Thus it was that Soada was left to fight her battle alone. She did not
weep or wail when Wassef’s body was brought home and the moghassil and
hanouti came to do their offices. She did not smear her hair with mud,
nor was she moved by the wailing of the mourning women nor the chanters
of the Koran. She only said to Fatima when all was over: “It is well; he
is gone from my woe to the mercy of God! Praise be to God!” And she held
her head high in the village still, though her heart was in the dust.
She would have borne her trouble alone to the end, but that she was
bitten on the arm by one of her father’s camels the day they were
sold in the marketplace. Then, helpless and suffering and fevered, she
yielded to the thrice-repeated request of Dicky Donovan, and was taken
to the hospital at Assiout, which Fielding Bey, Dicky’s friend, had
helped to found.
But Soada, as her time drew near and the terror of it stirred her heart,
cast restless eyes upon the whitewashed walls and rough floors of the
hospital. She longed for the mud hut at Beni Souef, and the smell of the
river and the little field of onions she planted every year. Day by day
she grew harder of heart against those who held her in the hospital--for
to her it was but a prison. She would not look when the doctor came, and
she would not answer, but kept her eyes closed; and she did not shrink
when they dressed the arm so cruelly wounded by the camel’s teeth, but
lay still and dumb.
Now, a strange thing happened, for her hair which had been so black
turned brown, and grew browner and browner till it was like the hair of
her mother, who, so the Niline folk said, was descended from the English
soldier-slave with red hair.
Fielding Bey and Dicky came to see her in hospital once before they
returned to Cairo; but Soada would not even speak to them, though she
smiled when they spoke to her; and no one else ever saw her smile during
the days she spent in that hospital with the red floor and white walls
and the lazy watchman walking up and down before the door. She kept her
eyes closed in the daytime; but at night they were always open--always.
Pictures of all she had lived and seen came back to her then--pictures
of days long before Mahommed Selim came into her life. Mahommed Selim!
She never spoke the words now, but whenever she thought them her heart
shrank in pain. Mahommed Selim had gone like a coward into the desert,
leaving her alone.
Her mind dwelt on the little mud hut and the onion field, and she saw
down by the foreshore of the river the great khiassas from Assouan and
Luxor laden with cotton or dourha or sugar-cane, their bent prows hooked
in the Nile mud. She saw again the little fires built along the shore
and atop of the piles of grain, round which sat the white, the black,
and the yellow-robed riverine folk in the crimson glare; while from the
banks came the cry: “Alla-haly, ‘m alla-haly!” as stalwart young Arabs
drew in from the current to the bank some stubborn, overloaded khiassa.
She heard the snarl of the camels as they knelt down before her father’s
but to rest before the journey into the yellow plains of sand beyond.
She saw the seller of sweetmeats go by calling--calling. She heard the
droning of the children in the village school behind the hut, the dull
clatter of Arabic consonants galloping through the Koran. She saw the
moon--the full moon-upon the Nile, the wide acreage of silver water
before the golden-yellow and yellow-purple of the Libyan hills behind.
She saw through her tears the sweet mirage of home, and her heart
rebelled against the prison where she lay. What should she know of
hospitals--she whose medicaments had been herbs got from the Nile valley
and the cool Nile mud? Was it not the will of God if we lived or the
will of God if we died? Did we not all lie in the great mantle of the
mercy of God, ready to be lifted up or to be set down as He willed?
They had prisoned her here; there were bars upon the windows, there were
watchmen at the door.
At last she could bear it no longer; the end of it all came. She stole
out over the bodies of the sleeping watchmen, out into the dusty road
under the palms, down to the waterside, to the Nile--the path leading
homewards. She must go down the Nile, hiding by day, travelling by
night--the homing bird with a broken wing-back to the but where she had
lived so long with Wassef the camel-driver; back where she could lie
in the dusk of her windowless home, shutting out the world from her
solitude. There she could bear the agony of her hour.
Drinking the water of the Nile, eating the crumbs of dourha bread she
had brought from the hospital, getting an onion from a field, chewing
shreds of sugarcane, hiding by day and trudging on by night,
hourly growing weaker, she struggled towards Beni Souef.
Fifty--forty--thirty--ten--five miles! Oh! the last two days, her head
so hot and her brain bursting, and a thousand fancies swimming
before her eyes, her heart fluttering, fluttering--stopping, going
on--stopping, going on.
It was only the sound of the river--the Nile, Mother of Egypt, crooning
to her disordered spirit, which kept her on her feet. Five miles, four
miles, three miles, two, and then--she never quite remembered how she
came to the hut where she was born. Two miles--two hours of incredible
agony, now running, now leaning against a palm tree, now dropping to her
knees, now fighting on and on, she came at last to the one spot in the
world where she could die in peace.
As she staggered, stumbled, through the village, Yusef, the drunken
ghaffir, saw her. He did not dare speak to her, for had he not killed
her father, and had he not bought himself free of punishment from
the Mudir? So he ran to old Fatima and knocked upon her door with his
naboot, crying: “In the name of Allah get thee to the hut of Wassef the
camel-driver!”
Thus it was that Soada, in her agony, heard a voice say out of the
infinite distance: “All praise to Allah, he hath even now the strength
of a year-old child!”