Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “On trust, and for a public purpose,” she retorted. “If I thought you’d pay your war-debts with it, I’d say take it, but I don’t believe your alleged statesmen ‘ud do that. They’d start a new war. If I find the treasure on my land and let you British have it, it’s to go to a board of trustees — gentlemen, not politicians.”

  “We can’t pledge the British Government, you know!”

  “Nobody can. Your politicos are as rotten as ours in the U.S. But you’ve some gentlemen, haven’t you, outside politics?”

  The financial member sat back and chuckled. The legal member stared. Norwood, the banker, walked across the room and chose another chair. Grim turned round to hide a smile and avoided looking at me for fear I would wink at him. The financial and the legal member exchanged glances.

  “Very well,” said the financial member, rising. “In our private capacity, speaking strictly unofficially, we agree to do our best toward that solution, if the treasure is there.”

  Joan Angela gave him no opportunity to hedge on that.

  “Good! Go to it, boys!” she said, smiling at I Grim and me. “Good night, all! I won’t keep Mr. Norwood waiting any longer.”

  CHAPTER XIV. “Please come quickly!”

  Joan Angela awfully resented having Narayan Singh dancing constant attendance on her. But Norwood and his wife were equally relieved, for it is no joke having a millionairess in your house with an Egyptian feud against her. Mrs. Watts occupied Joan’s suite at the hotel, and Joan was spirited away near midnight in a closed car, but Zegloush knew before morning where she was staying. Narayan Singh, surveying the world at large before breakfast, recognized the same old street-cleaner spy and his assistant who had hitherto loafed in our street and reported our doings.

  So when we called with a car to take her to view the property, that move was known to the enemy at once. Luckily they did not know of our interview with two members of the council, both of whom had left by a back way after midnight, provided with perfect alibis by Grim, who leaves as little to Lady Luck as can be managed.

  Have you ever seen a map of the Fayoum? It is an extraordinary section of flat country that was once a lake-bed. In places where water reaches it the soil is immensely fertile, and every yard of that is cultivated by the peasantry, who live in the usual stinking Egyptian villages among their hens and thriving insects. But the edge of the Fayoum is not at all regular, so that the desert crowds it much as a sand-beach holds back the sea, in curves and promontories, and wherever, for any reason, the irrigation stops short, there the desert encroaches.

  Joan Angela’s thousand acres were unquestionable desert on a promontory jutting into the Fayoum, so that within a few miles there were half a dozen filthy villages, containing on the average two or three hundred inhabitants apiece, scattered southward and south-eastward in an uneven semicircle. Toward the south west all was sand as far as the distant limestone hills.

  We started with the road to ourselves, except for peasantry bringing in their market stuff, but we began to be followed before long by two of those gorgeously painted, brazenly — trumpeting, sport-model cars in which the soul of the moneyed Egyptian delights. They kept behind us until, we left the avenue of lebbakh trees and the pyramid, and turned off into the desert. Then, though, they put on speed and passed, taking a line at an angle to ours, sufficiently close to us as they went by to disclose the fact that the leading car was driven by Zegloush himself. He turned his head to grin in our direction, and was evidently pleased that we should recognize him.

  Two of the men in the car behind were the identical police officers who had searched me in Shepheard’s Hotel, although on this occasion they were not in uniform; they even went so far as to raise their hands in a sort of mock salute, and if anything in the world was obvious it was that they were bent on mischief and equally bent on our knowing that they, and none others, were responsible for what was going to happen.

  As we had no weapons it would have been wise to return to Cairo, but Joan Angela would not hear of it. She said that coloured men were no more difficult to face than whites. You can’t argue with a woman when she owns millions, and you like her, and she sees, or thinks she sees a chance to benefit the wide world, so forward we went, losing sight of all except the dust of those other cars long before we reached Joan’s camp and found Atkins and his staff busy with their excavation.

  They had uncovered about twenty feet of what I looked like pavement, constructed of huge stone slabs, but it was much too wide to be a water- conduit, although Atkins swore he could hear water gurgling underneath. We slid down the sand to the bottom and listened, but could hear nothing, and Chu Chi Ying shook his head. He said it was too far to the southward by at least fifty yards, and not nearly deep enough below the desert level. Atkins had been trying to pry up one of the stones I with the meagre means at his disposal, but they must have weighed thirty or forty tons apiece.

  On Chu Chi Ying’s advice we staked out another sand-patch, seventy-five yards south, and told Atkins to pitch another marquee and dig there, promising to send him out a good gang with plenty of tools the next day. He went about pitching the marquee at once; but before his men had dragged the heavy canvas out from one of the wooden huts we learned what Zegloush and his friends had gone for.

  Warning came from the direction of the distant villages — sudden tumult — several hundred men advancing, roaring like a tidal wave and throwing up the sand in handfuls as they rushed. Their dust was like a battle-squadron’s smoke-screen. You could only see the sticks they carried brandishing above the cloud. But you could recognize their roar; there was no mistaking it — the very worst mob war-cry that there is.

  “La allah ilia Allah! La allah ilia Allah!”

  Get those sullen, stolid fellahin once shouting their blind creed in unison, and after that about the only argument worth using on them is machine-guns. There was no room for doubt as to which way they were coming, or what their business was; they were headed our way, and the business was to beat us with their long sticks into red mud that would by and by cockle in the heat and go blowing downwind, leaving broken bones for the jackals to come and crack.

  “I’ll bet you he’s been telling them,” said Grim, “that we’re here to lower the price of cotton in some ingenious way. Well — all aboard! Atkins, you and your gang had better climb on the running-board. We’ll pull our freight out ahead of them.”

  That was perfectly sound tactics. It was even possible that by driving slowly and keeping well in sight of the mob we might draw them away from the camp and save the wooden buildings from destruction. We were going to need those buildings to house labourers. Grim took the wheel, and instead of retreating made a circuit in the mob’s direction, merely keeping out of range of sticks and stones.

  We headed eastward and they changed direction, swooping after us. If there had ever been a doubt of their intention, there was none now. The fellah would always rather kill than burn; centuries of the kourbash under the rule of conquerors have taught him that violence should be applied to persons; he will kill, when aroused, with a ferocity that surpasses the ravening of animals, but, unlike folk who are a fraction less materially minded, prefers not to destroy what he would rather tear down and steal at his leisure.

  So it began to look like a mere amusing interlude, for they had no chance of catching us. We kept just sufficiently far ahead of them to draw them away from the camp. We were all laughing, when something went suddenly wrong with the engine; it heated up, the radiator boiled over, and we stopped. The mob yelled. Grim got the engine going again, but only for about a minute, and the second time we stopped the fellahin realized that we were in serious difficulty. Atkins got down and jerked up the engine-cover, and Grim and I climbed out. The roar that went up from the fellahin about three hundred yards away was the voice of ancient Egypt, as merciless as her scorpions and her sun-baked sky.

  “Damn bad pigeon!” remarked Chu Chi Ying, folding his arms on the mid-ship seat philosophically
.

  There was no time to discover what the trouble was. Atkins lined up his little party of drilled automatons and told them to wrench sticks away from the mob. Grim and I got the tools out, and made shift to do our utmost with a hammer and a wrench, passing to Atkins the short iron bar that belonged to the jack, and I dare say that between us we might have done some damage before the end came-especially as Narayan Singh contrived to tear loose the iron foot-rest from the floor of the car: given any kind of weapon, he was sure to kill half a dozen men before they overwhelmed him. Joan Angela got out of the car and stood behind me.

  “I’ll take your hammer when you’re down,” she I said quietly.

  The mob was not fifty yards away, and a stone or two had come whizzing in our direction, when Zegloush and the two cars appeared from behind the dust-cloud, charging through the mob, knocking them right and left and getting between the raging fanatics and us. The plain-clothes police officers had revolvers and used them, firing in the air, and the others stood up, waving their arms, shouting, haranguing.

  The mob checked sullenly-Egypt harking to the voice of her oppressors. But even so, nine or ten of them sprinted by and closed with us. We had our work cut out for a minute or two, for if you want to layout the angry fellah without killing him you’ve a scuffle on your hands. But, exactly as the hot wind dies after stirring up the desert into dusty hell, the mob grew sullen and submissive-not reasonable, you understand: it simply quit-ceased shouting, ceased throwing up the sand, and stood looking on possessed by a sort of contemptuous curiosity, and reeking to high heaven from the sweat on its filthy cotton clothing. That’s Egypt, sullen and fanatically fierce by turns — five thousand years of unmodified heredity, obedient to its robber-pasha, as it always has been, saying “Kismet! The pasha is the will of God!”

  Within five minutes, lashed by the tongue of Zegloush and his friends, they were off back to their villages at a dog-trot, pursued by the nine or ten whom we had bruised with our improvised weapons, and Zegloush drove up, smiling like a papier-mache Turk, to inquire whether anyone was hurt. He introduced himself to Joan Angela.

  “I am Zegloush Pasha. Are you Miss Leich? I am glad to make your acquaintance. You are fortunate to make mine! I have saved your life, and if you are wise you will save yourself some serious trouble by listening to me. Those friends of yours are not well qualified to advise you, for they don’t understand conditions. You have seen this morning what will happen if you try to excavate on that land that you are supposed to own. The fellahin resent interference by foreigners. Besides, your title to that land is very insecure, to say the least of it, so the best thing you can do is to sell it to me, for I understand these villagers and can manage them. I will pay you a reasonable price.”

  He was radiantly confident-beaming with self admiration — perfectly sure that we were now amenable — and sweating from his exhortation to the mob. The police in the car behind him were grinning like thieves who have got away with something.

  “I’m not in the least afraid of your mob,” Joan Angela answered.

  Grim and I were working at the engine; all that was wrong was a broken water-connection, which was easy enough to fix, and we had plenty more water in a goat-skin bag.

  “If you think you can frighten me, summon them back!”

  His tarboosh nearly fell off with astonishment.

  “My mob? What do you mean — my mob?” he demanded.

  “They came and went at your bidding,” she answered.

  His fat face darkened, and he showed his teeth in a venomous grin. “Ah! You think you are very clever, Miss American Hig-liff,” he sneered. “However, you shall see!”

  He drove off without another word, straight toward Cairo, putting on speed at risk to his expensive springs; and when we had fixed the broken joint with a piece of rubber piping, and had refilled the radiator, we returned to the camp, none of us, I think, feeling particularly confident except Joan Angela.

  “If I die for it, I’ll take care that that creature doesn’t have his way,” she said quietly.

  But Grim took her in hand then, in the little hot camp-office that Atkins had converted into quarters for himself, and a lecture from Grim carries absolute conviction. He assured her that we were all ready to see the venture through, but that the life of every one of us, hers included, was worth less than a day’s purchase unless she watched her step. He likened Egypt to a desert full of unseen cobras that strike without warning, and insisted above all else that she should take utmost advantage of Narayan Singh’s willingness to be her bodyguard.

  That part rankled. She had no objection personally to Narayan Singh, but she was too well used to her own way to be shepherded by anyone. The frankness and readiness to meet anyone face to face that were her best possible protection in a civilized land were hardly a protection against folk who don’t admire that kind of thing; but it was hard to make her see that.

  Another difficulty was that Narayan Singh, being a Sikh, was well aware of the usual attitude of white toward the dark — whatever the dark man’s creed or quality. He would not over-assert himself. His own self-respect would prevent him from chancing a rebuke, and it was likely to be easy for her to give him the slip if that was her intention. Grim urged her to make it her business to keep the Sikh within sight or reach.

  She promised, and she meant it, but habit is too hard to be overcome by a fifteen-minute lecture, even when Grim does the persuading, and I took Narayan Singh aside.

  “If she won’t listen, compel her!” I said. “‘I’m with you, if there’s trouble afterwards.”

  He laughed.

  “You and I are friends, sahib. I could take you by the throat and choke you into submission, if that were the only way, and no harm done. You could strike me, if I were mad and would not listen, and I would thank you for it afterwards. But with Miss Leich it is otherwise. She may strike me, if she wishes. If she gives an order, I shall obey. My life is at her service, I having pledged it. But I will lay no hand on her.”

  He was near enough right in his attitude to be proof against any argument of mine, and we had nobody else we could trust to protect her and who at the same time could act the part of household servant at the Norwoods’ without exciting comment, so there was nothing for it but to trust Dame Fortune-an untrustworthy jade. We drove back to Cairo, and arrived there probably three hours later than Zegloush and his party, well along in the afternoon; and three hours is a lot of time to allow to a mischievous, ambitious rascal who has influence, besides being plenty long enough for the impression made by a lecture to wear or.

  We picked up Mrs. Watts at the hotel, and drove her and Joan Angela to the Norwoods’ house, where we left Narayan Singh on guard. Then we returned to our own quarters to make arrangements for a labour gang, and Grim went off to interview the financial member of the council, to see whether he couldn’t arrange for British soldiers to be quartered at the camp as a precaution against further interference by the villagers. So I was all alone when, just about six o’clock in the evening, there began to be another of those swiftly rising, savage riots for which Cairo was always famous — riots that explain why there is always at least one British regiment under arms in the Citadel.

  It was a savage riot this time, as fierce as it was sudden — one of thirty that took place that year. The demagogues out of office were keeping the crowd stirred up, on the time-worn principle, or lack of it, that the political fishing is easiest in troubled waters. They called this particular thing a bread riot. Bread was the same price as usual, and the bakers were earning less than usual, but it suited somebody to have a riot, so the bakers had to suffer.

  Suffer they did, for the military could not protect them all at a moment’s notice. It had been known at headquarters for days past that a riot might break out at any time, but nobody had been able to foresee on whose helpless necks the fury of fend himself would do for a scapegoat. The mob was sore, and all the politicians had to do was to direct its insane anger at somebody.
They picked on the bakers as the easiest mark in sight, an appeal to the belly being irresistible.

  So up the streets the mob came howling, breaking in the bakers’ windows and plundering on their way, with lorries full of soldiers and machine-guns in hot pursuit-all arms loaded with blank for the present, as the mob knew perfectly.

  From out of my window I saw them drag one wretched Armenian baker from his cart, in which he had the loaves piled for his evening trade, beat him almost unconscious, drag him through his open shop door, and hurl him into his oven to bake to death. His screaming wife tried to drag the door open, so they hurled her in after him, and the British soldiers forced their way on the scene too late to do more than break a head or two with their rifle-butts and rescue two charred corpses. So far the soldiers had not fired a shot or used a bayonet, although most of them were bleeding. The butt and boot were the gist of their argument, and the mob was using anything within reach.

  In the midst of all that came Narayan Singh, three steps at a stride upstairs, bursting in, breathless. He said nothing, but his eyes looked wild, and he thrust forward a crumpled letter for me to read. There wasn’t much he could say in the circumstances. The letter ran:

  Dear Miss Leich,

  Please pardon my approaching you. I am in dreadful trouble. I recently married in America a Pasha who now turns out to have an establishment of three wives, all under one roof. He has my money. I have lost my citizenship and am helpless. He is ill-treating me, and I don’t know to whom to turn unless to you, in the hope that your generosity will send you to my aid. I am ill and unable to walk; I am not sure I have not been poisoned; but my tormentor is away from home at the moment, and if you could come and carry me away to some safe place I would be everlastingly grateful. The servants would admit a woman into the house, but they would be afraid to admit you if you had an escort, so please don’t think of bringing any men-folk, for that would mean the end of me. Bring another woman if you like. This servant, who, I think, is faithful, has orders to use my last remaining money to hire a carriage and bring you here, if you will come. Please come quickly. I know that if you don’t I shah be dead within a day or so. If you will come I will tell you the whole secret of your land in the Fayoum. I am vomiting. I think it is arsenic. Oh, do, please, come quickly! You knew me as — Isabel Aintree.