Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  I guess the French officers had good glasses with them, for Jeremy had hardly mounted when the advancing Algerians opened a hot fire on us. The whole division surely wouldn’t have blazed away, with machine-guns and all, at two cars and a man on horseback unless someone had passed the word along that Faisal was in full view.

  So Grim and I abandoned our car, driver and all, and jumped into Jeremy’s place. It wasn’t more than two hundred yards to the top of a gentle rise, over which we disappeared from view; and just as we bumped over it I wrenched out the white tablecloth in which René’s chicken and stuff was wrapped and waved it violently.

  Then, Lord, what a sight! Below us, sheltered between two flanking hillocks, was about a division of Faisal’s Arab infantry, packing up sulkily, preparing to follow the retreat. It was a safe bet the French didn’t know they were there, and I dare say the same thought occurred to every one of us the same instant. Mabel thought of it. I know I did. But Jeremy voiced it first, heeling his horse up beside us.

  “What do you say, Jim? I bet you I can rally that gang. Shall I lead ’em and lick hell out of the Algies?”

  But Grim shook his head.

  “You might, but the game is to pull the plug properly. Get this lot on the run. The less fighting, the less risk of drasticism when the French get to Damascus. Chase ’em off home!”

  So Jeremy did it; and that, I believe, accounts for a story that got in the newspapers about Faisal trying to spring a surprise on the French at the last minute. Some French officers in armored cars came over the brow of the hill in pursuit of us — three cars, three officers, three machine-guns, and about a dozen men. One car quit on the hill-top, so I suppose it broke down, but its occupants must have seen Jeremy careering up and down the line encouraging those sulky Arabs to get a move on, and I suppose they told tales afterwards to a newspaper correspondent at the base.

  Anyhow, the two pursuing armored cars didn’t dare come near enough to be dangerous until we had followed the retreating Arab regiments for about a mile, and the Algerians appeared over the hill-top, coming very slowly. A long-range rifle-fire commenced, the Arabs returning it scrappily as they retreated; and we made believe there were other regiments to be shepherded, steering a northward course downhill toward broken ground that couldn’t have suited our purpose better. By the way those armored cars came after us, keeping their distance, it was clear enough that they suspected an ambush.

  So we had a clear start and led them a dance in and out among boulders and the branches of a watercourse, Jeremy galloping ahead to spy a course out. Whenever they came in view we acted a little piece for them, making René wave the white cloth while I protected him and held off Mabel and Grim, who went through the motions of trying to brain me with pistol butts.

  Two or three times they opened fire, more by way of forcing a surrender, I think, than with any intention of hitting us; they wanted to take Faisal alive. It was like a game of fox and geese, and with Jeremy scouting ahead we could have kept them dodging us for hours if we hadn’t run out of gas.

  Then we abandoned the car and took refuge in a cave that stank as if it had been a tomb for generations. The French drew up their cars fifty yards away with machine-guns covering the cave mouth; and after we were sure they weren’t going to squirt a stream of lead at us, I went out with the tablecloth to negotiate terms.

  I didn’t want to go, but Grim seemed to think they’d understand my French.

  Of course, there wasn’t anything really to argue about, but I played for time, because every minute was of value to the real Faisal, speeding on his way to British territory. The French officer who did the talking for his side — a little squat, pale, pug-faced fellow, who gave the impression of having risen from the ranks without learning polite manners on the way, agreed to accept our surrender and spare our lives for the time being; and by that time the smell in the cave had nearly overcome our party, so they all marched out.

  And Lord! The French captain was spiteful when he discovered that Jeremy wasn’t Faisal after all. He swore like a wet cat, accused Mabel of being a spy, took away our basket of provisions, and I think would have shot Jeremy out of hand if Jeremy hadn’t started clowning and made the other Frenchmen laugh.

  Laughter and murder no more mix than oil and water. He did what he called a harem dance for them, misusing his stomach outrageously, and the incongruity of that by a descendant of the Prophet took all the sting out of the situation. But they burned our abandoned car in sheer ill temper before crowding us into their own. And they shot the good horse.

  The joy-ride that followed was rather like the kind they give pigs on the way to the sausage shop — hurried and not intended to be mirthful.

  “What’s the use of losing tempers?” I asked Captain Jacques Daudet, who had captured us.

  He sat on my knees, with his pistol pressed against my chest. “Why not regard the whole thing as a joke? You’ve done your best and nobody can blame you. Besides, what can possibly happen? What do you suppose they’ll do to us?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and his little cold blue eyes met mine.

  “You will all be shot, of course,” he answered. “After that ...”

  He shrugged his shoulders again. But he cast no gloom; for Jeremy kept the lot of us, French too, excepting Daudet, in roars of laughter for ten miles until we reached temporary headquarters, where a born gentleman in a peaked red cap with gold on it sat on a camp-stool directing things.

  He recognized Grim at the first glance and knew him for an American in British service. He looked Grim in the eye and smiled. We told our story in turns, interrupting one another and being interrupted by René. The officer turned on the banker savagely, ordered him sent to the rear, and smiled at Grim again.

  Then he picked up the banker’s belongings, including the two packages, and tossed them after him with an air of utter contempt.

  Whereat he smiled at all of us.

  “And you are quite sure that the Emir Faisal has escaped?” he asked.

  “Well, there are those whom the news will annoy, which is too bad, but can’t be helped. For myself, I cannot say that I shall shed tears. Madame ... “ He looked straight at Mabel. “Major ...” He met Grim’s eyes and smiled. “Messieurs ...” It was my turn, and Narayan Singh’s; his steady stare was good and made you feel like shaking hands with him. “Monsieur Scapin...” That was meant for Jeremy, and they both laughed. “You have been adroit, but do you think I could depend on your discretion?”

  We did our best to look discreet.

  “You see, Madame et Messieurs, this is not warfare. We desire to accomplish a definite object with as little unpleasantness as possible. I shall regret the necessity of sending you to Beirut, but that is for your safety. An additional and very sound precaution which you yourselves might take would be to preserve complete silence regarding the events of the last two days. Subject to that condition, you will be given facilities for leaving Beirut by sea in any direction you may wish. Do we understand one another? Good! Now, let me see whether I have your names correctly.”

  He carefully wrote them down all wrong, described us as noncombatants, who should be allowed to leave the country, warned Jeremy that in a king’s clothes he looked too “intriguing,” provided plain clothes for him, returned our belongings (except the basket of provisions, which he kept) and sent us off in an ambulance on the first leg of the journey to Beirut, whence we got away in a coastwise steamer within the week. “Not all the French are swabs!” said Jeremy grievously as we took our leave of him.

  Grim agreed.

  “Not all of ’em. Let’s see — there was the Marne, the Aisne, the Somme, Verdun...”

  THE END

  THE MYSTERY OF KHUFU’S TOMB

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I. Which is a kind of preface

  CHAPTER II. Moustapha Pasha

  CHAPTER III. “You talk like the British government”

  CHAPTER IV. Zoom of the Zee-Bar-Zee

  CHAPTE
R V. Zezwinski of the Zee-Bar-Zee

  CHAPTER VI. “A land in which death is not difficult, but life has its complexities”

  CHAPTER VII. “The answer is still no”— “Then go to the Devil!”

  CHAPTER VIII. “If you want to bet I’ll bet with you”

  CHAPTER IX. “Lent us by Ah Li Wan”

  CHAPTER X. “Whom Allah hath made mad let none offend”

  CHAPTER XI. “Too much water!”

  CHAPTER XII. “Damn-fool thinkee money good for dead man. Makee plenty more mistake”

  CHAPTER XIII. “Go to it, boys!”

  CHAPTER XIV. “Please come quickly!”

  CHAPTER XV. “Speak, o man of swift decisions!”

  CHAPTER XVI. “Cleopatra, who would have liked to sell Egypt’s soul again”

  CHAPTER XVII. Magnificent simplicity

  The first edition’s cover

  CHAPTER I. Which is a kind of preface

  We Americans are ostriches. We stick well meaning heads into the political sands of these United States, swear — probably correctly — they are better than all other sands, and accordingly declare ourselves free for ever from entangling alliances. “Struthio camelus,” whose plumes are plucked for market while his head, stowed snugly in a stocking, “sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil,” and who then struts about asserting that a plucked and smarting rump is fashionable, ought to be our national bird, not the all-seeing eagle.

  But this isn’t an effort to reform the United States. We’re the finest there is or ever was, only rather more entangled with the old world than we think.

  The Great Pyramid of Gizeh is older than the Declaration of Independence, and its claims continue to have precedence, our elected statesmen notwithstanding. Statesmen understand not much beyond the drift of popular opinion; but conspirators have always understood that the safest place to conspire in is the centre of the establishment they aim at.

  The men whose lives are spent mainly in the open are the widest awake. To assert the contrary is only another phase of the ostrich habit. If a man wipes his knife on the seat of his trousers and knows where the cinnamon bear will be rooting at six a.m., he’s not necessarily less enlightened than the fellow who thinks he knows what the editorials in the morning paper really mean. That partly explains why the best policemen come from the plough-tail and the woods, and cities don’t often produce Abe Lincolns.

  All this sounds rather far from Egypt and the Pyramid of Gizeh, but is not. Few people know or knew why the Great Pyramid was built. Hundreds of thousands toiled at the making of it, most of whom thought they knew, just as most of the people who take the subway in the morning think they know why, and are deluded. They believed what they were told. They were told what was considered good for them to think. The men who told them knew hardly any more but were getting a profit, and hard cash always did look like Euclid’s Q.E.D. But the men who really did know why the Pyramid was building held their tongues and toiled elsewhere, also for cash, except Khufu himself, who was the arch-type of perfect profiteers.

  Khufu was king of Upper and Lower Egypt in those days. Cash dividends did not trouble him much, for he had the taxes to draw on and auditors passed his vouchers without comment. Consequently the man in the street of to-day might be paying higher taxes on account of old Khufu, if Joan Angela Leich hadn’t just contrived to miss me with her Ford one dark night on the Geiger Trail; which sounds incredible.

  But so is Joan Angela incredible; I’m coming to her presently. Everybody knows her who isn’t fenced in by apartment-house blocks. If she had pushed me over the edge of the Geiger that night, you, who read this, would be paying for more armaments.

  But it was Khufu who started the trouble. He is better known to fame as Cheops, and we know pretty well what he looked like.

  He was a calm, proud, confident-appearing man, with an obvious sense of his own importance and a smile that seemed to say: “Carry on, boys. What’s good for me is good for you,” Being city folk, he had them all in one place where they had got to listen. Spell-binders laid the argument on thick in one direction; in the other the overseers laid on the lash; and the minstrels, who were the equivalent of the daily Press in those days, praised all concerned.

  But right here I’m going to be called in question by the Egyptologists unless I hasten to explain. It will be said with a certain amount of surface truth that the Egyptians who laboured at building the Pyramid were peasants on vacation. Work ceased in the fields when the Nile had overflowed, and they were kept out of mischief by thoughtful superiors, who provided wholesome amusement with educational value that incidentally promoted trade. When the Nile receded at the end of three months, those who had survived the education were permitted to return home and go to work in the fields again, in order to raise crops, with which to pay the taxes, that should keep the ball a-rolling and Jack Pharaoh’s pyramid a-building again next season. That is what the text-book writers will assert.

  But those peasants were city folk. Egypt was always one great straggling city, with one wide avenue — the Nile — running straight down the middle of it. Everybody lived on Main Street, and they all do still; there was, and is, nowhere else to live, and if the Nile were to dry up Egypt would disappear.

  Living on one long street, Egyptians all look alike, think alike, and react to the same inducement. You can’t change the Nile, but it will change you, and if you stay there long enough will pattern you until you resemble all the others. Egypt has been invaded scores of times, overrun, looted, conquered, and made to pay tribute; its women have been forced to intermarry with the conquerors, because they are beautiful women with the eyes of gazelles and with a properly respectful attitude toward the male; so the pure-blooded Egyptian no longer exists. Nevertheless, the Egyptian of to-day is exactly like the Egyptian of four thousand years ago, and so is Egypt, except that nowadays you see blue cotton dungarees in place of unbleached linen; a corrupt style of near-French architecture; and two streets instead of one, since the foreigner built the railway.

  Then, just as now, there was always a small crowd of foreigners running things, while the native Egyptian did the work. It was a foreigner who suggested the Great Pyramid to Pharaoh, and who doubtless drafted the design and got the contract. No Egyptian ever lived who was capable of designing it. Khufu provided the money and labour, but there is always someone pulling strings behind the autocrat.

  In a later Pharaoh’s day another foreigner, Joseph by name, thought of cornering corn. Still another foreigner, Lesseps by name, conceived the Suez Canal and put that through. Only the dirt was shifted by Egyptians because they are Egyptians, and the dividends go elsewhere for the same reason.

  You can’t change Egypt. Not even its religion has changed except on the surface. The religion of the educated classes century by century may be the nominal creed of the labourer, but it has never got under his skin. He was always a fatalist, always a believer in brute force, born, bred, beaten and buried on the Nile, and tributary to it all his days; and if you want to start trouble on the Nile now you can do it exactly as it was done in Pharaoh’s time.

  Pharaoh’s religion was more than perfunctory, or he would never have run the prodigious political risk of forcing gangs of a hundred thousand men to labour in three-month tricks for thirty year. The priests put him up to it, of course. Pharaoh believed that his future in the next world depended wholly on the amount of material preparation that he made for it in this.

  He was not only an arch-profiteer. He pyramided profits. He conceived the idea — or priests conceived it for him — of taking the next world by storm. He would be a king for all eternity. He would outdo all the aristocracy who had had themselves entombed in opulence for generations past.

  The peasantry — the real Egyptians, that is, who lived on Main Street and paid taxes or were whipped — were no more impressed by that theory than they are by the Sermon on the Mount to-day. They had a more pragmatic, Nile-mud point of view. They wondered, just as they do to-day i
f anyone propounds a theory to them, whether there was money in it. It was obvious to them that there was. There was their money in it. Every Pharaoh, and every high official who got buried, had as much of the tax money as he could scrape out of the treasury buried with him for his use in the next world. The dwellers on Main Street, preferring this world to the next, and having toiled in the sun for twelve hours a day to earn that money, did some good, plain, Nile-mud thinking; and the result was what you might expect.

  It can’t have been long before the insurance Companies, if there were any, who underwrote burglary risks on mausoleums went out of business. It got so that a Pharaoh’s mummy was hardly set stiff before the boys were out with pickaxes to break the door down and get the treasure out of the vault. It was no use putting a guard before the door, because you can always bribe the guard in Egypt, anyhow, and the guard, being peasants in uniform would be quite as anxious to get their share of the loot as anybody else. No doubt a few got caught and hanged, or flayed alive, or whatever was considered suitable for that offence in those days, but the number of kings’ and noblemen’s tombs that were not broken open and robbed was zero, and that was all about it. The cash went into circulation again.

  So succeeding kings and noblemen took thought. They appealed to the public sense of decency, only to find that there was none. They got the priests to threaten damnation in the next world as the sure penalty for robbing tombs, only to discover that the boys who did the robbing didn’t take much stock in the next world, anyhow, but were dead set on getting what small comfort could be had in this. The nobility raised the taxes, strafed whole districts with extra hard labour, issued proclamations, passed laws forbidding anyone below the rank of nobleman to be seen near a cemetery, imported guards from other countries-and all to no effect. Bury a Pharaoh, and the boys got away with his baggage, as often as not in broad daylight, almost before he’d started on his journey to the world beyond.