide for accidents. So I looked further, kicking open a locked door in a partition wall.
The first glimpse inside set me to whistling so loud that Narayan Singh bellowed down the chimney again to ask what I wanted. A long table set against the wall of a narrow, room was piled with experimental pieces of rolled glass, and the back of nearly every perfect piece was silvered! Who couldn’t love a German after that? I changed my mind about the Huns, forgave them for the chimney, and began to look about for the store of quicksilver, nervously refusing attention to a persistent fear that some manager with time on his hands might have used up all the furnace’s reserve supply in the course of a private experiment.
It turned out that he had done just that. A small container that had held the stuff was empty in a corner on the floor; but that wasn’t all. On another bench was more rolled glass all laid out ready to be silvered, as if the experiments had gone far enough and mirror-making was about to begin on a small commercial scale.
Now the man who had made those preparations might have been waiting for the quicksilver to be imported; but in that case it was hardly likely that he would have laid the glass ready in rows. So I kicked down the door of another small room, hoping for a pound or two but never dreaming of the affluence in store.
There was a whole flask of mercury. But right in the middle of the floor of a big, dark closet stood a whole drum of cyanide of potassium not yet unsealed, although the top had been knocked from the crate.
Well; no nugget ever found by a Klondike sourdough or a fossicking old- timer at Ballarat was destined to have more far-reaching results than that unlawful discovery of mine. Like a stone cast into a pool, it has made rings that have not done rippling outward yet.
All I thought of at the time was Grim’s need of the stuff, and the probable delight of Jmil Ras, whoever he might be, remembering my own emotions on many an occasion when the needful turned up on a prospect from nowhere. But as the Indians say, we men are only as flies riding on the wheel; we have no foresight wort
hy of the name; we can guess pretty accurately what will happen when we touch the match to powder; but when a move and a discovery at random fits into the universal scheme so that the whole machinery of nations goes forward half-a-turn, we never dream of the result.
It was enough that Grim had what he wanted. In presence of that satisfaction difficulties vanished, and the business of repacking the stuff into improvised containers that could be hauled up-chimney — of following it with a rope under my armpits that cut like a medieval torture-rack — of rounding up cement and sand in order to reset the grille in place above the chimney — all got accomplished somehow.
Fortunately I had left my Bedouin cloak on the roof, and so could hide the torn and filthy state of my clothes when I reached the street. A good sluicing from a goat-skin water-bag in Ali Baba’s camel-khan removed the soot from head and hands, and I was able to regain the governorate and get upstairs unnoticed by anyone but Grim, who smiled at me through the open door as I passed, but said nothing. De Crespigny’s back was turned, which was as well.
Narayan Singh bought new, clean clothes for me in the suk, and brought them up to de Crespigny’s bedroom; and he smuggled out my sooty rags for some beggar’s benefit. I rather expected Grim to come upstairs and ask me questions, but he didn’t, and if de Crespigny suspected anything he kept quiet about it too. Before he left with my discarded clothes Narayan Singh put my mind at ease about the plunder, and gave me some information on another point that proved important in its way.
“Old Ali Baba has nailed up the poison in new boxes, and is hiding them among the camel-loads, sahib, He is in a great good temper, for he swears that you, sahib, are a prince of thieves with whom it is an honor to go stealing! He vows that your name shall be no longer Ramsden, but Harami [Thief]. Henceforth he says he is your father and is proud to call you son!”
CHAPTER VI. “Yemen — a thousand miles away — that hardly sounds like Jeremy!”
SO we were a well-found, well-contented party that rode out of El-Kalil that night and headed for the south end of the Dead Sea. Old Ali Baba is as careful of his camels as a good sea captain of his ship, as well as past master at judging their points, which are more elusive than those of a horse but equally important. We were mounted on the best beasts out of Syria, and swayed along at a fine clip under the stars in almost utter silence, except for the halfdozen brass bells swinging from camel’s necks. The baggage beasts were tied in strings of four, and each string was towed, as it were, by one of Ali Baba’s sons. The rest of us rode anywhere we chose to in the line, with Grim and Ali Baba leading, knee to knee. We all get our share of knocks and disappointments, but I have found the world a good old ball for all that, and have enjoyed the past, take it on the whole, nearly as much as I expect to like the future. Having wandered, I have seen and experienced a thousand things that are only hearsay to the fellows who have to stand by the home jobs, and there aren’t many of the pleasant ways that I haven’t sampled. But the best of all were those nights on camel-back, on what Grim calls his beat.
The moonlight made the dusty dry land seem to be carpeted with snow. The deep, blue-velvet shadows seemed to be full of the ghosts of ancient history, and the camel-bells intoned the same tune that has chimed along ridge and wadi, desert and dry watercourse for six or seven thousand years that we know about, and only the stars can tell you how many ages before that — each bell sounding a different note. And as no two camels stride alike there is no monotony; the carillon keeps changing.
You don’t talk much. Now and then a curt remark is shouted down the line; but for the most part you sit up there and meditate, with your head among the stars — rifle slung behind you — swaying comfortably as the beasts swing forward everlastingly — too contented to talk, or even to smoke.
You’ll hear a different tale from folk who have ridden baggage-camels for their sins. There is a great gulf fixed between the two experiences — a gulf as wide as that between old Ali Baba’s gang and the thieves who pose as law-abiding men. In a land where ninety-nine percent or so are thieves, it is safest and least mortifying to share your tent and provender with such as call themselves by their right name; frankly admitting that they are rascals — taking open pride in it, in fact — they will frankly find a decent camel for you. That quality of frankness is invariably based on elemental manhood, which is the only thing worth betting on anywhere from West Street to Hoboken, going East.
Nothing happened for four days, until we reached the rusty track of the Hedjaz Railway twenty miles to the southward of El-Maan, not far from where a desert track reaches out toward Petra and the Edom Mountains. There we gave the camels a twentyfour-hour rest after their long climb out of the Jordan Valley; for it doesn’t matter how carefully, and with what experience, you cinch the loads, up-hill and down-hill work are going to punish animals that were built for traveling at speed along the level. So we pitched our little cluster of worn tents in the shade of an enormous rock, and sat down desert-fashion; which means that: we did nothing with both hands continuously, while the camels munched dry thorns the day long and moaned and muttered through the night. We had the loads arranged in a semi-circle like a wall around us, and barring the flies and a scorpion or two, along with rather more sun and hot wind than you get at the seaside, that was as good a place to waste time in as any.
We had forced the camels to one long march in order to reach that spot at nightfall, so as to start off again by night when the full day’s rest was over. By four o’clock of the afternoon, a little while before the hot wind died, we all began to grow restless. Mujrim got into an argument with Ali Baba as to whether it wasn’t time to go and round up the camels, which started a lecture by the old man, every word of which I had heard ten times before; so I went over to Grim’s tent, where he was sitting in the entrance with his legs crossed, smoking.
I hadn’t anything particular to say; you seldom do have after the fourth day out, when all the details of the daily routine have arranged themselves and the world you left behind you seems a million miles away. But I’m not as self-contained as Grim — haven’t yet quite rid myself of the silly civilized convention which obliges you to say something whenever you approach a man. There’s no excuse for it. You’re never really fit to be a man’s friend until you can let the days go by without a word. Talk, at best, is only a substitute for proper apprehension, as the animals and ancients understand. Grim is always polite, even when you break in on his solitude.
“Strange,” I said, “that you can’t recall my Australian friend Jeremy. At the time when he was transferred from Egypt for special service under you, Lawrence, I’m told, was holding Petra; and as you were doing factotum for Lawrence, you must have been somewhere between here and Akaba at that time. Doesn’t the neighborhood stir your memory? When you return to a place after a considerable absence, don’t all the incidents and the people connected with it in your experience come back to mind?”
“Why, yes, they generally do,” said Grim.
“Unaccountable, then, that you can’t remember him. He was not the kind that is easy to forget — a boisterous, lovable, laughing, handsome fellow, well set up, and as full of tricks as an organgrinder’s monkey — ready with his hands — a great conjurer. Good Lord, man! You couldn’t possibly set eyes on Jeremy and not remember him. Did he die before he got to you?”
Grim eyed me steadily for thirty seconds, not considering me, apparently, nor my question, but turning over something in his mind that puzzled him.
“Why do you suppose,” he said at last, “that a fellow like Jeremy Ross should choose a country like Arabia to soldier in? Wasn’t he fond of company and good jokes? Wasn’t Ross the sort of man who whoops her up with the crowd whenever possible, and goes crazy from loneliness?”
“He’d heard of you. He told me his one ambition was to see service under your command. No, I should say Jeremy could burn his own smoke as well as any man.”
“You think so? You really think that?” Grim asked me with
surprizing earnestness.
“Spill the beans,” I suggested. “I never could guess conundrums. Out with what you know.”
* * * * *
I BELIEVE it hurts Grim almost physically to divulge his thoughts before what seems to him the proper time. It isn’t that he can’t trust you, for his judgment of whom to trust is more nearly infallible than any man’s I know; and he has the courage of his own conviction. Neither does he mistrust himself, or he would never undertake the dangerous missions he delights in. The nearest parallel that I can think of is that of a Scot with money in his purse; he is canny in the use of it, and careful not to tell. When he must, as it were, spend the information he hates not to get value in return for it.
“Your friend Jeremy Ross,” he said at last, “was in my camp all told about three weeks. He was a good man, but utterly undisciplined; I should say he was so sure of his own keen intelligence that orders from a less intelligent superior seemed like an insult to him. “We put him to work at Akaba off-loading cattle out of bumboats, and he doped out a new way of doing it without using gear or injuring the cattle — did a rare good job, in fact. But there was a certain Major Hendrick there, who knew nothing about cattle, but had opinions; and one of his opinions was that Jeremy Ross needed snubbing. So he ordered the method changed.
“It cost us about fifty head of cattle, and Ross said things not provided for in the army regulations. Well, you know how it is; when a trooper talks back at a major, the trooper gets the worst end. I was a major, too, but Hendrick was my senior, and you have to watch points in any case, taking the part of a trooper against an officer. The best I could do was to pretend I knew nothing, and to transfer Ross out of reach for the time being. Major Hendrick proposed to make a court-martial case of it, but there wasn’t any place to lock a man up in, and I shipped Ross away with a supply caravan that started inland the same afternoon. Hendrick kicked up an awful row, but couldn’t prove that I knew the Australian was under arrest; and anyhow, I was too busy to be quarreled with.”