"Let that Mother of Snakes Beware"
The terms that Grim had imposed on Abbas Mahommed were perfectly
well understood by every one concerned. The Arab is an individualist
of fervid likes and dislikes and the thing that perhaps he hates
most of all is to be observed by strangers; he does not like
it even from his own people. So there was nothing incomprehensible,
but quite the reverse, about that requirement that none from
the village should trespass in our direction all that day. And,
of course, only a bold robber conscious of his power to enforce
them would have dared to insist on such terms. But it was a
good thing that Mahommed Abbas did not call the bluff.
As it was, we slept all morning undisturbed, with only four
watchers posted, relieved at intervals of one hour. And the only
disturbance we suffered was from the lady Ayisha, who insisted
that the black-faced prisoner was hers, camel and all, and that
he should be taken to Petra for summary execution. She threatened
Grim with all sorts of dire reprisals in case he should let the
man go.
But setting every other consideration aside the man would have
been dangerous company on the journey. He was putting two and two
together in his own mind, and was not nearly as frightened as he
had been. But in Hebron he could do no harm, for once the Dead
Sea should be behind us it would not matter how many people knew
of Grim's errand, since we should travel faster than rumor
possibly could across the desert.
But if he should get one chance to talk with the lady Ayisha's
men, and even cause them to suspect that Grim might be in league
in some way with the British authorities, it would be all up with
our prospect of deceiving folk in future. There was danger enough
as it was that one of Ali Baba's men might make some chance
remark that would inform Ayisha or her escort.
Grim decided finally to let the man escape and gave Narayan Singh
and me instructions how to do it. But first he satisfied Ayisha
by giving loud orders to every one to watch the man, and by
telling her that he didn't care what she did with him after we
reached Petra. Then, late in the afternoon, when Mujrim had
rounded up the camels, a dispute was intentionally started about
an old well, and whether a good trail to the southward did not
make a circuit past it. The prisoner was asked, and he said he
knew the well. Grim called him a father of lies, which he
certainly was, and sent him off on the worst of the camels
between Narayan Singh and me to prove his words. Ali Baba kept
the Bishareen.
He led us a long way out into the desert among lumpy dunes in
which the salt lay in strata, and where no sweet-water well could
possibly be, or ever could have been. It was pretty obvious that
all he wanted was a chance to escape from us, and he began
offering bribes the minute we were out of sight of the camp.
The bribes were all in the nature of promises, however. He hadn't
a coin or a thing except the clothes he wore, Ali Baba's gang
having attended to that thoroughly.
"The wool-merchant--my master--is a rich man," he urged. "Let me
go and he will be your friend for ever after."
"We have no need of friends," Narayan Singh answered. "This man
and I, being spies in the government service, on the other hand,
are men whose friendship is of value. You can serve us in a
certain matter."
"Then give me money!" he retorted instantly. "He who serves the
government nowadays receives pay."
"The way to receive pay," said I, "is to take this letter to the
governor of Hebron, who will then know that a certain man is
pretending to be Ali Higg. Thus you will do the government a
great service, and may receive the difference in price between
the Bishareen camel and that mean brute you ride now."
"We waste time. There is no well out here. Give me the letter!"
He was gone in a minute, headed straight for Hebron, and Narayan
Singh and I fired several shots in the air to let Ayisha know
what a desperate pursuit we had engaged in. When we rode into
camp again, trying to look shamefaced, they had about finished
packing up, so Grim had time to call us terrible names for
Ayisha's benefit--names that it would not have been safe to apply
to any of Ali Baba's men if he had chosen them for the job.
Those thieves would stand for any kind of devilry, and were
willing to undertake all risks at Grim's bidding. Jail, fighting,
hardship, meant to them no more than temporary inconvenience. But
to have asked them to let a prisoner escape, and submit to
shameful abuse for it afterward in the presence of a woman and
strangers, would have been more than Arab loyalty could stand.
And, mother of me, how that woman Ayisha did revile us! If ever
she had doubted we were Indians she was sure of it now. She swept
with her tongue the whole three hundred million Indians into one
vile horde and de-sexed, disinherited, declassed, and damned the
lot of us. Before you think you know anything about abuse,
wholesale or retail, you should hear a lady of the desert
proclaim displeasure. I wouldn't be surprised to know that the
very camels blushed.
It was all Narayan Singh could stand, for Ali Baba and his gang
laughed derisively, and no true son of the East can endure to be
laughed at.
"Let that mother of snakes beware!" he growled in my ear; and
as it turned out in the end, he did not forget the grudge he
owed her.
We were off again a good hour before sundown, and Mahommed Abbas
sent out a screen of camel-men to follow us for several miles.
They fired about twenty shots when we were well out of range, and
boasted, as we learned afterward, of having put Ali Higg and a
hundred men to rout.
But that did no harm. It reduced the real Ali Higg's prestige for
a while all over the countryside; and in these days of League of
Nations and mandates and whatnot it is hard enough in all
conscience for brave villagers with muskets to find something to
make up songs about. De Crespigny knew the truth about it as soon
as our "escaped" man got to Hebron.
Before midnight we were well south of the Dead Sea and far beyond
the border up to which the British mandate was supposed to be
going to extend whenever the League of Nations Council should
stop arguing. We were something like two thousand feet below
sea-level now; but although the heat all day long under the tents
had been almost intolerable, the night air was actually chilly
because of the tremendous evaporation. The earth was throwing off
the heat it had absorbed all day, and chill drafts crept from the
mountaintops to take its place.
And as we crossed the imaginary border in pure, mellow moonlight,
with our three bells clanging, you could have told its approximate
whereabouts by the change that came over the gang. Even Grim's
back, away ahead on the leading camel, assumed a jauntier
swing. Old Ali Baba, next ahead of me, began to look ten
years younger, and his sons and grandsons started singing--about
Lot's wife acceptably enough, for we were near the fabled site of
Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Prophet of Islam, who had nothing if
not an eye for local color, incorporated that old story in
the Koran.
The pillar of salt that used to be called Lot's wife, and that
"stood there until this day," when the Old Testament writer
penned his narrative, has fallen into the Dead Sea in recent
memory. But all that did was to set loose imagination that had
hitherto been tied to one landmark, and Ali Baba pointed out to
me a dozen upright piles of argillaceous strata glistening in
moonlight, every one of which he swore was either Lot's wife or
one of her handmaidens.
"Such should be the fate of many other women," he asserted
piously. "It would save a great deal of trouble."
The lady Ayisha heard that remark, and the things she said for
the next ten minutes about men in general and old Ali Baba in
particular were as poisonous as the brimstone that once rained
down on Sodom and Gomorrah. She seemed to have no sense of being
under obligation for the escort, but rather to think we were all
in her debt for the privilege--a circumstance which appeared
to me to bode ill for the manners of the gentry we proposed
to visit.
Thereafter--I suppose since she considered she had utterly routed
and reduced me to submission after the messenger's escape she
summoned me to her side, thrusting the _shibrayah_ curtains apart
and beckoning with the fingers turned downward, Bedouin fashion.
We conversed quite amicably for more than an hour, she mocking my
Arabic pronunciation, but asking innumerable questions about
India--who my mother was, for instance, and whether my father
used to beat her much; what physic was used in India for
date-boils; why I had not stayed at home; wasn't I afraid of
meeting Ali Higg; and were there such great ones as he in India?
So, as there wasn't one chance in ten million of her knowing
anything at all about India, I saw fit to explain that as a
cockroach is to Allah so was Ali Higg to dozens of Indian bandits
I had known. I told her tales of men's head piled mountains high,
and of roads of corpses over which rajahs drove their chariots;
of arenas full of tigers into which living prisoners were thrown
once a week; and of a sheer cliff more than a mile high, over
which women were tossed to alligators.
She took it all in, but doubted demurely at the end of it whether
all those princely Indian terrorists added together could, as she
put it, "reach to the middle of the thigh of Ali Higg"!
I asked her how she had come to marry the gentleman, and she
answered with becoming pride that he had plundered her from the
Bagdad caravan; but I think she meant by that a caravan of
Bedouin on their way from Bagdad to wherever the grazing and
thieving were good. She had a way of her own of enlarging things.
Finally she asked me whether I carried good poison in my chest of
medicines, and I told her I had some that could reach down to
hell and kill the ifrits.
"Wallah!" she answered. "If you two eunuchs hadn't lost that
prisoner we could have tested some of it on him!"
After that she dismissed me, I suppose that she might meditate on
poison in the moonlight. I rode forward to take counsel with
Grim, and some time during the night she got word with one of Ali
Baba's younger sons. We had hardly camped an hour after dawn in
the red-hot foothills east of the Dead Sea when Narayan Singh
caught him rifling my chest, and he had the impudence to ask
which were poisons and which not. Narayan Singh threatened an
appeal to Grim, and the man apologized; but I saw Ayisha giving
him sweetmeats in her tent not long afterward.
She had none of the ordinary Moslem woman's notions of privacy. A
whole Bedouin family will live in a black tent ten by twelve, and
though she had picked up wondrous ideas of high estate since her
infancy, the desert upbringing remained. Her tent was pitched
each day in the midst of ours, and she ordered every one about,
Grim included, as if we were her husband's purchased slaves. And
because it was Grim's idea to make use of her to gain access to
her husband we all put up with it, fetching and carrying without
a murmur--that is to say, all except one of us.
Whenever Narayan Singh had to do her bidding his great black
beard rumbled with discontent; and as that only amused her she
ordered him about more than any one, the others aiding and
abetting by inventing things for him to be told to do. But it
hardly paid her in the long run.
On the third day, when we camped by an old well that Ali Baba
swore was the identical one made by the angel Gabriel to provide
water for Hagar and Ishmael--there are twenty or thirty of those
identical wells in Palestine alone, to say nothing of Arabia--she
began to take a particular fancy to Grim and to treat him with
more respect, giving him the title of prince on occasion, and
abusing the men for not attending more swiftly to his needs.
Now, whatever the alleged custom of other lands may be--and I
refuse to be committed on that point--there is no doubt whatever
about the East. There it is the woman who makes the first
advances. Grim took to sleeping in a tent with Mujrim and
Ali Baba.
Considering the customs of that land--the savage, accepted
way in which women swap owners when tribes are at war, and
between times when the raids are made on caravan routes--it
would be altogether wide of the mark to blame her too severely.
Grim is a good-looking fellow, even in the khaki officer's
uniform that makes most Christians look alike. Disguised as
an Arab he takes the eye of any man, to say nothing of women.
The lines of his face are just deep enough to accent the powerful
curve of his nose and chin; and his eyes, with their baffling
color, arrest attention. Then he stands, too, in that gear like a
scion of an ancient race, firmly, on strong feet, with his head
held high and arms motionless--not fidgeting with one or both
hands, as white men usually do. The wonder really is that Ayisha
did not betray her designs on him sooner.
Narayan Singh grew as nervous as a hen in the presence of snakes,
for he foresaw how Grim's star would surely wane from the moment
any such woman as Ayisha should establish a claim on him; and he
did not quite realize the full extent of Grim's resourcefulness
in making the most of a situation. Old Ali Baba's advice, on the
other hand, was just what he would have given to any of his sons.
"Let Ali Higg keep his wives within reach if he hopes to call
them his! _Wallahi!_ I would laugh to see the Lion of Petra
tearing his clothes with rage for such a matter as this!"
And all the gang agreed.
Ayisha began to question Grim openly about his home and belongings.
She wanted to know how many wives he had, and he told her none,
which made her all the more determined. If he had affected
squeamishness she would have despised him, and that would
have been the end of her usefulness; for scorn is very close
indeed to hate, and hate to spitefulness in the land where
she was raised. But he did nothing of the sort. He was as frank
as she was, and did his fencing, as you might say, with a club.
"The desert is full of women!" he told her on one occasion when
she made more than usually open overtures.
"But not such as I am!"
"A woman's heart lies under her ribs, and who shall read it?"
he answered.
"A pig can read some things!" she retorted; for he always managed
to keep just clear of the point where frankness might have merged
into poetry.
Her own four armed attendants seemed to take the whole affair
rather speculatively. She was probably in position to have them
crucified on her return to Petra in case they should offer
unacceptable advice. And it may be they would have looked
favorably on the chance to transfer allegiance from Ali Higg to
Grim, who had crucified nobody yet; as Ayisha's servants they
would doubtless go with her, should she change owners.
She asked me repeatedly for love potions, to be slipped into
Grim's food or into his drink, and was so importunate about it
that, after consulting Grim, I gave her some boric powder. The
next morning Grim told her that her eyes were like a young
gazelle's, so my reputation as a _hakim_ rose several degrees.
"Is he mad?" growled Narayan Singh. "Ah, each man has his
weakness! He and I have played with death a dozen times, but I
never knew him lose his head. So he is woman-crazed? What next,
I wonder!"
The girl had lots of encouragement, for, not counting the younger
men, who were hell bent for any kind of mischief, and constantly
egged her on, old Ali Baba spent half of each day in the tent
expounding to Grim the ethics of such situations; and they were
as simple as the code of Moses.
"Love thy neighbor's wife if she will let you. Defeat thy
neighbor in all ways whenever possible. On these two hang all
amusement and prosperity."
And Grim was much too wise to pretend to Ali Baba any other
motive than expedience. It would not have paid to take the old
rascal too much into his confidence, because most Arabs overplay
their hand; but he did drop a hint or two; and from what he told
me I should say it was Ayisha's persistent love-making that
provided the first suggestion of a plan in his mind for bringing
Ali Higg to terms.
But I'm sure the plan did not really take shape until we reached
the sun-baked railway-line that drags its rusty length behind
wild hills all the way from Damascus down to Mecca.
Some say that the very steel of the rails is sacred because it
was built to carry pilgrims to the Prophet's tomb. But some say
not. And those who lost the carrying trade on account of it, and
the tribes that used to lie in wait in mountain-passes for the
Damascus caravan in the month of pilgrimage, say distinctly not.
Between these two opinions there is a third, that of the gentry
who declare it is a curse, to be turned back on the heads of
those who use it.
During four nights we climbed unlovely hills, avoiding villages--to
the disgust of Ali Baba's gang, who would dearly have loved to
pick a quarrel somewhere and loot. They had a thousand excuses
for taking another trail, declaring that Grim had lost the way
or would lose it; that there was sweeter water elsewhere; or
that the hills were not so steep and hard on the camels. But
the moon was nearly full by then, and Grim seemed to carry a
map of the district in his head.
Whether he went by guesswork, or really knew, we turned up
finally a few miles from El-Maan at the exact spot he had aimed
for, and pitched camp soon after dawn within fifty yards of the
track. There was no water in that place and the gang grumbled
badly; but it was not long before the reason of his choice was
fairly obvious.
Tracks across the desert have a way of curving from point to
point, no more following a straight course than the cow-paths
do in other lands. Where there is a rock, or some peculiar
conformation of the ground to attract attention, men and beasts
will head for it, attracted somewhat after the fashion of a
compass-needle by a lodestone or lump of iron.
There was a rock shaped like a flattened egg beyond the track,
two or three hundred yards away from us. It stood all alone in a
dazzling wilderness that was doubtless green at certain seasons
of the year, but now was bone-dry and glittering with flakes of
mica. Close beside that ran a track worn by camels and horses,
and the shadow of that great rock in a weary land was plainly a
halting-place.
Our men wanted to cross over and take advantage of the shade it
would give as the sun climbed higher, but Grim refused to let
them; whereat Ayisha went into a shrewish rage, and ordered her
four men to take up her tent and pitch it over by the rock
whether Grim permitted it or not. So they obeyed her, and Grim
said nothing.
The rest of us set about cooking breakfast after the morning
prayers were over. My prayer-mat was next Narayan Singh's, and it
was interesting to hear him curse the Prophet _sotto voce_ while
pretending to vie with those robbers in fervid protestations of
faith in Islam. But more than the Prophet he cursed Ayisha,
praying to his Hindu pantheon to wreak all wrath on her.
It was a diluted pantheon, of course, because he was a Sikh; he
wasn't able to call on as many animal-shaped gods with as many
arms and teeth as a Bengali could have urged into action; but he
did his best with the technical resources at his disposal.
Without pretending to be a judge of other men's creeds, I thought
at the time that he made a pretty workman-like hash of that
lady's prospects, so far as his particular formula could do
it. I jotted down some of his suggestions to the gods for
future reference, and purpose to teach them to the U.S. Army
mule-skinners next time this country goes to war.
While we were eating breakfast in a circle in front of the tents,
all sticking our right hands into a common mess-pan and eating
like wolves--you have to be awfully careful not to use your
left hand, and unless you eat fast you'll get less than your
share--there came five men on camels out of a wady--a shallow
valley that lay like a cut throat with red rocks on its edge
something over a mile away beyond the egg-shaped rock. They were
armed--as everybody is in those parts who hopes to live--and
in a hurry.
Ayisha and her people did not see them, because the great rock
was in the way, but we left off eating to watch, and Grim went
into his tent to use field-glasses without being seen. It is not
unheard of for an Arab sheikh to use Zeiss binoculars, but it
might make a stranger suspicious.
The five men came on at a gallop, sending up the dust in clouds
like a cruiser's smoke-screen. They seemed to take it for
granted that we were friends, for we were in full view and far
outnumbered them, yet they did not check for an instant, and that
in itself was a suspicious circumstance.
They came to a halt ten yards away from Ayisha's tent, and stared
at her in silence, realizing, apparently for the first time, that
they had come within rifle-shot of strangers. We could see her
talking to them, but could not hear what she said. Perhaps that
was as well. I think that even Grim with his poker face in
perfect working order would have been flustered if he had been
given time to think. The surprise, when it came, made him brace
himself to meet it; and, once committed, he played with the sky
for a limit as usual.
One thing was quite clear: Ayisha had made herself known to them,
and they were properly impressed. They dismounted from their
camels, and, after bowing to her as respectfully as any lord of
the desert decently could do to a woman, they left their beasts
kneeling and started all together toward us.
So Grim went out to meet them, even outdoing their measured
dignity, striding as if the desert were his heritage. But he went
only as far as the railway track, and waited; to have gone a step
farther would have made them think themselves his superiors. Ali
Baba, Mujrim, Narayan Singh, and I, went out and stood behind him
at a properly respectful distance.