"That We Make a Profit from this Venture!"
Late that afternoon, before they loaded up the camels, there was
another conference between Grim, Jael Higg, Narayan Singh, our
prisoner Yussuf, and myself. The ancient hills of Edom were not
far away, and we were near enough to Petra to feel nervous. Jael
made a pretty good pretense of meeting Grim half-way, and I think
she had made up her mind to let him dig his own pit and tumble
into it.
Yussuf was aware by that time, if not of Grim's identity, at any
rate of the fact that he was an officer in the British pay, and
was rather obviously considering which would likely pay him
best--to side secretly with Ali Higg or openly with Grim, or both.
Having fought over all that country under Lawrence, and knowing
consequently every yard of it, I suppose Grim felt neither
thrilled nor mystified; but in case any scientist reads this and
wants to know how I felt, "fed up and far from home" about
describes it. But there was worse to come!
Grim turned to me at last and smiled in that darned genial
way he has when he means to call on your uttermost patience
or endurance.
"You see, the difficulty is," he said, "to get to Ali Higg
without his getting us first. He has probably got between forty
and fifty men in Petra with him, so we daren't invade the place.
Yet we've got to hurry, because old Ibrahim ben Ah with that army
may get suspicious and send back a messenger on his own account.
Now, do you feel willing to beard the Lion in his den?"
"Alone?" I asked.
I never felt less willing to do anything, and dare say my face
betrayed it.
"No. Narayan Singh will go too, and, of course, Ayisha."
Ayisha seemed about as safe an ambassador to send as an electric
spark to a barrel of powder. I glanced at Narayan Singh and felt
ashamed, for his eyes glowed unmistakably. He was enthusiastic.
Well, it seems I draw a color-line after all. I can't fight like
a Sikh, or be as good a man in lots of ways; but I'm not going to
be outdone by one in daring, while the Sikh is looking.
"All right," I said, "I'll do anything you say."
But I did not have the perfect voice-control I would have liked,
and Jael Higg grinned. That naturally settled it.
"Narayan Singh needn't come if he'd rather stay with you," I
added, and the Sikh raised his eyebrows.
"Do you dare to make love to Ayisha, sahib?" he grinned.
I began to see the general drift of the plan of campaign, and
wondered. Having seen more than a little of the Near East, and
knowing how the peace of the whole world depends on preserving
that unmelted hotpot of nations from anarchy, I was not impressed
by the stability of things in general!
Grim had come out on his hair-raising venture because no army was
available to deal with Ali Higg, and he would not have ventured
unless powers-that-pretend-to-be were sure that Ali Higg was
deadly dangerous. Did the peace of the world, then, depend on the
success or otherwise of a Sikh's mock love-making. It did look
like it.
Narayan Singh got to his feet with a laugh and a yawn, and went
to dance attendance on Ayisha, while Grim reinstructed Yussuf
regarding the ease with which the British could impound his Jaffa
property; but though I listened to all that, and heard Yussuf's
vows of fidelity--heard him promise to reverse his former report
and spread rumors in Ali's camp of a British army getting ready
to advance--the prospect to me looked gloomier and gloomier.
"You can only die once," Grim laughed after a quick glance at my
face, "and we may save a hundred thousand people from the sword."
But I suppose I wasn't cut out to be a willing martyr. It was a
case of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and though
I did go forward on that mad escapade it was fear that drove
me--fear of the Sikh's and Grim's contempt, and of my own
self-loathing afterward.
Grim and Narayan Singh are made of the real hero stuff. I wonder
how many others there are like me, who face the music simply
because one or two others have got guts enough to lead us
up to it.
We didn't move far that night, for there was no need, and Grim
was careful not to go where Ali Baba could not find him. We
passed through acres of oleander-scrub into a valley twelve miles
wide at its mouth, that narrowed gradually until the high red
sandstone cliffs shut out the moonlight. It was like the mouth of
hell, and suffocating, for the cliff-sides were giving off the
heat they had sucked up through the day.
The surest sign that Ali Higg was either over-confident or
seriously engaged elsewhere was that there was no guard in the
ravine. Ten men properly placed could have destroyed us. Even the
great Alexander of Macedon could not force that gorge, and
suffered one of his worst defeats there. The Turks made the same
mistake and tried to oust Lawrence in the Great War; but he
simply overwhelmed them with a scratch brigade of partly armed
Bedouins and women.
Grim called a halt at last where a dozen caves a hundred feet
above the bottom of the gorge could be reached by a goat-track
leading to a ledge. There was a rift in the side-wall there,
making a pitch-dark corner where the camels could lie unseen and
grumble to one another--safe enough until daylight, unless they
should see ghosts and try to stampede for the open. Grim sent the
women and Ayisha's four men up to the caves with only Narayan
Singh to watch them, for there was no way of escape, except by
that twelve-inch goat-track.
Then, because Ali Baba's sons and grandsons were nervous about
the "old man their father," and because the one thing that more
than all other circumstances combined could ruin our slim chance
would be panic, Grim squatted on the sand in the gorge with the
men all around him and began to tell stories.
Right there in the very jaws of death, within a mile of the lair
of Ali Higg, in possession of two of the tyrant's wives, with an
army at our rear that might at that minute be following old Ali
Baba into the gorge to cut off our one possible retreat, he told
them the old tales that Arabs love, and soothed them as if they
were children.
That was the finest glimpse of Grim's real manhood I had
experienced yet, although I could not see him for the darkness.
You couldn't see any one. It was a voice in the night--strong,
reassuring--telling to born thieves stories of the warm humanity
of other thieves, whose accomplishments in the way of cool cheek
and lawless altruism were hardly more outrageous than the task in
front of us.
And he told them so well that even when a chill draft crept along
the bottom of the gorge two hours before dawn, taking the place
of the hot air that had ascended, and you could feel the shiver
that shook the circle of listeners, they only drew closer and
leaned forward more intently--almost as if he were a fire at
which they warmed themselves.
But heavens! It seemed madness, nevertheless. We had no more
pickets out than the enemy had. We were relying utterly on Grim's
information that he had extracted from the women and the
prisoners, and on his judgment based on that.
No doubt he knew a lot that he had not told us, for that is his
infernal way of doing business; but neither that probability, nor
his tales that so suited the Arab mind, nor the recollection of
earlier predicaments in which his flair for solutions had been
infallibly right, soothed my nerves much; and I nearly jumped out
of my skin when a series of grunts and stumbling footfalls broke
the stillness of the gorge behind us.
It sounded like ten weary camels being cursed by ten angry men,
and I supposed at once that Ibrahim ben Ah had sent a detachment
to investigate and that this was their advance-guard. Who else
would dare to lift his voice in that way in the gorge? You could
hear the words presently:
"Ill-bred Somali beast! Born among vermin in a black man's kraal!
Allah give thee to the crows! Weary? What of it? What of my back,
thou awkward earthquake! Thou plow-beast! A devil sit on thee! A
devil drive thee! A devil eat thee!"
_Whack! Whack!_
"Oh my bones! My old bones!"
Mujrim was the first to recognize the voice. He got up quietly
and stood in the gorge; and in another minute a blot of denser
blackness that was a camel loomed above him, and he raised his
hand to seize the head-rope. But the camel saw him first, and,
realizing that the journey was over at last, flung itself to the
ground with the abandon of a foundered dog, and lay with its neck
stretched out straight and legs all straddled anyhow. Mujrim was
just in time to catch his father, who was nearly as tired as the
camel. It was pretty obvious at once that Jael's authority had
failed badly when it came to exchanging camels.
The sons all surrounded the old man and made a fuss over him,
laying him down on a sheepskin coat and chafing his stiff
muscles, calling him brave names, rubbing his feet, patting his
hands, praising him, while he swore at them each time they
touched a sore spot.
They would not even give him a chance to hand over his letter
to Grim, until at last he swore so savagely that Mujrim paid
attention and took the letter out of the old man's waistcloth. It
was in the same envelop in which the other had gone, unsealed,
but with the thumb-mark of Ibrahim ben Ah imprinted on its face.
"To think that I, of all people, should fetch and carry for such
dogs!" swore Ali Baba. "I asked for a good beast in exchange for
mine, and they gave me this crow's meat, and laughed! May Allah
change their faces! May the water of that oasis turn their bowels
into stone!
"Aye, Jimgrim, they will stay there! They are glad enough to stay
there. They are dogs that fear their master's whip. They are so
afraid of him that I think if Ali Higg should bid them roast
themselves alive the dogs would do it. May they roast a second
time in hell for giving me that camel.
"Bah! What kind of sons have I? Are these the sons of my loins
that let me parch? Is there no water-bag?"
Grim struck a match in the dark corner where the camels were; but
all the envelop contained was a piece of jagged paper torn from
the original letter, with Ibrahim ben Ah's thumb-mark done
in ink made from gunpowder by way of acknowledgment. It meant,
presumably, that instructions would be obeyed, and so far, good;
we were not now in danger of trouble from that source.
But Ali Baba found his tongue again, and freed himself from his
sons after he had drank about a quart of water.
"That Ibrahim ben Ah was puzzled," he said. "Allah! But the fool
asked questions; and by the Prophet's beard I lied in answer to
him! Ho! What a string of lies! Who was I but a sheikh from
El-Kalil bringing word to Ali Higg of the movements of a British
force! In what way did I become the friend of Ali Higg? Was I not
always his friend! Was it not I who fed him when he first escaped
from Egypt! Ho-ho-ho! Have I not been working for a year to
gather men for him in El-Kalil! Have I not made purchases in
El-Kalil and El-Kudz for his wife Ayisha! _Il hamdulillah!_ My
tongue was ready! May the lies rot the belly of the fool
who ate them!
"But that was not all. He wanted to know other things--as, for
instance, whether the other force of forty men is still at large,
and if so who shall protect the women in Petra.
"'For,' quoth he, `by Allah, there are men in the neighborhood
who have felt our Ali's heel, and who would not scruple to wreak
vengeance if his back were altogether turned. Convey him my
respectful homage, and bid him look to his rear,' said Ibrahim
ben Ah."
At that Grim called to Narayan Singh, who came down the
goat-track like a landslide. You mustn't whistle your man in
those parts, or the Arabs will say the devil has defiled
your mouth.
"Ask Jael Higg to come here."
"A word first, Jimgrim sahib! While I watched, those women
talked. Jael, the older one, offered Ayisha forgiveness if she
would obey henceforth; but Ayisha gave her only hard words,
saying that in a day or so it will be seen whose cock crows
loudest. So Jael called to two of the men who have been with
Ayisha all this time, and they squatted in the mouth of her cave.
As it was very dark I crept quite close and listened. She bade
them watch their chance and run to Ali Higg.
"'If he is ill and angry, never mind,' she said. `If he beats
you, never mind. He will reward you afterward. Bid him, as he
values life,' she said, `call in those forty men whom he would
send to punish the Beni Aroun people. Tell him I am a prisoner,
but those forty are enough to turn the tables until Ibrahim ben
Ah can come. A camel must leave in a hurry for Ibrahim ben Ah at
the oasis, and bring him and all the men back to straighten
this affair.'
"She promised them money and promotion for success, and sure
death for failure!"
"Good!" said Grim, turning to me. "You see? It always pays to
stage a close-up in a game like this. We've caught our friend Ali
Higg between soup and fish."
"Get in quick, then, and kidnap him," I urged.
"Man alive," he answered, "we've no kind of right to do that.
Bring her down," he told Narayan Singh, "and then have Mujrim tie
those four men of Ayisha's so they've no chance to escape."
Jael Higg came down in a livid passion--altogether too near home
to enjoy taking secondhand orders from an Indian in the dark. She
was still less amused when she discovered that Grim knew her
little scheme.
"Well, Jael," he said, "you weren't quite frank with me after
all, were you? Which will you do now--stay in that hole up
there with a double guard, or come into Petra with us and
behave yourself?"
For, I should say, a whole minute, she did not answer. You could
not tell in the dark, but I think she was fighting back tears,
and too proud to betray it.
"I'm your prisoner," she hissed at last. "Do what you like, and
take the consequences."
"I'll put you to no indignity, Jael, if you'll play fair."
"My God! What? Are you mad, or am I? What are you going to do
with Ali Higg?"
"Make friends with him."
"You swear that?"
"Sure."
She was silent for another minute.
"Very well," she said at last. "I'll do my best."
"Accepted," answered Grim. "Now--bring down Ayisha--fetch out the
camels--mount--and forward all!"
We went forward just as dawn was breaking, and I believe every
man Jack of us except Grim had his heart in his teeth. Grim was
likely too busy conning over the plan in his head to feel afraid,
that being, as far as I could ever tell, the one lone advantage
of being leader, just as the capacity to drive out fear by
steady thinking is as good a reason as exists for placing a
man in command.
Nobody knows how old Petra is, but it was a thriving city when
Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees, and for a full five thousand
years it has had but that one entrance, through a gorge that
narrows finally until only one loaded camel at a time can pass.
Army after army down the centuries have tried to storm the place,
and failed, so that even the invincible Alexander and the Romans
had to fall back on the arts of friendship to obtain the key. We,
the last invaders, came as friends, if only Grim could persuade
the tyrant to believe it.
The sun rose over the city just as we reached the narrowest part
of the gut, Grim leading, and its first rays showed that we were
using the bed of a watercourse for a road. Exactly in front of
us, glimpsed through a twelve-foot gap between cliffs six hundred
feet high, was a sight worth going twice that distance, running
twice that risk, to see--a rose-red temple front, carved out
of the solid valley wall and glistening in the opalescent
hues of morning.
Not even Burkhardt, who was the first civilized man to see the
place in a thousand years, described that temple properly;
because you can't. It is huge--majestic--silent--empty--aglow
with all the prism colors in the morning sun. And it seems
to think.
It takes you so by surprise when you first see it that in face of
that embodied mystery of ancient days your brain won't work, and
you want to sit spellbound. But Grim had done our thinking for
us, so that we were not the only ones surprised. Such was the
confidence of safety that those huge walls and the narrow
entrance to the place inspire that Ali Higg had set only four men
to keep the gate; and they slept with their weapons beside them,
never believing that strangers would dare essay that ghost-haunted
ravine by night.
They were pounced on and tied almost before their eyes were open;
and, catching sight of Jael Higg first, and getting only a
glimpse of Grim, they rather naturally thought their chief had
caught them napping; so they neither cried out nor made any
attempt to defend themselves; and presently, when they discovered
their mistake, the fear of being crucified for having slept on
duty kept them dumb.
Grim led the way straight to that amazing temple, and we invaded
it, camels and all, off-loading the camels inside in a hurry and
then driving them out again to lie down in the wide porch between
the columns and the temple wall. The porch was so vast that even
all our string of camels did not crowd it.
The main part of the interior was a perfect cube of forty feet,
all hand-hewn from the cliff, and there were numerous rooms
leading out of it that had once been occupied by the priests of
Isis, but "the lion and the lizard" had lived in them since their
day. We put the prisoners, including Ayisha's four men, in one
room under guard.
That much was hardly accomplished when the spirit of our
seventeen thieves reacted to their surroundings, and all the
advantage of our secret arrival was suddenly undone. Half of them
had gone outside to tie the camels, under Ali Baba's watchful
eye; and it was he, as a matter of fact, who started it. From
inside we heard a regular din of battle commencing--loud shouts
and irregular rifle-fire--and I followed Grim out in a hurry.
There was no enemy in sight. Old Ali Baba was busy reloading his
rifle fifty paces away in front of the temple door, facing us
with his sons, in a semicircle around him, and they were shooting
at something over our heads. Grim laughed rather bitterly.
"My mistake," he said. "I ought to have thought of that."
So I went out to see.
Surmounting the temple front, at least a hundred feet above the
pavement and perfectly inaccessible, was a beautifully carved
stone urn surmounting a battered image of some god or goddess. It
was in shadow, because the cliff wall, from which the temple had
been carved, overhung it; so it was peculiarly difficult to hit,
even at that range; but they were all firing away at it as if Ali
Higg and all his men were hidden behind the thing. There was no
particular need to stop them, for they had made noise enough
already to awake the very slumbering bones of Petra. Ali Baba
advised me to shoot too, and I asked him why.
"To burst the thing."
"But why?"
"That we make a profit from this venture."
"How?"
He paused to reload once more. He had already fired away about
fifteen cartridges.
"Allah! The very dogs of El-Kalil have heard of Pharaoh's treasure."
"I am neither a dog," said I, "nor an inhabitant of El-Kalil, for
which Allah for his thoughtfulness be praised! Tell me what you
and the dogs know."
"This place was the treasury of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, a bad
king and an unbeliever, whom may Allah curse! In that urn are his
gold and rubies. If we can crack it they will come tumbling down
and we shall all be rich."
_"Mashallah!_ You believe that? Why haven't Ali Higg and his men
cracked it, then?"
_"Shu halalk?_* I have told you Pharaoh was an evil king. He was
in league with devils and bewitched the place. The devils guard
it. May Allah twist their tails! Look--see! We shoot, but the
bullets miss the mark each time!"
--------
* What chatter is this?
--------
"Perhaps you haven't prayed enough to exorcize the devils?" I
suggested, and he dropped the butt of his rifle on the ground to
consider the proposition.
"Out of the mouth of an unbeliever has come wisdom before now,"
he said. "There may be truth in that."
And he called all his sons and grandsons there and then to spread
their mats and pray toward Mecca, performing the prescribed
ablutions first with water from one of the goatskin bags.
Well, there wasn't any further use in trying to keep our
movements secret. Grim beckoned me to where he stood beside
Narayan Singh, with Ayisha looking mischievous in the gloom
behind them, and issued final instructions.
"Present my compliments and these gifts to Ali Higg--I'm busy at
prayer, remember--and say how greatly honored we feel to have
escorted his wife across the desert. If he asks where her four
men are, tell him I'll bring them later. Be sure and make me out
a great sheikh, and say I heard he is sick, so sent my _hakim_ in
advance to give him relief; then do your best for him, if he'll
let you--after Ayisha has done her worst," he added in a whisper.
"Don't forget you're a _darwaish._ The more you jaw religion the
better the old rascal will like you. See you soon. So long!"
So Narayan Singh and I, followed by Ayisha and two of Ali Baba's
sons, left that ancient temple bearing the medicine-chest as well
as presents, and I hope the others did not feel as scared as I did.