ACHMET THE ROPEMAKER STRIKES
War! War! The chains of the conscripts clanked in the river villages;
the wailing of the women affrighted the pigeons in a thousand dovecotes
on the Nile; the dust of despair was heaped upon the heads of the old,
who knew that their young would no more return, and that the fields of
dourha would go ungathered, the water-channels go unattended, and the
onion-fields be bare. War! War! War! The strong, the broad-shouldered
--Aka, Mahmoud, Raschid, Selim, they with the bodies of Seti and the
faces of Rameses, in their blue yeleks and unsandalled feet--would go
into the desert as their forefathers did for the Shepherd Kings. But
there would be no spoil for them--no slaves with swelling breasts and
lips of honey; no straight-limbed servants of their pleasure to wait on
them with caressing fingers; no rich spoils carried back from the fields
of war to the mud hut, the earth oven, and the thatched roof; no rings of
soft gold and necklaces of amber snatched from the fingers and bosoms of
the captive and the dead. Those days were no more. No vision of loot or
luxury allured these. They saw only the yellow sand, the ever-receding
oasis, the brackish, undrinkable water, the withered and fruitless date-
tree, handfuls of dourha for their food by day, and the keen, sharp night
to chill their half-dead bodies in a half-waking sleep. And then the
savage struggle for life--with all the gain to the pashas and the beys,
and those who ruled over them; while their own wounds grew foul, and, in
the torturing noon-day heat of the white waste, Death reached out and
dragged them from the drooping lines to die. Fighting because they must
fight--not patriot love, nor understanding, nor sacrifice in their
hearts. War! War! War! War!
David had been too late to stop it. It had grown to a head with
revolution and conspiracy. For months before he came conscripts had been
gathered in the Nile country from Rosetta to Assouan, and here and there,
far south, tribes had revolted. He had come to power too late to devise
another course. One day, when this war was over, he would go alone, save
for a faithful few, to deal with these tribes and peoples upon another
plane than war; but here and now the only course was that which had been
planned by Kaid and those who counselled him. Troubled by a deep danger
drawing near, Kaid had drawn him into his tough service, half-blindly
catching at his help, with a strange, almost superstitious belief that
luck and good would come from the alliance; seeing in him a protection
against wholesale robbery and debt--were not the English masters of
finance, and was not this Englishman honest, and with a brain of fire
and an eye that pierced things?
David had accepted the inevitable. The war had its value. It would draw
off to the south--he would see that it was so--Achmet and Higli and Diaz
and the rest, who were ever a danger. Not to himself: he did not think
of that; but to Kaid and to Egypt. They had been out-manoeuvred, beaten,
foiled, knew who had foiled them and what they had escaped; congratulated
themselves, but had no gratitude to him, and still plotted his
destruction. More than once his death had been planned, but the dark
design had come to light--now from the workers of the bazaars, whose
wires of intelligence pierced everywhere; now from some hungry fellah
whose yelek he had filled with cakes of dourha beside a bread-shop; now
from Mahommed Hassan, who was for him a thousand eyes and feet and hands,
who cooked his food, and gathered round him fellaheen or Copts or
Soudanese or Nubians whom he himself had tested and found true, and ruled
them with a hand of plenty and a rod of iron. Also, from Nahoum's spies
he learned of plots and counterplots, chiefly on Achmet's part; and these
he hid from Kaid, while he trusted Nahoum--and not without reason, as
yet.
The day of Nahoum's wrath and revenge was not yet come; it was his deep
design to lay the foundation for his own dark actions strong on a rock of
apparent confidence and devotion. A long torture and a great over-
whelming was his design. He knew himself to be in the scheme of a
master-workman, and by-and-by he would blunt the chisel and bend the saw;
but not yet. Meanwhile, he hated, admired, schemed, and got a sweet
taste on his tongue from aiding David to foil Achmet--Higli and Diaz were
of little account; only the injury they felt in seeing the sluices being
closed on the stream of bribery and corruption kept them in the toils of
Achmet's conspiracy. They had saved their heads, but they had not
learned their lesson yet; and Achmet, blinded by rage, not at all.
Achmet did not understand clemency. One by one his plots had failed,
until the day came when David advised Kaid to send him and his friends
into the Soudan, with the punitive expedition under loyal generals. It
was David's dream that, in the field of war, a better spirit might enter
into Achmet and his friends; that patriotism might stir in them.
The day was approaching when the army must leave. Achmet threw dice once
more.
Evening was drawing down. Over the plaintive pink and golden glow of
sunset was slowly being drawn a pervasive silver veil of moonlight. A
caravan of camels hunched alone in the middle distance, making for the
western desert. Near by, village life manifested itself in heavily laden
donkeys; in wolfish curs stealing away with refuse into the waste; in
women, upright and modest, bearing jars of water on their heads; in
evening fires, where the cover of the pot clattered over the boiling mass
within; in the voice of the Muezzin calling to prayer.
Returning from Alexandria to Cairo in the special train which Kaid had
sent for him, David watched the scene with grave and friendly interest.
There was far, to go before those mud huts of the thousand years would
give place to rational modern homes; and as he saw a solitary horseman
spread his sheepskin on the ground and kneel to say his evening prayer,
as Mahomet had done in his flight between Mecca and Medina, the distance
between the Egypt of his desire and the ancient Egypt that moved round
him sharply impressed his mind, and the magnitude of his task settled
heavily on his spirit.
"But it is the beginning--the beginning," he said aloud to himself,
looking out upon the green expanses of dourha and Lucerne, and eyeing
lovingly the cotton-fields here and there, the origin of the industrial
movement he foresaw--"and some one had to begin. The rest is as it must
be--"
There was a touch of Oriental philosophy in his mind--was it not Galilee
and the Nazarene, that Oriental source from which Mahomet also drew? But
he added to the "as it must be" the words, "and as God wills." He was
alone in the compartment with Lacey, whose natural garrulity had had a
severe discipline in the months that had passed since he had asked to be
allowed to black David's boots. He could now sit for an hour silent,
talking to himself, carrying on unheard conversations. Seeing David's
mood, he had not spoken twice on this journey, but had made notes in a
little "Book of Experience,"--as once he had done in Mexico. At last,
however, he raised his head, and looked eagerly out of the window as
David did, and sniffed.
"The Nile again," he said, and smiled. The attraction of the Nile was
upon him, as it grows on every one who lives in Egypt. The Nile and
Egypt--Egypt and the Nile--its mystery, its greatness, its benevolence,
its life-giving power, without which Egypt is as the Sahara, it conquers
the mind of every man at last.
"The Nile, yes," rejoined David, and smiled also. "We shall cross it
presently."
Again they relapsed into silence, broken only by the clang, clang of the
metal on the rails, and then presently another, more hollow sound--the
engine was upon the bridge. Lacey got up and put his head out of the
window. Suddenly there was a cry of fear and horror over his head, a
warning voice shrieking:
"The bridge is open--we are lost. Effendi--master--Allah!" It was the
voice of Mahommed Hassan, who had been perched on the roof of the car.
Like lightning Lacey realised the danger, and saw the only way of escape.
He swung open the door, even as the engine touched the edge of the abyss
and shrieked its complaint under the hand of the terror-stricken
driver, caught David's shoulder, and cried: "Jump-jump into the river--
quick!"
As the engine toppled, David jumped--there was no time to think,
obedience was the only way. After him sprang, far down into the grey-
blue water, Lacey and Mahommed. When they came again to the surface, the
little train with its handful of human freight had disappeared.
Two people had seen the train plunge to destruction--the solitary
horseman whom David had watched kneel upon his sheepskin, and who now
from a far hill had seen the disaster, but had not seen the three jump
for their lives, and a fisherman on the bank, who ran shouting towards a
village standing back from the river.
As the fisherman sped shrieking and beckoning to the villagers, David,
Lacey, and Mahommed fought for their lives in the swift current, swimming
at an angle upstream towards the shore; for, as Mahommed warned them,
there were rocks below. Lacey was a good swimmer, but he was heavy, and
David was a better, but Mahommed had proved his merit in the past on many
an occasion when the laws of the river were reaching out strong hands for
him. Now, as Mahommed swam, he kept moaning to himself, cursing his
father and his father's son, as though he himself were to blame for the
crime which had been committed. Here was a plot, and he had discovered
more plots than one against his master. The bridge-opener--when he found
him he would take him into the desert and flay him alive; and find him he
would. His watchful eyes were on the hut by the bridge where this man
should be. No one was visible. He cursed the man and all his ancestry
and all his posterity, sleeping and waking, until the day when he,
Mahommed, would pinch his flesh with red hot irons. But now he had other
and nearer things to occupy him, for in the fierce struggle towards the
shore Lacey found himself failing, and falling down the stream.
Presently both Mahommed and David were beside him, Lacey angrily
protesting to David that he must save himself.
"Say, think of Egypt and all the rest. You've got to save yourself--let
me splash along!" he spluttered, breathing hard, his shoulders low in
the water, his mouth almost submerged.
But David and Mahommed fought along beside him, each determined that it
must be all or none; and presently the terror-stricken fisherman who had
roused the village, still shrieking deliriously, came upon them in a
flat-bottomed boat manned by four stalwart fellaheen, and the tragedy of
the bridge was over. But not the tragedy of Achmet the Ropemaker.