In the morning he was still brooding over the message; and as they
travelled through the black desert on the way to Ghardaia and the hidden
cities of the M'Zab, he fell into long silences. Then, abruptly, he
would rouse himself to gaiety and animation, telling old legends or new
tales, strange dramas of the desert, very seldom comedies; for there are
few comedies in the Sahara, except for the children.
Sometimes he was in danger of speaking out words which said themselves
over and over in his head. "If I 'wait too long, I may wait for ever.'
Then, by Allah, I will not wait." But he kept his tongue in control,
though his brain was hot as if he wore no turban, under the blaze of the
sun. "I will leave things as they are while we are in this black
Gehenna," he determined. "What is written is written. Yet who has seen
the book of the writing? And there is a curse on all this country, till
the M'Zab is passed."
After Bou-Saada, he had gradually forgotten, or almost forgotten, his
fears. He had been happy in the consciousness of power that came to him
from the desert, where he was at home, and Europeans were helpless
strangers. But now, M'Barka's warnings had brought the fears back, like
flapping ravens. He had planned the little play of the sand-divining,
and at first it had pleased him. M'Barka's vision of the dark man who
was not of Victoria's country could not have been better; and because he
knew that his cousin believed in the sand, he was superstitiously
impressed by her prophecy and advice. In the end, he had forced her to
go on when she would have stopped, yet he was angry with her for
putting doubts into his mind, doubts of his own wisdom and the way to
succeed. With a girl of his own people, or indeed with any girl, if he
had not loved too much, he would have had no doubts. But he did not know
how it was best to treat Victoria. His love for her was so strong, that
it was like fear, and in trying to understand her, he changed his mind a
dozen times a day. He was not used to this uncertainty, and hated to
think that he could be weak. Would she turn from him, if he broke the
tacit compact of loyal friendship which had made her trust him as a
guide? He could not tell; though an Arab girl would scorn him for
keeping it. "Perhaps at heart all women are alike," he thought. "And if,
now that I am warned, I should risk waiting, I would be no man." At
last, the only question left in his mind was, "When?"
For two days they journeyed through desolation, in a burnt-out world
where nothing had colour except the sad violet sky which at evening
flamed with terrible sunsets, cruelly beautiful as funeral pyres. The
fierce glow set fire to the black rocks which pointed up like dragons'
teeth, and turned them to glittering copper; polishing the dead white
chalk of the chebka to the dull gleam of dirty silver. Far away there
were always purple hills, behind which it seemed that hope and beauty
might come to life again; but travelling from morning to night they
never appeared any nearer. The evil magic of the black desert, which
Maïeddine called accursed because of the M'Zabites, made the beautiful
hills recede always, leaving only the ugly brown waves of hardened
earth, which were disheartening to climb, painful to descend.
At last, in the midst of black squalor, they came to an oasis like a
bright jewel fallen in the trough of swine. It was Berryan, the first
town of the M'Zabites, people older than the Arabs, and hated by them
with a hatred more bitter than their loathing for Jews.
Maïeddine would not pass through the town, since it could be avoided,
because in his eyes the Beni-M'Zab were dogs, and in their eyes he,
though heir to an agha, would be as carrion.
Sons of ancient Phoenicians, merchants of Tyre and Carthage, there never
had been, never would be, any lust for battle in the hearts of the
M'Zabites. Their warfare had been waged by cunning, and through
mercenaries. They had fled before Arab warriors, driven from place to
place by brave, scornful enemies, and now, safely established in their
seven holy cities, protected by vast distances and the barrier of the
black desert, they revenged their wrongs with their wits, being rich,
and great usurers. Though Mussulmans in these days, the schisms with
which they desecrated the true religion were worse in the eyes of
Maïeddine than the foolish faith of Christians, who, at least, were not
backsliders. He would not even point out to Victoria the strange minaret
of the Abadite mosque at Berryan, which tapered like a brown obelisk
against the shimmering sky, for to him its very existence was a
disgrace.
"Do not speak of it; do not even look at it," he said to her, when she
exclaimed at the great Cleopatra Needle. But she did look, having none
of his prejudices, and he dared not bid her let down the curtains of her
bassour, as he would if she had been a girl of his own blood.
The extraordinary city, whose crowded, queerly-built houses were blocks
of gold in the sunlight, seemed beautiful to Victoria, coming in sight
of it suddenly after days in the black desert. The other six cities,
called holy by the Beni-M'Zab, were far away still. She knew this,
because Maïeddine had told her they would not descend into the Wady
M'Zab till next day. Berryan and Guerrara were on the upper plateau; and
Victoria could hardly bear to pass by, for Berryan was by far the most
Eastern-seeming place she had seen. She wondered if, should she ask him
as a favour, Maïeddine would rest there that night, instead of camping
somewhere farther on, in the hideous desert; for already it was late
afternoon. But she would ask nothing of him now, for he was no longer
quite the trusty friend she had persuaded herself to think him. One
night, since the sand-divining, she had had a fearful dream concerning
Maïeddine. Outside her tent she had heard a soft padding sound, and
peeping from under the flap, she had seen a splendid, tawny tiger, who
looked at her with brilliant topaz eyes which fascinated her so that she
could not turn away. But she knew that the animal was Maïeddine; that
each night he changed himself into a tiger; and that as a tiger he was
more his real self than when by day he appeared as a man.
They filed past Berryan; the meharis, the white stallion, the
pack-camel, and the mule, in slow procession, along a rough road which
wound close to the green oasis. And from among the palm trees men and
women and little children, gorgeous as great tropical birds, in their
robes of scarlet, ochre-yellow, and emerald, peered at the little
caravan with cynical curiosity. Victoria looked back longingly, for she
knew that the way from Berryan to the Wady M'Zab would be grim and
toilsome under the burning sun. Hill after hill, they mounted and
descended; hills stony yet sandy, always the same dull colour, and so
shapeless as to daze the brain with their monotony. But towards evening,
when the animals had climbed to the crest of a hill like a dingy wave,
suddenly a white obelisk shot up, pale and stiff as a dead man's finger.
Tops of tall palms were like the dark plumes on the heads of ten
thousand dancing women of the Sahara, and as a steep descent began,
there glittered the five hidden cities, like a strange fairyland lost in
the desert. The whole Wady M'Zab lay under the eyes of the travellers,
as if they looked down over the rim of an immense cup. Here, some who
were left of the sons of Tyre and Carthage dwelt safe and snug,
crouching in the protection of the valley they had found and reclaimed
from the abomination of desolation.
It seemed to Victoria that she looked on one of the great sights of the
world: the five cities, gleaming white, and glowing bronze, closely
built on their five conical hills, which rose steeply from the flat
bottom of the gold-lined cup--Ghardaia, Beni-Isguen, Bou-Noura, Melika,
and El-Ateuf. The top of each hill was prolonged to a point by the
tapering minaret of one of those Abadite mosques which the girl thought
the most Eastern of all things imported from the East. The oasis which
gave wealth to the M'Zabites surged round the towns like a green sea at
ebb tide, sucked back from a strand of gold; and as the caravan wound
down the wonderful road with which the Beni-M'Zab had traced the sheer
side of their enchanted cup, the groaning of hundreds of well-chains
came plaintively up on the wind.
The well-stones had the obelisk shape of the minarets, in miniature; and
Negroes--freed slaves of the rich M'Zabites--running back and forth in
pairs, to draw the water, were mere struggling black ants, seen from the
cup's rim. The houses of the five towns were like bleached skeletons,
and the arches that spanned the dark, narrow streets were their ribs.
Arrived at the bottom of the cup, it was necessary to pass through the
longest and only modern street of Ghardaia, the capital of the M'Zab. A
wind had sprung up, to lift the sand which sprinkled the hard-trodden
ground with thick powder of gold dust, and whirl it westward against the
fire of sunset, red as a blowing spray of blood. "It is a sign of
trouble when the sand of the desert turns to blood," muttered Fafann to
her mistress, quoting a Bedouin proverb.
The men of the M'Zab do not willingly give lodging to strangers, least
of all to Arabs; and at Beni-Isguen, holy city and scene of strange
mysteries, no stranger may rest for the night. But Maïeddine, respected
by the ruling power, as by his own people, had a friend or two at every
Bureau Arabe and military station. A French officer stationed at
Ghardaia had married a beautiful Arab girl of good family distantly
related to the Agha of the Ouled-Serrin, and being at Algiers on
official business, his wife away at her father's tent, he had promised
to lend his house, a few miles out of the town, to Si Maïeddine. It was
a long, low building of toub, the sun-dried sand-blocks of which most
houses are made in the ksour, or Sahara villages, but it had been
whitewashed, and named the Pearl.
There they slept, in the cool shadow of the oasis, and early next
morning went on.
As soon as they had passed out of this hidden valley, where a whole race
of men had gathered for refuge and wealth-building, Victoria felt,
rather than saw, a change in Maïeddine. She hardly knew how to express
it to herself, unless it was that he had become more Arab. His
courtesies suggested less the modern polish learned from the French (in
which he could excel when he chose) than the almost royal hospitality of
some young Bey escorting a foreign princess through his dominions.
Always "_très-mâle_," as Frenchwomen pronounced him admiringly, Si
Maïeddine began to seem masculine in an untamed, tigerish way. He was
restless, and would not always be contented to ride El Biod, beside the
tall, white mehari, but would gallop far ahead, and then race back to
rejoin the little caravan, rushing straight at the animals as if he must
collide with them, then, at the last instant, when Victoria's heart
bounded, reining in his horse, so that El Biod's forefeet--shod
Arab-fashion--pawed the air, and the animal sat upon his haunches,
muscles straining and rippling under the creamlike skin.
Or, sometimes, Maïeddine would spring from the white stallion's back,
letting El Biod go free, while his master marched beside Guelbi, with
that panther walk that the older races, untrammelled by the civilization
of towns, have kept unspoiled.
The Arab's eyes were more brilliant, never dreamy now, and he looked at
Victoria often, with disconcerting steadiness, instead of lowering his
eyelids as men of Islam, accustomed to the mystery of the veil,
unconsciously do with European women whom they respect, though they do
not understand.
So they went on, travelling the immeasurable desert; and Victoria had
not asked again, since Maïeddine's refusal, the name of the place to
which they were bound. M'Barka seemed brighter, as if she looked
forward to something, each day closer at hand; and her courage would
have given Victoria confidence, even if the girl had been inclined to
forebodings. They were going somewhere, Lella M'Barka knew where, and
looked forward joyously to arriving. The girl fancied that their
destination was the same, though at first she had not thought so. Words
that M'Barka let drop inadvertently now and then, built up this
impression in her mind.
The "habitude du Sud," as Maïeddine called it, when occasionally they
talked French together, was gradually taking hold of the girl. Sometimes
she resented it, fearing that by this time it must have altogether
enslaved Saidee, and dreading the insidious fascination for herself;
sometimes she found pleasure and peace in it; but in every mood the
influence was hard to throw off.
"The desert has taken hold of thee," Maïeddine said one day, when he had
watched her in silence for a while, and seen the rapt look in her eyes.
"I knew the time would come, sooner or later. It has come now."
"No," Victoria answered. "I do not belong to the desert."
"If not to-day, then to-morrow," he finished, as if he had not heard.
They were going on towards Ouargla. So much he had told her, though he
had quickly added, "But we shall not stop there." He was waiting still,
though they were out of the black desert and the accursed land of the
renegades. He was not afraid of anything or anyone here, in this
vastness, where a European did not pass once a year, and few Arabs, only
the Spahis, carrying mails from one Bureau Arabe to another, or tired
soldiers changing stations. The beautiful country of the golden dunes,
with its horizon like a stormy sea, was the place of which he said in
his thoughts, "It shall happen there."
On the other side of Ghardaia, even when Victoria had ceased to be
actually impatient for her meeting with Saidee, she had longed to know
the number of days, that she might count them. But now she had drunk so
deep of the colour and the silence that, in spite of herself, she was
passing beyond that phase. What were a few days more, after so many
years? She wondered how she could have longed to go flying across the
desert in Nevill Caird's big motor-car; nevertheless, she never ceased
to wish for Stephen Knight. Her thoughts of him and of the desert were
inextricably and inexplicably mingled, more than ever since the night
when she had danced in the Agha's tent, and Stephen's face had come
before her eyes, as if in answer to her call. Constantly she called him
now. When there was some fleeting, beautiful effect of light or shadow,
she said, "How I wish he were here to see that!" She never named him in
her mind. He was "he": that was name enough. Yet it did not occur to her
that she was "in love" with Knight. She had never had time to think
about falling in love. There had always been Saidee, and dancing; and to
Victoria, the desire to make money enough to start out and find her
sister, had taken the place which ideas of love and marriage fill in
most girls' heads. Therefore she did not know what to make of her
feeling for Stephen. But when a question floated into her brain, she
answered it simply by explaining that he was different from any other
man she had met; and that, though she had known him only a few days,
from the first he had seemed more a friend than Si Maïeddine, or any one
else whom she knew much better than Stephen.
As they travelled, she had many thoughts which pleased her--thoughts
which could have come to her nowhere else except in the desert, and
often she talked to herself, because M'Barka could not understand her
feelings, and she did not wish to make Maïeddine understand.
"Burning, burning," was the adjective which she repeated oftenest, in an
almost awestruck whisper, as her eyes travelled over immense spaces; for
she thought that the desert might have dropped out of the sun. The
colour of sand and sky was colour on fire, blazing. The whole Sahara
throbbed with the unimaginable fire of creative cosmic force, deep,
vital orange, needed by the primitive peoples of the earth who had not
risen high enough yet to deserve or desire the finer vibrations.
As she leaned out of the bassour, the heat of the sun pressed on her
lightly veiled head, like the golden lid of a golden box. She could feel
it as an actual weight; and invisible behind it a living power which
could crush her in an instant, as the paw of a lion might crush a flower
petal.
Africa itself was this savage power, fierce as fire, ever smouldering,
sometimes flaming with the revolt of Islam against other creeds; but the
heart of the fire was the desert. Only the shady seguias in the oasis
towns cooled it, like children's fingers on a madman's forehead; or the
sound of a boy's flute in a river bed, playing the music of Pan,
changeless, monotonous yet thrilling, as the music of earth and all
Nature.
There were tracts in the desert which colour-blind people might have
hated; but Victoria grew to think the dreariest stretches beautiful; and
even the occasional plagues of flies which irritated M'Barka beyond
endurance, only made Victoria laugh.
Sometimes came caravans, in this billowing immensity between the M'Zab
and Ouargla--city of Solomon, whither the Queen of Sheba rode on her
mehari: caravans blazing red and yellow, which swept like slow lines of
flame across the desert, going east towards the sunrise, or west where
the sunset spreads over the sky like a purple fan opening, or the tail
of a celestial peacock.
What Victoria had once imagined the desert to be of vast emptiness, and
what she found it to be of teeming life, was like the difference between
a gold-bright autumn leaf seen by the naked eye, and the same leaf
swarming under a powerful microscope.
The girl never tired of following with her eyes the vague tracks of
caravans that she could see dimly sketched upon the sand, vanishing in
the distance, like lines traced on the water by a ship. She would be
gazing at an empty horizon when suddenly from over the waves of the
dunes would appear a dark fleet; a procession of laden camels like a
flotilla of boats in a desolate sea.
They were very effective, as they approached across the desert, these
silent, solemn beasts, but Victoria pitied them, because they were made
to work till they fell, and left to die in the shifting sand, when no
longer useful to their unloving masters.
"My poor dears, this is only one phase," she would say to them as they
plodded past, their feet splashing softly down on the sand like big wet
sponges, leaving heart-shaped marks behind, which looked like violets as
the hollows filled up with shadow. "Wait till your next chance on earth.
I'm sure it will make up for everything."
But Maïeddine told her there was no need to be sorry for the sufferings
of camels, since all were deserved. Once, he said, they had been men--a
haughty tribe who believed themselves better than the rest of the world.
They broke off from the true religion, and lest their schism spread,
Allah turned the renegades into camels. He compelled them to bear the
weight of their sins in the shape of humps, and also to carry on their
backs the goods of the Faithful, whose beliefs they had trampled under
foot. While keeping their stubbornness of spirit they must kneel to
receive their loads, and rise at the word of command. Remembering their
past, they never failed to protest with roarings, against these
indignities, nor did their faces ever lose the old look of sullen pride.
But, in common with the once human storks, they had one consolation.
Their sins expiated, they would reincarnate as men; and some other
rebellious tribe would take their place as camels.
Five days' journeying from Ghardaia brought the travellers to a desert
world full of movement and interest. There were many caravans going
northward. Pretty girls smiled at them from swaying red bassourahs,
sitting among pots and pans, and bundles of finery. Little children in
nests of scarlet rags, on loaded camels, clasped squawking cocks and
hens, tied by the leg. Splendid Negroes with bare throats like columns
of black marble sang strange, chanting songs as they strode along.
White-clad Arabs whose green turbans told that they had been to Mecca,
walked beside their young wives' camels. Withered crones in yellow
smocks trudged after the procession, driving donkeys weighed down with
sheepskins full of oil. Baby camels with waggling, tufted humps followed
their mothers. Slim grey sloughis and Kabyle dogs quarrelled with each
other, among flocks of black and white goats; and at night, the sky
pulsed with the fires of desert encampments, rosy as northern lights.
Just before the walled city of Ouargla, Victoria saw her first mirage,
clear as a dream between waking and sleeping. It was a salt lake, in
which Guelbi and the other animals appeared to wade knee-deep in azure
waves, though there was no water; and the vast, distant oasis hovered so
close that the girl almost believed she had only to stretch out her hand
and touch the trunks of the crowding palm trees.
M'Barka was tired, and they rested for two days in the strange Ghuâra
town, the "City of Roses," founded (according to legend), by Solomon,
King of Jerusalem, and built for him by djenoum and angels in a single
night. They lived as usual in the house of the Caïd, whose beautiful
twin daughters told Victoria many things about the customs of the Ghuâra
people, descendants of the ancient Garamantes. How much happier and
freer they were than Arab girls, how much purer though gayer was the
life at Ouargla, Queen of the Oases, than at any other less enlightened
desert city; how marvellous was the moulet-el-rass, the dance cure for
headache and diseases of the brain; how wonderful were the women
soothsayers; and what a splendid thing it was to see the bridal
processions passing through the streets, on the one day of the year when
there is marrying and giving in marriage in Ouargla.
The name of the prettier twin was Zorah, and she had black curls which
fell straight down over her brilliant eyes, under a scarlet head-dress.
"Dost thou love Si Maïeddine?" she asked the Roumia, with a kind of
innocent boldness.
"As a friend who has been very kind," Victoria answered.
"Not as a lover, oh Roumia?" Zorah, like all girls of Ouargla, was proud
of her knowledge of Arabic.
"No. Not as a lover."
"Is there then one of thine own people whom thou lovest as a lover, Rose
of the West?"
"I have no lover, little white moon."
"Si Maïeddine will be thy lover, whether thou desirest him or not."
"Thou mistakest, oh Zorah."
"I do not mistake. If thou dost not yet know I am right, thou wilt know
before many days. When thou findest out all that is in his heart for
thee, remember our talk to-day, in the court of oranges."
"I will tell thee thou wert wrong in this same court of oranges when I
pass this way again without Si Maïeddine."
The Ghuâra girl shook her head, until her curls seemed to ring like
bells of jet. "Something whispers to my spirit that thou wilt never
again pass this way, oh Roumia; that never again will we talk together
in this court of oranges."