The Sacrifice

by Sarban

  They followed; it now occurred to them to wonder why there were no signs of an encampment there by the water, where there was herbage for the horses and shelter and shade. They looked up expecting to see the rest of the nomads on their way down, but there was not a soul in sight between the lofty cliffs except their guide and themselves.

  The cliff they approached was deeply eroded and broken. Great masses of rock jutted out, almost free of the main cliff and inclining to it like buttresses. The nomad led them round one such mass and they found themselves then before a deep, narrow fissure which appeared to cleave the wall of the defile from top to bottom. There was just room for one person to pass into the fissure at a time. The nomad went in, beckoning back to them.

  ‘What’s in here do you suppose?’ Nicola whispered.

  ‘Search me! Their camp, perhaps. I should think they’ll probably want us to have some food with them.’

  ‘Well, that’s an idea. Press on!’

  They followed close behind the native for twenty or thirty yards and then stood gazing about them in wonder. The fissure had led them into the bottom of a roughly circular natural shaft, open at the top, but so deep that the light was subdued. It felt cool as a well, and there was a delicious moistness on the dark rock which fed a vegetation of small ferns and flowering plants rooted in its cracks. The floor was sandy, but almost entirely covered by a creeping, bright green succulent plant with tiny white flowers.

  Opposite them was another opening in the rock: a lofty rounded arch, so symmetrical that it might have been hewed by hand instead of being hollowed out by some attritive process of water and sand.

  There was still no sign of any camp, but for a few minutes they did not think of that. They wandered about, crunching the fat, sappy stems beneath their feet, looking at the little rock plants and exclaiming with incredulous delight at the contrast between that shadowy coolness and the lifeless, blistering rocks of the desert outside.

  Their guide startled them by raising a clear, short cry which went echoing round and round the shaft high up overhead. He had crossed to the dark arch and stood there, as if awaiting someone.

  In immediate response, a figure emerged from the dusk of the arch, and without hesitation approached the girls, who stood stock-still in amazement, sure now that they were in the hands of no ordinary desert tribe.

  It was a girl who came across to them, unveiled, smiling and stretching out an arm in welcome and invitation. She was of a light complexion and of a similar cast of features to the Berber women they had seen in the Atlas; she was handsome and had the same erect bearing as they have. But her dress was unlike their nomad guide’s and unlike any they had ever seen elsewhere.

  Her head covering was a kind of helmet made of shining bronze scales, and from that, at the back and sides depended a veil made of fine mesh of some metallic thread. Her outer garments were light and loose, so thin that they revealed a close-fitting under-tunic which had the appearance rather of some extraordinary light and pliant hauberk made of overlapping scales. This tunic glinted with a bronze and silver sheen through a long gown of sea-green gauze. Her black hair was done in two thick plaits, braided with gold thread, which were brought forward over her shoulders and hung upon her bosom. Round her shoulders was thrown a wide cloak of filmy blue-green stuff so fine that it floated on the air about her at every movement. She wore sandals of white leather with long straps which were bound cross-wise round her legs almost to the knee.

  Hanging from her left shoulder by a thick green cord and visible when her cloak swung back was a short sword with an ivory hilt in a leaf-shaped scabbard of green leather. Alison looked at the weapon, carried as she had never seen a sword carried before, under the armpit, and from that to the long-bladed barbed spear in the nomad’s hands, and while she allowed the girl to take her by the hand and draw her towards the arch in the rock she could not return her smile for the strange wonder that was beginning to possess her.

  No one spoke. The girl led them out of the subdued light of the shaft into a cave where for a minute or two they could see nothing at all. Then, as their eyes adapted themselves they saw that they were in a high, seemingly natural cavern, the walls of which glistened faintly with moisture. From ahead there filtered a diffused, faintly greenish light which strengthened as they advanced. On turning a corner abruptly they stopped and stood blinking in a soft brilliance.

  An immense natural hall, so high that they could only dimly make out its roof, was lit by reflected sunlight pouring in from the surface of the lake through a cloister of rock columns which seemed partly natural, partly hewn and dressed by human hands. The rest of this great chamber appeared, however, to have been left untouched by tools; the walls were for the most part of a white, crystalline rock which caught the indirect, wavering light and flashed it back in innumerable tiny gleams of cold blue and green; the floor was a confusion of water-worn boulders of all sizes, white, cream and honey-brown veined with green and black. Through the middle rushed a torrent of glassy green water boiling into white foam round the boulders and roaring away to the lake through channels tunnelled beneath the cloisters.

  From the edge of the broad ledge of rock on which their new guide led them out they looked straight down into the rushing river. Its swirling speed made them giddy; they spoke, but its roar drowned their words. Water was the dominant force here, as absolute a lord of its own hollow, glimmering, cool-coloured world as the sun over his desert above them. The river was a lord of life: seeing it there in its own sounding cavern that it had hollowed out of the perdurable rock, they felt its terrible strength—an alliance of invincible impetuosity with invincible Time; but they had come to it now with a knowledge of the cruelty of its rival, fire, and though its power awed them, they perceived its beneficence. All about the rocky gates by which it burst out of the mountain, grew velvet mosses and delicate ferns, drinking the fine spray it flung them as it hurtled in foaming rapids out to its kingdom and its dependent subjects peopling the placid depths of the lake and its green islands.

  They had lost their veiled nomad now. The girl with the bronze helm led them through the cloisters, where they felt the rock underfoot shake with the thunder of the river’s escape, and on to a part of the lake shore which lay in the shadow of a tall cliff. Here, human handiwork, which they had doubtfully guessed in the cloisters, was clearly apparent. There was nothing yet that they could call design, but a people capable of mason-work on a colossal scale had completed a kind of vast, irregular terrace which nature seemed originally to have sketched out roughly with broad ledges of red, creamy and white stone and great, isolated flat rocks. The terrace was deeply indented with bays and inlets, pools full of mauve water-hyacinths and flowering reeds over which big scarlet and blue dragon-flies hovered and darted. Out in the lake where the water looked a deep blue-green, floated white and gold lotus flowers; their view across its surface was closed by beds of reeds and innumerable rushy islands. About the terrace and its pools there stalked tame water-fowl, black and white ibises, spoon-bills, stilts and flamingos, and over the lake pied kingfishers hung on their fluttering wings or dropped like stones to splash and rise again with a fish in their bills.

  They could not see along the shore. In front, the terrace was terminated by the cliff projecting well out into the lake. It went sheer down into the water and it was pierced by numerous loopholes and arches opening into galleries which ran deep into the rock. Their guide led them in. The light was dim and greenish, the air cool and the rock walls smooth and moist to their hands. Everywhere, all the time, there was a sound of water, splashing and rippling in little channels near at hand or rambling and surging distantly in great volumes in some hidden tunnels of the cliff.

  After passing through a number of outer galleries, which were illuminated from the lake and hung with delicate, climbing verdure and soft mosses, they descended a dusky staircase and were brought into a chamber which must have been on the level of the water or partly below it, for the light came dif
fusedly down through long shafts cut slanting upwards from its domed roof. The chamber was high and roughly circular in shape; the rocks in which it was hollowed were predominately green and brown with irregular veins of red. In the centre of the roof had been left a great pendant boss of stone where a seepage of water glistened and gathered to form a tiny thread that trickled and dropped with clear, sweet notes into a basin cut in the floor beneath.

  Here there were signs of a more developed art: ledges at the foot of the wall had been so cut and smoothed as to form stone benches, and there was a low round table made of a single polished slab of stone. Then, almost opposite the opening by which they had come in was a lofty arch closed for three-quarters of its height by double gates of so curious a design that they walked over to examine them more closely. They were a lattice-work composed of variously coloured pebbles each about the size of a hen’s egg and ground to present a flat surface showing the intricate figure of their vari-coloured substance. The pebbles were arranged in symmetrical patterns joined by short spindles of turned bronze and the whole was held in a massive bronze frame. Beyond these lattice gates the passage or alcove was pitch-dark.

  They turned to look round the chamber again, but wheeled back to the gates, startled by a calm voice speaking to them from beyond the lattice, in English.

  ‘Welcome to the Lake,’ it said. ‘Ah! You are surprised to hear your own language? Forgive me if I do not fully introduce myself just now. According to the custom of the country the host should not obtrude himself on his guests. I have just heard that my people were fortunate enough to get you out of the way of the sandstorm in time, and I have come quickly to assure you that everything will be done to help you and your companions. I expect at any moment to have news of your friends. Rest assured that some of my people will have seen them and guided them to safe shelter. Nothing can stir on the desert within a hundred kilometres of this place without my people knowing it. Meanwhile I have told my servants to see to your comfort. When you are refreshed and rested I will come and make acquaintance with you properly.’

  It was a man’s voice, deep and not unpleasing. The English was fluent and accurate, but not spoken as an Englishman speaks it.

  The two girls in their amazement could not find an immediate reply, and when Alison, taking a step or two towards the lattice gates, stumblingly thanked the speaker and asked in whose house they were, there was no reply. Their host had apparently withdrawn as soon as he had finished speaking.

  The reassurance, however, was comforting. They were vastly relieved to know that more of the nomads had been out and that the Riggs family were in all probability being sheltered and looked after. The anxiety that had prevented their full and free appreciation of their adventure was lifted. They turned smiling to the girl who had brought them, and followed when she beckoned them, their tongues loosened to marvel at the strangeness and the excitement of what had happened to them.

  In Marrakesh and Rabat they had been told stories of magnificent palaces built by rich pashas and caids in the Atlas; they had a chance to peep into one such building in Mazagan; but even without an English resident’s comments they would have detected the artificiality of those places—built to the plans of French architects who had copied the designs of old Moorish work, and fitted with Western plumbing and American bars. They had been told, too, that the sons of the tribal chieftains in the Sahara had all been educated in Paris; that if they were entertained by a sheikh in their journey they would be given an imitation of a meal that might be served in a Riviera hotel; and that they would see Cadillacs in the oases.

  Five days of Saharan travel had seemed to show that the truth lay somewhere aside from both romance and its debunking. They had seen no palaces since leaving the Atlas, and no Cadillacs in the desert: they had been offered entertainment by Arabs in the oases, but had been happy to evade accepting it; the diet of Saharan sheikhs, as they had observed it, consisted principally of greasy boiled grain and flies.

  They had from the outset determined to adopt a firmly unromantic attitude, and had rather spoilt the sport of those who were eager to disillusion a pair of adventurous young girls by replying that they did not expect anything of the Sahara except sun and sweat and dust and boredom. Secretly they had not believed in the boredom. They had exaggerated that to themselves as they had privately thought that most people exaggerated the danger of the desert.

  Now they had been vividly shown the desert’s power: it could be dangerous beyond anything that all except a few of their informants themselves could conceive. And as their peril had surpassed all they could have imagined, so had their rescue from it.

  The chance that had sent them deliverers from a troglodyte tribe dwelling in cool caverns by an unmapped lake was fantastic: in their hearts they exulted over the adventure and drank in its strangeness, its difference from all they had ever read or heard, with enthusiasm and wondering delight. Their determination to be severely unromantic was left with their luggage in the jeep. They confessed to each other a jealous reluctance to have the Riggs and the Viljoens share their discovery. The pretence that they were not really doing anything extraordinary or exciting in driving across the Sahara was quite abandoned. Alison admitted the excitement of real exploration and set herself to observe every particular of the place and its inhabitants for her diary and her letters. One of the first people she would write to when they reached the Niger was Capitaine Duncan. He, perhaps, or Colonel De l’Aubespine, must know something about the tribe and its English-speaking chief.

  They were taken to a bath house deeper in the rock than the circular chamber, and there, in great troughs of polished cream and olive-green stone, they plunged in flowing water so chill it made them gasp and shout and set their blood dancing with exhilaration. When its first shock had worn off they lay soaking, revelling in the unbelievable coolness, watching the pale reflected light waver in shimmering bands over the aqueous tints of the polished stonework round them. They dawdled long over their bath, examining and trying out the contents of many alabaster jars they found on the shelves: perfumed soaps and oils and unguents that were instantly soothing to their sand-stung skin.

  Idly they noticed that some other figures in loose garments passed and repassed in the shadows at the far end of the bath, and when, finally, they left the water and wrapped themselves in the big towels their guide had provided, they found that not only had their own clothes been brushed, but that two complete sets of native robes had been laid out for them. They held the light, gauzy tunics up and spread them over their arms, admired the fineness of their texture and the delicacy of their shades of blue and green and grey, but, with a trace of regret, decided to wear their own travel-stained slacks and cotton shirts.

  When they returned to the circular chamber they found two or three other girls in attendance on them, all so like their guide that they might have been sisters, but wearing, instead of her curious tunic of metallic scales, loose trousers of soft, semi-opaque white stuff and an outer gown of grey-green gauze belted with a silver girdle.

  These made them signs to be seated on cushions they had laid on the stone divan and then they brought in to them a succession of dishes of glazed red earthenware, each with a conical cover of plaited straw, which, being removed, allowed a savoury odour to escape and offer its own invitation to fall to. The meal consisted of eight or nine such dishes, all consisting of fish or small birds, dressed in a variety of ways, with many sauces. There was no bread, but a great platter of boiled grain soaked in melted butter, like couscous, was brought in. They had not been expected to have the knack of eating with their fingers: two heavy silver spoons had been laid on the table, and with these they ate from every dish as it was put before them, until, by the sixth or seventh, they could do no more than dip their spoons and touch their lips with them. They were given to drink a syrupy wine, which they mixed plentifully with water in big goblets of thick green glass, and when they had at last conveyed to the serving girls that they could eat no more,
water was brought in a bronze ewer for them to wash their fingers in. The whole apparatus of the meal was simple, and there was nothing whatsoever from Europe. The silver spoons and the basins were obviously of native workmanship, though of a far higher standard than similar things they had seen in their short excursion into the bazaar of Marrakesh.

  On another part of the stone ledge there had been laid some thick mattresses with covers of a cool satin-like material, but neither Alison nor Nicola felt any desire to sleep. The coolness of the place was still so novel to them and the chill water of the bath had made them alert and inclined for action; they did not know how short a time they might have in these caves and they wanted to explore, not waste the afternoon in a siesta. They prowled round the chamber for a few minutes, wondering whether it would be discourteous to make a move to go out by themselves.

  The girl with the helmet, who had remained by the entrance to the chamber when the other servants had left, now made a sign to them, holding up her fingers with the tips bunched together as if bidding them listen or wait for something. She then crossed over to the lattice gates and opened them.

  The alcove beyond was slowly illuminated by a soft golden glow of reflected sunlight, and they heard their host’s voice speaking to them again from within, inviting them to come near.

  They entered the alcove and the girl closed the gates behind them.

  It was a small oblong room, no wider than the arch by which they entered it, but very high. The rock that formed its walls and floor was pale-coloured, smooth and highly polished and the sunlight illuminating it entered by three or four round shafts opening in a row high up in one of the walls. Light also filtered through an intricately worked screen of ivory which stretched entirely across the further wall from a height of four feet or so above the floor upwards for some eight or nine feet. Below this screen or lattice window was a broad divan piled with soft cushions.