“Him who goodness will not mend, evil will not mend.”—Arabic Proverb.
Zarah stood at the point of the great V which cleft the outer ring of the mountains, and from which started the path leading down to the plateau.
That the dying Sheikh’s daughter was expected there was no doubt, as showed the bonfires upon the mountain’s highest peaks, streaking the purple, starlit sky with orange flames; yet, save for the Arab who stood patiently near the spear which marked the beginning of the hidden path, with the camels which had brought them safely and at full speed across the desert and the quicksands, there was neither sign of life nor shout of greeting nor firing of rifles in salutation.
She looked back across the limitless, billowing desert, showing under the stars like a great ocean of endless, unbroken waves frozen into immobility as they surged from north to south, by some magician’s hand. She laughed softly at the thought of the civilization she had dropped, as one drops an outworn cloak from about the shoulders, and had left for ever upon the outskirts of the great desert of which she was the child. She looked ahead into the future and down the narrow path dividing her from the dying man, over whose kingdom in the heart of the mountains she would so shortly rule.
Giving no thought to her father in her utter selfishness, she laughed aloud in sheer delight at the picture conjured up by her ambition, laughed until the sweet, soft notes were flung against the rocks by the hot wind from the south and carried through the cleft down to the open[59] space where they were thrown in echo, from this side to that side over the sparkling waters until they broke and were lost in the baying of the great dogs which, eyes red with hate and ruffs upstanding, fought to get out of the kennels so as to reach the woman they hated.
She shivered at the sound, although the hot wind from the south enfolded her like a blanket, and, suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to see some living creature in the place of death and shadows, took a quick step forward, then shrank behind a rock.
Upon a ledge, high up on the mountainside, to which it seemed that only a goat could possibly have climbed, sat blind Yussuf, singing to himself: “‘The corn passeth from hand to hand, but it cometh at last to the mill.’”
He sang the words of the proverb as he sat staring down at Zarah the Cruel as though he had eyes in the scarred face with which to see her.
“It cometh at last to the mill! It cometh at last to the mill!”
He repeated the words over and over again whilst the rosary of Mecca slipped between his sensitive fingers, and the girl, steeped in the superstition of her race, spread hers in the gesture to ward off misfortune and touched an amulet of good luck which hung about her neck.
Did he know she was there? Had he come, ironically, to welcome her and to bid her hasten to her father’s side, as had bidden the man who had awaited her at Hutah with swiftest camels? Or had he, dire figure of ill omen, been set upon her path by Fate this night, when the scorching wind blew from the south heralding the storm? There was no time to ponder the question; there was only just time enough in which to register a vow to lay some cunning trap into which the blind man should set his feet and find his death as though by dire mischance. No! there was no time, for she suddenly fathomed the meaning of the intense silence and stillness, and, gathering her draperies about her, slipped as noiselessly as some tiger[60] cat under the ledge upon which the blind man sat, and down the steep path.
She did not look up, she did not look back, else might she have seen the face of Yussuf the blind turned in her direction, with the scarred mouth twisted in a smile. She sped as quickly as the path would allow her, spurred by the thought of the men who, gathered round their dying chief, only waited for the failing heart to cease beating to acclaim one of themselves as his successor in her place.
She knew full well the man who would be chosen if she failed to reach her father in time. Even Al-Asad, half-caste, bloodthirsty, ambitious, as physically powerful as the lion after which he had been named, outcast from the Benoo-Harb tribe, but more through the fact that his father had been a Nubian slave than for the crimes he had committed in the light-heartedness of youth.
As she ran she conjured up a picture of the man who had taken blind Yussuf’s place at her father’s right hand and who had dared to look at her with something more than the respect due to the Sheikh’s daughter in his handsome eyes.
There was no sign of any man as she fled across the plateau, neither—the hour for sleep having come for the women and children—was there sound of life, but a great light shone through the barred windows of the Hall of Judgment far up on the mountainside. She raced up the steps and stood, breathless, in the doorway, unseen by the men gathered about the man whom they loved and who lay dying of the wounds received in the last great fight with the Bedouins, who had fallen upon the brigands as they peacefully returned, with much spoil, from raiding a caravan journeying towards Oman.
Knowing the effect of mystery upon her race, she wrapped herself in her great white cloak, pulled the veils about her face and a yashmak beneath her eyes, which flashed with no soft light. She cursed beneath her breath when the men rose and spoke together, looking towards[61] Al-Asad, who stared down at the Sheikh lying so quietly at his feet.
She had arrived too late; her father had died without blessing her and proclaiming her his successor.
She cared nothing about the blessing, but she knew that without the proclamation she stood no earthly chance against the claim Al-Asad would enforce through sheer brute force.
Superstition helped her in her need.
She believed that the soul lingered in the body for three days after the heart had ceased to beat, and she acted unhesitatingly, fearlessly, upon the belief.
She bent and picked up a lance lying upon the ground, and raised it above her head just as, without seeing her in the shadows, the men moved in a body towards Al-Asad.
She pitted her indomitable will against the mighty power of death, she flung it across the space which divided her from her father, and, for a fraction of time, pulled him back to the world he had loved exceeding well.
“Hail! father!” she shouted.
“Hail! father!” she shouted again as the men turned swiftly in her direction, then moved hastily backwards when the right hand of the man whom they supposed dead, moved.
Motionless from fear, they stared at, without recognizing, Zarah as she stood, tall and straight, in the shadows, wrapped in white from head to foot, her eyes half closed under the supreme effort she was making, her right hand raised, holding a spear ready for throwing.
She bent a little forward as she made one last bid for power, and at the sonorousness of her voice, which sounded like the calling of the evil one in the mountains, the men touched the amulets around their necks.
“Hail! father!” she shouted once again, until her words seemed to beat like wings against the walls, which had been built by holy hands. “Speak, father, ere thou passeth on. Speak! Speak! Speak!”
[62]
Al-Asad, the lion-hearted, backed against the wall as the Sheikh, his feet upon the edge of the world to come, slowly turned his head towards his daughter; the others flung the end of their cloaks across their eyes, touching their amulets. The girl stood quite still, her face dead white, her nostrils pinched, her breath whistling between her closed teeth.
“Farewell, daughter. Rule wisely in my stead. Take only from those who have more than is necessary for life. Lift up the fallen, help the needy, spare not in charity towards my brother Yussuf, with whose safekeeping I charge thee lest evil befall thee. Throw thou the spear ere I close my eyes, as a sign that thou steppest into my shoes, O my daughter.”
The Sheikh’s words rang clear as a bell but as though from a long distance; his eyes did not waver as the spear, thrown with unerring aim, flashed across the room; he whispered “Mercedes,” and closed them for ever as it buried itself in the cushions at his feet.
Zarah the Cruel had triumphed for a moment over death, but she had caught the look of dismay on Al-Asad’s face and the stealthy movement of the men’s hands towards their cummerbunds. Without hesitating, with no intention of allowing a second to elapse before driving her victory home, she passed slowly up the room towards the dais, unarmed, fearless in the strength of her tremendous personality.
She took no notice of the men as, wrapped in her cloak and veils, she slowly ascended the steps of the dais and knelt to kiss her father; she looked down upon him for a moment, then taking a massive gold ring from the first finger of his right hand, slipped it on her own, and rose to her feet.
“’Tis she,” whispered Bowlegs. “’Tis Zarah the Cruel!”
“Nay, brother, it cannot be; she was a child bordering upon womanhood. This is a woman grown, who is as the[63] gazelle in her walk and as the jasmine in her perfume. Maybe ’tis the spirit of her mother, who has come to meet her lord, or perchance——”
They stopped speaking, and took a step nearer the centre of the dais as Zarah played her trump card.
She dropped the veils from her head, the yashmak from before her face, and the cloak from her shoulders, standing revealed in the garments she had donned at Hutah in the oasis of Hareek.
She was ravenous from hunger and almost dead with fatigue, but she stood without a tremor, glittering from head to foot in the jewels which embroidered the voluminous orange-satin trousers, the golden, travel-stained sandals, and the bolero, which allowed the satin skin to show at the waist. Her face was white, her crimson mouth parted in a slight smile; her yellow eyes passed slowly from one face to the other and on to the next of those fierce, unscrupulous men, who watched her for a while and then, with all the inconstancy of the Arab, reverted, with the exception of Al-Asad, to their former allegiance as they succumbed to the call of her beauty.
A sudden, tremendous shout of reception and of welcome went up:
“Ahlan wasahlan! Ahlan wasahlan!”
They shouted the words over and over again, until the women and children wakened on the far side of the mountains and the birds, which inhabited the secluded spot, rose twittering and screaming in clouds, to be whirled this way and that way by the wind from the south, which seemed, in its suffocating heat, to have swept across the open mouth of hell.
Slowly Zarah the beautiful, the relentless, raised her right hand, upon which shone her father’s ring, above her head to quell the tumult, and, as a great silence fell, stretched it out to the men, who, with the exception of Al-Asad, rushed forward and, kneeling, touched her sandalled foot, acknowledging her as chief.
[64]
She had won.
There was no tenderness, no love, in her eyes as she looked down upon them, neither was there softness in her heart as she looked into the future. She would rule the men with an iron hand and drive them with a whip of steel, favouring those who did her bidding, treading beneath her heel those who rebelled until she ground them in the dust. She would be their hadeeyah, the woman to lead them into battle, even as had led Ayesha, the wife of Mohammed, the Prophet of Allah, the one and only God; she would make the mountain home a corner of paradise and her dwelling a place of gold and precious stones, as a frame to her beauty.
“I stand in my father’s place, O men!” she cried. “I have taken the reigns of government from the Sheikh’s fingers, which are locked in those of death. Obey me and I will raise you to heights you—nay, not one of you—have dreamed of; rebel, and I will set your bodies upon the highest peak as food for vultures. I will go forth with you, lead you—nay, give ear until I have come to the end of my words, for I will not speak again. Yea! I will lead you forth and bring you back with gold and cattle and fair women, until the fame of these rocks is spread from the north to the south and from the east to the west. I will have none but the beautiful, none but the brave, about me to do my bidding. I——”
She stopped short at a sound from the far end of the hall and raised her head. Yussuf, blind, scarred, terrible to behold, stared back at her from the shadows of the door, challenging her proud statement with his empty orbits, repudiating her words without a sound or movement.
“ ... save for Yussuf the Blind,” she concluded slowly, as she raged inwardly at the man’s temerity, “whom I must needs take to my heart in obedience to my father’s dying wish.”
She gave no outward sign of the rage which swept her[65] as she finished speaking, but she looked round for someone upon whom to vent her wrath and found him in Al-Asad, who leant against the wall, watching her from out the corner of his eyes.
“Thou!” she said, her voice cutting across the silence like a whip. “Whyfore standest thou when others kneel?”
“The lion does not flee before the gazelle!” replied Al-Asad, who had loved her from the first moment he had seen her.
Zarah made a little motion of her hand which brought the men to their feet, then beckoned Al-Asad, who walked slowly towards her and into the trap she had set for him. She had more than one weapon in her armoury and more than one form of punishment in her mind.
That the man loved her, in his savage way, she had always known; that he had worked to succeed the dead Sheikh and thereby to force her into becoming his own woman if she wished to rule, she had guessed intuitively, and in a second of time had thought out a plan in which, through his humiliation, she could revenge herself for the insult.
She was well above medium height, but seemed small beside Al-Asad as he towered above her, mighty arms folded across his breast, looking down upon her beauty.
He was a magnificent animal, with all an animal’s instincts and a dog’s fidelity, but she feared him not a bit. She looked up at the handsome face with the almost negroid lips and into the flashing eyes and down into the heart, as childish as it was vain, and smiled and raised her hand when he made a quick step forward.
“I am footsore,” she said softly. “I have cut my sandals upon the rocky path.”
She may have heard the sharp intake of breath, but she took no notice when the men turned, the one to the other, as Al-Asad knelt. His fingers trembled in the[66] tumult of his love for the beautiful woman as he unfastened the knotted ribbons of her sandals, his heart leapt as he bent and kissed the little foot, leaving his manhood in the dust beneath it. He sprang to his feet, holding the golden sandal against his breast, shrinking back against the wall at the men’s laughter, in which the woman he loved joined.
“Neither does the gazelle fear the dead lion,” she mocked as he fled from the hall out into the night and up to his dwelling upon the mountainside, where he flung himself full length upon the ground with the golden sandal against his lips.
“I love thee, love thee, love thee!” he whispered, “and will serve thee to my last hour and with all my strength. If I cannot be thy king, thy master, I will be thy slave. One day perchance, thou too wilt waken to love and learn what suffering means.”
If he had but known, love had come to her, love for the white man, causing her to suffer through the chafe of the chains which bound her.
Zarah watched the great figure as he fled past blind Yussuf and through the doorway out into the night, then smiled, and stooping, lifted her cloak and spread it across the dead Sheikh.
“I will sleep in the bed of my fathers,” she said curtly. “Bring me meat and wine to my bedchamber. To-morrow I will commit my dead father to the sands and will then make choice, amongst the slaves, for those who will attend me both night and day. Obey me, and it will be well with all of you; resist me, and your lives will be even darker than this night of storm.”
The men, so long held upon the leash by the dead Sheikh, so long baffled in their fierce desires, shouted their praises as they made a way for her. She passed them without looking at them, glittering with jewels, superb in her strength.
She climbed the steps leading to the dwelling wherein[67] her father had slept, and up to the roof, and, leaning on the balustrade, raised her face to the sky which showed sullen and starless.
Great sandstorms do not sweep the deserts of Arabia bringing devastation in their path, but the hot wind from the south will lift the topmost layer of sand hundreds of feet into the air, where it hangs like a pall across the heavens, causing men to hide their faces and cattle to flee for shelter from the terrific heat which descends from it, scorching the earth.
She walked to the corner of the roof from which, through the cleft in the rocks, the red sands of the desert could be seen stretching in great waves away to the south. She stared down and drew her hands across her eyes, and stared again; drew back with a half-uttered cry of fear, then moved forward, leaning far over the coping, looking down.
At the very edge of the quicksands and as far out across the great waste as eye could see, white shapes danced, and whirled, and bowed, retreating, advancing, whirling hand in hand, flinging their white raiment up to the sky, which hung, like a dun-coloured ceiling, low down above their caperings.
The scorching, sand-laden wind blew against her lips and through her hair and seemed to press like a great bar of red-hot iron against the satin skin which showed beneath her bodice, and yet she stood looking down, watching the light flicker this way and that way over the quicksands, and the ghostly forms running up in pairs, in ones, in twos, in files up and down and over the sand-waves until they melted into the far distance.
She had heard the tale of the half-starved, half-witted, degenerate races which are supposed to inhabit the mysterious, unexplored depths of the great desert; living like lizards, worshipping the elements, inter-marrying until brain and body are sapped of strength, and for the first time she felt grateful for the ring of quaking sand which[68] kept her safe from robbers, beasts, and such foul creatures as those which danced so merrily under the lowering sky.
She loved beauty, she loved strength, and watched with a shudder until the last white figure, leaping and bounding, had followed its fellows back to the unexplored regions of the desert, then knelt and bowed her beautiful head almost to the ground.
But she knelt before the scorching flames of the love which had sprung up in her heart for Ralph Trenchard as she had lain in his arms. Not for a day, nor for an hour of a day, had he been out of her thoughts since the morning of the accident. She lay awake at night thinking of the handsome face bent down to hers; she thrilled at the thought of his arms about her; she had thought of him unceasingly as she raced death to reach her father; she had sworn by the beard of the Prophet, which being a soulless woman she had no right to do, to bring him some day to her mountain home and for ever to her feet.
She stretched out her arms and called him by name, scorched by the hot wind which had twisted the sand into dancing shapes, sending them capering and leaping this way and that way, in the cross-eddies from the east, a ghostly phenomenon seen once in a lifetime, if that.
She ran to the side and looked out across the desert, which lay silent, foreboding, empty, and shivered under a sudden premonition of evil.
“Where are you?” she cried, beating her hands upon the burning stones. “Where are you? I love you, love you, love you, and I am calling you.”
There was no answer.
At that very moment Ralph Trenchard rode into the holiday camp pitched by Helen Raynor and her grandfather—Egypt’s Water Finder. They had pitched it some fifty miles west of Ismailiah whilst they waited to[69] start upon an expedition into Arabia, which had for its object the discovery of water hidden in the heart of a range of mountains, as described upon vellum inscribed by the Holy Palladius.