Waldo, brought face to face with the actuality of the unbelievable—as he
himself would have worded it—was completely dazed. In silence he
suffered the consul to lead him from the tepid gloom of the interior,
through the ruinous doorway, out into the hot, stunning brilliance of the
desert landscape. Hassan followed, with never a look behind him.
Without any word he had taken Waldo’s gun from his nerveless hand and
carried it, with his own and the consul’s.
The consul strode across the gravelly sand, some fifty paces from the
southwest corner of the tomb, to a bit of not wholly ruined wall from
which there was a clear view of the doorway side of the tomb and of the
side with the larger crevice.
“Hassan,” he commanded, “watch here.”
Hassan said something in Persian.
“How many cubs were there?” the consul asked Waldo.
Waldo stared mute.
“How many young ones did you see?” the consul asked again.
“Twenty or more,” Waldo made answer.
“That’s impossible,” snapped the consul.
“There seemed to be sixteen or eighteen,” Waldo reasserted. Hassan
smiled and grunted. The consul took from him two guns, handed Waldo his,
and they walked around the tomb to a point about equally distant from the
opposite corner. There was another bit of ruin, and in front of it, on
the side toward the tomb, was a block of stone mostly in the shadow of
the wall.
“Convenient,” said the consul. “Sit on that stone and lean against the
wall; make yourself comfortable. You are a bit shaken, but you will be
all right in a moment. You should have something to eat, but we have
nothing. Anyhow, take a good swallow of this.”
He stood by him as Waldo gasped over the raw brandy.
“Hassan will bring you his water bottle before he goes,” the consul went
on; “drink plenty, for you must stay here for some time. And now, pay
attention to me. We must extirpate these vermin. The male, I judge, is
absent. If he had been anywhere about, you would not now be alive. The
young cannot be as many as you say, but, I take it, we have to deal with
ten, a full litter. We must smoke them out. Hassan will go back to camp
after fuel and the guard. Meanwhile, you and I must see that none
escape.”
He took Waldo’s gun, opened the breech, shut it, examined the magazine
and handed it back to him.
“Now watch me closely,” he said. He paced off, looking to his left past
the tomb. Presently he stopped and gathered several stones together.
“You see these?” he called.
Waldo shouted an affirmation.
The consul came back, passed on in the same line, looking to his right
past the tomb, and presently, at a similar distance, put up another tiny
cairn, shouted again and was again answered. Again he returned.
“Now you are sure you cannot mistake those two marks I have made?”
“Very sure indeed,” said Waldo.
“It is important,” warned the consul. “I am going back to where I left
Hassan, to watch there while he is gone. You will watch here. You may
pace as often as you like to either of those stone heaps. From either
you can see me on my beat. Do not diverge from the line from one to the
other. For as soon as Hassan is out of sight I shall shoot any moving
thing I see nearer. Sit here till you see me set up similar limits for
my sentry-go on the farther side, then shoot any moving thing not on my
line of patrol. Keep a lookout all around you. There is one chance in a
million that the male might return in daylight—mostly they are nocturnal,
but this lair is evidently exceptional. Keep a bright lookout.
“And now listen to me. You must not feel any foolish sentimentalism
about any fancied resemblance of these vermin to human beings. Shoot,
and shoot to kill. Not only is it our duty, in general, to abolish them,
but it will be very dangerous for us if we do not. There is little or no
solidarity in Mohammedan communities, but on the comparatively few points
upon which public opinion exists it acts with amazing promptitude and
vigor. One matter as to which there is no disagreement is that it is
incumbent upon every man to assist in eradicating these creatures. The
good old Biblical custom of stoning to death is the mode of lynching
indigenous hereabouts. These modern Asiatics are quite capable of
applying it to any one believed derelict against any of these inimical
monsters. If we let one escape and the rumor of it gets about, we may
precipitate an outburst of racial prejudice difficult to cope with.
Shoot, I say, without hesitation or mercy.”
“I understand,” said Waldo.
“I don’t care whether you understand or not,” said the consul. “I want
you to act. Shoot if needful, and shoot straight.” And he tramped off.
Hassan presently appeared, and Waldo drank from his water bottle as
nearly all of its contents as Hassan would permit. After his departure
Waldo’s first alertness soon gave place to mere endurance of the monotony
of watching and the intensity of the heat. His discomfort became
suffering, and what with the fury of the dry glare, the pangs of thirst
and his bewilderment of mind, Waldo was moving in a waking dream by the
time Hassan returned with two donkeys and a mule laden with brushwood.
Behind the beasts straggled the guard.
Waldo’s trance became a nightmare when the smoke took effect and the
battle began. He was, however, not only not required to join in the
killing, but was enjoined to keep back. He did keep very much in the
background, seeing only so much of the slaughter as his curiosity would
not let him refrain from viewing. Yet he felt all a murderer as he gazed
at the ten small carcasses laid out arow, and the memory of his vigil and
its end, indeed of the whole day, though it was the day of his most
marvelous adventure, remains to him as the broken recollections of a
phantasmagoria.
* * * * *
On the morning of his memorable peril Waldo had waked early. The
experiences of his sea-voyage, the sights at Gibraltar, at Port Said, in
the canal, at Suez, at Aden, at Muscat, and at Basrah had formed an
altogether inadequate transition from the decorous regularity of house
and school-life in New England to the breathless wonder of the desert
immensities.
Everything seemed unreal, and yet the reality of its strangeness so
besieged him that he could not feel at home in it, he could not sleep
heavily in a tent. After composing himself to sleep, he lay long
conscious and awakened early, as on this morning, just at the beginning
of the false-dawn.
The consul was fast asleep, snoring loudly. Waldo dressed quietly and
went out; mechanically, without any purpose or forethought, taking his
gun. Outside he found Hassan, seated, his gun across his knees, his head
sunk forward, as fast asleep as the consul. Ali and Ibrahim had left the
camp the day before for supplies. Waldo was the only waking creature
about; for the guards, camped some little distance off, were but logs
about the ashes of their fire.
When he had begun camp life he had expected to find the consul, that
combination of sportsman, explorer and archæologist, a particularly
easy-going guardian. He had looked forward to absolutely untrammeled
liberty in the spacious expanse of the limitless wastes. The reality he
had found exactly the reverse of his preconceptions. The consul’s first
injunction was:
“Never let yourself get out of sight of me or of Hassan unless he or I
send you off with Ali or Ibrahim. Let nothing tempt you to roam about
alone. Even a ramble is dangerous. You might lose sight of the camp
before you knew it.”
At first Waldo acquiesced, later he protested. “I have a good pocket
compass. I know how to use it. I never lost my way in the Maine woods.”
“No Kourds in the Maine woods,” said the consul.
Yet before long Waldo noticed that the few Kourds they encountered seemed
simple-hearted, peaceful folk. No semblance of danger or even of
adventure had appeared. Their armed guard of a dozen greasy
tatterdemalions had passed their time in uneasy loafing.
Likewise Waldo noticed that the consul seemed indifferent to the ruins
they passed by or encamped among, that his feeling for sites and
topography was cooler than lukewarm, that he showed no ardor in the
pursuit of the scanty and uninteresting game. He had picked up enough of
several dialects to hear repeated conversations about “them.” “Have you
heard of any about here?” “Has one been killed?” “Any traces of them in
this district?” And such queries he could make out in the various talks
with the natives they met; as to what “they” were he received no
enlightenment.
Then he had questioned Hassan as to why he was so restricted in his
movements. Hassan spoke some English and regaled him with tales of
Afrits, ghouls, specters and other uncanny legendary presences; of the
jinn of the waste, appearing in human shape, talking all languages, ever
on the alert to ensnare infidels; of the woman whose feet turned the
wrong way at the ankles, luring the unwary to a pool and there drowning
her victims; of the malignant ghosts of dead brigands, more terrible than
their living fellows; of the spirit in the shape of a wild ass, or of a
gazelle, enticing its pursuers to the brink of a precipice and itself
seeming to run ahead upon an expanse of sand, a mere mirage, dissolving
as the victim passed the brink and fell to death; of the sprite in the
semblance of a hare feigning a limp, or of a ground-bird feigning a
broken wing, drawing its pursuer after it till he met death in an unseen
pit or well-shaft.
Ali and Ibrahim spoke no English. As far as Waldo could understand their
long harangues, they told similar stories or hinted at dangers equally
vague and imaginary. These childish bogy-tales merely whetted Waldo’s
craving for independence.
Now, as he sat on a rock, longing to enjoy the perfect sky, the clear,
early air, the wide, lonely landscape, along with the sense of having it
to himself, it seemed to him that the consul was merely innately
cautious, over-cautious. There was no danger. He would have a fine,
leisurely stroll, kill something perhaps, and certainly be back in camp
before the sun grew hot. He stood up.
Some hours later he was seated on a fallen coping-stone in the shadow of
a ruined tomb. All the country they had been traversing is full of tombs
and remains of tombs, prehistoric, Bactrian, old Persian, Parthian,
Sassanian, or Mohammedan, scattered everywhere in groups or solitary.
Vanished utterly are the faintest traces of the cities, towns, and
villages, ephemeral houses or temporary huts, in which had lived the
countless generations of mourners who had reared these tombs.
The tombs, built more durably than mere dwellings of the living,
remained. Complete or ruinous, or reduced to mere fragments, they were
everywhere. In that district they were all of one type. Each was domed
and below was square, its one door facing eastward and opening into a
larger empty room, behind which were the mortuary chambers.
In the shadow of such a tomb Waldo sat. He had shot nothing, had lost
his way, had no idea of the direction of the camp, was tired, warm and
thirsty. He had forgotten his water bottle.
He swept his gaze over the vast, desolate prospect, the unvaried
turquoise of the sky arched above the rolling desert. Far reddish hills
along the skyline hooped in the less distant brown hillocks which,
without diversifying it, hummocked the yellow landscape. Sand and rocks
with a lean, starved bush or two made up the nearer view, broken here and
there by dazzling white or streaked, grayish, crumbling ruins. The sun
had not been long above the horizon, yet the whole surface of the desert
was quivering with heat.
As Waldo sat viewing the outlook a woman came round the corner tomb. All
the village women Waldo had seen had worn yashmaks or some other form of
face-covering or veil. This woman was bareheaded and unveiled. She wore
some sort of yellowish-brown garment which enveloped her from neck to
ankles, showing no waist line. Her feet, in defiance of the blistering
sands, were bare.
At sight of Waldo she stopped and stared at him as he at her. He
remarked the un-European posture of her feet, not at all turned out, but
with the inner lines parallel. She wore no anklets, he observed, no
bracelets, no necklace or earrings. Her bare arms he thought the most
muscular he had ever seen on a human being. Her nails were pointed and
long, both on her hands and her feet. Her hair was black, short and
tousled, yet she did not look wild or uncomely. Her eyes smiled and her
lips had the effect of smiling, though they did not part ever so little,
not showing at all the teeth behind them.
“What a pity,” said Waldo aloud, “that she does not speak English.”
“I do speak English,” said the woman, and Waldo noticed that as she
spoke, her lips did not perceptibly open. “What does the gentleman
want?”
“You speak English!” Waldo exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “What luck!
Where did you learn it?”
“At the mission school,” she replied, an amused smile playing about the
corners of her rather wide, unopening mouth. “What can be done for you?”
She spoke with scarcely any foreign accent, but very slowly and with a
sort of growl running along from syllable to syllable.
“I am thirsty,” said Waldo, “and I have lost my way.”
“Is the gentleman living in a brown tent, shaped like half a melon?” she
inquired, the queer, rumbling note drawling from one word to the next,
her lips barely separated.
“Yes, that is our camp,” said Waldo.
“I could guide the gentleman that way,” she droned; “but it is far, and
there is no water on that side.”
“I want water first,” said Waldo, “or milk.”
“If you mean cow’s milk, we have none. But we have goat’s milk. There
is to drink where I dwell,” she said, sing-songing the words. “It is not
far. It is the other way.”
“Show me,” said he.
She began to walk, Waldo, his gun under his arm, beside her. She trod
noiselessly and fast. Waldo could scarcely keep up with her. As they
walked he often fell behind and noted how her swathing garments clung to
a lithe, shapely back, neat waist and firm hips. Each time he hurried
and caught up with her, he scanned her with intermittent glances, puzzled
that her waist, so well-marked at the spine, showed no particular
definition in front; that the outline of her from neck to knees,
perfectly shapeless under her wrappings, was without any waist-line or
suggestion of firmness or undulation. Likewise he remarked the amused
flicker in her eyes and the compressed line of her red, her too red,
lips.
“How long were you at the mission school?” he inquired.
“Four years,” she replied.
“Are you a Christian?” he asked.
“The Free-folk do not submit to baptism,” she stated simply, but with
rather more of the droning growl between her words.
He felt a queer shiver as he watched the scarcely moved lips through
which the syllables edged their way.
“But you are not veiled,” he could not resist saying.
“The Free-folk,” she rejoined, “are never veiled.”
“Then you are not a Mohammedan?” he ventured.
“The Free-folk are not Moslems.”
“Who are the Free-folk?” he blurted out incautiously.
She shot one baleful glance at him. Waldo remembered that he had to do
with an Asiatic. He recalled the three permitted questions.
“What is your name?” he inquired.
“Amina,” she told him.
“That is a name from the ‘Arabian Nights,’” he hazarded.
“From the foolish tales of the believers,” she sneered. “The Free-folk
know nothing of such follies.” The unvarying shutness of her speaking
lips, the drawly burr between the syllables, struck him all the more as
her lips curled but did not open.
“You utter your words in a strange way,” he said.
“Your language is not mine,” she replied.
“How is it that you learned my language at the mission school and are not
a Christian?”
“They teach all at the mission school,” she said, “and the maidens of the
Free-folk are like the other maidens they teach, though the Free-folk
when grown are not as town-dwellers are. Therefore they taught me as any
townbred girl, not knowing me for what I am.”
“They taught you well,” he commented.
“I have the gift of tongues,” she uttered enigmatically, with an odd note
of triumph burring the words through her unmoving lips.
Waldo felt a horrid shudder all over him, not only at her uncanny words,
but also from mere faintness.
“Is it far to your home?” he breathed.
“It is there,” she said, pointing to the doorway of a large tomb just
before them.
The wholly open arch admitted them into a fairly spacious interior, cool
with the abiding temperaturc of thick masonry. There was no rubbish on
the floor. Waldo, relieved to escape the blistering glare outside,
seated himself on a block of stone midway between the door and the inner
partition-wall, resting his gun-butt on the floor. For the moment he was
blinded by the change from the insistent brilliance of the desert morning
to the blurred gray light of the interior.
When his sight cleared he looked about and remarked, opposite the door,
the ragged hole which laid open the desecrated mausoleum. As his eyes
grew accustomed to the dimness he was so startled that he stood up. It
seemed to him that from its four corners the room swarmed with naked
children. To his inexperienced conjecture they seemed about two years
old, but they moved with the assurance of boys of eight or ten.
“Whose are these children?” he exclaimed.
“Mine,” she said.
“All yours?” he protested.
“All mine,” she replied, a curious suppressed boisterousness in her
demeanor.
“But there are twenty of them,” he cried.
“You count badly in the dark,” she told him. “There are fewer.”
“There certainly are a dozen,” he maintained, spinning round as they
danced and scampered about.
“The Free-people have large families,” she said.
“But they are all of one age,” Waldo exclaimed, his tongue dry against
the roof of his mouth.
She laughed, an unpleasant, mocking laugh, clapping her hands. She was
between him and the doorway, and as most of the light came from it he
could not see her lips.
“Is not that like a man! No woman would have made that mistake.”
Waldo was confuted and sat down again. The children circulated around
him, chattering, laughing, giggling, snickering, making noises indicative
of glee.
“Please get me something cool to drink,” said Waldo, and his tongue was
not only dry but big in his mouth.
“We shall have to drink shortly,” she said, “but it will be warm.”
Waldo began to feel uneasy. The children pranced around him, jabbering
strange, guttural noises, licking their lips, pointing at him, their eyes
fixed on him, with now and then a glance at their mother.
“Where is the water?”
The woman stood silent, her arms hanging at her sides, and it seemed to
Waldo she was shorter than she had been.
“Where is the water?” he repeated.
“Patience, patience,” she growled, and came a step nearer to him.
The sunlight struck upon her back and made a sort of halo about her hips.
She seemed still shorter than before. There was a something furtive in
her bearing, and the little ones sniggered evilly.
At that instant two rifle shots rang out almost as one. The woman fell
face downward on the floor. The babies shrieked in a shrill chorus.
Then she leapt up from all fours with an explosive suddenness, staggered
in a hurled, lurching rush toward the hole in the wall, and, with a
frightful yell, threw up her arms and whirled backward to the ground,
doubled and contorted like a dying fish, stiffened, shuddered and was
still. Waldo, his horrified eyes fixed on her face, even in his
amazement noted that her lips did not open.
The children, squealing faint cries of dismay, scrambled through the hole
in the inner wall, vanishing into the inky void beyond. The last had
hardly gone when the consul appeared in the doorway, his smoking gun in
his hand.
“Not a second too soon, my boy,” he ejaculated. “She was just going to
spring.”
He cocked his gun and prodded the body with the muzzle.
“Good and dead,” he commented. “What luck! Generally it takes three or
four bullets to finish one. I’ve known one with two bullets through her
lungs to kill a man.”
“Did you murder this woman?” Waldo demanded fiercely.
“Murder?” the consul snorted. “Murder! Look at that.”
He knelt down and pulled open the full, close lips, disclosing not human
teeth, but small incisors, cusped grinders, wide-spaced, and long, keen,
overlapping canines, like those of a greyhound: a fierce, deadly,
carnivorous dentition, menacing and combative.
Waldo felt a qualm, yet the face and form still swayed his horrified
sympathy for their humanness.
“Do you shoot women because they have long teeth?” Waldo insisted,
revolted at the horrid death he had watched.
“You are hard to convince,” said the consul sternly. “Do you call that a
woman?”
He stripped the clothing from the carcass.
Waldo sickened all over. What he saw was not the front of a woman, but
the body of a female animal, old and flaccid—mother of a pack.
“What kind of a creature is it?” he asked faintly.
“A Ghoul, my boy,” the consul answered solemnly, almost in a whisper.
“I thought they did not exist,” Waldo babbled. “I thought they were
mythical; I thought there were none.”
“I can very well believe that there are none in Rhode Island,” the consul
said gravely. “This is in Persia, and Persia is in Asia.”
_Edward Lucas White_.