Swords From the Sea

by Harold Lamb

  "Well, it can do us no harm now," said Marie.

  By sunset it seemed as if they had escaped any harm. Ahead of them rose the pyramid peak that Paul remembered as towering over the gulf of Bomba. Selim, too, picked out his last landmark-a miracle of green, an island of foliage in the waste. He chanted its name, the Well of the Ga zelles. He described its water, bubbling up from the rocks and flowing in a stream.

  The stumbling horses scented moisture on the wind and thrust out sweat-flecked heads. Not for six weeks had beast or man come upon a flowing spring. The ache and fever of thirst sharpened in them, as they rode into a stand of poplars, with high grass underfoot.

  The Well of the Gazelles lay in a natural cistern of eroded rock, flecked by shade. Selim, urging his mount ahead, started to swing down to the pool. Then he paused, motionless.

  "Ahai!" he shouted, and turned in the saddle to strike at the head of Marie's pony and turn it back.

  In the clear water floated two bodies. Their limbs spread out, their heads bent down as if trying to peer under them. They had been stripped of clothing.

  When Marie had drawn away, the janizary pulled out the nearest body, finding it cold to the touch, but not long dead. Attentively he examined the mottled face from which the eyeballs projected. With difficulty he pulled loose a thin silk cord that, knotted under the chin, had strangled the man.

  "Pashalik," he growled, pointing from the body back toward the east. The two had been the riders of Hamer Pasha, who had failed to rejoin the command. They had been killed not long since, and left where Eaton would find them, if he got that far.

  They drank heavily of the cold water, after piling loose stones on the dead Arabs. As they climbed from the oasis up to the headland overlooking the coast, they saw no signs of human beings near them. The flame of sunset crept higher, lighting the natural towers of rock along their way.

  Coming out on the far slope several hundred feet above the sea, Paul examined the line of the horizon slowly. The sea was turning dark as the glow faded to an amber hue on the higher clouds. No ship was visible.

  Until the first stars showed, southerly, Paul waited, reckoning that Hull might have taken the Argus far off the shore, with a stiff breeze blowing. The sea had looked choppy. The cautious Hull might not have cared to anchor for the night.

  When he set about gathering what wood he could find, Selim came close to peer at him, and then to stand in his way exclaiming.

  "He will have no fire lighted," the girl explained wearily. "It will show up and down the coast, and draw the Tripolitans to us. He thinks they are not far away."

  Paul knew that to be true. But it was necessary to light a beacon at once, so long as it might possibly be noticed by a lookout at sea.

  The beacon also must be clear and bright. When he had struck sparks from the flint and pan of his musket into a sprinkling of powder, and the flames ate into his pile of combustibles, Selim snarled and picked up his musket to strike out the blaze. He had been sullen since he had seen no American vessel awaiting them.

  Paul did not try to hold the janizary back. Instead, he stepped between him and the fire, with his musket across his knees. The big man hesitated, and the blaze caught, whirling up from the brittle thorn-bush. In a moment they were framed against its glow.

  Shots flashed at them, from near at hand. Sparks flew up as a bullet struck the burning wood. Paul thought the shots came from three or four weapons, from the side behind the screen of darkness.

  A glance showed him that the ground around the fire offered no cover. "Uphill!" he called and motioned to Selim.

  Keeping Marie between them, they ran from the circle of light, into masses of boulders and rubble. Above them the glow revealed the face of a cliff.

  No more shots came out of the night. Paul imagined their unseen adversaries reloading calmly, watching their scrambling climb up the treacherous broken rock. He halted Selim to listen, and heard nothing.

  "We can't climb much farther," whispered Marie.

  Paul nodded. Below them their beacon flared bright. He thought: They came from the well and waited to close in on us; now they must be waiting for darkness again, to attack here.

  Already they had led off the horses, or the beasts had run off, frightened by the shots. While Paul tried to renew the priming of his musket, his hand shaking with excitement, the light began to fade. The fire was burning out.

  Selim crouched listening, trusting to his ears, not his eyes. Although the three of them had made a great clatter in their dash up the slope, their enemies had made no sound to disclose their position.

  Paul realized that his own position was bad as could be, and that he had only a few moments to remedy it. Marie was sitting passive by him, her face a white blur turned up to him. She had found a long flat stone to sit on. And he noticed the edges of other flat stones ascending like steps behind her.

  Instinctively he glanced up. Above the peculiar stones a dark patch showed in the sheer wall of rock. A cleft or cavern it must be-except that it seemed to be square.

  When the fire below them dimmed to embers, he touched Selim's arm. Pulling the girl to her feet, he led her up the course of stones, feeling his way around loose rocks. After a moment his foot came down on a level space of stone, and he could make out nothing in front of him, although his shoulder brushed against smooth rock. The cliff seemed to open here in front of them.

  Before the boy could investigate further, the janizary gripped him in sudden warning. Paul could see nothing beyond the muzzle of his musket. But he heard movement outside in the darkness below him.

  On either side a faint rasping of stones drew closer. Aiming blindly at the sounds, Paul fired his musket-glimpsing by the flash the shapes of crouching men and the gleam of metal below.

  Selim did otherwise. With an ear-splitting yell he swung his musket at the climbers and leaped after it, his scimitar rasping out of its sheath. His war cry resounded again, and loose stones slid away beneath him. A man yelped, and another voice barked a command. The racket diminished into silence.

  Presently the janizary climbed back, panting and carrying his musket again. He rumbled excitedly.

  "He says," Marie interpreted, faintly, "he killed one or two, but the others ran away."

  Whatever the janizary had done, he had startled and driven back their invisible assailants. The slope below them remained quiet.

  Paul availed himself of the respite to examine their niche in the cliff, finding it to be a dozen feet deep and oddly square. Since the opening was no wider than the stretch of his arms, he started piling the loose stones into a barricade at the edge. Selim helped him silently, and it pleased Paul that the janizary accepted his leadership, in even a small thing like that. But it puzzled him that some of the stones should be square, obviously shaped by man-made tools.

  At the same time Marie discovered that the center of their crypt was occupied by something massive and hollow made of smooth marble.

  It felt like a long chest, as high as the boy's waist. The top of the chest lay broken in several parts on the floor, which was littered with debris of tiles and bricks. Paul had never encountered anything like the vast marble chest. He tried to jest about it. "We will put you in it, mademoiselle, if our fort is attacked again."

  Her low laugh echoed in the darkness. "Be careful! You might put me in my grave."

  This space around them that he had walled in so carefully she thought to be an empty tomb, one of the many that honeycombed the heights in Africa. The marble chest she called a sarcophagus.

  It made the strange girl merry, that he should not have guessed how he had got them into a tomb, which might hold them forever.

  "Have you no fear?" he demanded.

  She became quiet. "I am sick with fear," she admitted, her voice taut. "But you and Selim are doing what you can. There is nothing more we can do." After a moment she said as if to herself: "If the help of God comes to us, then we will not be harmed."

  When he thought she had go
ne to sleep, he heard her whispering and went closer to hear.

  "Holy Mary of the Seas," Marie was praying, "give aid. Thou who dwellest in the stars, hear me ..."

  Quietly he moved back to the entrance of the tomb. Marie had her religion, and she seemed to believe that prayer would aid them in some way-when they had nothing to eat but shreds of dry meat tucked away in Selim's girdle, and no water to suffer their aching throats to get down the hard meat. They were cut off from the sea, cornered where the Tripolitans could be reinforced from the countryside.

  Two days must pass, Paul reckoned, before Eaton's column could reach the gulf of Bomba.

  Although he stared out into the haze of moonlight until it danced like mist before his tortured eyes, he could perceive no movement on the slope beyond the tomb. As the moon swung westward, the stone lintel over the entrance took shape, with a pattern cut into it. The pattern formed into Greek letters, Paul thought.

  He felt then as if he had visited the site before, although he had never been ashore at Bomba. Something about the tomb on the mountainside facing the sea was familiar ... Eugene's words-the treasure trove, the gold-plated walls, and the jewel-inlaid sarcophagus of the African prin cess, Cleopatra. There was little left of such a treasure because it had been broken into, ages before.

  Then he remembered that Eugene had passed this spot on the coast, and must have noticed the entrance of the ravaged tomb. Why, then, had the Tyrolese hinted at loot to be found here? It was another riddle that Paul was too weary to solve.

  Beneath him Selim lay on his cherished cloak, breathing evenly, sleeping as calmly as if the three of them were not pinned on a cliff under the watch of the outposts of Derna ... Eugene had called the place the Tomb of the Outlander.

  At a touch on his shoulder, Paul lifted his head with an effort to look out into morning mist that cleared slowly to reveal no vessel standing in to the white line of the heavy swell.

  Beyond the low wall of stones Selim and Marie were motioning to him, kneeling over a flat slab of marble.

  "A gift of water," she called to him.

  The marble was a portion of the lid of the sarcophagus, lying in the vine-covered rubble outside. A shallow trough had been incised in its surface, and the trough still held a little rainwater. This had been meant for the birds, Marie said. Sometimes those who planned their stone caskets ordered such hollows made so that the birds might find water there for ages.

  It cheered her to find what she called a gift. Paul thought of the clear spring within a mile of them that they could not attempt to reach. They could only sit in their crypt and wait for the Tripolitans to appear in force. Then they would have no alternative but surrender.

  When the sun burned away the mist, he looked for a long time at one point in the haze along the skyline. Out of the haze a ship appeared with tops'ls set in what he took to be a light breeze. When he was certain, he said: "There is the brig Argus, standing in."

  Leisurely and gracefully the dark vessel with the crowded white canvas ran the length of the gulf and back, keeping her offing. By her actions Paul knew that Isaac Hull was searching for the men who had made the signal the night before. A masthead lookout could have observed no more than a splinter of light on the horizon. Probably officers who had telescopes on the afterdeck were patiently studying the bare escarpment of the coast, puzzled because the signal had not been repeated.

  All morning the shore below the tomb had been deserted. If the Trip olitans had remained, after the appearance of the ship, they were careful to keep out sight.

  Just before noon the Argus came into the wind and swayed up a boat. Pulling away, the boat headed for the shore at a point near the Well of the Gazelles. The oars moved leisurely, as if the cutter were performing some routine duty. Evidently that duty was not to replenish water casks, because the cutter turned to follow the shore without approaching it.

  Selim watched it with impassive curiosity, while Marie, lying against the barricade, questioned Paul impulsively. Were not the Americans coming to shore? Couldn't some signal be made to bring them in?

  To all the questions he shook his head. One cutter's crew would not be apt to risk a landing. He imagined Hull, puzzled by the silence of the shore, warning the officer at the tiller not to venture within musket shot. Hull handled his ship and crew with efficiency.

  Nor could the men in the cutter distinguish any waving of clothes on the face of the cliff, almost a mile distant. They would be watching the beaches-

  As the cutter neared him, Paul made his decision. It seemed impossible that any of their antagonists could be hidden still in the boulders below their vantage point. He had been marking the course of a brush-strewn gully that led down to the water. In five minutes, that could bring him out within sight of the boat, which would be passing it.

  When he explained that to the girl, she pointed to the slab of marble, saying: "We have water. Can't we wait?"

  He had only a few moments to act. Unreasoning hope buoyed him. She lay without moving, whimpering a little as if in distress, and he did not think until afterward that she had grown too weak to stand up.

  As he crawled down from the ledge, his musket slung over his shoulder, a fever of eagerness gripped him. Although his feet slipped on the smooth rocks and he had to catch at the brush to keep from falling, he heard nothing else stirring near him.

  The gully proved to be the dry bed of a stream. When he thought he was close to the shore, he began to run. Scrambling through boulders, he dropped heavily into a sandy hollow. He heard the wash of the sea.

  Then he saw the man lying in his way. A lean body, face down without any weapon-wounded or asleep.

  Taking his musket in his hand, Paul walked to the prone figure and bent over it, tensed to swing down the butt of the gun if the man moved.

  As he did so, he heard the swift impact of feet behind him. Instantly the figure beneath him twisted over. A brown arm lashed up at him with a knife. Paul warded the sweep of the blade with his gun.

  Then he was struck between the shoulders, the blow sickening him. Arms grappled him, and sharp metal thrust deep under his ribs. He found himself on his knees in the sand, and he heard voices arguing above him.

  He strained to pull himself up. Then to his surprise he found he could not move. A foot thrust against his shoulder, turning him over.

  Against the glare of the sky four heads wrapped in gleaming cloths bent over him. Hadjali's foot stirred him curiously, as if he had been a trapped animal.

  Chapter Eight

  One of the oarsmen in the cutter sighted movement in the shallow ravine as they passed. He told the officer at the tiller that it looked like a gray horse loaded with a pack. But when the officer, Midshipman George Washington Mann, observed the mouth of the ravine, he could make out nothing moving. He held the cutter on its course, carrying out his orders to observe the shore for a recognition signal.

  His orders carried out, Midshipman Mann rejoined his vessel and reported in a voice that he tried to keep deep and sonorous that he had made out no sign of friend or enemy within the African wilderness. Flushed with excitement, he held himself stiff in his short jacket and flowing tie before the commander, who at the mature age of twenty-two had been at sea for eight years, and in action against the enemy.

  For a chance at such action Midshipman Mann would have offered up his right hand cheerfully. Instead, he had been kept on the Argus for six weeks, everlastingly holding within sight the landmark of a solitary pyramid peak.

  The next morning, in fair sailing weather, they sighted movement on shore far to the east. The telescope picked up scattered men approaching like grazing animals, stooping to pick at the ground. Except for tiny specks that were blue coats among them, and the glint of metal from a field gun, there was nothing to identify them as General Eaton's force.

  When the cutter was beached at the east point of the gulf, Midshipman Mann went ashore, to be greeted by wildly shouting Arabs and an officer of Marines who had lost the buttons
from his coat.

  Holding out his hand, the officer said: "Trade you this for salt pig, beans, barley, and brandy." His hand held wisps of dusty fennel. "Two days' rations, George."

  The voice issuing from the clay-stained figure with the scrub of a beard on its sun-blackened head was that of Lt. Presley N. O'Bannon, detailed at Alexandria to escort General Eaton.

  "Aye-aye, sir," piped the midshipman worshipfully.

  Marie was conscious that friendly Arabs swarmed over the barricade of stones and ransacked the tomb noisily, churning among broken bricks and pottery as if searching for something. They besieged Selim with their cries, who swore by the ninety and nine holy names of Allah that he had driven a hundred Tripolitans from the tomb.

  Then the unwearied janizary was carrying her down the slope where Paul had ventured out to the ship, and had disappeared. Selim edged around a nest of boulders and set her down in a sandy hollow where two of their Bedouins squatted to peer at a crisscross of tracks.

  These desert men explained that their herds had been left to graze near the dead city, and that they had followed the Drub-Devil for nearly three days without food. But the tracks of the valuable horses held their eyes. One horse of the six, they declared, had been shod. And one man of the five who entered the hollow had worn shoes instead of slippers.

  Taking up sand from a dark patch on the ground, the Bedouins sniffed it and swore that blood had run into the sand here. Selim and Marie recognized Paul's tracks, knowing that he had been taken off by the riders-still alive, Selim thought, or his body would have been stripped and left for the vultures.

  The Bedouins hurried off after the horse tracks, looking like a pair of vultures themselves, hoping to come upon some discarded article or a stray beast. Marie did not want to look at the stains in the trampled sand where ants swarmed. When Selim brought her fresh water and grapes in two new shining cups, she felt better. He said there were two ships now instead of one, and piles of stones on the beach, and she should go and eat more. Himself, he thirsted for a taste of the wine in the Americans' kegs.