by Talbot Mundy
“Why?”
“Write me a second letter. Have the woman write it, and you affix the seal. Give order that they are to provide a swift, fresh camel in exchange for my weary beast. I shall make a great fuss about the beast they provide, rejecting this and that one, thus causing them to believe in me, since men without proper authority do not act thus, but are content with anything so be they can only escape unharmed.”
So the second letter was written; and in the rising, scorching heat old Ali Baba set off, mounted on the meanest of the baggage beasts, whose hump was getting galled, so that he wasn’t likely to be of much use to us within a day or so.
Then we all got under the shelter of the low tents to give the other camels a rest and wait for evening, and I think Jael Higg slept, but I don’t know, for we gave her a tent to herself; she refused point blank to share one with Ayisha.
And Ayisha, I know, did not sleep. She came in the noon glare to the tent I occupied with Narayan Singh and entered without ceremony, slipping through the low opening with the silent ease that comes naturally to the Badawi. She squatted down in front of us, and I awoke the Sikh, who was snoring a chorus from Wagner’s “Niebelungen Ring.”
For a moment I thought he was going to resume the night’s flirtation, but there was something in the quiet manner of her and the serious expression of her face that he recognized as quickly as I did. All her imperious attitude was gone. She did not look exactly pleading, nor yet cunning; perhaps it was a blend of both that gave her the soft charm she had come deliberately armed with.
Of this one thing I am absolutely sure; whatever that young woman did was calculated and deliberate; and the more she seemed to act on impulse the more she had really studied out her move.
Narayan Singh checked a word half-way, and we waited for her to speak first. Her eyes sought mine, and then the medicine-chest. Then she looked back at me, and I made a gesture inviting her to speak.
“You told me,” she said at last, “that you have poison in that box that would reach down to hell and slay the ifrits. Give me some of it.”
“Ya sit Ayisha. I need it all for the ifrits,” I answered.
“I will make no trouble for you,” she said; and for a moment I suspected she meant to kill herself.
“You are young and beautiful,” I told her. “The world holds plenty of good for you yet.”
At that she flashed her white teeth and her eyes blazed.
“Truly! Allah puts a good omen into your mouth, miyan! Yet little comes to the woman who neglects to plan for it. Give me the poison. I will pay.”
I was about to refuse abruptly, being rather old-maidish about some things and not always ready with a smile for what I don’t approve; but Narayan Singh interrupted in time to prevent the unforgivable offense of preaching my own code of morals uninvited.
“Tell us who is to be poisoned,” he demanded.
“That is none of your business,” she answered calmly.
“But the poison is our business,” said the Sikh. “We make terms. If the person to be poisoned is an enemy of ours, well and good; you shall have it and we shall be gainers. But Allah forbid that we should hasten the death of a friend! Is it for Jael Higg?”
“No, for I see that to poison her would be to incur the enmity of Jimgrim. Already he takes counsel with her; did he and she not lay their heads together in your presence after morning prayers?”
“For whom, then? For Jimgrim?”
“God forbid! Shall I woo a dead man? Nay! You say you will give me the poison if I tell? You swear it? Then it is for the Lion of Petra. Thus I shall win the love of Jimgrim. And Jael, being without a man, will run away to Egypt, where her money is.”
“Bismillah!” swore the Sikh. “I see no reason why I should not get an angry husband out of the way so simply! But remember, Ayisha, you must slay me in turn if you hope to have Jimgrim for husband. By my beard and the Prophet’s feet, it is I who will have you to wife, if I have to burn kingdoms first!”
“Give me the poison first, and we shall see,” she laughed.
“Very well; leave us for a while, Ayisha. I will persuade this master of mine, who has a vein of caution, since he lacks the zeal of love. I will bring you the stuff when he and I have talked it over.”
“Strong, strong stuff,” she insisted. “Stuff that would eat iron. Ali Higg’s belly is tough.”
“It shall come out through his flesh like flame,” the Sikh promised.
As soon as she had gone, and he had watched her out of earshot, he turned to me with a gruff laugh.
“Now, sahib, make her up a potion of some harmless powder for me to carry to her tent while you go and tell our Jimgrim what has passed. Give her physic that will purge the Lion of Petra without doing worse than make his belly burn. Stay; give croton in a bottle; that is best.”
CHAPTER 11. “That we make a profit from this venture!”
LATE that afternoon, before they loaded up the camels, there was another conference between Grim, Jael Higg, Narayan Singh, our prisoner Yussuf, and myself. The ancient hills of Edom were not far away, and we were near enough to Petra to feel nervous. Jael made a pretty good pretense of meeting Grim half-way, and I think she had made up her mind to let him dig his own pit and tumble into it.
Yussuf was aware by that time, if not of Grim’s identity, at any rate of the fact that he was an officer in the British pay, and was rather obviously considering which would likely pay him best — to side secretly with Ali Higg or openly with Grim, or both.
Having fought over all that country under Lawrence, and knowing consequently every yard of it, I suppose Grim felt neither thrilled nor mystified; but in case any scientist reads this and wants to know how I felt, “fed up and far from home” about describes it. But there was worse to come!
Grim turned to me at last and smiled in that darned genial way he has when he means to call on your uttermost patience or endurance.
“You see, the difficulty is,” he said, “to get to Ali Higg without his getting us first. He has probably got between forty and fifty men in Petra with him, so we daren’t invade the place. Yet we’ve got to hurry, because old Ibrahim ben Ah with that army may get suspicious and send back a messenger on his own account. Now, do you feel willing to beard the Lion in his den?”
“Alone?” I asked.
I never felt less willing to do anything, and dare say my face betrayed it.
“No. Narayan Singh will go too, and, of course, Ayisha.”
Ayisha seemed about as safe an ambassador to send as an electric spark to a barrel of powder. I glanced at Narayan Singh and felt ashamed, for his eyes glowed unmistakably. He was enthusiastic.
Well, it seems I draw a color-line after all. I can’t fight like a Sikh, or be as good a man in lots of ways; but I’m not going to be outdone by one in daring, while the Sikh is looking.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll do anything you say.”
But I did not have the perfect voice-control I would have liked, and Jael Higg grinned. That naturally settled it.
“Narayan Singh needn’t come if he’d rather stay with you,” I added, and the Sikh raised his eyebrows.
“Do you dare to make love to Ayisha, sahib?” he grinned.
I began to see the general drift of the plan of campaign, and wondered. Having seen more than a little of the Near East, and knowing how the peace of the whole world depends on preserving that unmelted hotpot of nations from anarchy, I was not impressed by the stability of things in general!
Grim had come out on his hair-raising venture because no army was available to deal with Ali Higg, and he would not have ventured unless powers-that-pretend-to-be were sure that Ali Higg was deadly dangerous. Did the peace of the world, then, depend on the success or otherwise of a Sikh’s mock love-making. It did look like it.
Narayan Singh got to his feet with a laugh and a yawn, and went to dance attendance on Ayisha, while Grim reinstructed Yussuf regarding the ease with which the British could impound
his Jaffa property; but though I listened to all that, and heard Yussuf’s vows of fidelity — heard him promise to reverse his former report and spread rumors in Ali’s camp of a British army getting ready to advance — the prospect to me looked gloomier and gloomier.
“You can only die once,” Grim laughed after a quick glance at my face, “and we may save a hundred thousand people from the sword.”
But I suppose I wasn’t cut out to be a willing martyr. It was a case of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and though I did go forward on that mad escapade it was fear that drove me — fear of the Sikh’s and Grim’s contempt, and of my own self-loathing afterward.
Grim and Narayan Singh are made of the real hero stuff. I wonder how many others there are like me, who face the music simply because one or two others have got guts enough to lead us up to it.
We didn’t move far that night, for there was no need, and Grim was careful not to go where Ali Baba could not find him. We passed through acres of oleander-scrub into a valley twelve miles wide at its mouth, that narrowed gradually until the high red sandstone cliffs shut out the moonlight. It was like the mouth of hell, and suffocating, for the cliff-sides were giving off the heat they had sucked up through the day.
The surest sign that Ali Higg was either over-confident or seriously engaged elsewhere was that there was no guard in the ravine. Ten men properly placed could have destroyed us. Even the great Alexander of Macedon could not force that gorge, and suffered one of his worst defeats there. The Turks made the same mistake and tried to oust Lawrence in the Great War; but he simply overwhelmed them with a scratch brigade of partly armed Bedouins and women.
Grim called a halt at last where a dozen caves a hundred feet above the bottom of the gorge could be reached by a goat-track leading to a ledge. There was a rift in the side-wall there, making a pitch-dark corner where the camels could lie unseen and grumble to one another — safe enough until daylight, unless they should see ghosts and try to stampede for the open. Grim sent the women and Ayisha’s four men up to the caves with only Narayan Singh to watch them, for there was no way of escape, except by that twelve-inch goat-track.
Then, because Ali Baba’s sons and grandsons were nervous about the “old man their father,” and because the one thing that more than all other circumstances combined could ruin our slim chance would be panic, Grim squatted on the sand in the gorge with the men all around him and began to tell stories.
Right there in the very jaws of death, within a mile of the lair of Ali Higg, in possession of two of the tyrant’s wives, with an army at our rear that might at that minute be following old Ali Baba into the gorge to cut off our one possible retreat, he told them the old tales that Arabs love, and soothed them as if they were children.
That was the finest glimpse of Grim’s real manhood I had experienced yet, although I could not see him for the darkness. You couldn’t see anyone. It was a voice in the night — strong, reassuring — telling to born thieves stories of the warm humanity of other thieves, whose accomplishments in the way of cool cheek and lawless altruism were hardly more outrageous than the task in front of us.
And he told them so well that even when a chill draft crept along the bottom of the gorge two hours before dawn, taking the place of the hot air that had ascended, and you could feel the shiver that shook the circle of listeners, they only drew closer and leaned forward more intently — almost as if he were a fire at which they warmed themselves.
But heavens! It seemed madness, nevertheless. We had no more pickets out than the enemy had. We were relying utterly on Grim’s information that he had extracted from the women and the prisoners, and on his judgment based on that.
No doubt he knew a lot that he had not told us, for that is his infernal way of doing business; but neither that probability, nor his tales that so suited the Arab mind, nor the recollection of earlier predicaments in which his flair for solutions had been infallibly right, soothed my nerves much; and I nearly jumped out of my skin when a series of grunts and stumbling footfalls broke the stillness of the gorge behind us.
It sounded like ten weary camels being cursed by ten angry men, and I supposed at once that Ibrahim ben Ah had sent a detachment to investigate and that this was their advance-guard. Who else would dare to lift his voice in that way in the gorge? You could hear the words presently:
“Ill-bred Somali beast! Born among vermin in a black man’s kraal! Allah give thee to the crows! Weary? What of it? What of my back, thou awkward earthquake! Thou plow-beast! A devil sit on thee! A devil drive thee! A devil eat thee!”
Whack! Whack!
“Oh my bones! My old bones!”
Mujrim was the first to recognize the voice. He got up quietly and stood in the gorge; and in another minute a blot of denser blackness that was a camel loomed above him, and he raised his hand to seize the head-rope. But the camel saw him first, and, realizing that the journey was over at last, flung itself to the ground with the abandon of a foundered dog, and lay with its neck stretched out straight and legs all straddled anyhow. Mujrim was just in time to catch his father, who was nearly as tired as the camel. It was pretty obvious at once that Jael’s authority had failed badly when it came to exchanging camels.
The sons all surrounded the old man and made a fuss over him, laying him down on a sheepskin coat and chafing his stiff muscles, calling him brave names, rubbing his feet, patting his hands, praising him, while he swore at them each time they touched a sore spot.
They would not even give him a chance to hand over his letter to Grim, until at last he swore so savagely that Mujrim paid attention and took the letter out of the old man’s waistcloth. It was in the same envelop in which the other had gone, unsealed, but with the thumb-mark of Ibrahim ben Ah imprinted on its face.
“To think that I, of all people, should fetch and carry for such dogs!” swore Ali Baba. “I asked for a good beast in exchange for mine, and they gave me this crow’s meat, and laughed! May Allah change their faces! May the water of that oasis turn their bowels into stone!
“Aye, Jimgrim, they will stay there! They are glad enough to stay there. They are dogs that fear their master’s whip. They are so afraid of him that I think if Ali Higg should bid them roast themselves alive the dogs would do it. May they roast a second time in hell for giving me that camel.
“Bah! What kind of sons have I? Are these the sons of my loins that let me parch? Is there no water-bag?”
Grim struck a match in the dark corner where the camels were; but all the envelop contained was a piece of jagged paper torn from the original letter, with Ibrahim ben Ah’s thumb-mark done in ink made from gunpowder by way of acknowledgment. It meant, presumably, that instructions would be obeyed, and so far, good; we were not now in danger of trouble from that source.
But Ali Baba found his tongue again, and freed himself from his sons after he had drank about a quart of water.
“That Ibrahim ben Ah was puzzled,” he said. “Allah! But the fool asked questions; and by the Prophet’s beard I lied in answer to him! Ho! What a string of lies! Who was I but a sheikh from El-Kalil bringing word to Ali Higg of the movements of a British force! In what way did I become the friend of Ali Higg? Was I not always his friend! Was it not I who fed him when he first escaped from Egypt! Ho-ho-ho! Have I not been working for a year to gather men for him in El-Kalil! Have I not made purchases in El-Kalil and El-Kudz for his wife Ayisha! Il hamdulillah! My tongue was ready! May the lies rot the belly of the fool who ate them!
“But that was not all. He wanted to know other things — as, for instance, whether the other force of forty men is still at large, and if so who shall protect the women in Petra.
“‘For,’ quoth he, ‘by Allah, there are men in the neighborhood who have felt our Ali’s heel, and who would not scruple to wreak vengeance if his back were altogether turned. Convey him my respectful homage, and bid him look to his rear,’ said Ibrahim ben Ah.”
At that Grim called to Narayan Singh, who came down
the goat-track like a landslide. You mustn’t whistle your man in those parts, or the Arabs will say the devil has defiled your mouth.
“Ask Jael Higg to come here.”
“A word first, Jimgrim sahib! While I watched, those women talked. Jael, the older one, offered Ayisha forgiveness if she would obey henceforth; but Ayisha gave her only hard words, saying that in a day or so it will be seen whose cock crows loudest. So Jael called to two of the men who have been with Ayisha all this time, and they squatted in the mouth of her cave. As it was very dark I crept quite close and listened. She bade them watch their chance and run to Ali Higg.
“‘If he is ill and angry, never mind,’ she said. ‘If he beats you, never mind. He will reward you afterward. Bid him, as he values life,’ she said, ‘call in those forty men whom he would send to punish the Beni Aroun people. Tell him I am a prisoner, but those forty are enough to turn the tables until Ibrahim ben Ah can come. A camel must leave in a hurry for Ibrahim ben Ah at the oasis, and bring him and all the men back to straighten this affair.’
“She promised them money and promotion for success, and sure death for failure!”
“Good!” said Grim, turning to me. “You see? It always pays to stage a close-up in a game like this. We’ve caught our friend Ali Higg between soup and fish.”
“Get in quick, then, and kidnap him,” I urged.
“Man alive,” he answered, “we’ve no kind of right to do that. Bring her down,” he told Narayan Singh, “and then have Mujrim tie those four men of Ayisha’s so they’ve no chance to escape.”
Jael Higg came down in a livid passion — altogether too near home to enjoy taking secondhand orders from an Indian in the dark. She was still less amused when she discovered that Grim knew her little scheme.
“Well, Jael,” he said, “you weren’t quite frank with me after all, were you? Which will you do now — stay in that hole up there with a double guard, or come into Petra with us and behave yourself?”