by Harold Lamb
Jacob took the packet. "It's Bigsby's," he said, wondering why she did not ask what had happened that morning. He had wanted to tell her. Now she stood in invisible armor, her thoughts hidden, challenging him.
"Sealed orders from him to you?" Her words had a bright anger in them. His eyes sought the delicate line of her throat rising from the loose lace of her dress. "Shall I put on the spurs, too, Jacob?"
In sudden anger his arm reached out to her. His hands gripped her shoulders, and his lips pressed hard against hers, as if by gripping her close to him he could break down the unseen armor and melt the hard brightness. He felt the softness of her hair and body, and felt that her lips were still against his. Then, ashamed, he let her go, and heard her voice, unchanged, "Was that quite satisfactory ?"
Mechanically he bent to pack the envelope in his kit, then transferred it to his coat pocket. Michal had gone out the open door and he thought that she would be sitting in her chair. He had to go out to say something to her. When he reached the door, he found that she was not on the veranda. Searching the garden, he sighted her on the path where the black goat grazed. And he noticed two saddled horses inside the gate. Jemail came up to take his bag, and he followed the servant.
On the garden path Michal kneeled with her back to the gate, listening curiously. Idly she prodded the earth with a trowel, tracing a pattern around the familiar line of jonquils. It was a familiar pattern, and the flowers had no meaning because they would be there exactly the same on the morrow. Yes, it was a very familiar pattern; Jacob had gone as Aurel had gone.
When she heard a step on the path she stopped digging. Mr. Parabat, smiling with pleasure, was coming up the path with his small measured steps.
Across the shoulders of the mountains the two men climbed with a silence between them. They moved slowly because the shaggy horses were laden with blanket rolls and saddlebags. Moisture rose in a vapor from the animals under the glare of the late afternoon sun.
Jacob, following Daoud along the narrow track, felt the pressure of the sun on his back. The plodding of his horse, the thrust of heat from the sky, blended with the picture in his mind's eye of the neat garden path where Michal had gone out. Jacob was glad that he could sit effortless in the damp saddle that stung his thighs as the horse moved methodically upward into space, without needing thought or a word spoken.
By squinting against the glare of the slopes, he could perceive that they had changed. The dimness and refreshing moisture of the Riyat ravine had yielded to yellow heights of broken stone. The air had grown thinner, forcing him to breathe deep. Wisps of brown and white flitted away from the trail ahead of him—gazelles. A mountain sheep climbed leisurely, pausing to watch him. Jacob reflected that these animals could not have been hunted with rifles, or they would have been more wary of men.
They must be climbing toward the level watered by melted snow. He had no aneroid; the sun had taken the place of a compass; his few articles of clothing and kit hung in saddlebags woven from goat's hair; the blankets pushing against his hips were pressed out of raw sheep's wool; he lacked even a pair of sunglasses. Up the slopes he sighted clusters of black tents looking like rusty black cloaks hung out to dry.
"Aimak," said Daoud, pulling in to rest his horse. "Some winter pastures. The people in those tents will not bother us."
In these pastures, where grass grew late, watered by melting snow, the people brought their herds to find grass after the summer's heat had destroyed grazing in the lowlands.
"How do they know who we are?"
"Know? Oh, they can see."
How could the dwellers in the upper pastures distinguish the nature of two blue figures half a mile away? Daoud had changed in certain respects. He seemed less sure of the English he spoke; in the saddle, with a sheepskin coat loose on his back, he had become more alive physically, less the shy scientist of the cubbyhole in the museum.
"Daoud, you are changing over from Oxford graduate to mountain Kurd."
"Now you feel better, Jacob! No, how should I change? It is only that we are in the hills. We are on real earth." He smiled. "These Jebal—these highlands have always been habitable." For a moment he reflected. "Yes, my grandfather, who is a Kurd, says men have always been here. Even now, after I have come back from Oxford, he says that. My Arab grandfather has only a folk memory of wandering to escape from the heat of deserts. The desert makes one feel religious, he said, because it is full of torment."
"It makes one feel imaginative."
Daoud took the least thing seriously. "So do the mountains, Jacob. It is the same thing. Only in cities you do not feel imaginative. There are too many tramcars."
"What about the Empire State Building?"
After considering, Daoud shook his head. "No, it has elevators. I have heard. You step in and swosh, you step out at five hundred feet. Do you imagine anything when you do that?"
Toward sunset they dropped down to the bed of the small river along which the trail traced its way. Immediately the air grew chill. The river rushed boisterously between outcroppings of limestone, and they crossed it upon a stone bridge. The bridge was too narrow for anything but a laden horse or a small cart, and Jacob noticed that the stones were black volcanic basalt fitted together without mortar. It had stood here over the river flood for many centuries. Not even a jeep could cross it, to proceed beyond this point.
"We will sleep here," said Daoud, nodding at a stone hut set into the hill by the trail.
A gnarled human being came out of the hut with a bead rosary in one hand. His other hand held the fist of a slender ten-year-old boy. Their dark wool garments appeared as tough and unchangeable as the stone facing of the hut.
"There is no place else to sleep," the archaeologist apologized, noticing how Jacob stared around him. "This is what you call a roadhouse in America, and the keeper can give us tea and perhaps lamb."
After freeing his horse of all but the saddle blanket, Daoud tore a sheet from the notebook he carried and wrote a few lines on it with Jacob's fountain pen. Folding the page, he gave it to the ten-year-old who was helping them. "Marhaba " the boy exclaimed, pressing the paper against his heart.
"Ei," Daoud nodded, after giving a few directions.
Immediately the youngster turned and began to run up the hill, jumping rocks like a goat. As far as Jacob could see him, he kept on running.
"He will be there before us with the message," Daoud said, glancing after the boy. "By noon tomorrow, at the latest."
"Where?"
Daoud explained. The river at this point marked the boundary of the summer grazing of the Herki tribe, who were not accustomed to foreigners because they kept secluded in the upper ranges. His note would explain that the two of them were friends of Mr. Parabat on their way to the monastery, requesting that they might pass as guests through the land of the Herki. If the Herki received them as guests, they would have no trouble reaching the monastery.
"And suppose we don't rate as guests?"
"They might keep us from passing. These people are restless now, Jacob, because Kurds are being killed by the military in the lower Zab valleys." Daoud did not want to discuss that. "Watch this happening," he said quickly.
The keeper of the bridge was dragging a five-months-old lamb from the small flock penned by the hut. As he did so he drew a curved knife from his girdle. Man and beast headed toward the single oak that sheltered a raised stone slab above the hut. This block of stone was bare, Jacob noticed, but for two points that projected up on either side like rudimentary horns or wings.
When he reached the altar-like stone, the keeper tied up the struggling animal with a cord attached to the stone. From a metal bowl he carried he emptied some embers of fire upon the top of the stone between the projections. Then with a single slash of the curved knife he cut the lamb's throat.
Framed against the sunset gleam, the bearded man and the smoking stone made a picture that tugged at Jacob's memory of something seen long before. "Abraham's sacrifice," he mu
rmured.
"What?" Daoud laughed. "No, it's our dinner starting to cook."
When the stars were out from horizon to horizon and Jacob had eaten his dinner, he sat on the bridge to smoke a last pipe, hearing the horses stamp by the hut and the rush of the water below him. Daoud had gone inside to sleep, but Jacob did not feel like sleeping. The gray contour of the earth came closer now under the star gleam. This earth had not changed its shape under the hands of men. Only stones had been made into a house and the bridge that seemed at that moment to span two intervals of time. . . .A folded paper had come into Michal's hand on the garden walk, and the mountain boy was running through the night with another folded paper—running north and east, under the gleam of Andromeda and Polaris. He could not see the face of a compass yet he could discern those two pointers in the sky. By what intangible guide was Michal led, and was she asleep at this moment within her room, with the door that was her way of escape standing open ?
Jacob tried to think of something tangible, to draw the quiet of drowsiness into his mind. Sir Clement had said, watch for what is unusual. . . .Abraham had meant to sacrifice what he most loved. . . .Had he held Michal in his arms for five seconds or five minutes? No, he should concentrate on the warning, because Michal would be gone when he returned to Mr. Parabat's garden. If she would not be there on the paths. . .With all his years of study Sir Clement had admitted honestly that he could only be certain that something extraordinary existed in Araman, if Araman itself existed. How could you track down a something? Sir Clement had a core of integrity, not artificial righteousness, but a natural rightness that was unyielding. Michal had a word for that.
Under the bright mockery of the ageless stars Jacob could not sleep.
Perhaps it was lack of sleep, or perhaps the thin air of the heights, but the next day Jacob felt a subtle exhilaration.
In this translucent air objects at a distance became vivid and unmistakable. The very stones showed their specks of mica. These mountains had assumed a relationship to him; they were opening their innermost recesses to his unaccustomed sight. It was a feeling undefined as yet. Never before had he been in the saddle so far from man-made roads. For the first time he felt glad to be climbing up from the last outpost of civilization at Riyat.
Early in the afternoon they zigzagged up a sharp granite ridge, and Jacob beheld one of the secrets of the mountains. The gray ridge had to be climbed like a wall. On the summit they looked down into a vista of green—a long valley sprinkled with grazing herds, dark tree growth, and black patches which Jacob knew now to be clusters of tents at a great distance. This green expanse was fortified by the outer escarpment of granite. Planes flying over it would observe nothing but dark specks sprinkled over the vivid green.
"The valley of the Herki," Daoud informed him, and added sharply, "Stop!"
From a fold in the earth beside them a throng of horsemen appeared, spurring the animals into a gallop. This cavalcade of thirty or forty riders gathered speed swiftly and bore down on Jacob and Daoud. Bright cloaks fluttered over the small horses.
Jacob suspected they had been watching from the granite height, and he swore silently at his own stupidity in not sighting them before now. All the riders—some were girls with flying hair—carried rifles. At a few paces they reined in suddenly and dismounted. The men nearest Jacob clicked back the bolts of their rifles and drew out cartridge clips ostentatiously.
"It is nothing bad," Daoud muttered. "Only the usual show for visitors."
Most of the Herki riders had gray hair, some were boys and girls in their early teens. All carried themselves erect, moving as if on parade. Their fine bodies gleamed in striped silk shirts and velvet Zouave vests embroidered and heavy with silver. One oldster sported a dark blue full-dress uniform of a Turkish colonel. The slender boy who stepped out before this Victorian figure had loose sleeves hanging to the grass; gold glinted on his saddle. As he came closer Jacob realized that he was not more than thirteen or fourteen.
This stripling carrying an old Mauser on his arm touched his fingers to his forehead and heart. "Man Baba Beg " he said.
"Khwasti-bi, Baba Beg" murmured Daoud.
Baba Beg, the leader of the mounted commando of youthful and overage Herki, turned to Jacob, his eyes sparkling. "I am spiking," he said slowly, "English-little to you."
He spoke clearly but with the flat intonation of one who has learned a language from books.
"It was kind of you to come to welcome us, Baba Beg," responded Jacob, adjusting himself to the mood of the moment. And he added curiously, "Where did you learn English?"
"Once," said Baba Beg, "in the American school at Baghdad." He swung on his heel to let his glance travel over the faces of the excited tribesmen. His spare shoulders straightened with pride that he should be answered by the strange American.
"He is the son of Mullah Ismail," Daoud whispered. "He will take us in as guests."
"How old are you, son of Mullah Ismail?" Jacob asked.
The boy hesitated then spoke rapidly to the archaeologist. Daoud laughed cheerfully. "He does not know how to say it in little-English. Baba Beg has got his first wife with child but has not yet killed an enemy with his rifle."
Eagerly the Herki Kurds, who now felt at liberty to talk, asked for news of the battle toward which Mullah Ismail had gone. Carefully Daoud answered that there was fighting but not yet a battle.
Then girls in the cavalcade brought out a filled goatskin and bowls, pouring milk curds and whey from the skin into the bowls and offering them shyly to the visitors. Jacob observed that the girls wore no veils and seemed to manage their horses as well as the men. They all sat down in the grass where the sun warmed the slope and ate from the bowls. They are all children, Jacob thought, with rifles for playthings, and time is nothing to them. What value should these hill people set upon an hour, except that visitors from the outer world had arrived, important men with news ?
When Baba Beg heard that they wanted to go on to the monastery the next day, he showed sharp disappointment. "He says," Daoud explained, "no American has come to the Herki before. I think he wanted to show you a document and have his singers—his minstrels—perform. That would take more than one night. But if you wish to go, he says Father Hyacinth can guide you to what he calls the place of the old men."
He asked a question of the boy and went on.
"Apparently a priest, Father Hyacinth, comes down every now and then with herbs and dried rose leaves to be sold to Mr. Parabat, and also to eat some good dinners in the tents of the Herki, because Baba Beg says the dinners are lean licking at the place of the old men."
Long before the cavalcade reached their destination, at the main tents of the Herki, darkness had closed down on the valley, and Jacob saw the flicker of torches moving about the red glow of cooking fires ahead of them. Except for the boy, who was the son of Mullah Ismail, the Kurds rode apart from the visitors, escorting them but not intruding on them. Presently a rifle flashed in the gloom and a bullet cracked overhead.
Baba Beg reined in, and another rider lifted a cry that carried far. A distant wail answered it, and the boy moved on again, satisfied. "My sentries do not sleep," he explained in his best English.
And Jacob thought of Badr the driver who was never asleep at Mr. Parabat's gate when Michal came back at night.
Before full starlight—Jacob had ceased to glance automatically at his wrist watch—he was seated on a large carpet between Daoud and Father Hyacinth, to drink tea and eat bread and cheese and dates. The priest ate heartily, saying little—a spare, bronzed head with a beard so thick it seemed like overlong fur. Except for his silence and the restless watchfulness of his dark eyes, he appeared like any other figure of the West. "Il n'y ariy a rien ici," he assured Jacob. "Ne t'agite pas, c est le jeu des enfants."
Daoud glanced at Jacob expectantly—French being one of the languages he did not speak. And Jacob could only answer haltingly that he was not worrying; in fact he was enjoying himself, because his
French conversational power was less than Baba Beg's little-English. This did not seem to surprise Father Hyacinth, who remarked that he had studied in the Biblioteca Apostolica in Rome before the beginning of the wars, in 1913, and he wondered whether American bombs had damaged this library of the Vatican. When Jacob said he thought not, Father Hyacinth remarked that that was a precious thing to hear, and returned to his bread and cream cheese.
In the firelight beyond the carpet Jacob sensed rather than saw rows of people sitting in attentive silence, to taste to the utmost the appearance in their midst of two men from the outside. In spite of his urging he could not make Baba Beg sit down by him. The boy insisted on standing to serve them himself, and he brought in his minstrel with the air of a master of ceremonies. Somewhere a flute sounded, and the singer, a saturnine man, his head bound in a scarlet gypsy scarf, chanted what seemed to Jacob to be a folk song.
"What is all this?" Jacob said quietly to the archaeologist.
"Only a song, Jacob. It goes on about life for the Kurds being to suffer, so it is better to dream and to smell sweet roses and watch for the dawn and caress a woman's soft hair——"
"Caresse les cheveax doux comme la soie" corrected Father Hyacinth.
"Anyway, to do all that, Jacob, before your heart and body grow cold and dead and you have lived without dreaming."
Young Baba Beg smiled, pleased by the interest of his guests. At the song's end Jacob seized the chance to show the boy his contour map, thinking that Baba Beg might tell him the truth about where he was on the map. Daoud shook his head uneasily.
Although Baba Beg pored over it earnestly, he could not point out the valley of the Herki on the shaded mountain ranges. "It is a bad map," he exclaimed, nettled.
"And so it is," assented Daoud quickly, his eyes warning Jacob. "You see these mapmakers in London did not know the Kurdish names; these purple frontier lines do not help any."