One day when Pansy was in the large hall of the harem, Rayma came to
her, a look of feverish excitement in her eyes.
"Do you still wish to escape?" she asked, watching her supplanter as if
she could not believe such a desire could lie in the heart of any woman
the Sultan pleased to favour.
For Pansy her struggle became daily more difficult. It was an
obsession now, her wish to escape from her captor.
"How can I? Whichever way I turn someone is there to stop me."
"There is one who will not stop you. Not if he is paid well enough,"
Rayma said, her voice dropping to a whisper.
"Who is that?" Pansy asked quickly.
"One of the eunuchs who guards your room at night. He loves jewels
beyond all things on earth. And surely the Sultan has given you
plenty, although you never wear them."
The Sultan had given Pansy none, because he knew she would not accept
them. But she had jewels of her own; one that would be bribe enough
for anybody--the great diamond that had aroused her lover's comments
one night in the moonlit garden of Grand Canary.
Pansy clutched at the mere idea of escape. Where she would escape to,
she did not pause to consider. To escape she forgot his colour, his
religion, his wild life, his treatment of her father, everything,
except her own love for him.
"How do you know he'll let himself be bribed?" she asked.
"One of the women told me. He is her brother. I've spent days in
trying to help you get away."
"Oh, Rayma, I can never thank you enough," Pansy said, hysterically
grateful.
The Arab girl cast a spiteful glance at her, wondering why the other
could not guess that it was her, Rayma's, one desire to get rid of her
rival.
"Each night after dark you must open your door," the Arab girl went on.
"There will come a night when only one of the guards will be here.
Then, if you bribe him enough, he will let you pass."
Rayma did not imagine that Pansy would escape. She expected and hoped
that she would be caught in the attempt. Judging by her desert
standards, death would be the portion of any slave-girl who dared
attempt to fly from her owner.
After that, every night when she was alone, Pansy opened the sandalwood
door leading into the long, dark passage by which she had first entered
the palace.
Then, one evening, she found only one of the jewelled guards there.
On seeing this, she closed the door again, and going to her jewel case
got out the one big diamond.
From the gallery of her sumptuous prison she had gathered that beyond
the rose garden lay the grounds of the Sultan's own quarters, where she
had spent those three days prior to his unveiling. During that brief
time she had noticed that, at night and during the heat of the day, the
horses that browsed in the sun-scorched paddock were stabled in a long,
low building at the far end of the scanty field. And she knew, too,
that the iron gates by which she had entered the palace could not lie
so very far away from the paddock.
With trembling hands and almost sick with anxiety and excitement, Pansy
opened the door of her prison. She said nothing to the guard there.
She merely held the gem towards him.
On seeing it, his eyes glittered covetously.
Without a word he took the diamond.
Pansy passed down the dim passage. She hardly knew how her feet took
her along its ill-lit length. Every moment she expected to meet
someone, or that one of the several doors leading into it would open,
and her flight be brought to an abrupt end.
However, unchallenged she reached the iron gates.
A lamp flickering in a niche close by, showed her that one of the doors
was slightly ajar. With shaking hands she pulled it further open and
slipped out.
Outside all was silence and whiteness. Like a sea, the desert
stretched away to a milky horizon. In a luminous vault the moon hung,
a great round molten mass, that filled the world with a shimmer of
silver.
Finding herself really beyond the palace precincts, took all strength
from the girl. Hardly daring to breathe, she crept a few steps
further, and leant against the city wall, to recover a little and get
her bearings. Then, furtive as a shadow, she made her way towards a
long, low building that showed up like a huge ebony block in the
whiteness.
There were others as furtive as Pansy prowling round the city walls;
jackals searching for offal, snarled at her as she passed along,
slinking away and showing teeth that gleamed like ivory in the
moonlight.
The first sound of them made her start violently, for she felt the
Sultan's hand upon her, drawing her back to himself and captivity. But
when she saw the prowlers were four-footed, she passed on, heedless of
them, until the paddock fence was reached.
To climb over was a simple task. Then she ran swiftly across the
grassy space; suddenly deadly afraid, not of the loneliness, but that
the stable doors might be locked and she would not be able to carry out
her project.
However, in El-Ammeh there were no thieves daring enough to steal the
Sultan's horses, so the doors were never locked. They creaked
ominously when Pansy opened them, filling the still night with harsh
sounds--sounds that she felt must reach her captor's ears.
Inside, the stables were vaguely light with the rays of the moon that
dripped in from high little windows. Fortunately for Pansy's plan it
was the hour for the palace servants' evening meal, or there might have
been half a dozen men in the building. As it was, there was only a
long row of horses, each in separate stalls.
Pansy knew that if her protege were there, he would answer to her call.
"Sultan," she said softly.
There was a whinny from a stall some twenty yards away. Guided by the
sound she went in that direction.
It was the work of a few moments to unfasten the animal. But to Pansy
it seemed an age. Her hands trembled as she fumbled at the halter, for
she heard pursuit in every sound.
Then she led the animal out of the building, into the moonlight, and
closed the door behind her.
She was an expert bare-back rider.
Leading the horse to the fence, she mounted. Then she trotted him back
to the middle of the enclosure, and with voice and hand urged him
towards the fence again.
In his old steeplechasing days, a hurdle the height of the rails had
presented no difficulties to "The Sultan." And, even now, he took the
fence at an easy bound.
Once over, it seemed to Pansy that the last obstacle between herself
and freedom had been circumvented.
She leant forward, patting her horse encouragingly.
"Oh, Sultan," she said hysterically. "I don't mind where you take me,
so long as I can get away from here."
Left to itself, after the manner of horses, the animal picked the route
it knew the best; the sandy track along which the Sultan Casim
generally took it for exercise.
For the first mile or so Pansy was conscious of nothing except that she
had escaped--escaped from a love she could not conquer, a man she could
not hate.
White and billowy the world lay around her, an undulating sea of sand
with only one dark patch upon it, the city of El-Ammeh. The track the
horse followed wound through tufted hillocks, mounds of silver in the
moonlight. Here and there a stunted shrub cast black lines on the
all-prevailing whiteness.
At the end of an hour Pansy discovered she was not the rider she once
was. Her months of confinement had left her sadly "out of form." She
was worn out with the exertion and the excitement of escape. It took
all her skill to keep her seat on the horse. And the animal knew, for
it slackened speed as a good horse will when conscious of a tired rider.
Others, also, seemed aware that something weak and helpless was abroad,
and with the strange magnetism of the wild they were drawn towards the
girl.
Here and there in the melting, misty distance, a dark form appeared,
lopping along at a safe range, keeping pace with the old horse and its
rider, every now and again glancing at the two with glaring green eyes,
and calling one to another with shrieks of maniacal laughter.
Pansy hardly heard the hyenas. She was too intent on keeping her seat.
But the horse heard them and he snorted with rage and fear.
As the miles sped by, the girl was aware of nothing except a desire to
get further and further away from her lover, and to keep her seat on
the horse.
Then she became aware of something else.
For the horse halted and she fell off, flat on the soft sand.
Shaken, but not hurt, she sat up and gazed around.
A little oasis had been reached, where date palms stood black against
the all-prevailing silver, and a tiny spring bubbled with cheerful
whisper.
When the Sultan took his namesake out for exercise, this was the
extreme limit of their ride--the horse had been there once already that
day--and in the shade of the date palms the man and the horse would
rest awhile before returning to the city.
But Pansy knew none of these things. She only knew that valuable time
was being lost sitting there on the ground. But it was such an effort
to get up.
Green eyes had seen her fall as if dead. The hyenas crept stealthily
forward to feast upon what lay helpless in the sand. But when she sat
up they retreated, to squat on their haunches at a safe distance, and
fill the night with demoniacal laughter.
The sound brought Pansy to her feet, swaying with fatigue. She had
heard it before, around her father's camp in Gambia.
But it was one thing to hear the hyenas when there were thirty or more
people between herself and them, and another now that she was quite
alone in the desert, with no one to come to her aid.
The chorus of mad, mocking mirth brought fear clutching at her, a fear
that the horse's wild snorts increased. She looked round sharply to
find there were at least a dozen of the brutes on her trail.
It was not Pansy's nature to show fear, even though she felt it.
Going to the spring, she picked up several large stones, and threw them
at the hyenas.
A note of fear crept into their hideous voices. They beat a swift
retreat, melting away into distance. There was too much life left in
the girl and horse for them to attack as yet.
Gathering her tired self together Pansy looked round for a rock high
enough to enable her to mount by. As it happened there was none handy.
Taking her horse by the mane, she led him from the oasis. Somewhat
protestingly he went.
Pansy had to stagger on for nearly a mile on foot, in the deep,
fatiguing sand, before she could find a tussock high enough to mount by.
Once on, she left the route to her horse.
To the uninitiated, one portion of the desert looks very similar to
another. And the girl had no idea that the horse was retracing his
steps, making his way slowly and laboriously back to El-Ammeh.
She had not the strength left even to look around her. The hot night,
the long ride, the sickly excitement attached to escaping, the thirst
that now raged within her, and the final tiring walk, after months of
inactivity, had told upon her. Utterly worn out, she just managed to
keep her seat, in a world that had become a place of aching weariness,
through which there rang occasional wild shrieks of laughter.
Then it became impossible to cling on any longer.
All at once, she fell off and stayed in the sand, half stunned by her
fall, conscious of nothing except that she had escaped from the Sultan
Casim Ammeh.
When she fell the horse stopped. He stretched a long neck and sniffed
and sniffed at her. But since she did not get up, he did not leave
her. He waited until she was ready to start off again, quite glad of
the rest himself.
However, there was not to be much rest for him.
A shriek of diabolical laughter rang out at his very heels. With a
snort of fear and rage, he lashed out. The laughter turned into a howl
of pain, and one of the hyenas retreated on three legs, with a broken
shoulder.
But there were twenty or more of them now, against one old horse and a
girl too utterly exhausted to know even that her life was in danger.
And each of the hyenas had a strength of jaw that could break the thigh
of an ox, and a cowardice of heart equalled only by their strength.
For sometime they circled round, watching their prey with ravenous,
glaring green eyes, and every now and again one or the other made a
forward rush, only to find those iron heels between it and its meal.
The horse understood being baited in this manner, by foes just beyond
his reach. It had been part of the hell the girl he guarded had
rescued him from.
As time went on, the hyenas grew bolder.
Once they rushed in a body. But they retreated. One with a broken
jaw, one with a mouthful of live flesh torn from "The Sultan's" flank,
and one did not retreat at all. It lay with its skull smashed in, its
brains bespattering the horse's hoofs--hoofs over which now a red
stream oozed, filling the hot night air with the smell of live blood.
A desperate battle raged in the lonely desert under the white light of
the moon. A battle that filled the night with the mad mirth of hyenas,
and the wild shrieks of a frightened, hurt, infuriated horse--"The
Sultan"--fighting as he had fought that day in the East End of London
when Pansy had first come across him. But fighting for her life as
well as his own, against the cowards that beset him.