The business began during Ramadan; how it ended and where was in the
mouth of every soldier between Beni Souef and Dongola, and there was not
a mud hut or a mosque within thirty miles of Mahommed Selim’s home, not
a khiassa or felucca dropping anchor for gossip and garlic below the
mudirieh, but knew the story of Soada, the daughter of Wassef the
camel-driver.
Soada was pretty and upright, with a full round breast and a slim
figure. She carried a balass of water on her head as gracefully as a
princess a tiara. This was remarked by occasional inspectors making
their official rounds, and by more than one khowagah putting in with
his dahabeah where the village maidens came to fill their water-jars.
Soada’s trinkets and bracelets were perhaps no better than those of her
companions, but her one garment was of the linen of Beni Mazar, as good
as that worn by the Sheikh-Elbeled himself.
Wassef the camel-driver, being proud of Soada, gave her the advantage of
his frequent good fortune in desert loot and Nile backsheesh. But Wassef
was a hard man for all that, and he grew bitter and morose at last,
because he saw that camel-driving must suffer by the coming of the
railway. Besides, as a man gets older he likes the season of Ramadan
less, for he must fast from sunrise to sunset, though his work goes on;
and, with broken sleep, having his meals at night, it is ten to one but
he gets irritable.
So it happened that one evening just at sunset, Wassef came to his hut,
with the sun like the red rim of a huge thumb-nail in the sky behind
him, ready beyond telling for his breakfast, and found nothing. On his
way home he had seen before the houses and cafes silent Mussulmans with
cigarettes and matches in their fingers, cooks with their hands on the
lids of the cooking pots, where the dourha and onions boiled; but
here outside his own doorway there was no odour, and there was silence
within.
“Now, by the beard of the Prophet,” he muttered, “is it for this I
have fed the girl and clothed her with linen from Beni Mazar all these
years!” And he turned upon his heel, and kicked a yellow cur in the
ribs; then he went to the nearest cafe, and making huge rolls of
forcemeat with his fingers crammed them into his mouth, grunting like
a Berkshire boar. Nor did his anger cease thereafter, for this meal of
meat had cost him five piastres--the second meal of meat in a week.
As Wassef sat on the mastaba of the cafe sullen and angry, the village
barber whispered in his ear that Mahommed Selim and Soada had been
hunting jackals in the desert all afternoon. Hardly had the barber fled
from the anger of Wassef, when a glittering kavass of the Mouffetish at
Cairo passed by on a black errand of conscription. With a curse Wassef
felt in his vest for his purse, and called to the kavass--the being more
dreaded in Egypt than the plague.
That very night the conscription descended upon Mahommed Selim, and by
sunrise he was standing in front of the house of the Mamour with twelve
others, to begin the march to Dongola. Though the young man’s father
went secretly to the Mamour, and offered him backsheesh, even to the
tune of a feddan of land, the Mamour refused to accept it. That was a
very peculiar thing, because every Egyptian official, from the Khedive
down to the ghafhr of the cane-fields, took backsheesh in the name of
Allah.
Wassef the camel-driver was the cause. He was a deep man and a strong;
and it was through him the conscription descended upon Mahommed
Selim--“son of a burnt father,” as he called him--who had gone shooting
jackals in the desert with his daughter, and had lost him his breakfast.
Wassef’s rage was quiet but effective, for he had whispered to some
purpose in the ear of the Mamour as well as in that of the dreaded
kavass of conscription. Afterwards, he had gone home and smiled at Soada
his daughter when she lied to him about the sunset breakfast.
With a placid smile and lips that murmured, “Praise be to God,” the
malignant camel-driver watched the shrieking women of the village
throwing dust on their heads and lamenting loudly for the thirteen young
men of Beni Souef who were going forth never to return--or so it seemed
to them; for of all the herd of human kine driven into the desert
before whips and swords, but a moiety ever returned, and that moiety so
battered that their mothers did not know them. Therefore, at Beni Souef
that morning women wept, and men looked sullenly upon the ground--all
but Wassef the camel-driver.
It troubled the mind of Wassef that Mahommed Selim made no outcry at his
fate. He was still more puzzled when the Mamour whispered to him that
Mahommed Selim had told the kavass and his own father that since it was
the will of God, then the will of God was his will, and he would go.
Wassef replied that the Mamour did well not to accept the backsheesh
of Mahommed Selim’s father, for the Mouffetish at the palace of Ismail
would have heard of it, and there would have been an end to the Mamour.
It was quite a different matter when it was backsheesh for sending
Mahommed Selim to the Soudan.
With a shameless delight Wassef went to the door of his own home, and,
calling to Soada, told her that Mahommed Selim was among the conscripts.
He also told her that the young man was willing to go, and that the
Mamour would take no backsheesh from his father. He looked to see her
burst into tears and wailing, but she only stood and looked at him like
one stricken blind. Wassef laughed, and turned on his heel; and went
out: for what should he know of the look in a woman’s face--he to whom
most women were alike, he who had taken dancing-girls with his camels
into the desert many a time? What should he know of that love which
springs once in every woman’s heart, be she fellah or Pharaoh’s
daughter?
When he had gone, Soada groped her way blindly to the door and out into
the roadway. Her lips moved, but she only said: “Mahommed--Mahommed
Selim!” Her father’s words knelled in her ear that her lover was willing
to go, and she kept saying brokenly: “Mahommed--Mahommed Selim!” As the
mist left her eyes she saw the conscripts go by, and Mahommed Selim was
in the rear rank. He saw her also, but he kept his head turned away,
taking a cigarette from young Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, as they passed
on.
Unlike the manner of her people, Soada turned and went back into her
house, and threw herself upon the mud floor, and put the folds of her
garment in her mouth lest she should cry out in her agony. A whole day
she lay there and did not stir, save to drink from the water-bottle
which old Fatima, the maker of mats, had placed by her side. For Fatima
thought of the far-off time when she loved Hassan the potter, who had
been dragged from his wheel by a kavass of conscription and lost among
the sands of the Libyan desert; and she read the girl’s story.
That evening, as Wassef the camel-driver went to the mosque to pray,
Fatima cursed him, because now all the village laughed secretly at the
revenge that Wassef had taken upon the lover of his daughter. A few
laughed the harder because they knew Wassef would come to feel it had
been better to have chained Mahommed Selim to a barren fig-tree and
kept him there until he married Soada, than to let him go. He had
mischievously sent him into that furnace which eats the Fellaheen to
the bones, and these bones thereafter mark white the road of the Red Sea
caravans and the track of the Khedive’s soldiers in the yellow sands.
When Fatima cursed Wassef he turned and spat at her; and she went back
and sat on the ground beside Soada, and mumbled tags from the Koran
above her for comfort. Then she ate greedily the food which Soada should
have eaten; snatching scraps of consolation in return for the sympathy
she gave.
The long night went, the next day came, and Soada got up and began to
work again. And the months went by.