By the time the news of the disappearance of Sir George Barclay's party
reached England, Pansy was well on her way to El-Ammeh.
She arrived there one night after dark, a darkness out from which high
walls loomed and over them strange sounds came; the thin wail of
stringed instruments; a tom-tom throbbing through the blue night; the
plaintive song of some itinerant musician, and the shuffle of crowded
human life.
She was not given much time to dwell upon those things. Her escort
skirted the high walls. A big horse-shoe arch loomed up, with heavy
iron gates; gates that clanged back as they approached. And the flare
of torches showed a long passage leading into darkness.
Into the passage her litter was carried with a swaying, somnolent
movement. Then the gates closed with a clang behind her, leaving the
escort outside; and she and Alice were alone with the flaming torches,
the black, engulfing passage, and half a dozen huge negroes in gorgeous
raiment.
With a sickly feeling, Pansy slipped from her litter.
Her journey's end!
The journey had lasted over six weeks. Under other circumstances Pansy
would have enjoyed it. It could not have been more comfortable. She
had travelled in the cool of the morning and in the cool of the
evening. Always for the long midday halt the same sumptuous tent was
up, awaiting her reception, taken down again after she had departed,
and up again before she arrived at the next halting place.
The country she travelled through was an interesting one, park-like and
grassy at first, as the weeks passed becoming ever more sandy and arid,
with occasional patches that were wonderfully fertile. Until, finally,
like a glowing, yellow sea before her, she had her first glimpse of the
Sahara on its southern side--billow upon billow of flaming sand,
stretching away to a tensely blue sky, with here and there a stunted
bush, a twist of coarse grass, or a clump of distorted cacti with red
flowers blazing against the heated, shimmering air--a vast solitude
where nothing moved.
For a week they had journeyed through the desert. Late one evening a
lake came into view, with fruitful gardens growing around it, where
date palms, olives, and clustering vines flourished. On the far side a
walled city showed.
It lay golden in the misty glow of evening, its minarets standing out
against a shadowed sky. Even as she approached it had been swallowed
by darkness. Softly the lake lapped as they skirted it, and the world
was filled with a constant hissing sigh, the sound of shifting sand
when the wind roamed over it--the voice of the desert.
Much as Pansy dreaded her journey's end, she welcomed it.
She lived for nothing now but to see the Sultan; to plead with him for
her father, her friends, herself. And she buoyed herself up with the
hope that her own riches would enable her to ransom them all.
But if she failed!
She grew sick at the thought. And the thought was with her as she
stood in the stone passage, her strained eyes on the gigantic negro
guards who had come to escort her to her new quarters. They were
attired from head to foot in rich, brightly coloured silks, and they
literally blazed with jewels.
The man who was their master might have so much money that he would
prefer revenge.
This thought was in Pansy's mind some minutes later when she sat alone
with her maid in one of the many apartments in the palace of El-Ammeh.
It was a big room with walls and floor of gold mosaic, and a domed
ceiling of sapphire-blue where cut rock-crystals flashed like stars.
Five golden lamps hung from it, suspended by golden chains; lamps set
with flat emeralds and rubies and sapphires.
It was furnished very much as her tent had been, except that there were
wide ottomans against the gilded walls, and the tables and stools were
of sandalwood. In one corner stood a large bureau of the same
sweet-scented wood, beautifully carved. Three heavy, pointed doors of
sandalwood led into the apartment. The place was heavy with its
sensuous odour.
In a little alcove draped with curtains of gold tissue the negroes
deposited Pansy's belongings. Then they withdrew, leaving the girl and
her maid alone; Pansy with the depressing feeling that money might not
have much influence with the Sultan Casim Ammeh.
Two of the doors of her gilded prison were locked, Pansy quickly
discovered. Outside of the one she had entered by a couple of negro
guards were stationed, who refused to let her pass.
On learning this, she went out into the fretted gallery. Below a
garden lay. She stood at the head of the steps leading into it,
anxious to get away from the dim scented silence of the great room, in
touch with the trees and stars and the cool, rose-scented breath of
night that she understood.
She tried to argue that all the splendour and luxury placed at her
disposal boded well for the future, that her captor might not be going
to carry out his threats.
Her gaze turned towards the room, with its wealth and luxury--a fit
setting for a Sultan's favourite.
Pansy shivered.
What price might she not have to pay for her father's life?
Then she thought of Raoul Le Breton. The dark blood in him seemed
nothing now, compared with the thought of having to become the chattel
of this wild, desert chief.
Slight sounds in the big room roused her from her reverie.
She started violently, expecting to see the Sultan coming to make his
bargain.
But only a couple of white-robed servants were there.
The biggest of the inlaid tables was set for dinner; a dinner for one,
set in a European way. And the meal that followed was the work of a
skilled French _chef_.
But the sumptuous repast had no charm for a girl worried to death at
the thought of her own fate and her father's. To please Alice she made
some pretence of eating.
Leaving her maid to revel in the neglected dainties, Pansy went back to
her vigil in the arches.
In course of time, the lamps burning low, Alice's prodigious yawns
drove her to lie wakeful among the soft cushions of one of the ottomans.
From fitful slumbers Alice's voice roused her the next morning. Alice
with the usual early morning tea, a tray of choice fruit, and a basket
full of rare and beautiful flowers.
Distastefully Pansy looked at the choice blossoms. She felt they were
from the Sultan to his unwilling visitor; a silent message of
admiration; of homage, perhaps.
"Take them away, Alice," she said quickly. "And put them where I can't
see them."
With a curious glance at her mistress, the girl obeyed.
Pansy drank her tea, all the time pondering on her future.
If she had to go under, she would go under fighting. If this wild
chief were prepared to give her her father's life in exchange for
herself, she would see that he got as little pleasure as possible out
of his bargain. If he were infatuated with her as Alice and Dr.
Edouard seemed to think, so much the better. All the more keenly he
would feel the lashes her tongue would be able to give.
Pansy knew he spoke French, for this fact had come into the story her
father had told her in years gone by.
In thinking of the cutting things she would be able to lay to her
captor, Pansy tried to keep at bay the dread she felt. Since he was
not there to hit at in person, she hit at him with sneers at his race
to Alice.
"I don't suppose there's anywhere I can have a bath," she remarked when
her tea was finished. "Cleanliness isn't one of the virtues of these
Arabs."
"Dere be one," Alice assured her. "De most beautifullest one you eber
saw."
Pansy agreed with her maid some minutes later when she was splashing
about in its cool waters.
Alice had pointed out the place to her. In dressing-gown and slippers,
Pansy had passed through the wide gallery, a lacy prison of stone it
seemed to the girl, for although it gave a wide view of the desert,
there was not one spot in its carved side that she could have put her
hand through.
Immediately beneath lay a garden, surrounded by a high wall.
Pansy had seen many gardens, but none to equal the one before her in
peace and beauty. It was a dream of roses. In the middle was a sunken
pond where water-lilies floated and carp swam and gaped at her with
greedy mouths when her shadow fell across them, as if expecting to be
fed. Vivid green velvety turf surrounded the pond, a rarity in that
arid country. There was nothing else in the garden but roses, of every
shade and colour. They streamed in cascades over the high walls. They
grew in banks by the pond, in trellised alleys and single bushes. The
garden was a gem of cool greenness, scent and silence, and over it
brooded the shadows of gigantic cypresses.
The bath-room lay beneath the stone gallery, with fretted and columned
arches where more roses clung and climbed, opening directly on the
scented quiet of the garden. It was a huge basin of white marble,
about thirty feet across and deep enough to swim in, with a carved
edge, delicate as lace.
Pansy was in no mood to appreciate her fairy-like surroundings. And
the beauty of her prison in no way softened her heart towards her
captor.
As she splashed about in the bath, over the high walls came the sound
of bells, like church chimes wrangling in the distance on an English
Sunday.
Wistfully Pansy stopped and listened to them. She was travelled enough
to recognize them as camel bells; some train coming to this barbaric
city.
When she returned to the dim, gilded room, breakfast was awaiting her;
an ordinary Continental breakfast.
She pecked at it, too sick at heart to eat. Then she sat on, awaiting
Edouard's appearance. He had parted with her the previous night,
promising to come and see her when she was installed in the Sultan's
palace.
It was evening before he came. Pansy greeted him eagerly. All day she
had dreaded that her captor might appear. But she wanted to see him,
to satisfy herself about her father.
Edouard's visits to her were purely professional, and brief. Always
his idea was to get away, for his conscience pricked him where Pansy
was concerned. He was used to his patron's wild ways, and he knew the
girl's position was not of her own choosing.
"Will you tell the Sultan I want to see him?" she said when he rose to
go.
"Hasn't he paid you a visit yet?" the doctor asked with surprise.
"No, and I'm so worried about my father."
Edouard left, promising to deliver her message. But he came the next
day, saying the Sultan had refused to grant her an interview.
"I wonder why he won't see me," she said drearily.
Edouard wondered also.
That evening he dined with his friend and patron, not in a gorgeous
Eastern apartment like Pansy's, but in one that was decidedly Western
in its fittings and appointments. And the Sultan was attired as Pansy
had seen him several times in Grand Canary, in black dress-suit, white
pleated shirt and the black pearl studs.
Dinner was over before Edouard approached the subject of the
girl-prisoner.
"If I were you I'd see Miss Barclay," he said. "This suspense won't do
her any good. She frets all day about her father."
"It's not in my plans to see her just yet," the Sultan replied.
Edouard glanced at him.
Then he did what for him was a bold thing, fat and comfortable and fond
of his easy berth as he was. He challenged his royal master concerning
his intentions towards the captive girl.
"What are your plans with regard to Miss Barclay?" he ventured. "She's
not one of the sort who can be bought with a string of pearls or a
diamond bracelet."
"I'm going to marry her," the Sultan said easily.
Edouard experienced a feeling of relief, on his own account as much as
Pansy's.
The doctor studied her with renewed interest the next day when he paid
her his usual visit.
"If I sent a note to the Sultan, do you think it would be any use?"
Pansy asked him anxiously, the moment he had done with professional
matters.
"It would do no harm at any rate," he replied.
Pansy got to her feet quickly.
She knew Edouard was in touch with her captor--a prisoner like herself
she imagined, but free to come and go because of his calling. She did
not know he was a man so faithful to his master that the latter's
smallest wish was carried out to the letter.
Going into the alcove where her belongings were, Pansy seated herself
on the edge of a couch, with a writing-pad on her knee. For some
minutes she stayed frowning at a blank piece of paper. It was so
difficult to know what to say to this savage chief who held the lives
of her father and friends in his hands.
After some minutes thinking she wrote:
"To the Sultan Casim Ammeh.
Perhaps you do not know that I am very rich. Any price you may ask I
am prepared to give for my father's life and freedom, for the lives and
freedom of my English friends who are also your prisoners, and for my
own. The ransom will be paid to you in gold. All you will have to do
will be to mention the sum you want, and allow me to send a message
through to my bank in England.
Pansy Langham Barclay."
The note was put into an envelope, sealed, addressed and taken out to
Edouard.
On handing it over, however, Pansy suddenly recollected that the
Sultan, for all his wealth and power, might be ignorant of the arts of
reading and writing.
"Can he read French?" she asked.
An amused look came to the doctor's face.
"If he can't make it out, I'll read it to him," he replied.
It was evening before Le Breton got the note. Le Breton again as Pansy
knew him, in khaki riding-suit, just as he had returned from a ride on
her old race-horse, that had been brought to his camp the day of her
capture, and was now in the palace stables.
The note was lying on his desk, with the name that Pansy now hated--the
Sultan Casim Ammeh--written on the envelope in her pretty hand.
A tender look hovered about his mouth as he picked up the letter and
read it. Again the girl was "doing her best" for some helpless
creatures--his prisoners. Although the fact filled him with an even
greater admiration for Pansy, it did not lessen his hatred for her
father.
He sat down and dashed off a brief reply in an assumed hand.
"All the gold in Africa will not buy my vengeance from me.
Casim Ammeh."
His answer reached Pansy with her dinner, reducing her to despair.
It seemed that nothing she could do would have any influence with this
savage ruler.
Hopeless days followed; days that brought her nothing but a series of
elaborate meals. Yet she knew that life went on around her; a life
quite different from any she had been accustomed to.
Morning and night she heard faint voices wailing from unseen minarets.
Over the high walls of her garden came the hum of a crowded city. From
her screened gallery she saw camel trains loom out of the haze of
distance to El-Ammeh, with a wrangle of sweet bells; camels that came
from some vast unknown.
And there was another sound that Pansy heard; a sound that hailed from
somewhere within the Palace; that always came about bedtime, and always
set her shivering; the sound of a girl screaming.
Each morning with her early tea there was a basket of rare flowers,
flowers she did not trouble to tell Alice to move now; she put them
down to some palace custom, nothing that had any bearing on the Sultan.
She never thought of Le Breton's words:
"Still only a few flowers, Pansy?"
And each evening she sat in the dim, scented room and waited for those
muffled screams. She knew where they came from now; from somewhere
behind one of the locked doors leading into her room.
Limp and listless, she dragged through the hot, monotonous days,
brooding on her own fate and her father's, envying the ragged black
crows that flew, free, like bits of burnt paper, high in the scorching
sky.
Pansy had been about a fortnight in El-Ammeh, when something happened.
One morning, as she stood by the sunken pond, feeding the greedy carp
with rolls she was too miserable to eat, Alice came to her round-eyed
and startled-looking.
"Oh, Miss Pansy, dey hab come for you," she gasped
"Who?" Pansy asked quickly.
"De Sultan's soldiers."
"Are they going to take me to him?" she asked, feeling the interview
she desired and dreaded was now at hand.
"Dey take you to de slave market. To be sold. Oh, oh!" the girl
wailed.
Alice's hysterical sobs followed Pansy down the dim passage some
minutes later, when, with strained face and tortured eyes, she went
with a guard of eight Arab soldiers to meet the fate the Sultan Casim
Ammeh had promised for her more than sixteen years before.