by Talbot Mundy
You may say it was gall that let him make such dangerous use of other people, and I’ll agree with you. Don’t you admire a man with gall, provided it’s not his own profit or some mere commercial end he’s serving? I take it Drake had gall, and John Paul Jones, and Theodore Roosevelt as well as others whose memory more men cherish than the haters of the great prefer to think. I’m not one of those who choose to discredit any man who does things.
And it was luck and gall in combination, if you like, that now gave him the use of an “army” of a hundred and forty men, with a woman to captain them whose brains had been the making of Ali Higg. I won’t say much for her military judgment, because we had captured her too easily for her to boast on that score; but she had the gift of bending Arabs to her will, and you know how it goes in politics: if you own the man who can swing the votes, the election is yours. The same principle applies in other walks of life.
I have heard a missionary criticaster say that because Ali Higg’s army was mounted on stolen camels and fed on looted grain, as well as armed for the most part with rifles filched from the Allies, therefore Grim should have scorned to make use of it. But a quarter of a century ago I left off arguing with men like that. In the midst of unwesternized knavery Grim always uses the least unmoral weapon he can find, and makes the most of it.
We followed him out of the cave now to the narrow path that wound along the face of the cliff to a point where it met a flight of ancient stone steps something like a mile long. (The ancients who carved Petra out of sandstone evidently didn’t mind a toilsome climb to church, for there was a place of sacrifice at the top of the hill.) We sat down beside Ali Baba in a row with his men, overlooking the Roman amphitheatre, whose tiers and tiers of stone seats glittered in the sun.
The valley two hundred feet beneath us, inside the amphitheatre and all about it, was black with goat-hair Bedouin tents, in which the wives and daughters of Ali Higg’s army were busy with their morning work, of doing nothing, leisurely. There were eagles soaring above us, whose shadows raced on the dazzling rock below, and innumerable kites were circling on about a level with our eyes. You could sometimes catch the bronze sheen on their backs, and watch the play of their wing-tips as they swerved. Along a ledge on the opposite cliff sat a row of vultures in fair imitation of us.
The colors of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado are about the same as those of Petra — the raw, real color out of which the paint for the universe was mixed with a hard light from a polished turquoise sky to judge it all by, provided your brain will work in front of any such kaleidoscope. But we weren’t there for the view.
“We’ll give Jael Higg a chance to talk her old man round,” said Grim in English; and Ali Baba caught the gist of it. (He knew enough English in the old days to rob tourists when the Turks weren’t looking, and enough Turkish to cheat the police over the commission afterwards.)
“Whatever talking a woman does — and especially that woman — is the woof of trouble, Jimgrim!” he said warningly.
But I saw other trouble coming, and laughed aloud, for which I cursed myself a moment afterwards. A laugh is pretty easily misunderstood in that land.
The cliff bulged outward on our left beyond the opening of Ali Higg’s cave, and around the bend there was another cave that we hadn’t investigated; but judging by the chatter of female voices it was the headquarters of Ali Higg’s harem. He evidently overrode the rule about providing a separate establishment for each additional wife.
Around that corner now Ayisha came — Ayisha the divorced — with all her belongings done up in a huge blue bundle, and the whole lot balanced on her head. The wives of a polygamist are not, I believe, noted for lying down together like the leopard and the kid of prophecy, and a chorus of mocking laughter followed her. Seeing and hearing me cough out that unconsidered “Aha!” she naturally supposed me to be mocking her, too, and we were mortal enemies from that minute. At least, she was my mortal enemy, and I haven’t learned yet how to keep an affair like that strictly one-sided. I once knew a man who kept a female panther for a pet; he used to say the dear thing only needed humoring, but I remember attending his funeral, because there wasn’t any parson, and I had to read the service. I kept the panther’s hide for a souvenir — with a neat round hole between the eyes to show how she and I made friends at last. You couldn’t help thinking of a panther when you saw Ayisha angry.
Balancing that enormous bundle (full of the loot of villages, no doubt) with the grace that is born in the Bedouin women, she made as if to pass us, and I think she would have done if Grim hadn’t spoken, for she was proud.
“Ya sit Ayisha, what have I done that you should treat me scornfully?” he asked. [ O Lady Ayisha.].
“Have a care!” groaned Ali Baba. Having raised sixteen sons and grandsons he posed as an authority on women. She turned to face Grim, her body quivering like a fine Damascus blade as she balanced the load. He smiled up at her, and she seemed to waver between liking for him and disgust at me. Then with the sudden swiftness of a female panther making up her mind she answered his smile with melting eyes and flashing teeth, and opened the war with me by dumping the bundle into my lap. It would have damaged a smaller man, for it weighed more than a hundred-weight and there were brass bowls in it, and knives and things like that, but I caught it on knees and shins and, although I didn’t plan to, kicked it forward so that it rolled over the edge of the path and fell two hundred feet on to the ruined roof of an ancient tomb below.
You know how a panther lays his ears back? She expressed anger just as effectually, even if you couldn’t exactly say how she did it. It wasn’t any use apologizing. I sat rubbing my shins, with both eyes watching for the dagger I felt sure would come my way in a second. But she passed the buck to Grim.
“Kill that fool for me!” she commanded him; and he laughed at me whimsically sideways.
“But I need the man,” he said. “He is the hakim. He has the chest of medicines. Who else shall physic us?”
“Bah!” she exclaimed. “I would bastinado such a fool! He is the son of sixty dogs who gave me baby’s pap instead of poison for the Lion in there! Thanks to that fool I am divorced instead of a widow! Throw him down after my baggage!”
“We can recover most of it, and what has been broken shall be replaced,” Grim answered. “What are your plans, O Lady Ayisha?”
“I go to find my people.”
“Where are they?”
“Only Allah knows.”
You see, the desert hasn’t changed much. Hagar did the same thing once, going out alone into the waste of sand and rock, in search of a tiny wandering tribe whose tents are here today and gone tomorrow; and thousands since have done the same thing, without enough acquaintance with the angels to get water whenever they need it.
“Be seated,” said Grim, and she took him at his word, thrusting herself down between him and me, giving me the point of her elbow. I shifted along close to Ali Baba so as to allow her a full six feet of clearance, still bearing that possible dagger in mind.
“And now,” growled Ali Baba in my ear, “the bint believes she has him! He has bidden her sit beside him before witnesses, and has promised her a new outfit! Once before she called herself his wife on half the provocation; and now who shall deny her?”
“He will,” I retorted. “Jimgrim is no Arab. We don’t do things that way in the West.”
“This is the East,” he answered, “and she will do things her way! Inshallah, Jimgrim may prove clever enough to foil her, but I doubt it.” [ If God wills.]
But more than cleverness was going to enter into Grim’s dealings with that young woman. He was smiling, and a hint of worry underlay the smile. Nobody but a born fool would think of applying Western standards to judge her conduct by, and though she had meant to poison Ali Higg there wasn’t a doubt she had had lots of provocation. It was true we hadn’t invited her to poison him, but she had made the attempt on Grim’s account none the less and we had taken full advantage of it. If
Grim had been disposed to leave her at a loose end I wouldn’t have agreed to that, and even the wild Lothario Narayan Singh, I think, would have objected. But Grim would be the last man to leave her unprovided for; I have seen him spend his scant spare hours befriending murderers whom he has landed in the gaol.
“We go south to deal with Saoud, who calls himself the Avenger,” Grim said to her. “Will you come with us?”
“I go where my lord wishes,” she answered, in the sort of voice that Ruth may have used to Boaz in the Bible story. Ruth came from that desert country, too.
She must have known Grim was an American, but I really think she meant what she said. Out in the sunlight there he was a lot better looking than Ali Higg, because his face wasn’t seamed by vice and anger; and she had grown so used to being owned by a man who resembled Grim superficially that it wouldn’t be much of a task to transfer her affections. Grim, for one thing, had no other wife, and did not bastinado people.
“Until you find your people or another husband you must regard me as a father,” Grim said kindly.
“But why should I look for another husband?” she asked.
That highly interesting question wasn’t answered just then. Jael Higg came out, looked at the two of them, and laughed in that mean, metallic way that women use to one another. But I think that she, too, suspected that there might be a dagger to reckon with, for she made no direct comment.
“I am ready,” she said in English. “My husband has agreed to my going with you. I shall bring a woman to keep me in countenance, but” — (she glanced brazenly down the line of our men and raised her voice, finishing the speech in Arabic)— “I don’t suppose there will be a man among you rash enough to try any liberties!” I guess she was right, too, for her thin lips weren’t of the yielding kind.
Some spirit of devilment took hold of me then, and forgetting my role of Indian hakim I horned in with a suggestion.
“Won’t Ayisha serve the purpose, Lady Jael?”
Well, that woman was used to handling men by brow-beating and overbearing them. I suppose she had tongue-lashed into subjection some of the toughest characters between the Dead Sea and the Persian Gulf, and you get out of the habit of mincing words when that sort of job occurs frequently. You get fluent-acrid-fiery; or at least that had happened to her. And she turned loose the full flood of her vocabulary on to me, speaking past Ayisha as if that young woman never existed, but making it perfectly obvious that we might divide the epithets between us. I dare say some of it was meant for Grim, too. The fact was that the situation had got on her nerves and all her pent-up rage had to find some sort of outlet. I had simply provided her an outlet; and Grim his opportunity.
He waited until she had finished, and then got to his feet and yawned.
“Let’s have a clear understanding on two points to begin with, Lady Jael,” he said in English. “I’ll answer for my men. And two women on this expedition are enough.”
The effect was as if he had struck her. She flinched away from him, and he followed up before she could recover and give tongue.
“I’ll give all the orders. Everybody else obeys.”
She bit her lip and turned her back on him. And then I realized that Ali Higg had been quietly watching us from inside the cave. She wasn’t used to being rebuked in front of him. He came out and stood in the entrance, smiling ironically. I don’t think he knew any English, but he appreciated that that termagant head-wife of his had met a man who wasn’t in the least afraid of her, and who knew how to manage her; and he looked almost good-tempered as he watched that happen which he had never been able to achieve.
“Call Yussuf,” ordered Grim, producing his writing-pad and fountain-pen, and sitting down again as if the incident were closed.
Now Yussuf was the spy, you may remember, with a home in Jaffa, who had brought word to Ali Higg about the plans and disposition of the British Army in Palestine, and had fallen into our hands on his way back — a very dark-skinned man with little gold ear-rings, whose normal profession was spying for both sides to any quarrel. He was shoved along the ledge from his place at the end of the line by Ali Baba’s men, and stood shifting from one foot to the other in front of Grim, clasping his hands first in front and then behind him as he watched Grim write.
Grim made considerable fuss with two envelopes, addressing both, and sealing one inside the other. He evidently wanted to be seen doing that — wanted Ali Higg to see it; so I asked him in Arabic, why two envelopes? There was no need to answer me, because Ali Higg made it clear that he was watching and listening. Jael, too, swallowed down her rage and faced about. Grim addressed himself to Yussuf.
“What do you want me to do with you?” he asked.
“Father of irony! What a question! Jaffa is my home. I was on my way thither when your honors decided otherwise. As a fish yearns for the sea I long for Jaffa.”
“Can you make your way alone?”
“Inshallah.”
“Would you like to try?”
“Give me but your permission and a camel, and see me put the telegraph to shame!”
“If I give you a letter to take to Jerusalem, will you deliver it?”
“Father of surprises! What is in the letter? Shall I carry then an order for my own arrest?”
“No. But there is an order inside that you are to be paid a full week’s wages as a messenger, provided you deliver the letter without delay.”
“Allah ykafik anni!” [ God reward you on my behalf.]
“You know what will probably happen if Ali Higg’s men catch you?”
“Trust me! I know the dogs! They will find it easier to catch the wind!”
“And you know what will happen to your Jaffa property if you try to play a trick on me?”
“Your honors had no need to say that. I am a loyal man.”
“I know you for a spy-for-both-sides,” answered Grim. “If one overtook you on the way and offered you money for the letter I shall give you, it would be your natural course to take the money and let the letter go. That is why I warn you about your Jaffa property. If you part with the one you shall lose the other.”
“Trust me!”
“I don’t trust you. I offer you payment and impose conditions. I give you clearly to understand that failure to deliver that letter in Jerusalem will involve a definite and heavy penalty. Now choose: will you carry the letter or remain here?”
“As well ask a thirsty man what he will do for a drink of water! Give me the letter!”
Grim gave it to him, and Jael returned into the cave to talk with Ali Higg. Despite the booing she had recently received, Ayisha got up and walked back toward the women’s quarters as if she had forgotten something, and we saw no more of her for several hours. Grim’s whole manner changed instantly. With a glance over his shoulder to make sure that neither Ali Higg could see him, he pulled out a loaded Army revolver from under his cloak and passed it to Yussuf along with a handful of extra cartridges.
“Now go!” he ordered in a low voice. “One of Ali Baba’s sons shall go below with you and pick you out a camel. Ride straight for that oasis where Ali Higg’s army is camped.”
“But they will capture me!”
“Listen, will you! If you go now you’ll get there about nightfall. I don’t think they’ll be there, but if you see their camp-fires, make your camel kneel, and wait until they’re gone. Better approach the oasis from the northward. They’ll move off toward the south. The minute they’re out of sight, feed your camel and then make for El-Mann; from there on to Jerusalem the way is easy.”
“But—”
“You have your orders. Go!”
One of Ali Baba’s sons went along with him to select a camel, and nobody except Yussuf worried on that score. We all knew which critter he would get; there was only one worthless specimen. Old Ali Baba laughed.
“The crows will say Allah is kind!” he remarked. “They would prefer to pick the bones of a fatter man, but any corpse is meat to them! Both J
ael and the Lion know he carries that agreement. Father of ruses, he will be dead and they will have the letter before midnight; but why? What is to be gained by that?”
“Nothing,” Grim answered. “But he’ll live and they won’t have it, if you ride hard.”
“I?”
“Surely — you. The men at the oasis know you. I’m going to give you another letter presently, which Ali Higg will sign, ordering Ibrahim ben Ah to take those men southward at once and meet us at a place in the desert half-way between here and Abu Lissan. Take the best camel we’ve got, and keep to the southward. You’ll reach the oasis well ahead of Yussuf. The Lion is sure to want to send either Jael herself or one of his own men instead of you; but I shall insist on your going. Then either the Lion or Jael will probably give you another letter with secret orders to Ibrahim ben Ah to capture Yussuf, kill him or bribe him, and take his letter from him. They’ll very likely bribe you: in that case accept the bribe, but don’t do what they say. Tear their letter up, or burn it in the desert. I think Yussuf will get through; at any rate, I’ve given him his chance.”
“And if not?” I interrupted.
“Then, as Ali Baba remarked, the crows will eat him.”
“That’s Yussuf’s end of it,” said I. “But how about us? There’ll be nothing then to keep the Lion and Jael from turning on us. They’ll have that precious letter to the bank back, and —
“Not they,” Grim answered, smiling. “That letter to the bank is still in my pocket. If by some accident they happen to capture Yussuf all they’ll find out is that I didn’t give it to him after all. If they don’t capture him — as I hope they won’t — they’ll still think he had it. They’re likely not to turn on us until they’ve got that piece of paper back, but they’d surely try to murder me if they believed it was on my person. I’d sooner they had it in for Yussuf! And at that, we’ve given Yussuf a better chance for his life than he’d have had if we left him here with Ali Higg.”
