And the first day was like unto the second and the third, for these two
desert farers went but slowly.
Each dawn, if they had travelled in the night, they found their tents
pitched; each night they moved on, or not, as pleased the girl's mood,
each hour of the day strengthening the love in the man's soul, each
minute of the night passing over him, as he lay outside the entrance to
her tent, so that, at the slightest sound from the dim, sweet, scented
interior, he might spring to his feet, awaiting the little call for
help which never came. Jill slept as peacefully as a babe, stirring
only at a dreamed of, or imagined, swaying of the bed, as does the
seafarer sometimes who sleeps for the first time after many months upon
a bed, the four feet of which stand firmly on the ground.
During the waking moments after her first night's rest, uninitiated
Jill had in imagination gone through and ardently disliked the
frightful hour in which she would help collect, and clean, and pack a
litter of soiled pots and pans, and other such abominations, which
collecting, etc., seems to constitute one of the chief charms of a
Western picnic; so great had been her relief on hearing that there was
absolutely nothing to do but to see that the cushions and coffee were
safely strapped upon Howesha's back, the only patient part of the
animal. They were standing in front of the tents with the animals at
their feet, the man watching the girl's every movement. Jill herself,
being vastly rested, was absolutely radiant as to looks; strange dishes
and hot winds and cold causing no havoc to the skin, nor the lack of
Marcel methods unsightliness to her hair.
The dusk hid the dilapidation of her tailor-made, which looked the
fresher for being pressed under the mattress; she always travelled
boot-trees, so her shoes were all right, and the two Jacob's ladders,
falling on the outside of her stockings, looked just like clocks neatly
mended; her lovely hair rioted under her blue hat, and her high spirits
rioted in her blue eyes, as she fed the camels with dates and wiped her
sticky fingers on the silken coats.
"What!" she had exclaimed. "You don't mean to say that you are going
to leave all this for the first thief to collect," withdrawing as she
spoke her basket of dates from the vicinity of her new camel's mouth.
Verily, a beast of great beauty and worth was she, but shining as a
mere rushlight, in comparison to the Blériot head-light radiance of the
fallen Taffadaln.
"The Arab does not steal!"
"Oh! but------" said Jill, putting a date into her own mouth by
mistake, and therefore speaking with difficulty, "but they do steal,
and murder, and do all kinds of _dreadful_ things like that--I learnt
it all in school!"
"No," reiterated the man calmly, "the Arab does _not_ steal, he merely
carries out the order of Allah, who, when Abraham turned his son
Ishmael from his door, gave unto the boy the open plains and deserts as
a heritage, permitting him to take and make use of whatever he could
find therein.
"And as it is written that every hand was turned against Ishmael, so
his descendants turn their hand against the descendants of those who
persecuted the son of Abraham; but amongst their own tribe, or to those
who ask of their hospitality, you will find the greatest honesty.
"In a camp everything is left unguarded, and nothing goes astray. If
you, clothed in fine linen and arrayed in jewels, were to enter the
tent of some half-starving Arab, and ask of him hospitality, he would
share his last few coffee beans with you, and give you his couch, if by
chance he was possessed of such a luxury, and speed you on your way the
morrow, and believe me, you would not find a ribbon missing from your
attire, even though you had left him without the wherewith to make his
beloved coffee."
The girl laughed, for she really cared not a rap either way, and was
only arguing for the sake of drawing the man out, having found argument
the best and simplest method of breaking through the Eastern reserve,
up against which she had more than once found herself during the last
few days.
"Well! I call that splitting hairs. I really can't say I see that the
persecution of Ishmael makes stealing different from stealing; to my
mind, taking sugar from a bowl that is not yours, and diamonds that are
not yours from a safe, are one and the same thing, as both ornamental
and necessary booty belong to someone else."
"And yet," replied the Eastern, "in the West a man who cheats at cards
is damned everlastingly, but a nation is acclaimed who takes the land
with all its wealth from some wretched, half-educated native; takes it
by force of arms or diplomacy, which, nine times out of ten, means
trickery. Yes! Acclaimed with such adjectives as valiant, strong,
beneficent, applauded to the skies, whilst reams are written anent the
glorious, victorious campaign. Victorious! Allah! When the nation
goes out with artillery and unlimited forces to meet a handful of men,
whose strength lies in a spear, and pride in some dozen flintlocks,
which have been sold to the benighted heathen for solid gold or shining
lengths of purest ivory.
"Besides, the Arab requires 'what he gains,' as is his way of
expressing himself. No people on earth endure such hardships as this
my people; never enough to eat, burnt in the summer, frozen in the
winter, buried in sand, tortured with thirst, fleeing from place to
place, never at peace, yet always happy in his miserable tent.
"For the _gazu_ or raid on caravan or camp, which will yield booty of
horse, or camel, or women--well! that is in the blood, and both sides
are prepared. If you or they should have the better horses, or the
better cunning, both of which we of the East so dearly love, one can
hardly be expected to sympathise with those who lose from want of
forethought."
And as he spoke, he raised a light spear, which he held in his hand,
and drove it through one edge of the tent flap which covered the
entrance, deep into the sand.
"That is a sign that I am coming back, and believe me, the worst of
Arabs would pass this way and seeing the sign would leave my belongings
unmolested. Yes! even if many moons passed, until the skins had
rotted, and the sands had covered the rotted remains."
After which explanation, Jill remained silent for a space, and then
approached her camel, feeling that the rapping of her knuckles, however
slight, had been quite unwarranted, for her sympathy in human beings
and their feelings was great, and the understanding which kept her from
wounding the sensibilities of those humans even greater.
Her wish to draw out the man had caused her figurative feet to make a
_faux pas_, in fact she felt that her pedestal had tilted ever so
slightly, causing the drapery of decency, and courtesy, to swing aside
for one moment, exposing a particle of clay upon the ivory of her
beautiful feet to the eyes of the man whose outlook on life was so
broad, whose principles were so stern, and whose people she had so
rudely criticised. Therefore she was dissatisfied with herself.
Though, if she had known it, the man looked upon her with the same
solicitude and tenderness, as you or I would look upon the babe, who,
in its first efforts to get from table to chair, pulls the table-cloth
about its unsteady little feet.
Also sensing that the woman he loved was troubled, there was no
gladness in the heart of the Arab, so that, in his anxiety to remove
the pebble from the path, he approached her, as she stood with skirt
lifted in readiness to mount her recumbent camel, whereupon she looked
up at the grave face and apologised truly and sweetly, and by her sweet
and humble act, causing the man of the East to marvel at her strength,
and to salaam deeply before her as he accounted himself as the sand
beneath her little feet.
"Now wait a moment!" laughed Jill, whose worries disappeared beneath
the warmth of her happy nature with the vanishing celerity of the dew
beneath the sun. "I am going to try my hand with the camels. I really
have a good deal of influence over animals--domesticated ones, I
mean------ Oh! Yes! I suppose they are, but of course in England we
don't have them hanging around as we do horses and dogs, you know. I
don't like cats, however--I simply can't stand the way they look past
and through you, at the spirits I always think, which we humans cannot
see standing beside us.
"I had one once, I found her in the picture gallery one night, who
positively made me creep. She would get up suddenly from the fire and
go sidling and wriggling across the room in the most absurd fashion,
purring and simply confused with delight, to rub herself up and down
the empty air, and by the way her tail was flattened down and then shot
up again, I was positive she was being stroked. She almost lived in
the picture gallery, sitting staring at the pictures of an ancestor of
mine, who had the most _frightful_ reputation.
"The worst of it all was that the whole village began to suffer from
catalepsy as Dads said, and then it all got into the newspapers, and
occult societies camped at the gates, water diviners drilled on the
lawns, the _Merry Harvester_ was filled with 'ologists hailing from
this country, and some genuine catamaniacs, until I had the bright idea
of fastening a placard on the gates to say that the cat was dead,
though she had suddenly disappeared the night the picture of the
ancestress fell, owing _honestly_ to a faulty plug in the wall. Now!
let me try and see if my knowledge of the Arabian tongue is good enough
to be understood by the camel."
Lowering her voice a tone, she suddenly cried "Get up!"
Whereupon the animal rose clumsily to its feet, as the girl, laughing
aloud, clung to the man's arm.
"Oh," she cried, "did you ever know anything so funny, though why, I am
sure I can't say--fancy a camel obeying me."
"Get down!" she suddenly ordered in her sweet, broken Arabic, at which
the camel knelt, leaving the Arab astounded, for the beautiful, lazy
woman of the East troubles not her soul in the training of beasts, nor
has she any command over them.
Having mounted and got the three animals to their feet, Jill laughed
delightedly, announcing her intention of starting the trio and leading
them for a short space, to which the man, craving to satisfy the
slightest wish, consented, fastening the pack camel to the off-side of
Jill's beast, so that she should be in the middle, upon which they
started off triumphantly, leaving the tent to the stars and moon.
For an hour they travelled over the sand, covered in patches with low
shrubs, and broken here and there by sand dunes, until Jill suddenly
stopped her chattering and pointed.
"There's a caravan or something over there, and we seem to be heading
straight for it--it's--yes--it's a tent under some palms--why!
Yes--no! yes it is--oh, it's our tent--how _can_ it be our tent when we
have been going straight ahead all the time, haven't we?"
Without the glimmer of a smile, the Arab shook his head.
"We have been describing a circle ever since we started."
"But no!" argued the girl, who was half mortified, half ready to laugh,
"there is no left rein, and I left the right one hanging------"
"Yes, but quite unconsciously you kicked your camel with your left foot
when we were some way from the tent--you didn't notice, but she
immediately began to turn to the left; after that, you patted her
continually on the left side, and camels, who, from pure stupidity or
hereditary instinct, will go straight on to eternity untouched, are
trained to turn in the direction of the side touched by hand, foot, or
whip; the single rein is of very little use, and hardly ever used by a
native, for once a camel bolts, nothing will stop him, excepting a
cloth flung over his head, or the birth of some passing fancy in his
head, which serves to divert the evil tenor of his benighted brain.
And I defy anyone unused to the desert and its markings to know if they
are really going straight or in a circle, and you were too taken up to
notice the stars. Try again! Keep that red star straight ahead, those
two close together, just behind your right shoulder, and you will
unfailingly reach the so-called mountain, in the shadow of which we
shall find our tent."
And the maker of sweet music bowed low from afar, and salaamed with
fervour, when, just before the hour of dawn, three camels came to a
halt, and knelt on the word of command of this veiled woman, who spoke
his language sweetly, but as a stranger.