"I think that is all. I'll come up on Saturday morning to see you off.
Good-bye for the present." And then, in the same hoarse voice as
before, looking steadfastly into her face for a moment, "God bless you,
my girl!"
For some minutes Helena did not move from the spot on which Lord Nuneham
left her. A sense of double bereavement had fallen on her for the first
time with a crushing blow. That some day she would lose her father was
an idea to which her mind had long been accustomed, but never for one
moment until then--not even in the bitter hour in which they had parted
at the door--had she allowed herself to believe that a time would come
when she would have to live on without Gordon. It was here now. The
past and the future alike were closed to her. A black curtain had
fallen about her life. If Gordon could not return without the risk of
arrest, what right had she to expect him to come back to her at all? He
was gone. He was lost to her. She was alone.
The city, which had been lying hot in the quivering sun, began to grow
red and hazy, and in the gathering twilight Helena became conscious of
criers in the streets below. The black boy, who was always bustling
about her, interpreted their cries. They were crying the funeral of the
students who had fallen at El Azhar. It was to take place that night.
Ishmael Ameer called on the people to gather in the great market-place
of Mohammed Ali and walk up by torchlight to the Arab cemetery outside
the town.
"Would lady like Mosie go and see? Then Mosie come back and tell lady
everything," said the black boy, and in the hope of being alone Helena
allowed him to go.
But hardly had the boy gone when a timid knock came to her door and the
Army surgeon entered the room. The man's thin lips were twitching, and
he was clearly ill at ease.
"Excuse me," he said, "but hearing you were soon to leave for home ... I
thought it only fair to myself ... In fact, I have come to make an
explanation."
"What is it?" asked Helena, without a trace of interest in her tone.
The surgeon gnawed the ends of his moustache for an instant, and then,
looking uneasily at Helena, he said--
"When you come to turn things over in your mind you may perhaps think I
was to blame in keeping your dear father's secret. His condition,
however, was not so serious but that under ordinary circumstances ... I
say _ordinary_ circumstances ... he might have lived five years, ten
years, even fifteen. The truth is, though----"
"Well?"
"I want to prove the sincerity of my friendship, Miss Graves. I am sure
you prefer that I should speak plainly."
"The truth is--what!" asked Helena, who was now listening with strained
attention.
"That ... that your dear father's death ... I am now fully convinced of
it ... was due--partly due at all events ... to circumstances that ...
that were _not_ ordinary."
Helena's pale face turned white, but she made no answer, and after a
moment the surgeon said--
"It would have been cruel to tell you this last night immediately after
the shock of your bereavement but ... but now that you are going away
... Besides, I spoke to Lord Nuneham. I mentioned my surmises. But you
know what he is ... a great man, undoubtedly a great man, but incapable
of taking counsel. Always has been, always will be, we all of us find
it so."
Helena, seized with an indefinable fear, was speechless, but the
surgeon's blundering tongue went on--
"'Better not speak of it,' said Lord Nuneham. 'Drop it! Don't let us
weaken our case against the man and rouse popular fury by an accusation
we cannot possibly bring home. Wait! We'll get hold of him to better
purpose by-and-by.'"
Helena's heart was beating violently, but she only said, with laboured
breathing--
"Can't we dispense with all this? You have come to tell me that my
father did not die from natural causes--isn't that it?"
"Yes ... that is to say ... pardon me ... we are alone?"
Helena assented impatiently.
"Then, to tell you the truth ... I am satisfied that violence ... as a
contributing cause, at all events ... I looked at him again this
morning, when ... at the last moment, in fact ... and the marks were
even plainer than before."
"Marks?"
"Marks of a man's hand about the throat."
"A man's hand?" said Helena, with her lips rather than with her voice.
"I thought at first it might have been the General's own hand, but there
was one peculiarity which forbade that inference."
"Tell me."
"It was the left hand, and while the thumb and the first, second, and
fourth fingers were plainly indicated, there was no impression made by
the third."
"So?"
"So I concluded that the marks about the throat must have been made by
somebody who had lost the third finger of his left hand."
Helena gazed a long time blankly into the surgeon's face, until at
length, frozen by fear, having said all, he tried to convey the
impression that he had said nothing.
"Miss Graves, I have given you pain--I feel I have. And mind, I do not
say certainly that the hand at your father's throat was the cause of his
death. It may have been used merely to push him off. But if the person
seen last in the General's company was apparently quarrelling with him
... please understand, I make no accusations. I have never met Ishmael
Ameer. And even if it should be found that he had this peculiarity ...
of the third finger, I mean ... In any case, the Consul-General will not
hear of an indictment, so I'm sure ... I'm sure I can rely on your
discretion. But hearing you were going home, I felt I could not allow
you to think that I had permitted your dear father----"
The surgeon went stammering on for some time longer, but Helena did not
listen, and when at last the man backed himself out of her room, hugging
his shallow soul with the flattering thought that in following his
selfish impulse he had done well, she did not hear him go.
She was now sure of that which she had hitherto only half suspected.
The Egyptian had killed her father! Killed him! there was no other word
for it; not merely by the excitement his presence engendered but by
actual violence. The authorities knew it, too, they knew it perfectly,
but they were afraid--afraid in the absence of conclusive evidence--to
risk the breakdown of a charge against one whom the people in their
blindness worshipped.
The sky had grown blue and luminous by this time, the stars had come out
in the distant depths of the heavens, and from the market-place below
the ramparts of the Citadel there came up into the clear air the thick
murmuring of the vast multitude that had gathered there, with ten
thousand smoking torches, to follow the new prophet to the Arab cemetery
beyond the town.
When Helena thought of the Egyptian again it was with an intensity of
hatred she had never felt before. He had not only killed her father but
he had been the first cause of the devilish entanglement which had led
to Gordon's disgrace. Yet he was to escape punishment for these
offences; he was to go on until some sin against the State had brought
him into the meshes of its Ministers, while her father was in his grave
and Gordon was in banishment and she ... she was sent home in her
womanish helplessness and shame!
"O God, is there to be no one to punish this man?" she thought, in the
dark searching of her soul, while her finger-nails were digging trenches
in her palms and from the hard clenching of her teeth her lips were
bleeding.
Then suddenly, in the delirium of her hatred of the Egyptian and the
tragic tangle of her error, while she was standing alone in her desolate
room, with the "Allah! Allah!" of Ishmael's followers surging up from
below, a new feeling--a feeling she had never felt before--stirred in
the depths of her abased and outraged soul.
"Shall I go back to England?" she asked herself. "Shall I?"
*CHAPTER VII*
As soon as Lord Nuneham reached the Agency he went up to his wife's
room. The sweet old lady was sitting in her dressing-gown with her face
to the windows on the west, while the Egyptian woman was combing out her
thin, white hair and binding it up for the night. The sun was gone, but
the river and the sky were shining like molten gold, and a faint
reflected glow was on her soft, pale cheeks.
"Ah, is it you, John?" she said in a nervous voice, and while he was
taking a seat she looked at him with her deep, slow, weary eyes as if
waiting for an answer to a question she was afraid to ask.
"Helena is going home, Janet," said the old man after a moment.
"Poor girl!"
"There is a steamship on Saturday. I thought it better she should sail
by that."
"Poor thing! Poor darling!"
"Her will seems to be quite gone--she agrees to everything."
"Poor Helena!"
"I don't think she has shed a tear since her father died. It is
extraordinary. She startles me, almost frightens me. Either she is a
girl of astonishing character, or else----"
"She has had a great shock, poor child. Only yesterday at this hour her
father was with her, and now----"
"True--quite true!"
A hush fell upon all. Even Fatimah's comb was quiet. It was almost as
if a spirit were passing through the room. At length the old lady
said--
"Any news of----"
"None."
"Would you tell me if there were?"
"If you asked me--yes."
"My poor boy!"
"Hafiz has inquired everywhere. Nobody knows anything about him."
"He will come back, though, I am sure he will," said Lady Nuneham with a
nervous trill, and then a strange contraction passed over the
Consul-General's face, and he rose to go.
"We'll not speak about that again, Janet," he said; but, full of the
sweetest and bitterest emotion that comes to the human soul--the emotion
of a mother when she thinks of the son that is lost to her--the old lady
did not hear.
"I remember that his grandfather ... it was in the early days of the
Civil War, I think ... he had done something against his General, I
suppose----"
She had been speaking for some moments when Fatimah, who was standing
behind, reached round to her ear and said--
"His lordship has gone, my lady," and then there was a sudden and deep
silence.
The molten gold died out of the river and the sky, and in the luminous
blue twilight the old lady got into bed.
"Fatimah," she said, "do you think Doctor would allow me to go up to the
Citadel one day this week?"
"Why not, if the carriage was closed and the blinds down?"
"And, Fatimah?"
"What is it, O my heart?"
"What do you think the Consul-General meant when he said Helena
frightened him?"
"I think he meant that she's one of the girls who do things when they're
in trouble--drown themselves, take poison, or something."
"My poor Helena! My poor Gordon!"
There was the rustling whisper of a prayer at the pillow, and then, for
the weary and careworn old lady another day slid into night.
*CHAPTER VIII*
Meantime Gordon, with a heart filled with darkness, sat huddled up on
his bed in the little guest-room of the Coptic Cathedral. On a table at
his left a small green-shaded lamp was burning, and on a chair at his
right sat the saintly old Patriarch, gently patting his bare arm and
trying in vain to comfort him.
"Yes, God is merciful, my son, and it is just because we are such guilty
creatures that our Lord came to deliver us."
"But you don't know, Father, you don't know," said Gordon.
"Know--what, my son?"
"You don't know what reason I have to reproach myself," said Gordon, and
then, catching by the sure instinct of a pure heart some vague sense of
Gordon's position, the old man began to talk of confession, wherein the
soul of man lays down its sins before God and begins to feel as if it
had wings.
"On receiving the penitent's confession," he said, "it is the duty of
the Coptic priest to take his sin upon himself just as if it were his
own, and if I, my son----"
"But you can't! It's impossible! God forbid it," said Gordon; and then
the saintly old soul, allowing that there were sacred places in the
heart of man which only God's eye should see, spoke of atonement,
whereby he that is guilty of any sin may begin his journey towards
repentance, and be numbered at last, if his penitence be true, among the
living who live in God's peace.
"Why should any of us, my son, no matter how foul the stain of sin we
have contracted, live in the dread of miscarrying for ever while we have
energy to atone?" said the good old man in his worn and husky voice; and
then the tides of Gordon's troubled mind, which had ebbed and flowed
like the sea on a desolate shore under the blank darkness of a starless
night, seemed to be suddenly brightened by a light from the morning.
"Father," he said, "could you send for somebody?"
"Indeed I could--who is it?" asked the Patriarch.
"Captain Hafiz Ahmed of the Egyptian Army. He can be found at
headquarters. Say that some one he knows well wishes to see him at
once."
"I'll tell Michael to take the message immediately," said the Patriarch,
and his shuffling old feet went off on his errand.
The new light that had dawned on Gordon's mind was the same as he had
seen before, and yet it was now quite different. He would deliver
himself up, as he had first intended to do, but in humility, not in
pride, in submission to the will of God, not in defiance of the power of
man. A reclaiming voice seemed to say to him, "Atone for your crime!
Confess everything! Die--on the gallows if need be! Better suffer the
pains of death than the furies of remorse! Give your own life for the
life you have taken, no matter by what impulse of self-defence or
devilish accident of fate!"
Hafiz would carry his message to headquarters, or perhaps help him to go
there, and the good old Patriarch would explain why he had not gone
before.
"It is the only way now, the only hope," he thought.
Within half-an-hour Hafiz arrived hot and breathless as if he had been
running. One moment he stood near the door, while his lip lagged low
and his cheerful face darkened at sight of Gordon's white cheeks, and
then he gushed out into words which tried their best to be brave but
were tragic with tears.
"I knew it," he said, "I've said so all day long. 'He's lying ill
somewhere, or he would show up now, whatever the consequences.' You're
wounded, aren't you? Let me see."
"It's nothing," said Gordon. "Nothing at all. Sit down, old fellow."
And then Hafiz sat on the right of the bed, holding Gordon's hand in his
hand, and told him what had happened during the day--how Macdonald and
his bloodhounds had been out in pursuit of him, expecting to arrest and
court-martial him, and how he also had been searching for him since
yesterday, but with the hope of helping him to escape.
"High and low we've looked, everywhere--everywhere except here--and who
would have thought of a place like this?" said Hafiz. "So much the
better, though! You'll stay here until you are well and I can get you
safely away. I will, too! You'll see I will!"
It was hard to listen to the good fellow's schemes for his escape and
tell him at once of his intention to give himself up, so Gordon asked
one by one the questions that were uppermost in his mind, little
thinking that Hafiz's answers would break up his purpose and stifle for
ever the cry of his tortured heart.
"The General is buried, isn't he?" he said, turning his face away as he
spoke, and when Hafiz answered Yes, that he had died by the hand of God
and been buried that afternoon, and that everybody was saying that he
had been a good man and a great soldier and Egypt would never again see
his equal, Gordon asked himself what, after all, would be the worth of
an atonement which offered as an equivalent for a life like the
General's a life such as his own, which was no longer of any use to him
or to any one.
And again, when he asked in a low voice that was breathless with fear,
how his father was, and Hafiz answered that the iron man whose name had
been a terror in Egypt for so many years, though calm on the outside
still, was breaking up like a frozen lake from below; that he had been
calling him over the telephone all day long, and entreating him to find
his son that he might tell him to deliver himself up immediately, in
spite of everything, lest he should be charged with desertion and be
liable to death, Gordon sickened with a sense of the shame into which he
was about to plunge his father in his last days by the confession he
intended to make and the fate he meant to meet.
And again, when with deepening emotion he asked about his mother--was
she worse for the disgrace that had overtaken himself?--and Hafiz told
him No, that though sitting in a sort of bewilderment, waiting for God's
light in the darkness that had fallen on her life, she was yet living in
a beautiful blind hope that he would come back to justify himself, and
meantime sending messages to him saying, "Tell him his mother is sure he
only did what he believed to be right, because her boy could not do what
was wrong," Gordon's heart knocked hard at his breast with the thought
that the brave atonement to which he had set his face would surely kill
his mother before it had time to kill him.
And when, last of all, in the sore pain of a wounded tenderness, he
asked about Helena--was she well and was she asking after him?--and
Hafiz again answered, No, but that he had seen her at the General's
funeral (where he could not trust himself to speak to her for pity of
the dumb trouble in her pale face), and that, leaning on the arm of the
Consul-General, she had lifted her tearless eyes as if looking for
somebody she could not see, and that she was to go back to England soon,
very soon--on Saturday--without any one for company, being alone in the
world now, then Gordon broke down altogether, for he saw himself
following her on her lonely journey home with a cruel and needless blow
that would ruin the little that was left of her peace.
"On Saturday, you say?"
"Yes, by the English steamer from Alexandria," said Hafiz, and then,
eagerly, as if by a sudden thought, "Gordon!"
"Well?"
"Why shouldn't you go with her?"
Gordon shook his head.
"Why not? You'll be better by that time, and even if you're not ... You
can't stay here for ever, and if you should fall into Macdonald's hands
... Besides, it's better in any case to let the War Office deal with
you. They'll know everything before you reach London, and they'll see
you've been in the right. You'll get justice there. Gordon, whereas
here ... Then there's Helena, too--she's expecting you to join her--I'm
sure she is--why shouldn't she, being friendless in Egypt now, and
without anybody to go to even at home? And if the worst comes to the
worst, and you have to leave the army, which God forbid, you'll be
together at all events; she'll be with you anyway----"
"No, no, my boy, no!" cried Gordon; but Hafiz, full of his new hope, was
not to be denied.
"You think it's impossible, but it isn't. _Wallahi_! Leave it to me.
I'll arrange everything. Trust me!" he said, and in the warmth of his
new resolve and the urgency of another errand, he got up to go.
The hundred and fifty Notables who had been arrested that morning before
the Grand Cadi's house had been tried in the afternoon by a Special
Tribunal, and despatched in the evening as dangerous rebels to the penal
settlement in the Soudan. In protest against this injustice, as well as
in lamentation for the loss of the students who had fallen at El Azhar,
Ishmael Ameer had called upon the people of Cairo to follow him in
procession to the Arabic cemetery outside the city, that there, without
violence or offence, they might appeal from the barbarity of man to the
judgment seat of God.
"They've gone with him, too," said Hafiz, "tens of thousands of them, so
that the streets are deserted and half the shops shut up. Oh, they've
not done with Ishmael yet--you'll see they have not! I must find out
what he's doing, though, and come back and tell you what's going on.
Meantime I'll say nothing about you--about knowing where you are, I
mean--nothing to the Consul-General, nothing to my mother, nothing to
anybody. Good-bye, old fellow! Leave yourself to me. I'll see you
through."
When Hafiz went off with a rush of spirits, Gordon, being left alone,
sank to a still deeper depression than before. He felt as if he were
thrown back again on that desolate shore where the tides of his mind
ebbed and flowed under the blank darkness of a starless sky.
The proud atonement whereby he had expected to wipe out his crime had
fallen utterly to ashes. It looked like nothing better now than a
selfish impulse to escape from a life that had become a burden to him by
killing his father's honour, his mother's trust, and the last hope of
Helena's happiness.
"No, I cannot deliver myself up. It is impossible," he thought.
But if death itself was denied to him, what was there left to him in
life? His career as a soldier was clearly at an end, his father's house
was for ever closed to him, and his days with Helena were over.
"Then what can I do? Where can I go?" he asked himself.
Suddenly he remembered what the General had said in that delirious
moment when with bitter taunts he had told him to fly to some foreign
country where men would know nothing of his disgrace. Cruel and unjust
as that sentence had seemed to him then, it appeared to be all that was
left to him now, when work and home and love alike were gone from him.
"Yes, I'll go away," he thought, with a choking sob. "I'll bury myself
as far from humanity as possible."
Yet at the next moment the hand of iron was on his heart again, and he
told himself that though he might fly from the sight of man he could not
escape from the eye of God, and to be alone with that was more than a
guilty man could bear, and live.
"But why can't I go to America?" he asked himself.
It was his mother's home, and a country to which something in his blood
had always been calling him. But no! That refuge also was denied to
him, for though he might hide in New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia,
or Chicago, or San Francisco, better than in the trackless desert
itself, yet in the very pulse of life he would still be alone, with a
mind that must always be rambling through the ways of the past, seeing
nothing in the happiness of other men but cruel visions of what might
have come to him also but for one blind moment of headstrong passion.
"Is life, then, to be utterly closed to me?" he thought.
Was he neither to die for his crime nor live for his repentance? Had
God Almighty set His face against both?
He thought of Helena as she would be in England, alone like himself, cut
off for the rest of her life from every happiness except the bitter one
of her memory of their few short days together, thinking ill of him, as
she needs must for leaving her in her sore need, while all the time his
heart was yearning for love of her and he would have given his soul to
be by her side, but for the barrier of blood which now seemed to
separate them forever.
And then in the bitterness of his remorse and the depths of his abased
penitence, thinking the Almighty Himself must be against him, he began
to pray--never having prayed since the days when his mother held him to
her knee.
"O God, have pity upon me," he cried, as he sat huddled up on his bed.
"I only intended to do what was right, yet I have plunged everybody I
love into trouble. What can I do? Where can I go? Let it be anything
and anywhere! O Lord, speak to me, lead me, deliver me, tell me what I
ought to do; tell me, tell me!"
The green-shaded lamp on the table had gone out by this time, the
darkness of the night had gone, and a dim gleam of saffron-tinted light
from the dawn had begun to filter through the yellow window curtains of
the room.
Then suddenly the silence of the little, pulseless place was broken by
the sound of eager footsteps running over the gravel path of the
courtyard and leaping up the stone staircase of the house.
It was Hafiz returning from the cemetery.
*CHAPTER IX*
The Mohammedan cemetery of Cairo lies to the north-east of the city,
outside the Bab-en-Nasr (the Gate of Victory), on the fringe of the
desert, and down a dusty road that leads to a group of tomb-mosques of
the Caliphs, now old and falling into decay.
No more forlorn and desolate spot ever lay under the zealous blue of the
sky. Not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a rill of water, not a bird
singing in the empty air. Only an arid waste, dotted over by an
irregular encampment of the narrow mansions of the dead, the round
hummocks of blistered clay, each with its upright stone, its _shahed_,
capped with turban or tarboosh. The barren nakedness and savage aridity
of the place make it a melancholy spectacle by day, but in the silence
of night, under the moon's quiet eye, or with the darkness flushed by
the white light of the stars, the wild desolation of the city of the
dead is an awesome sight. Such was the spot in which the people of
Cairo had concluded to pass their Night of Lamentation--such was their
Gethsemane.
When tidings of their intention passed through the town there were
rumblings of thunder in the ever-lowering diplomatic atmosphere. The
Consul-General heard it, and sent for the Commandant of Police.
"This gathering of great numbers of natives outside the walls," he said,
"looks like a ruse for an organised attack on the European inhabitants.
Therefore let your plans for their protection be put into operation
without delay. As the ostensible object of the demonstration is a
funeral, you cannot stop it, but see that a sufficient body of police
goes with it and that your entire force is in readiness."
After that he called up the officer who was now in command of the Army
of Occupation, and advised that the troops at Kasr-el-Nil, at the
Citadel, and particularly at the barracks of Abbassiah, should be
strictly confined and kept in readiness for all emergencies.
"If all goes well to-night," he said, "give your men an airing in the
streets in the morning. Let their bands go with them, so that when the
turbulent gentlemen who are organising all this hubbub take their walks
abroad they may meet one of your companies coming along. If they turn
aside to avoid it, let them meet another and another ... And wait!" said
the old man, while his brow contracted and his lip stiffened. "The man
Ishmael Ameer has escaped us thus far. He has been lying low and
allowing others to get into trouble. But he seems to be putting his
head into the noose this time. Follow him, watch him--don't be afraid."
The bodies of the students who were to be buried that night had been
lying in the Mosque of the Sultan Hasan at the foot of the Citadel, and
as soon as word came that the Imams had recited the prayer for the dead,
asking "Give your testimony respecting them--were they faithful?" and
being answered, "Aye, faithful unto death," the cortege started.
First a group of blind men, at slow pace, chanting the first Surah of
the Koran; then the biers, a melancholy line of them, covered with red
and green cloths and borne head foremost; then schoolboys singing, in
shrill voices, passages from a poem describing the last judgment; then
companies of Fikees, reciting the profession of faith; then the female
relatives of the dead, shrouded black forms with dishevelled hair,
sitting in carriages or squatting on carts, wailing in their woe; and
finally Ishmael Ameer himself and his vast and various following.
Never had any one seen so great a concourse, not even on the days when
the sacred carpet came from Mecca. There were men and women, rich and
poor, great and small, religious fraternities with half-furled banners
and dervishes with wrapped-up flags, sheikhs in robes and beggars in
rags. Boys carried lamps, women carried candles, and young men carried
torches and open flares which sent coils of smoke into the windless air.
Their way lay down the broad boulevard of Mohammed Ali, across the wide
square of the Bab-el-Khalk, past the Governorat and the police
headquarters. As they walked at slow pace, they chanted the Surah which
says, "O Allah! There is no strength nor power but in God! To God we
belong and to Him we must return." The shops were shut, and the
muezzins called from the minarets as the procession went by the mosques.
Thus like a long, sinuous stream, sometimes flowing deep and still,
sometimes rumbling in low tones, sometimes breaking into sharp sounds,
they passed through the narrow streets of the city and out by the
Bab-en-Nasr to the Mohammedan cemetery beyond the walls.
As Hafiz approached this place the deep multitudinous hum of many
tongues that came up from it was like the loud sighing of the wind.
Calm as the night was, it was the same as if a storm had broken over
that spot while the desert around lay sleeping under the unclouded moon.
Through a thick haze that floated over the ground there were bubbles and
flashes of light, the red and white flames of the lamps and torches,
spurting and steaming like electrical apparitions from a cauldron.
A cordon of mounted police surrounded the cemetery, and a few were
riding inside. The funerals were over, and the people were squatting in
groups on the bare sand. Hafiz could hear the solemn chanting of the
Fikees as they passed their beads through their fingers and recited to
the spirits of the dead. Some of the dervishes were dancing, and some
of the women were swaying their bodies to a slow, monotonous, hypnotic
movement that seemed to act on them like a drug.
A number of the Ulema, professors of El Azhar and teachers of the Koran,
were passing from group to group, comforting and counselling the people.
Behind each of them was a little crowd of followers, and, where the
crowd of such followers was greatest, there always was the erect white
figure and pale face of Ishmael Ameer, He stood in his great stature
above the heads of the tallest of the men about him, and as he passed
from company to company he left hope and inspiration behind him, for his
lips seemed to be touched with fire.
"Night has fallen on us, O my brothers," he said in his throbbing voice.
"Our path is desolate, we are encompassed by sorrows, we envy the dead
who are in their graves. O ye people of the tombs, you have passed on
before us. Peace be to you! Peace be to us also! A woman is here who
has lost her husband--the camel of her house is gone! A mother is here
who has lost her son--the eye of her heart is blind! O Thou most
merciful of those that show mercy, comfort and keep them and send them
safely to Thy Paradise! Sleep, O servants of God, in the arms of the
Mighty and Compassionate!"
"Poor me, poor my children, poor all the people!" cried the women who
crouched at his feet.
"Oppressors have risen against us, O God, but let us not cry to Thee for
vengeance against them. They are Christians, and it was a Christian who
said, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'"
"La ilaha illa-llah! La ilaha illa-llah!" cried the men, but their
faces were dark and stern.
"O sons of Adam," cried Ishmael, "shall the children of one Father fight
before His face? To-night the lamps are lit to the Lord on the rock at
Mecca. To-night, too, the lamps are burning to God on the Calvary at
Jerusalem. So it has been for a thousand years. So it will be for a
thousand more. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
At that a great shout went up from the clamorous billow of human beings
about him, and "O children of Allah," he cried, "religion is the bread
of our souls, and the strangers who have come to us from the West are
trying to take it away. Let us fight to preserve it! Let us draw the
sword of our spirit against a black devouring world! By the life of our
God, let us be men! By the tombs of our fathers, let us be living
souls! By the beard of the Prophet (praise to his name!), let us no
longer be mere machines for the making of gold for Europe! Better the
mud hut of the fellah with the Spirit of God within, than the palace of
the rich man with the devil's arms on the doorpost. If we cannot be free
in the city, let us go out to the desert. Out from the empire of man to
the empire of Allah! And if we must leave behind our gorgeous mosques,
built on the bones of slaves and cemented with the blood of conquest, we
shall worship in a vaster and more magnificent temple, the dome whereof
is the sky."
By this time the excitement of the people amounted to frenzy. "Allah!
Allah!" they shouted as they followed Ishmael from group to group in an
ever-increasing crowd that was like a boiling, surging, rushing river,
flashing in fierce brilliance under the light of the lamps and torches.
"Brothers," said Ishmael again, "your homes are here, and your wives and
children. I am going out into the desert and you cannot all follow me.
But give me one hundred men and your enemies will afflict you no more.
One hundred men to carry into every town and village the word of the
message of God, and the reign of Mammon will be at an end. Our Prophet
(praise to his name!) was driven out of Mecca as a slave, but he
returned to it as a conqueror. We are driven out of Cairo in disgrace
but we shall come back in glory. So the years pass and repeat
themselves," he cried, and then, in triumphant tone, "Yes, by Allah!"
The emotional Egyptian people were now like children possessed, and the
fever in Ishmael's own face seemed to have consumed the natural man.
"I ask for martyrs, not for soldiers," he cried. "Shall not the reward
of him who suffers daily for his brethren's sake be equal to that of the
man who dies in battle? I ask for the young and the strong, not the
weak and the old--difficulty is before us and danger and perhaps death.
I ask for sinners, not saints--though you are as pure as the sands of
the sea-shore, like the sands of the shore you may be fruitless. But
are you sin-laden and suffering? Do the ways of life seem to be closed
to you? Does the sweet light of morning bring you no joy? Are you
praying for the darkness of death to cover you? Is your repentance
deep? In the bitterness of your soul are you calling upon God for a way
of redemption? Then come to me, my brothers! Your purification is
here! A pilgrimage is before you that will cleanse you of all sin.
"Allah! Allah! Allah!" cried the people with one voice, and the cry of
their thousand throats in that desolate place was like the boom of
breakers in cavernous rocks.
It was one of those moments of life when by a spontaneous impulse
humanity shows how divine is the heart of man. In an instant, more than
five hundred men, some of them looked upon as low and base, leapt out in
answer to Ishmael's call, and were struggling, quarrelling, almost
fighting to go with him.
For two hours thereafter the professors and teachers were busy selecting
one hundred from the five hundred, telling them what they had to do and
where they had to go, each man to his allotted place, while the mounted
police rode round and through them in a vain effort to find out what was
being said.
The night was now near to morning, the lamps and torches were dying out,
and a dun streak, like an arrow's barb, was shooting up into the
darkness of the sky. In this vague fore-dawn the hundred chosen men were
drawn up before the tomb of a Sheikh, and Ishmael, standing on the dome
of it, with his tall figure against the uncertain light, spoke to them
and to the vast company of the people that had gathered about.
"Brothers," he said, "you offer yourselves as messengers of the
Compassionate to carry His word to the uttermost ends of this country
and as far as the tongue you speak is spoken. You have been told what
to say and you will say it without fear. You are no rebels against the
State, but if the commandments of the Government are against the
commandments of God, you are to tell the people to obey God and not the
Government."
At that word the sea of faces seemed to flash white under the heaviness
of the sky, but Ishmael only looked down at the hundred men who stood
below and said calmly--
"You are soldiers of God, therefore you will carry no weapons of the
devil with you on your journey. Do you expect to conquer by the sword?
Stand back, this pilgrimage is not yours! Do you wish to drive the
English out of Egypt, to establish Khedive or Sultan, to found kingdom
or empire? Go home! This work is not for you! Only one enemy will you
drive out, and that is the devil! Only one Sultan will you establish,
and that is God!"
The mass of moving heads seemed to sway for a moment, and then, amid the
deep breathing of the people, Ishmael said--
"You will take nothing with you on your way, neither purse nor scrip nor
second coat. In the city or the village or the desert the Merciful will
make your beds, the Compassionate will provide for you. Where the
Mussulman is, there is your brother--greet him, he will welcome you.
Where his house is there is your home--enter it, it will shelter you.
But you are slaves of God, therefore look for no ease and comfort.
Burning heat by day, weary marches by night, hunger and thirst and toil
and pain--these only are the allurements God offers to His
servants--these and glory!"
At that last word a loud shout broke from the people, but when Ishmael
spoke again the burden of a great awe seemed to fall upon them.
"Say farewell to one another and to your wives and children. If God
wills it you will come back. If He does not will it you will go on,
never more to look in each other's faces."