It was a great day in the Muslim year. The Mahmal, or Sacred Carpet, was
leaving Cairo on its long pilgrimage of thirty-seven days to Mecca and
Mahomet’s tomb. Great guns boomed from the Citadel, as the gorgeous
procession, forming itself beneath the Mokattam Hills, began its slow
march to where, seated in the shade of an ornate pavilion, Prince Kaid
awaited its approach to pay devout homage. Thousands looked down at the
scene from the ramparts of the Citadel, from the overhanging cliffs,
and from the tops of the houses that hung on the ledges of rock rising
abruptly from the level ground, to which the last of the famed Mamelukes
leaped to their destruction.
Now to Prince Kaid’s ears there came from hundreds of hoarse throats the
cry: “Allah! Allah! May thy journey be with safety to Arafat!” mingling
with the harsh music of the fifes and drums.
Kaid looked upon the scene with drawn face and lowering brows. His
retinue watched him with alarm. A whisper had passed that, two nights
before, the Effendina had sent in haste for a famous Italian physician
lately come to Cairo, and that since his visit Kaid had been sullen and
depressed. It was also the gossip of the bazaars that he had suddenly
shown favour to those of the Royal House and to other reactionaries, who
had been enemies to the influence of Claridge Pasha.
This rumour had been followed by an official proclamation that no
Europeans or Christians would be admitted to the ceremony of the Sacred
Carpet.
Thus it was that Kaid looked out on a vast multitude of Muslims, in
which not one European face showed, and from lip to lip there passed the
word, “Harrik--Harrik--remember Harrik! Kaid turns from the infidel!”
They crowded near the great pavilion--as near as the mounted Nubians
would permit--to see Kaid’s face; while he, with eyes wandering over
the vast assemblage, was lost in dark reflections. For a year he had
struggled against a growing conviction that some obscure disease was
sapping his strength. He had hid it from every one, until, at last,
distress and pain had overcome him. The verdict of the Italian expert
was that possible, but by no means certain, cure might come from an
operation which must be delayed for a month or more.
Suddenly, the world had grown unfamiliar to him; he saw it from afar;
but his subconscious self involuntarily registered impressions, and he
moved mechanically through the ceremonies and duties of the immediate
present. Thrown back upon himself, to fight his own fight, with the
instinct of primary life his mind involuntarily drew for refuge to
the habits and predispositions of youth; and for two days he had shut
himself away from the activities with which David and Nahoum were
associated. Being deeply engaged with the details of the expedition to
the Soudan, David had not gone to the Palace; and he was unaware of the
turn which things had taken.
Three times, with slow and stately steps, the procession wound in a
circle in the great square, before it approached the pavilion where the
Effendina sat, the splendid camels carrying the embroidered tent wherein
the Carpet rested, and that which bore the Emir of the pilgrims, moving
gracefully like ships at sea. Naked swordsmen, with upright and shining
blades, were followed by men on camels bearing kettle-drums. After them
came Arab riders with fresh green branches fastened to the saddles like
plumes, while others carried flags and banners emblazoned with texts
and symbols. Troops of horsemen in white woollen cloaks, sheikhs and
Bedouins with flowing robes and huge turbans, religious chiefs of the
great sects, imperturbable and statuesque, were in strange contrast to
the shouting dervishes and camel-drivers and eager pilgrims.
At last the great camel with its sacred burden stopped in front of
Kaid for his prayer and blessing. As he held the tassels, lifted the
gold-fringed curtain, and invoked Allah’s blessing, a half-naked sheikh
ran forward, and, raising his hand high above his head, cried shrilly:
“Kaid, Kaid, hearken!”
Rough hands caught him away, but Kaid commanded them to desist; and the
man called a blessing on him; and cried aloud:
“Listen, O Kaid, son of the stars and the light of day. God hath exalted
thee. Thou art the Egyptian of all the Egyptians. In thy hand is power.
But thou art mortal even as I. Behold, O Kaid, in the hour that I was
born thou wast born, I in the dust without thy Palace wall, thou amid
the splendid things. But thy star is my star. Behold, as God ordains,
the Tree of Life was shaken on the night when all men pray and cry aloud
to God--even the Night of the Falling Leaves. And I watched the falling
leaves; and I saw my leaf, and it was withered, but only a little
withered, and so I live yet a little. But I looked for thy leaf, thou
who wert born in that moment when I waked to the world. I looked long,
but I found no leaf, neither green nor withered. But I looked again upon
my leaf, and then I saw that thy name now was also upon my leaf, and
that it was neither green nor withered; but was a leaf that drooped as
when an evil wind has passed and drunk its life. Listen, O Kaid! Upon
the tomb of Mahomet I will set my lips, and it may be that the leaf of
my life will come fresh and green again. But thou--wilt thou not
come also to the lord Mahomet’s tomb? Or”--he paused and raised his
voice--“or wilt thou stay and lay thy lips upon the cross of the
infidel? Wilt thou--”
He could say no more, for Kaid’s face now darkened with anger. He made
a gesture, and, in an instant, the man was gagged and bound, while a
sullen silence fell upon the crowd. Kaid suddenly became aware of this
change of feeling, and looked round him. Presently his old prudence
and subtlety came back, his face cleared a little, and he called aloud,
“Unloose the man, and let him come to me.” An instant after, the man was
on his knees, silent before him.
“What is thy name?” Kaid asked.
“Kaid Ibrahim, Effendina,” was the reply.
“Thou hast misinterpreted thy dream, Kaid Ibrahim,” answered the
Effendina. “The drooping leaf was token of the danger in which thy life
should be, and my name upon thy leaf was token that I should save thee
from death. Behold, I save thee. Inshallah, go in peace! There is no God
but God, and the Cross is the sign of a false prophet. Thou art mad. God
give thee a new mind. Go.”
The man was presently lost in the sweltering, half-frenzied crowd; but
he had done his work, and his words rang in the ears of Kaid as he rode
away.
A few hours afterwards, bitter and rebellious, murmuring to himself,
Kaid sat in a darkened room of his Nile Palace beyond the city. So
few years on the throne, so young, so much on which to lay the hand of
pleasure, so many millions to command; and yet the slave at his door had
a surer hold on life and all its joys and lures than he, Prince Kaid,
ruler of Egypt! There was on him that barbaric despair which has taken
dreadful toll of life for the decree of destiny. Across the record of
this day, as across the history of many an Eastern and pagan tyrant, was
written: “He would not die alone.” That the world should go on when he
was gone, that men should buy and sell and laugh and drink, and flaunt
it in the sun, while he, Prince Kaid, would be done with it all.
He was roused by the rustling of a robe. Before him stood the Arab
physician, Sharif Bey, who had been in his father’s house and his own
for a lifetime. It was many a year since his ministrations to Kaid had
ceased; but he had remained on in the Palace, doing service to those
who received him, and--it was said by the evil-tongued--granting
certificates of death out of harmony with dark facts, a sinister and
useful figure. His beard was white, his face was friendly, almost
benevolent, but his eyes had a light caught from no celestial flame.
His look was confident now, as his eyes bent on Kaid. He had lived long,
he had seen much, he had heard of the peril that had been foreshadowed
by the infidel physician; and, by a sure instinct, he knew that his
own opportunity had come. He knew that Kaid would snatch at any offered
comfort, would cherish any alleviating lie, would steal back from
science and civilisation and the modern palace to the superstition of
the fellah’s hut. Were not all men alike when the neboot of Fate struck
them down into the terrible loneliness of doom, numbing their minds?
Luck would be with him that offered first succour in that dark hour.
Sharif had come at the right moment for Sharif.
Kaid looked at him with dull yet anxious eyes. “Did I not command that
none should enter?” he asked presently in a thick voice.
“Am I not thy physician, Effendina, to whom be the undying years? When
the Effendina is sick, shall I not heal? Have I not waited like a dog
at thy door these many years, till that time would come when none could
heal thee save Sharif?”
“What canst thou give me?”
“What the infidel physician gave thee not--I can give thee hope. Hast
thou done well, oh, Effendina, to turn from thine own people? Did not
thine own father, and did not Mehemet Ali, live to a good age? Who
were their physicians? My father and I, and my father’s father, and his
father’s father.”
“Thou canst cure me altogether?” asked Kaid hesitatingly.
“Wilt thou not have faith in one of thine own race? Will the infidel
love thee as do we, who are thy children and thy brothers, who are
to thee as a nail driven in the wall, not to be moved? Thou shalt
live--Inshallah, thou shalt have healing and length of days!”
He paused at a gesture from Kaid, for a slave had entered and stood
waiting.
“What dost thou here? Wert thou not commanded?” asked Kaid.
“Effendina, Claridge Pasha is waiting,” was the reply.
Kaid frowned, hesitated; then, with a sudden resolve, made a gesture of
dismissal to Sharif Bey, and nodded David’s admittance to the slave.
As David entered, he passed Sharif Bey, and something in the look on
the Arab physician’s face--a secret malignancy and triumph--struck him
strangely. And now a fresh anxiety and apprehension rose in his mind as
he glanced at Kaid. The eye was heavy and gloomy, the face was clouded,
the lips once so ready to smile at him were sullen and smileless now.
David stood still, waiting.
“I did not expect thee till to-morrow, Saadat,” said Kaid moodily at
last.
“The business is urgent?”
“Effendina,” said David, with every nerve at tension, yet with outward
self-control, “I have to report--” He paused, agitated; then, in a firm
voice, he told of the disaster which had befallen the cotton-mills and
the steamer.
As David spoke, Kaid’s face grew darker, his fingers fumbled vaguely
with the linen of the loose white robe he wore. When the tale was
finished he sat for a moment apparently stunned by the news, then he
burst out fiercely:
“Bismillah, am I to hear only black words to-day? Hast thou naught to
say but this--the fortune of Egypt burned to ashes!”
David held back the quick retort that came to his tongue.
“Half my fortune is in the ashes,” he answered with dignity. “The rest
came from savings never made before by this Government. Is the work less
worthy in thy sight, Effendina, because it has been destroyed? Would thy
life be less great and useful because a blow took thee from behind?”
Kaid’s face turned black. David had bruised an open wound.
“What is my life to thee--what is thy work to me?”
“Thy life is dear to Egypt, Effendina,” urged David soothingly, “and my
labour for Egypt has been pleasant in thine eyes till now.”
“Egypt cannot be saved against her will,” was the moody response. “What
has come of the Western hand upon the Eastern plough?” His face grew
blacker; his heart was feeding on itself.
“Thou, the friend of Egypt, hast come of it, Effendina.”
“Harrik was right, Harrik was right,” Kaid answered, with stubborn gloom
and anger. “Better to die in our own way, if we must die, than live in
the way of another. Thou wouldst make of Egypt another England; thou
wouldst civilise the Soudan--bismillah, it is folly!”
“That is not the way Mehemet Ali thought, nor Ibrahim. Nor dost thou
think so, Effendina,” David answered gravely. “A dark spirit is on thee.
Wouldst thou have me understand that what we have done together, thou
and I, was ill done, that the old bad days were better?”
“Go back to thine own land,” was the surly answer. “Nation after nation
ravaged Egypt, sowed their legions here, but the Egyptian has lived them
down. The faces of the fellaheen are the faces of Thotmes and Seti. Go
back. Egypt will travel her own path. We are of the East; we are Muslim.
What is right to you is wrong to us. Ye would make us over--give us
cotton beds and wooden floors and fine flour of the mill, and cleanse
the cholera-hut with disinfectants, but are these things all? How many
of your civilised millions would die for their prophet Christ? Yet
all Egypt would rise up from the mud-floor, the dourha-field and the
mud-hut, and would come out to die for Mahomet and Allah--ay, as
Harrik knew, as Harrik knew! Ye steal into corners, and hide behind the
curtains of your beds to pray; we pray where the hour of prayer finds
us--in the street, in the market-place, where the house is building,
the horse being shod, or the money-changers are. Ye hear the call of
civilisation, but we heap the Muezzin--”
He stopped, and searched mechanically for his watch. “It is the hour the
Muezzin calls,” said David gently. “It is almost sunset. Shall I open
the windows that the call may come to us?” he added.
While Kaid stared at him, his breast heaving with passion, David went to
a window and opened the shutters wide.
The Palace faced the Nile, which showed like a tortuous band of blue and
silver a mile or so away. Nothing lay between but the brown sand, and
here and there a handful of dark figures gliding towards the river, or a
little train of camels making for the bare grey hills from the ghiassas
which had given them their desert loads. The course of the Nile was
marked by a wide fringe of palms showing blue and purple, friendly and
ancient and solitary. Beyond the river and the palms lay the grey-brown
desert, faintly touched with red. So clear was the sweet evening air
that the irregular surface of the desert showed for a score of miles as
plainly as though it were but a step away. Hummocks of sand--tombs and
fallen monuments gave a feeling as of forgotten and buried peoples; and
the two vast pyramids of Sakkarah stood up in the plaintive glow of
the evening skies, majestic and solemn, faithful to the dissolved and
absorbed races who had built them. Curtains of mauve and saffron-red
were hung behind them, and through a break of cloud fringing the horizon
a yellow glow poured, to touch the tips of the pyramids with poignant
splendour. But farther over to the right, where Cairo lay, there hung
a bluish mist, palpable and delicate, out of which emerged the vast
pyramids of Cheops; and beside it the smiling inscrutable Sphinx faced
the changeless centuries. Beyond the pyramids the mist deepened into a
vast deep cloud of blue and purple, which seemed the end to some mystic
highway untravelled by the sons of men.
Suddenly there swept over David a wave of feeling such as had passed
over Kaid, though of a different nature. Those who had built the
pyramids were gone, Cheops and Thotmes and Amenhotep and Chefron and the
rest. There had been reformers in those lost races; one age had sought
to better the last, one man had toiled to save--yet there only remained
offensive bundles of mummied flesh and bone and a handful of relics
in tombs fifty centuries old. Was it all, then, futile? Did it matter,
then, whether one man laboured or a race aspired?
Only for a moment these thoughts passed through his mind; and then,
as the glow through the broken cloud on the opposite horizon suddenly
faded, and veils of melancholy fell over the desert and the river and
the palms, there rose a call, sweetly shrill, undoubtingly insistent.
Sunset had come, and, with it, the Muezzin’s call to prayer from the
minaret of a mosque hard by.
David was conscious of a movement behind him--that Kaid was praying with
hands uplifted; and out on the sands between the window and the river
he saw kneeling figures here and there, saw the camel-drivers halt their
trains, and face the East with hands uplifted. The call went on--“La
ilaha illa-llah!”
It called David, too. The force and searching energy and fire in it
stole through his veins, and drove from him the sense of futility
and despondency which had so deeply added to his trouble. There was
something for him, too, in that which held infatuated the minds of so
many millions.
A moment later Kaid and he faced each other again. “Effendina,” he said,
“thou wilt not desert our work now?”
“Money--for this expedition? Thou hast it?” Kaid asked ironically.
“I have but little money, and it must go to rebuild the mills,
Effendina. I must have it of thee.”
“Let them remain in their ashes.”
“But thousands will have no work.”
“They had work before they were built, they will have work now they are
gone.”
“Effendina, I stayed in Egypt at thy request. The work is thy work. Wilt
thou desert it?”
“The West lured me--by things that seemed. Now I know things as they
are.”
“They will lure thee again to-morrow,” said David firmly, but with a
weight on his spirit. His eyes sought and held Kaid’s. “It is too late
to go back; we must go forward or we shall lose the Soudan, and a Mahdi
and his men will be in Cairo in ten years.”
For an instant Kaid was startled. The old look of energy and purpose
leaped up into his eye; but it faded quickly again. If, as the Italian
physician more than hinted, his life hung by a thread, did it matter
whether the barbarian came to Cairo? That was the business of those who
came after. If Sharif was right, and his life was saved, there would be
time enough to set things right.
“I will not pour water on the sands to make an ocean,” he answered.
“Will a ship sail on the Sahara? Bismillah, it is all a dream! Harrik
was right. But dost thou think to do with me as thou didst with Harrik?”
he sneered. “Is it in thy mind?”
David’s patience broke down under the long provocation. “Know then,
Effendina,” he said angrily, “that I am not thy subject, nor one
beholden to thee, nor thy slave. Upon terms well understood, I have
laboured here. I have kept my obligations, and it is thy duty to keep
thy obligations, though the hand of death were on thee. I know not what
has poisoned thy mind, and driven thee from reason and from justice. I
know that, Prince Pasha of Egypt as thou art, thou art as bound to me as
any fellah that agrees to tend my door or row my boat. Thy compact
with me is a compact with England, and it shall be kept, if thou art an
honest man. Thou mayst find thousands in Egypt who will serve thee at
any price, and bear thee in any mood. I have but one price. It is well
known to thee. I will not be the target for thy black temper. This is
not the middle ages; I am an Englishman, not a helot. The bond must
be kept; thou shalt not play fast and loose. Money must be found; the
expedition must go. But if thy purpose is now Harrik’s purpose, then
Europe should know, and Egypt also should know. I have been thy right
hand, Effendina; I will not be thy old shoe, to be cast aside at thy
will.”
In all the days of his life David had never flamed out as he did now.
Passionate as his words were, his manner was strangely quiet, but his
white and glistening face and his burning eyes showed how deep was his
anger.
As he spoke, Kaid sank upon the divan. Never had he been challenged so.
With his own people he had ever been used to cringing and abasement, and
he had played the tyrant, and struck hard and cruelly, and he had
been feared; but here, behind David’s courteous attitude, there was a
scathing arraignment of his conduct which took no count of consequence.
In other circumstances his vanity would have shrunk under this whip of
words, but his native reason and his quick humour would have justified
David. In this black distemper possessing him, however, only outraged
egotism prevailed. His hands clenched and unclenched, his lips were
drawn back on his teeth in rage.
When David had finished, Kaid suddenly got to his feet and took a step
forward with a malediction, but a faintness seized him and he staggered
back. When he raised his head again David was gone.