Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “As I see it, any tribe out there has as much right to elect Ali Higg leader as you and I have to elect a president,” said Grim. “I don’t suppose they did elect him, but they’ll claim they did. The point is, he’s got himself elected somehow. We’ve no veto. I don’t hold with murder; it sets a bad example and turns loose a horde of individual trouble-makers who were under something like control before. It might be easy to have him murdered; you see how easy old Woolly-wits thought it might be. Murder has always been the solution of politics in the Old World right down to date; and look where they’re at in consequence!”

  “You must have some idea to go on,” I suggested.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “They say I look a bit like Ali Higg.”

  “But what then? Haven’t you a plan — nothing you mean to try first?”

  “Oh yes. Chercher la femme.”

  “So there’s a woman in it?”

  “You bet! Ali Higg’s no born statesman. His brains live in a black tent, and he keeps ’em encouraged with French and English books bought in Jerusalem — silk stockings — gramophones — all kinds of things.”

  “What is she — a Turk? I’ve heard some of them are educated nowadays.”

  “No. And she never was a Turk. She was born in Bulgaria of Greco-Russo- Bulgar parents, educated at Roberts College and Columbia University, New York, married to a drummer in the shredded-codfish business, divorced — on what grounds I don’t know — divorced him, though, I believe came out here as war worker-teacher in refugee camps in Egypt — made the acquaintance of Ali Higg when he was prisoner of war down there — he was fighting for the Turks at one time — and helped him to escape.

  “I’ve never set eyes on her, but they say she’s a rare good-looker and has more brains in her little finger than most men keep under their hats. I’m told she has designs on the throne of Mesopotamia.”

  “Mespot? I thought the League of Nations was going to let the Arabs choose their own king.”

  “Sure. And as soon as she sees that Ali Higg’s pretensions don’t amount to a row of shucks I wouldn’t give ten piastres for that gentleman’s lease of life! Borgia had nothing on her, they tell me.”

  “So we’re out to play chess with a white woman. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “What’s your hurry?” asked Grim. “If you find out too much all at once you’ll lose your bearings. I’ll introduce you to the lady if we ever reach Petra right side up. Now let’s eat, and get a move on. A full belly for a long march! Come.”

  CHAPTER 4. “Go and ask the kites, then, at Dat Rasi”

  SO far everything worked out strictly according to plan. We had hardly finished a hurried meal when the lady Ayisha and her men arrived on mean baggage camels provided by old Rafiki; and they were not in the least pleased with their mounts, for a baggage camel is as different from a beast trained to carry a rider as an up-to-date limousine is from a Chinese one-wheel barrow. Perched on top of the lady Ayisha’s beast was a thing they call a shibriyah — a sort of tent with a top like an umbrella, resting on the loads slung to the camel’s flanks. From inside that she was busy abusing everybody.

  There was only one good camel with her outfit — a small, blooded looking Bishareen, a shade or two lighter in color than the rest, ridden by a wiry, mean rascal with a very black face. He seemed anxious not to assert himself, for he kept his mount well away in the shadows, and moved off when anyone approached him.

  It was growing pitch-dark. Grim counted noses and gave the order to be off. Two or three men mounted, and that brought all the kneeling camels to their feet. One of Ali Baba’s sons caught the beast assigned to me, brought him round to the gate, and began nakhing him to make him kneel again. But I know one or two things about Arabs and their ways of assessing humanity. Knowledge is for use.

  “Do you mistake me for a cripple?” I asked, and instead of continuing to nakh in the camel language he pulled the beast’s head down.

  The trick is simple enough. You put your foot on the hollow of the camel’s neck and swing into the saddle as he raises his head again. Men used to the desert despise you if you have to make your mount kneel in order to get on his back, pretty much as horsemen of other lands despise the tender foot who can’t rope and saddle his own pony. There’s no excuse for that, of course; it stands to reason that lots of first-class men can’t mount a camel standing, never having done it; but, according to desert lore, whoever has to make his camel kneel is a person of no account.

  So I started off with at least one minus mark not notched against me. There was also an enormous feeling of relief, because I heard those two brats blubbering at being left behind.

  And oh, what a start that was before the moon-rise, with the great soft- footed beasts like shadows stringing one behind another into line through the streets of a city as old as Abraham! Utter silence, except for three camel bells with different notes. Instant, utter severance from all the new world, with its wheels that get you nowhere and conventions that have no meaning except organized whimsy.

  Peace under the stars, wholly aloof and apart from the problem that had sent us forth. And the feel under you of league-welcoming resilience, whatever the camels might say by way of objection. And they said a very great deal gutturally, as camels always do, yielding their prodigious power to our use with an incomprehensible mixture of grouchiness and inability to do less than their best.

  Grim rode in advance. His was the first camel bell that jangled with a mellow note somewhere in the darkness around the turn of a narrow street, or in a tunnel, where house joined house overhead. The lady Ayisha’s was the second bell, three beasts ahead of me; she being the guest of honor as it were, or, rather, the prize passenger, it was important to know her whereabouts at any given moment. And last of all came old Ali Baba with the third bell announcing that all were present and correct. He and his men sat their camels with a stately pride more than half due to the rifles and bandoliers that had been served out.

  That black-faced fellow on the little Bishareen did not trouble himself about position in the line as long as we wound through the city streets. He was next in front of me, and I saw him exchange signals with a fat man in a house door, who may have been Rafiki the wool-merchant. Narayan Singh was next behind me, and I looked back to make sure that he had seen the signal too.

  But when we passed out of the city at the south end and began to swing along a white road at a clip that was plenty fast enough for the baggage beasts, the man in front of me urged his beast forward, thrusting others out of the way and getting thoroughly well cursed for it, until he rode next behind Grim.

  Seeing that, Narayan Singh rode after him, flogging furiously, and got well cursed too. But nothing else in particular happened for several miles until we began to descend between huge hills of limestone and, just as the moon rose, came on the reserve camels waiting for us in the charge of two policemen in a hollow.

  Then there began to be happenings. First there was shrill delight from Ayisha and a chorus of approval from her four men at the prospect of changing to reasonably decent mounts. Then a tumult of indignation from the wool- merchant’s crowd — blunt refusal by them to consent to any change at all — threats — abuse — arguments — the roaring of camels who object on principle to everything, whatever it is, even to a chance to rest, because it hurts their backs to stand still loaded and over it all presently Grim’s voice issuing orders in a tone he had when things go wrong.

  Strange that they don’t choose leaders more often for their voices! It’s the most obvious thing in the world that a man with a silver tongue, as they call it, can swing and sway any crowd. If that man knows his own mind and has a plan worth spending effort on he can trumpet cohesion out of tumult and win against men with twenty times his brains. I don’t doubt Peter the Hermit had a voice like a bellbuoy in a tide-rip. Grim pitched his above the babel so that every word fell sharp, clear, and manly. They began to obey him there and then.

&nbs
p; But he could not attend to everything at once, and while he oversaw the changing of pack-saddles, and gave orders to the policemen to ride back on the camels behind Rafiki’s men and see them safely into the city, that black-faced fellow on the Bishareen edged away, and in a moment was off at full gallop headed southwards. Narayan Singh was the first to see him go, but it was half a minute before he could get near Grim and call his attention to it.

  Grim ordered three of Ali Baba’s men in pursuit at once.

  “Shall we shoot? Shall we slay?” asked one of them.

  “No, no. He hasn’t committed any crime yet. Catch him and bring him back.”

  “Crime? What is crime out here? We can kill him. But overtake him on that beast? Wallah!”

  They wasted another minute arguing for leave to shoot, and by the time they were off the deserter had a long start; but they rode with a will when they did go.

  If anything on earth looks more absurd than a ridden camel galloping away in the moonlight, with his neck stretched out in front of him and his four ungainly legs in the air all together, it is three more camels doing the same thing. They looked like a giant’s washing blown off the line flapping before a high wind, and made hardly more noise. The whack-whack-whack of sticks on the beasts’ rumps was as distinct as pistol-shots, but you hardly heard the galloping footfall.

  Grim went on about his business, for changing loads in the dark is a job that needs attention, unless you choose to have a good beast lose heart before morning and lie down in the middle of the road. A camel in pain from a badly cinched girth will endure it without argument for just so long; after which he quits, and not all the whacking or persuading in the world will get him up again.

  At the end of twenty minutes we were under way once more. Peace closed down on us, and we swayed along under the stars in majestic silence. There have been better nights since, I think; but until then that was the most glorious experience of a lifetime.

  It is my peculiar delight to read and relive ancient history, and of all history books the Old Testament is vastly the most absorbing — far and away the most accurate. There is a school of fools who set themselves up to scoff at its facts, but every new discovery only confirms the old record; and here were we sauntering through the night on camels over hills where the fathers of history fought for the first beginnings of each man’s right to do his own thinking in his own way.

  After a while Ali Baba gave his camel bell to his oldest son Mujrim, and forced his beast up beside mine, seeming to think silence might ruin the nerve of such a raw hand as myself. Or perhaps it was pride of race and country that impelled him. Even the meanest Arab thrills with emotion when he contemplates his ancient heritage, just as he rages at the prospect of seeing the Jews return to it, and Ali Baba, though a prince of thieves, was surely not a man without a heart.

  But the trouble with Arab as distinguished from Jewish history is that too little of it was written down, and too much of it invented to prove a theory — much like the stuff they put between the covers of school history books — so Ali Baba’s lecture, although gorgeous fiction in its way, hardly enriched knowledge. Not that he was free from the latterday craving for accuracy whenever it might serve to bolster up the rest of the fabric.

  “Yonder,” he said, for instance, pointing toward the sky-line with a dramatic sweep of his arm, “they say that Adam and Eve are buried. But they lie!”

  And having denounced that lie, he expected me to believe everything else he told me.

  According to him every rock we passed had its history of jinn and spirits as well as battles, and he knew where the tomb was of every national saint and hero, every one of whom had apparently died within a radius of twenty miles. Some of them had died in two or three different places as far as I could make out from his account of them.

  And what Abraham had not done on those hillsides in the way of miracles and war would not be worth writing in a book; whatever cannot be otherwise explained is set down to the Ancestor, the Arabs ranking Abraham next after Mohammed, because the patriarch built the Kaaba, or Mosque, at Mecca, that Mohammed centuries later on adopted for his new religion.

  But even Ali Baba grew tired of acting historian at last, and once more silence settled down, broken only by the bells and the camels’ gurgling, until about midnight we overhauled the three men who had been sent in chase of the fellow on the Bishareen. They had lost him, and were angry; for what should a man do except be angry in such a circumstance, unless he is willing to accept blame?

  “You should have let us shoot, Jimgrim! Once I got close enough to have cut his beast’s legs with my sword! You think this is like the city, where a policeman holds up a hand and men halt? Hah! Wallah! It was he who drew sword, and behold my camel’s nose where he slashed at it! One finger’s breadth closer and I would have had a sick beast on my hands — but he proved a blundering pig with his weapon and only made that scratch after all.

  “However, it is your fault, Jimgrim! You have made us to be laughed at by that father of dunghills! His beast was the faster, and he got away, and vanished in the shadows.”

  So there we halted and held a conference, letting the camels kneel and rest for half an hour, while each man said his say in turn.

  “That man is Rafiki’s messenger,” said Grim. “He is on his way to Abbas Mahommed, Sheikh of the Beni Yussuf, who owes Rafiki money. I think Rafiki is offering to forgo the debt if Abbas Mahommed will lie in wait for us and carry off this woman.”

  He did not ask for suggestions. There was no need. Every one of those cloaked and muffled rascals had a notion of his own on the spur of the moment, and was eager to get it adopted.

  “Allah!” said Ali Baba. “Let us fight, then, with Abbas Mahommed, and plunder his harem instead! It is simple. We come on his village before dawn when those sons of Egyptian mothers are asleep. We set fire to the thatch, and thereafter act as seems fit, slaying some and letting others escape!”

  “Wallah! Let us ride straight through the village, set a light to it, and run,” suggested Mujrim. “There isn’t a woman in that place I would burden a camel with.”

  “Nevertheless, we should take some women to keep as hostages against the time when a blood-feud begins.”

  “And surely we shall carry off some camels.”

  “Aye! They have a horse or two as well. Abbas Mahommed trades with El- Kerak, and only last month acquired a fine brown mare that caught my eye.”

  “What are fifty men! We can fight twice fifty of such spawn as the Beni Yussuf.”

  “Wallah! They ran when the police paid them a visit. Ran from the police!”

  “Yes, and were afraid to kill the Jew who sued Abbas Mahommed in the court for arrears of interest. They are cowards who dare not take their sheikh’s part in a dispute.”

  “Better wait until dawn, and then ride by their village and defy them.”

  But the lady Ayisha had the most astonishing suggestion. She came out from under the curtains of the shibriyah and sat against her camel’s rump to face the circle of armed men and instruct them.

  “Taib!” she said scornfully. “Let this Abbas Mahommed come and take me. I have a knife for his belly in any event. You go on to Ali Higg and say his wife is in the hands of that scum. Ali Higg can cross the desert in three days, and by the evening of the fourth day there will be no village left, nor a man to call Abbas Mahommed by his name. If I haven’t killed him already Abbas Mahommed will be carried off to Petra with the women, who shall watch what is done to him before they are apportioned with the other loot. That is simplest. Let Abbas Mahommed lift me if he dares!”

  She was clearly a young woman not averse to experiences, as well as confident of her lord’s good will. But Grim had the peace of the border in mind; and the gang were not at all disposed to stand by meekly while Abbas Mahommed paid a debt so easily to a mere wool-merchant.

  “I am an old man,” said Ali Baba, “and must die soon. May He Who Never Sleeps slay me before I see my sons afraid to figh
t Abbas Mahommed and all his host!”

  “Let’s talk like wise men and not fools,” proposed Grim at last, and since he had let them have their say first they heard him in silence now. “The difficulty is that Abbas Mahommed’s village lies at the corner of the Dead Sea. We must turn that corner. If we pass between him and the sea he has us between land and water. If we journey too far south to avoid him we lose at least a day and tire our camels out. A forced march now would mean that we must feed the camels corn, and we have none too much of it with us; whereas tomorrow the grazing will be passable, and farther on, where the grazing is poor, we shall need the corn.”

  “Wallah! The man knows.”

  “Inshalla, let there be a fight then!”

  “Wait!” counseled Ali Baba. “I know this Jimgrim. There will be a deception and a ruse, but no fight. Listen to him. Wait and see!”

  “I think we will travel to the southward,” said Grim, “and halt at dawn out of sight of Abbas Mahommed’s village. There let the camels graze. But I, and a few of us, will take the lady Ayisha’s camel with the shibriyah, and draw near to the village. That black-faced rogue of Rafiki’s will point us out to them, for he will recognize the shibriyah.

  “Then when they come to seize the lady Ayisha they will find no woman in the litter. So they will believe that Rafiki’s messenger has told lies that are blacker than his face, and will beat him and let us go.”

  “But if they do not let you go? They are ruffians, you know, Jimgrim.”

  “Then I shall find another way.”

  “And how will you account for being so few men, when Rafiki’s messenger will have said we are at least a score?”

  “Will that not be further proof that the man is a liar?”

  “If I did not know you of old I would say that is a fool’s plan,” remarked Ali Baba, and his sons grunted agreement. “But you have a devil of resourcefulness. Taib! Let us try this plan and see what comes of it.”