by Sax Rohmer
“The Libyan Desert?” suggested Sime.
The man shook, his head, seeking for words.
“The Arabian Desert?”
“No, no! Away beyond, far up in Africa” — he waved his long arms dramatically— “far, far up beyond the Sûdan.”
“The Sahara Desert?” proposed Sime.
“Yes, yes! it is Sahara Desert! — come across the Sahara Desert, and is come to Khartûm.”
“How did he get there?” asked Cairn.
The Indian shrugged his shoulders.
“I cannot say, but next he come to Wady Halfa, then he is in Assouan, and from Assouan he come down to Luxor! Yesterday an Egyptian friend told me Khamsîn is in the Fayûm. Therefore he is there — the man of evil — for he bring the hot wind with him.”
The Indian was growing impressive, and two American tourists stopped to listen to his words.
“To-night — to-morrow,” — he spoke now almost in a whisper, glancing about him as if apprehensive of being overheard— “he may be here, in Cairo, bringing with him the scorching breath of the desert — the scorpion wind!”
He stood up, casting off the mystery with which he had invested his story, and smiling insinuatingly. His work was done; his fee was due. Sime rewarded him with five piastres, and he departed, bowing.
“You know, Sime—” Cairn began to speak, staring absently the while after the fortune-teller, as he descended the carpeted steps and rejoined the throng on the sidewalk below— “you know, if a man — anyone, could take advantage of such a wave of thought as this which is now sweeping through Egypt — if he could cause it to concentrate upon him, as it were, don’t you think that it would enable him to transcend the normal, to do phenomenal things?”
“By what process should you propose to make yourself such a focus?”
“I was speaking impersonally, Sime. It might be possible—”
“It might be possible to dress for dinner,” snapped Sime, “if we shut up talking nonsense! There’s a carnival here to-night; great fun. Suppose we concentrate our brain-waves on another Scotch and soda?”
CHAPTER XII
THE MASK OF SET
Above the palm trees swept the jewelled vault of Egypt’s sky, and set amid the clustering leaves gleamed little red electric lamps; fairy lanterns outlined the winding paths and paper Japanese lamps hung dancing in long rows, whilst in the centre of the enchanted garden a fountain spurned diamond spray high in the air, to fall back coolly plashing into the marble home of the golden carp. The rustling of innumerable feet upon the sandy pathway and the ceaseless murmur of voices, with pealing laughter rising above all, could be heard amid the strains of the military band ensconced in a flower-covered arbour.
Into the brightly lighted places and back into the luminous shadows came and went fantastic forms. Sheikhs there were with flowing robes, dragomans who spoke no Arabic, Sultans and priests of Ancient Egypt, going arm-in-arm. Dancing girls of old Thebes, and harem ladies in silken trousers and high-heeled red shoes. Queens of Babylon and Cleopatras, many Geishas and desert Gypsies mingled, specks in a giant kaleidoscope. The thick carpet of confetti rustled to the tread; girls ran screaming before those who pursued them armed with handfuls of the tiny paper disks. Pipers of a Highland regiment marched piping through the throng, their Scottish kilts seeming wildly incongruous amid such a scene. Within the hotel, where the mosque lanterns glowed, one might catch a glimpse of the heads of dancers gliding shadowlike.
“A tremendous crowd,” said Sime, “considering it is nearly the end of the season.”
Three silken ladies wearing gauzy white yashmaks confronted Cairn and the speaker. A gleaming of jewelled fingers there was and Cairn found himself half-choked with confetti, which filled his eyes, his nose, his ears, and of which quite a liberal amount found access to his mouth. The three ladies of the yashmak ran screaming from their vengeance-seeking victims, Sime pursuing two, and Cairn hard upon the heels of the third. Amid this scene of riotous carnival all else was forgotten, and only the madness, the infectious madness of the night, claimed his mind. In and out of the strangely attired groups darted his agile quarry, all but captured a score of times, but always eluding him.
Sime he had hopelessly lost, as around fountain and flower-bed, arbour and palm trunk he leapt in pursuit of the elusive yashmak.
Then, in a shadowed corner of the garden, he trapped her. Plunging his hand into the bag of confetti, which he carried, he leapt, exulting, to his revenge: when a sudden gust of wind passed sibilantly through the palm tops, and glancing upward, Cairn saw that the blue sky was overcast and the stars gleaming dimly, as through a veil. That moment of hesitancy proved fatal to his project, for with a little excited scream the girl dived under his outstretched arm and fled back towards the fountain. He turned to pursue again, when a second puff of wind, stronger than the first, set waving the palm fronds and showered dry leaves upon the confetti carpet of the garden. The band played loudly, the murmur of conversation rose to something like a roar, but above it whistled the increasing breeze, and there was a sort of grittiness in the air.
Then, proclaimed by a furious lashing of the fronds above, burst the wind in all its fury. It seemed to beat down into the garden in waves of heat. Huge leaves began to fall from the tree tops and the mast-like trunks bent before the fury from the desert. The atmosphere grew hazy with impalpable dust; and the stars were wholly obscured.
Commenced a stampede from the garden. Shrill with fear, rose a woman’s scream from the heart of the throng:
“A scorpion! a scorpion!”
Panic threatened, but fortunately the doors were wide, so that, without disaster the whole fantastic company passed into the hotel; and even the military band retired.
Cairn perceived that he alone remained in the garden, and glancing along the path in the direction of the fountain, he saw a blotchy drab creature, fully four inches in length, running zigzag towards him. It was a huge scorpion; but, even as he leapt forward to crush it, it turned and crept in amid the tangle of flowers beside the path, where it was lost from view.
The scorching wind grew momentarily fiercer, and Cairn, entering behind a few straggling revellers, found something ominous and dreadful in its sudden fury. At the threshold, he turned and looked back upon the gaily lighted garden. The paper lamps were thrashing in the wind, many extinguished; others were in flames; a number of electric globes fell from their fastenings amid the palm tops, and burst bomb-like upon the ground. The pleasure garden was now a battlefield, beset with dangers, and he fully appreciated the anxiety of the company to get within doors. Where chrysanthemum and yashmak turban and tarboosh, uraeus and Indian plume had mingled gaily, no soul remained; but yet — he was in error ... someone did remain.
As if embodying the fear that in a few short minutes had emptied the garden, out beneath the waving lanterns, the flying débris, the whirling dust, pacing sombrely from shadow to light, and to shadow again, advancing towards the hotel steps, came the figure of one sandalled, and wearing the short white tunic of Ancient Egypt. His arms were bare, and he carried a long staff; but rising hideously upon his shoulders was a crocodile-mask, which seemed to grin — the mask of Set, Set the Destroyer, God of the underworld.
Cairn, alone of all the crowd, saw the strange figure, for the reason that Cairn alone faced towards the garden. The gruesome mask seemed to fascinate him; he could not take his gaze from that weird advancing god; he felt impelled hypnotically to stare at the gleaming eyes set in the saurian head. The mask was at the foot of the steps, and still Cairn stood rigid. When, as the sandalled foot was set upon the first step, a breeze, dust-laden, and hot as from a furnace door, blew fully into the hotel, blinding him. A chorus arose from the crowd at his back; and many voices cried out for doors to be shut. Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and spun him about.
“By God!” — it was Sime who now had him by the arm— “Khamsîn has come with a vengeance! They tell me that they have never had anything like it
!”
The native servants were closing and fastening the doors. The night was now as black as Erebus, and the wind was howling about the building with the voices of a million lost souls. Cairn glanced back across his shoulder. Men were drawing heavy curtains across the doors and windows.
“They have shut him out, Sime!” he said.
Sime stared in his dull fashion.
“You surely saw him?” persisted Cairn irritably; “the man in the mask of Set — he was coming in just behind me.”
Sime strode forward, pulled the curtains aside, and peered out into the deserted garden.
“Not a soul, old man,” he declared. “You must have seen the Efreet!”
CHAPTER XIII
THE SCORPION WIND
This sudden and appalling change of weather had sadly affected the mood of the gathering. That part of the carnival planned to take place in the garden was perforce abandoned, together with the firework display. A halfhearted attempt was made at dancing, but the howling of the wind, and the omnipresent dust, perpetually reminded the pleasure-seekers that Khamsîn raged without — raged with a violence unparalleled in the experience of the oldest residents. This was a full-fledged sand-storm, a terror of the Sahara descended upon Cairo.
But there were few departures, although many of the visitors who had long distances to go, especially those from Mena House, discussed the advisability of leaving before this unique storm should have grown even worse. The general tendency, though, was markedly gregarious; safety seemed to be with the crowd, amid the gaiety, where music and laughter were, rather than in the sand-swept streets.
“Guess we’ve outstayed our welcome!” confided an American lady to Sime. “Egypt wants to drive us all home now.”
“Possibly,” he replied with a smile. “The season has run very late, this year, and so this sort of thing is more or less to be expected.”
The orchestra struck up a lively one-step, and a few of the more enthusiastic dancers accepted the invitation, but the bulk of the company thronged around the edge of the floor, acting as spectators.
Cairn and Sime wedged a way through the heterogeneous crowd to the American Bar.
“I prescribe a ‘tango,’” said Sime.
“A ‘tango’ is — ?”
“A ‘tango,’” explained Sime, “is a new kind of cocktail sacred to this buffet. Try it. It will either kill you or cure you.”
Cairn smiled rather wanly.
“I must confess that I need bucking up a bit,” he said: “that confounded sand seems to have got me by the throat.”
Sime briskly gave his orders to the bar attendant.
“You know,” pursued Cairn, “I cannot get out of my head the idea that there was someone wearing a crocodile mask in the garden a while ago.”
“Look here,” growled Sime, studying the operations of the cocktail manufacturer, “suppose there were — what about it?”
“Well, it’s odd that nobody else saw him.”
“I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you that the fellow might have removed his mask?”
Cairn shook his head slowly.
“I don’t think so,” he declared; “I haven’t seen him anywhere in the hotel.”
“Seen him?” Sime turned his dull gaze upon the speaker. “How should you know him?”
Cairn raised his hand to his forehead in an oddly helpless way.
“No, of course not — it’s very extraordinary.”
They took their seats at a small table, and in mutual silence loaded and lighted their pipes. Sime, in common with many young and enthusiastic medical men, had theories — theories of that revolutionary sort which only harsh experience can shatter. Secretly he was disposed to ascribe all the ills to which flesh is heir primarily to a disordered nervous system. It was evident that Cairn’s mind persistently ran along a particular groove; something lay back of all this erratic talk; he had clearly invested the Mask of Set with a curious individuality.
“I gather that you had a stiff bout of it in London?” Sime said suddenly.
Cairn nodded.
“Beastly stiff. There is a lot of sound reason in your nervous theory, Sime. It was touch and go with me for days, I am told; yet, pathologically, I was a hale man. That would seem to show how nerves can kill. Just a series of shocks — horrors — one piled upon another, did as much for me as influenza, pneumonia, and two or three other ailments together could have done.”
Sime shook his head wisely; this was in accordance with his ideas.
“You know Antony Ferrara?” continued Cairn. “Well, he has done this for me. His damnable practices are worse than any disease. Sime, the man is a pestilence! Although the law cannot touch him, although no jury can convict him — he is a murderer. He controls — forces—”
Sime was watching him intently.
“It will give you some idea, Sime, of the pitch to which things had come, when I tell you that my father drove to Ferrara’s rooms one night, with a loaded revolver in his pocket—”
“For” — Sime hesitated— “for protection?”
“No.” Cairn leant forward across the table— “to shoot him, Sime, shoot him on sight, as one shoots a mad dog!”
“Are you serious?”
“As God is my witness, if Antony Ferrara had been in his rooms that night, my father would have killed him!”
“It would have been a shocking scandal.”
“It would have been a martyrdom. The man who removes Antony Ferrara from the earth will be doing mankind a service worthy of the highest reward. He is unfit to live. Sometimes I cannot believe that he does live; I expect to wake up and find that he was a figure of a particularly evil dream.”
“This incident — the call at his rooms — occurred just before your illness?”
“The thing which he had attempted that night was the last straw, Sime; it broke me down. From the time that he left Oxford, Antony Ferrara has pursued a deliberate course of crime, of crime so cunning, so unusual, and based upon such amazing and unholy knowledge that no breath of suspicion has touched him. Sime, you remember a girl I told you about at Oxford one evening, a girl who came to visit him?”
Sime nodded slowly.
“Well — he killed her! Oh! there is no doubt about it; I saw her body in the hospital.”
“How had he killed her, then?”
“How? Only he and the God who permits him to exist can answer that, Sime. He killed her without coming anywhere near her — and he killed his adoptive father, Sir Michael Ferrara, by the same unholy means!”
Sime watched him, but offered no comment.
“It was hushed up, of course; there is no existing law which could be used against him.”
“Existing law?”
“They are ruled out, Sime, the laws that could have reached him; but he would have been burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages!”
“I see.” Sime drummed his fingers upon the table. “You had those ideas about him at Oxford; and does Dr. Cairn seriously believe the same?”
“He does. So would you — you could not doubt it, Sime, not for a moment, if you had seen what we have seen!” His eyes blazed into a sudden fury, suggestive of his old, robust self. “He tried night after night, by means of the same accursed sorcery, which everyone thought buried in the ruins of Thebes, to kill me! He projected — things—”
“Suggested these — things, to your mind?”
“Something like that. I saw, or thought I saw, and smelt — pah! — I seem to smell them now! — beetles, mummy-beetles, you know, from the skull of a mummy! My rooms were thick with them. It brought me very near to Bedlam, Sime. Oh! it was not merely imaginary. My father and I caught him red-handed.” He glanced across at the other. “You read of the death of Lord Lashmore? It was just after you came out.”
“Yes — heart.”
“It was his heart, yes — but Ferrara was responsible! That was the business which led my father to drive to Ferrara’s rooms with a loaded revolver in his pock
et.”
The wind was shaking the windows, and whistling about the building with demoniacal fury as if seeking admission; the band played a popular waltz; and in and out of the open doors came and went groups representative of many ages and many nationalities.
“Ferrara,” began Sime slowly, “was always a detestable man, with his sleek black hair, and ivory face. Those long eyes of his had an expression which always tempted me to hit him. Sir Michael, if what you say is true — and after all, Cairn, it only goes to show how little we know of the nervous system — literally took a viper to his bosom.”
“He did. Antony Ferrara was his adopted son, of course; God knows to what evil brood he really belongs.”
Both were silent for a while. Then:
“Gracious heavens!”
Cairn started to his feet so wildly as almost to upset the table.
“Look, Sime! look!” he cried.
Sime was not the only man in the bar to hear, and to heed his words. Sime, looking in the direction indicated by Cairn’s extended finger, received a vague impression that a grotesque, long-headed figure had appeared momentarily in the doorway opening upon the room where the dancers were; then it was gone again, if it had ever been there, and he was supporting Cairn, who swayed dizzily, and had become ghastly pale. Sime imagined that the heated air had grown suddenly even more heated. Curious eyes were turned upon, his companion, who now sank back into his chair, muttering:
“The Mask, the Mask!”
“I think I saw the chap who seems to worry you so much,” said Sime soothingly. “Wait here; I will tell the waiter to bring you a dose of brandy; and whatever you do, don’t get excited.”
He made for the door, pausing and giving an order to a waiter on his way, and pushed into the crowd outside. It was long past midnight, and the gaiety, which had been resumed, seemed of a forced and feverish sort. Some of the visitors were leaving, and a breath of hot wind swept in from the open doors.
A pretty girl wearing a yashmak, who, with two similarly attired companions, was making her way to the entrance, attracted his attention; she seemed to be on the point of swooning. He recognised the trio for the same that had pelted Cairn and himself with confetti earlier in the evening.
