THE WELLS OF OBAK
In that month of May Durrance lifted his eyes from Wadi Halfa and began
eagerly to look homeward. But in the contrary direction, five hundred
miles to the south of his frontier town, on the other side of the great
Nubian desert and the Belly of Stones, the events of real importance to
him were occurring without his knowledge. On the deserted track between
Berber and Suakin the wells of Obak are sunk deep amongst mounds of
shifting sand. Eastward a belt of trees divides the dunes from a hard
stony plain built upon with granite hills; westward the desert stretches
for fifty-eight waterless miles to Mahobey and Berber on the Nile, a
desert so flat that the merest tuft of grass knee-high seems at the
distance of a mile a tree promising shade for a noonday halt, and a pile
of stones no bigger than one might see by the side of any roadway in
repair achieves the stature of a considerable hill. In this particular
May there could be no spot more desolate than the wells of Obak. The sun
blazed upon it from six in the morning with an intolerable heat, and all
night the wind blew across it piercingly cold, and played with the sand
as it would, building pyramids house-high and levelling them, tunnelling
valleys, silting up long slopes, so that the face of the country was
continually changed. The vultures and the sand-grouse held it
undisturbed in a perpetual tenancy. And to make the spot yet more
desolate, there remained scattered here and there the bleached bones and
skeletons of camels to bear evidence that about these wells once the
caravans had crossed and halted; and the remnants of a house built of
branches bent in hoops showed that once Arabs had herded their goats and
made their habitation there. Now the sun rose and set, and the hot sky
pressed upon an empty round of honey-coloured earth. Silence brooded
there like night upon the waters; and the absolute stillness made it a
place of mystery and expectation.
Yet in this month of May one man sojourned by the wells and sojourned
secretly. Every morning at sunrise he drove two camels, swift
riding-mares of the pure Bisharin breed, from the belt of trees, watered
them, and sat by the well-mouth for the space of three hours. Then he
drove them back again into the shelter of the trees, and fed them
delicately with dhoura upon a cloth; and for the rest of the day he
appeared no more. For five mornings he thus came from his hiding-place
and sat looking toward the sand-dunes and Berber, and no one approached
him. But on the sixth, as he was on the point of returning to his
shelter, he saw the figures of a man and a donkey suddenly outlined
against the sky upon a crest of the sand. The Arab seated by the well
looked first at the donkey, and, remarking its grey colour, half rose to
his feet. But as he rose he looked at the man who drove it, and saw that
while his jellab was drawn forward over his face to protect it from the
sun, his bare legs showed of an ebony blackness against the sand. The
donkey-driver was a negro. The Arab sat down again and waited with an
air of the most complete indifference for the stranger to descend to
him. He did not even move or turn when he heard the negro's feet
treading the sand close behind him.
"Salam aleikum," said the negro, as he stopped. He carried a long spear
and a short one, and a shield of hide. These he laid upon the ground and
sat by the Arab's side.
The Arab bowed his head and returned the salutation.
"Aleikum es salam," said he, and he waited.
"It is Abou Fatma?" asked the negro.
The Arab nodded an assent.
"Two days ago," the other continued, "a man of the Bisharin, Moussa
Fedil, stopped me in the market-place of Berber, and seeing that I was
hungry, gave me food. And when I had eaten he charged me to drive this
donkey to Abou Fatma at the wells of Obak."
Abou Fatma looked carelessly at the donkey as though now for the first
time he had remarked it.
"Tayeeb," he said, no less carelessly. "The donkey is mine," and he sat
inattentive and motionless, as though the negro's business were done and
he might go.
The negro, however, held his ground.
"I am to meet Moussa Fedil again on the third morning from now, in the
market-place of Berber. Give me a token which I may carry back, so that
he may know I have fulfilled the charge and reward me."
Abou Fatma took his knife from the small of his back, and picking up a
stick from the ground, notched it thrice at each end.
"This shall be a sign to Moussa Fedil;" and he handed the stick to his
companion. The negro tied it securely into a corner of his wrap, loosed
his water-skin from the donkey's back, filled it at the well and slung
it about his shoulders. Then he picked up his spears and his shield.
Abou Fatma watched him labour up the slope of loose sand and disappear
again on the further incline of the crest. Then in his turn he rose, and
hastily. When Harry Feversham had set out from Obak six days before to
traverse the fifty-eight miles of barren desert to the Nile, this grey
donkey had carried his water-skins and food.
Abou Fatma drove the donkey down amongst the trees, and fastening it to
a stem examined its shoulders. In the left shoulder a tiny incision had
been made and the skin neatly stitched up again with fine thread. He cut
the stitches, and pressing open the two edges of the wound, forced out a
tiny package little bigger than a postage stamp. The package was a
goat's bladder, and enclosed within the bladder was a note written in
Arabic and folded very small. Abou Fatma had not been Gordon's
body-servant for nothing; he had been taught during his service to read.
He unfolded the note, and this is what was written:--
"The houses which were once Berber are destroyed, and a new town of wide
streets is building. There is no longer any sign by which I may know the
ruins of Yusef's house from the ruins of a hundred houses; nor does
Yusef any longer sell rock-salt in the bazaar. Yet wait for me another
week."
The Arab of the Bisharin who wrote the letter was Harry Feversham.
Wearing the patched jubbeh of the Dervishes over his stained skin, his
hair frizzed on the crown of his head and falling upon the nape of his
neck in locks matted and gummed into the semblance of seaweed, he went
about his search for Yusef through the wide streets of New Berber with
its gaping pits. To the south, and separated by a mile or so of desert,
lay the old town where Abou Fatma had slept one night and hidden the
letters, a warren of ruined houses facing upon narrow alleys and winding
streets. The front walls had been pulled down, the roofs carried away,
only the bare inner walls were left standing, so that Feversham when he
wandered amongst them vainly at night seemed to have come into long
lanes of five courts, crumbling into decay. And each court was only
distinguishable from its neighbour by a degree of ruin. Already the
foxes made their burrows beneath the walls.
He had calculated that one night would have been the term of his stay in
Berber. He was to have crept through the gate in the dusk of the
evening, and before the grey light had quenched the stars his face
should be set towards Obak. Now he must go steadily forward amongst the
crowds like a man that has business of moment, dreading conversation
lest his tongue should betray him, listening ever for the name of Yusef
to strike upon his ears. Despair kept him company at times, and fear
always. But from the sharp pangs of these emotions a sort of madness
was begotten in him, a frenzy of obstinacy, a belief fanatical as the
dark religion of those amongst whom he moved, that he could not now fail
and the world go on, that there could be no injustice in the whole
scheme of the universe great enough to lay this heavy burden upon the
one man least fitted to bear it and then callously to destroy him
because he tried.
Fear had him in its grip on that morning three days after he had left
Abou Fatma at the wells, when coming over a slope he first saw the sand
stretched like a lagoon up to the dark brown walls of the town, and the
overshadowing foliage of the big date palms rising on the Nile bank
beyond. Within those walls were the crowded Dervishes. It was surely the
merest madness for a man to imagine that he could escape detection
there, even for an hour. Was it right, he began to ask, that a man
should even try? The longer he stood, the more insistent did this
question grow. The low mud walls grew strangely sinister; the welcome
green of the waving palms, after so many arid days of sun and sand and
stones, became an ironical invitation to death. He began to wonder
whether he had not already done enough for honour in venturing so near.
The sun beat upon him; his strength ebbed from him as though his veins
were opened. If he were caught, he thought, as surely he would be--oh,
very surely! He saw the fanatical faces crowding fiercely about him ...
were not mutilations practised?... He looked about him, shivering even
in that strong heat, and the great loneliness of the place smote upon
him, so that his knees shook. He faced about and commenced to run,
leaping in a panic alone and unpursued across the naked desert under the
sun, while from his throat feeble cries broke inarticulately.
He ran, however, only for a few yards, and it was the very violence of
his flight which stopped him. These four years of anticipation were as
nothing, then? He had schooled himself in the tongue, he had lived in
the bazaars, to no end? He was still the craven who had sent in his
papers? The quiet confidence with which he had revealed his plan to
Lieutenant Sutch over the table in the Criterion grill-room was the mere
vainglory of a man who continually deceived himself? And Ethne?...
He dropped upon the ground and, drawing his coat over his head, lay, a
brown spot indistinguishable from the sand about him, an irregularity in
the great waste surface of earth. He shut the prospect from his eyes,
and over the thousands of miles of continent and sea he drew Ethne's
face towards him. A little while and he was back again in Donegal. The
summer night whispered through the open doorway in the hall; in a room
near by people danced to music. He saw the three feathers fluttering to
the floor; he read the growing trouble in Ethne's face. If he could do
this thing, and the still harder thing which now he knew to lie beyond,
he might perhaps some day see that face cleared of its trouble. There
were significant words too in his ears, "I should have no doubt that you
and I would see much of one another afterwards." Towards the setting of
the sun he rose from the ground, and walking down towards Berber, passed
between the gates.