Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “You say he hasn’t hurt my brother?”

  “Your brother has an injury sustained in fair fight, but he has been treated with respect and is satisfied on that score. You may have back your brother and the other member of your family, who is unharmed except for an accidental bruise on the jaw-bone.”

  “By Allah!” chuckled the Avenger. “That may stop her talking for a while!”

  “And you may have this place, and may take over all the followers of Jmil Ras—”

  “Half a mo’! Half a mo’! Whoa, hoss!” said Jeremy. “There’s ten of the blighters he can’t have. Ten of ’em went underground with me and know the secret — or at least enough of it to give the game away. By crikey, they and I don’t part company!”

  “You may have all of his men who care to follow you, excepting ten, whom Jmil Ras himself will select,” said Grim.

  The Avenger’s eyes were gleaming. The addition of about three hundred men to his force would be a victory in itself, for it would make his supremacy indisputable.

  “By Allah, the condition! What is the condition? Name it!”

  “You must agree to support Feisul. You must promise on your honor that when Feisul is proposed for ruler of Mesopotamia you will take his part with all your men and all the means at your disposal, receiving therefor proper dignity and treatment. And these tombs that have been opened—”

  “Wallah! They must be closed again, and stay so! That damned Jmil Ras has brought enough sorcery out of them already to destroy the world! Have no fear about the tombs!”

  “They must stay shut until Feisul opens them,” said Grim. “Feisul is a direct descendant of the Prophet, who may do without harm things that other men may not do.”

  “Taib. But what if I refuse to support Feisul? I am the ruler of these parts. Let Feisul be king in Baghdad, and I will not prevent, but let him leave this part to me.”

  “If you refuse, you must fight Jmil Ras without my help,” Grim answered. “I am his prisoner; I will return to the village with him and events must take their course. Perhaps you would like to send your men against his magic?”

  “By damn, not I!”

  “Then choose,” Grim answered. “Feisul is a true prince, by blood, creed, honor, and action. You are a man of honor, too. Which is better: To be a petty Sheikh, with this thorn in your side, and the hands of the friends of Feisul all against you to insure your downfall in any event when Feisul’s day comes; or to be the powerful supporter of a king, with proper honor and reward?”

  “Mashallah! You have a tongue of silver, Jimgrim!”

  “And what are your ears — leather?”

  “Nay, they are golden! I have nothing against Feisul. Let him be king, if he can accomplish it.”

  “That is not enough. Will you support him?”

  “On your terms, and if Jmil Ras goes, away, yes I will be for Feisul, if he can win the throne.”

  “Will you help him win the throne?”

  “Wallah! What a persistent fellow! Very well, I will help Feisul.”

  “Do you swear it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me hear you.”

  “By Allah and all His names; by the Prophet of El-Islam and all the holy saints; by the great Ali; by the Forty Martyrs; by my beard and my own honor and the honor of my sons, I swear to help make Feisul king, and to recognize him and support him, provided that Feisul recognizes me as first among the Sheikhs from Petra to the borders of the Hedjaz.”

  “All right,” said Grim. “You have sworn before witnesses. As long as you keep that oath I’ll be your friend. If ever you break it, I’m your enemy. Now shake hands with Jeremy Ross the Australian.”

  “Wallah! I would dread to do that. He is mad, and he has handled magic—”

  “You can turn the magic away from yourself by shaking hands with him. Take my word for it,” said Grim.

  “By Allah, your word is good, but peace of mind is better! I would rather not.”

  But Jeremy had the solution all ready for that little difficulty. “Put a bullet in the palm of your hand, and I’ll give you a sure sign,” he said, “that it’s peace between us from now on.” The Avenger hesitated, but Grim urged him, and at last he worried out a nickel bullet from a new cartridge and laid it in the open palm of his right hand.

  “Abracadabra!” said Jeremy. “Woolloomooloo! And three rousing cheers for my discharge!”

  He seized the Avenger’s hand, shook it once, and let go. The bullet had vanished, and a bright gold Turkish medjidie lay in its place, worth I dare say twenty U.S. dollars. The Avenger laughed.

  “Can you do that always?” he asked.

  “It happens as often as I make friends with a man,” said Jeremy. “Don’t spend that coin, though. As long as you keep it you’re protected against magic. Now that I’ve made friends with you I’m going to stow the stuff that killed those fanatics yonder down into the tomb, and close it tight. And I’ll put a spell on the tomb that’ll keep the devils quiet. But if anybody except me, or Feisul, who’s a direct descendant of the Prophet, dares to open the tomb, that stuff that killed those men will turn itself loose, and you’ll all find Hell comfortable in comparison.”

  It’s easy, of course, from this distance to laugh at the Avenger for a simpleton; yet I’ve seen people in New York, who had a college education, deceived by quackery equally absurd and without any such object-lesson as the Avenger had just witnessed. There were more than a hundred men lying dead or dying within a half-mile of us, who bore witness to the deadly efficiency of Jeremy’s magic. I think it would have been a marvel if he hadn’t been convinced; for that is a land full of ancient superstitions, where the tales are mostly about jinn and ifrits, who perform incredible miracles whenever it suits the plot.

  The Avenger in my judgment is one of the most decent and manliest Arabs I have met; and having witnessed that verbal agreement between him and Grim and Jeremy, it gives me pleasure to know that he has kept his part of it religiously, although how and when he struck for Feisul must be told another time. We are most of us superstitious in one way or another, and it is wisest not to sneer at a decent fellow who believes in devils and black magic but keeps his given word, come one come all, through thick and thin. I’ll doff my hat to him or his brother any day.

  CHAPTER XV. “Ali Baba! Ali Baba!”

  THE Avenger’s men had to bury the dead, for the other Sheikhs cleared out in a hurry, taking their wounded with them, for they questioned their own safety now that the Avenger’s force outnumbered theirs; and their men, having had enough of it, were unmanageable.

  Jeremy buried the remaining cyanide and closed up the tomb that covered the mouth of the mine with ceremony that would have done credit to any stage in the world. He caused the voices of the dead to speak out of the tomb, confirming his threat of what would happen if anyone but Feisul or himself should dare to trespass in there; and he kept the ten men who knew the secret and had helped him dolly out the gold-dust standing near him, chanting a jingle he had taught them, while he himself did astonishing tricks of sleight-of-hand — pulling a live chicken in halves, for instance, and making two live chickens of it. There isn’t a better showman in the world than Jeremy Ross.

  We pulled our freight that evening. Thousands of successes have been spoiled by staying around to talk about them afterward. And besides, you couldn’t have kept Jeremy Ross there another night without tying him hand and foot; he was like a boy released from school, dancing and singing and making a fool of himself until a saying started that they tell me has persisted until now— “as mad as Jmil Ras.”

  “Say, you chaps, come with me to Sydney! I’ll show you the old Bull’s Kid, and then we’ll hit the grass trail — country where you can buy a horse for twenty pounds that can gallop all day long, and the girls have sweet red lips — Oh golly! I’m so sick of camels and the talk they sling out here that I’d swap my gold-mine for a billy and blanket and a six months’ miner’s right! Come, and I’ll show you what life i
s!”

  “What would you do with your ten Arabs?” I suggested, thinking that would faze him. But not a bit of it.

  “Do with ’em? Why, take ’em along, of course. They wouldn’t let ’em land in Sydney without a bond, but I’ve got money — and still more in the bank at home. I’ll turn ’em into a traveling show — teach ’em tricks, and make their blooming fortune. They’ll know where Allah lives when they’ve been in Australia half a day!”

  However, that wasn’t their destiny; there were other activities in store for Jeremy and Grim and me and them, as I hope to tell.

  Meanwhile, our satisfaction was almost mild compared to that of Ali Baba and his sons. It was Ali Baba who had kept the fuel lighted under the great iron cooking-pot and sent the fumes of cyanide downwind, and his sons, who had defended him with rifles while he did it, were agreed that the honors were all his.

  So Mahommed, his youngest-born, gang poet and sublime romancer, made up a song about it and they sang it on the march all the way home to El-Kalil. I don’t remember nearly all of it, but I wrote down a few of the stanzas and have tried to translate them into English, though they lose most of their virtue in the process.

  Who came out of El-Kalil?

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  Bearing magic on his camels,

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  Laughing scorn of the Avenger,

  Making mock of all his numbers,

  Giving confidence to Jimgrim,

  Giving good advice to Jimgrim,

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  He who rode from El-Kalil!

  Who defeated the Avenger?

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  In a battle in the desert,

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  Conquered all the desert horsemen,

  Made a prince’s brother captive,

  And rode on into the mountains

  With his magic on the camels?

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  He who rode from El-Kalil!

  Then he mocked them in the mountains,

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  And he called his sons around him,

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  When a thousand desert chieftains

  Swore to follow the Avenger

  Bringing each a hundred horsemen

  With their banners to attack him,

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  He who honors El-Kalil!

  But the father of fine magic,

  Ali Baba!

  Swore by Allah to destroy them!

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  He, the friend of all the ifrits,

  He, the brother of the lightning,

  Took a cooking pot of iron

  And he filled it full of magic!

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  He, the pride of El-Kalil!

  Then the thousands came against him,

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  A hundred times a thousand!

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  But his magic made a tempest,

  And he loosed the tempest at them,

  And he mixed the magic with it,

  So that Azrael obeyed him!

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  He who rode from El-Kalil!

  So they cried out as they perished,

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  For the storm of dust obeyed him,

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  And he smote them in their thousands,

  He, the father of fine magic,

  And they fell and died in thousands,

  Oh, he slaughtered them in thousands!

  Ali Baba! Ali Baba!

  He whose home is El-Kalil!

  Well — that’s how history gets written. Mahommed, son of Ali Baba, is another man without a college education, and as full of superstition as a Jerusalem mattress is of bugs; but I’ll bet you anything you like that his version of these happenings will outlive mine, and that long after Jeremy and Grim and the Avenger and I are in our graves they will tell the story in El-Kalil of how Ali Baba made magic and destroyed a hundred thousand men.

  THE END

  WHEN TRAILS WERE NEW

  OR, THE GUNGA SAHIB

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  I

  The Wheel of Destiny

  “Justice, destiny and love, these three are blind,” says one of the lesser known commentators on the laws of Manu. But what the devil that had to do with Ben Quorn was a question that did not even occur to him. It did not even bore him. He ignored it. His job of digging graves in Philadelphia left him lots of time for reading. Nowadays, at five or ten cents a volume, a grave-digger can accumulate as good a library as anybody needs. Quorn was an omnivorous reader, on all sorts of subjects; and well-read books that can be carried in the pocket make their readers skeptical of writers — of philosophers for instance, and especially of journalists who quote philosophy. Just now, having finished a grave for a notorious millionaire whom he pitied for having to leave all that money behind him, Quorn was on a barrel in the tool-shed, studying the Morticians’ Monitor — an aggressively cheerful publication that flaunts a fighting motto on the title page: “They’re dying one a minute. Are you getting your share of the funerals?”

  “One funeral’s enough for any man!” said Quorn to himself. He had seen too many of them. He was restless.

  That reference to the Laws of Manu was on the second page, which is always reserved for intellectual trifles and embalmed jokes of the “smile that leaves no sting” persuasion. Quorn turned to the Want Ads — one and a half columns on the inside back page. The top half-column on the left-hand side contained in heavy black type the advertisement “Your face is your fortune. Improve it with Calverley’s Soap.” Beneath that was an electrotype of a movie hero with a he-man chin, whose face could have been improved by almost anything. Quorn thought about his own face for the ten thousandth time; it had become a habit. His face puzzled him, as it did other people. He stroked it, to remember what it looked like.

  It was an ordinary sort of face at first glance. But people who looked twice, usually looked a third time. It made him look much older than he actually was. It was the only reason why he dug graves for a living instead of being some one’s butler, or perhaps a bishop. Nobody trusted him much, and that was a strange thing, because he had discovered he could trust himself. His eyes held all the amber unbelief in ethics of a he-goat’s; their imponderable purpose made most people suspect him of being a satyr or an anarchist. As a matter of fact he was a rather conservative fellow, who saved his money and preferred Shakspere to Mencken, although he harbored a suspicion that poetry and music are a bit immodest.

  So far Quorn is comprehensible, and he could even understand himself. Having read three and a half dollars’ worth of five-cent books on psychology, behaviorism and kindred subjects, he felt he knew as much as the experts — maybe more. But why did he like elephants? There was nothing in Freud or Jung or Adler about elephants. And why did elephants like him? There was nothing in natural history to explain that. He could not stay away from the elephants when a circus came to town; they fascinated him. It seemed he fascinated them, too, although he never fed them, merely watched them. He had sometimes bribed elephant keepers to let him sit up all night with their charges. He liked their smell. He liked everything about them. But when questioned about it he usually only scratched the birth-mark on his forehead, just over the pinea
l gland. The question puzzled Quorn more than any one else. He seemed intuitively to know all about elephants; and because their home was India he had read a lot of books about the country and had a curious longing to go there. Last night he had dreamed he was in India. Coincidence? Here, at the foot of the right-hand column of the inside back page of the paper he was reading, was a Want Ad that made him almost bristle with curiosity. Work was over for the day. He shoved the folded paper in his pocket, washed himself and set forth to find the advertiser, at a good respectable address in an old-fashioned part of the city. He was shown into a private library and not kept waiting.

  “Are you a reliable single man?” a ministerial, middle-aged person asked him; he resembled nothing so much as a heron in spectacles. Quorn gave references, answered questions and agreed to be examined by a doctor. He got along astonishingly well with his inquisitor, who was almost the first person who had ever stared at him without becoming suspicious. He was almost suspiciously unsuspicious.

  “How many fellers have had this job?” Quorn asked him. “Is it one of these short-lived propositions?”

  “Two men have had it. One died. The other complained of being lonely,” his informant answered. “I myself was in Narada once, for three days. It is a very romantic, mysterious, beautiful place, and I enjoyed it immensely. But the circumstances are peculiar. There is usually a British official Resident, sometimes with his family; but no other Occidental is allowed in Narada for more than three days at a time, excepting our one caretaker. If you are seriously interested, I will tell you all about it.”

  It appeared that Narada, a tiny but extremely ancient Indian State, is almost independent, being subject only to the terms of a treaty with the British-Indian Government that dates from Clive’s time. The State contains one large city that is principally palaces and temples. Nobody knows why, and nobody cares, but when its ruler pays his biennial official visit to the British Viceroy, he rides all the way to Delhi — a journey of three weeks — on the back of an elephant, whose howdah is heavy with gold and silver. He returns to Narada on a different elephant, and is afterwards very expensively disinfected by Hindu priests, although he is not a Hindu by religion, but an Animist as far as anybody can discover. The Hindu priests can make him do incredibly severe and costly penances whenever he breaks the least of their ceremonial laws. His tyranny is consequently tempered by discretion.