“It is an hour’s poison.”—Arabic Proverb. If Ralph Trenchard had been a guest instead of a prisoner, if he had been the men’s blood-brother in crime instead of an intruder likely, for a space, to become their leader by marriage through the love-madness of the Sheikh’s daughter, more solicitude could not have been shown for his amusement and welfare in the days which preceded the great feast at which he was to be tricked or publicly coerced into a betrothal with Zarah.
As a rider and a shot, he had won the men’s hearts; as a foreigner who menaced the peace of the community, he stood in hourly danger of his life, if he had but known it.
He did not know.
With his thoughts given entirely to the memory of the girl he loved, lacking, through her death, the spur necessary to send him hot-foot back upon the road to civilization, he had unquestioningly accepted the explanation Zarah had given him of the mistake her men had made, and which had ended in the disastrous battle, and had set himself to live but for the passing day. He had longed for adventure, he had found adventure, and when the novelty passed off and the salt of hunting with cheetahs, racing across the moonlit desert, pitting his skill with rifle and horse against the finest riders and shots in the world, lost its savour, then he would make tracks for his own land, where the fare, if somewhat lacking in spice, is figuratively and literally less calculated to upset the digestion.
Having forgotten the European half of Zarah’s parentage, and lacking woman’s intuition and keener psychological[207] perception, he put her almost extravagant hospitality down to friendliness arising out of her friendship with Helen and her meeting with him in the past, just as he put the men’s apparent friendliness down to the perfect and world-famed hospitality of the Arab. He failed to grasp the fact that their intense interest in the sports arose from an almost savage determination to beat him, or to notice the ring of triumph in their shouting, or the bitterness in their eyes when either they triumphed or failed against him.
He came to look forward to his daily meeting with the men in the company of their mistress, well content, in his British detestation of all outward show of feeling, to hide his grievous hurt under a cloak of seeming indifference.
It was an adventure, and would end, as all adventure must, if a taste of salt is to be left on Life’s palate.
He loathed the luxury of his dwelling, and longed to ask the meaning of many things, amongst them the cause of the dogs’ hatred for the Arabian woman and of the empty sockets in the face of the man he encountered so often on his path, but with whom he had not spoken.
But believing that his adventure must soon end, and knowing the Oriental’s dislike of investigation into what concerns him privately, he asked no questions, in which he showed his wisdom; truth, in an answer to a straight question, being about as rare in the East as moss in the desert. He rode and bathed and hunted and ate and slept whilst waiting for something to fix his departure, ignorant of the fact that Helen, watched closely day and night, a prey to an overwhelming, secret fear, bravely endured the discomforts of her restricted life on the far side of the jutting rock wall he could see from his door.
He had almost forgotten Zarah’s criminal reputation; had grown accustomed to her continual presence and well-meant, if tiresome, ministrations. He thought that the day of sport and night of feasting and dancing had been[208] arranged to celebrate her union with the handsome Nubian, against whom he had found himself so often pitted in the sports.
He turned to look for Al-Asad as he raced at Zarah’s side across the desert at the head of a hundred men and, carried out of himself at the magnificent sight, shouted as he rode, taking no more notice than they did of the extraordinary appearance of the sky to the south-east, mistaking the distant phenomenon for a part of the sunset, which was making a blazing, fiery furnace of the sky in the west.
Zarah and Ralph Trenchard headed fifty men, who, their white cloaks streaming behind them in the evening breeze, shouted and laughed as they rode, separated by the Patriarch, Al-Asad and Bowlegs from fifty of their brethren, who, their white cloaks streaming behind them in the evening breeze, shouted and laughed as they urged their hejeen, or dromedaries, to their swiftest pace.
To mix camels and horses in a hunt, or at any other time, is a dire and foolish and fruitless task, giving rise to pitched battles between the beasts and broken heads amongst their riders. But Zarah’s men looked forward to the inevitable fight which decided the question of the horse or the camel’s precedence over the secret path at the end of a day’s hunting; it gave them all such a chance of paying off bad debts and old scores and such an appetite for the meal prepared for them by their patient, downtrodden womenfolk.
Al-Asad sang at the top of his golden tenor voice as he guided his magnificent dromedary from Oman with his feet, and with his spear prodded the cheetahs, with which they had been hunting, between the bars of the specially made cage strapped on the back of the dromedary he led. Bowlegs led another dromedary, upon whose shedad or baggage saddle were piled the gazelle, ostrich and bunches of kangaroo-rat which constituted the not particularly good bag for a day’s hunting in the desert.
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The Patriarch, looking as must Moses have looked if he bestrode a camel in rounding up the trapesing tribes of Israel, rode between the two men, with whom he conversed as best he could for the laughter and shouts of the men and the rumblings of the camels.
He looked at Ralph Trenchard and Zarah as they rode together just ahead and shook his head.
“’Tis best for the horse to mate with the mare and the white with the white,” he said, “for the mule is but a beast of burden, to which is apportioned a grievous fare of blows, and the half-caste is but a thing of scorn even to the pure-bred donkey-boy of the cities.”
Al-Asad stopped his singing and stared towards the west, as Bowlegs made answer as best he could for the sounds which proceeded from his camel’s throat and which denoted fear.
“Yea, oh, father,” he shouted in gasps. “What afflicts this evil beast? The half-caste is of no account, as we have lately learned through the death of the great Sheikh Hamed’s first born by his white wife. Methinks danger threatens, for, behold, this thrice accursed child of sin trembles as he runs. And the offspring of yon two would have the blood of three countries in its veins, so ’twere well to fell the tree before it bears fruit. And may Allah, in His mercy, give me a camel in paradise in the stead of this bag of shivers I now bestride.”
Al-Asad shaded his eyes from the glare of the evening sky and pointed towards the west.
“What seest thou yonder? A string of ostrich, a fleeing herd of gazelle, or Yussuf hunting with his dogs?”
The Patriarch, with eyes like a hawk, looked in the direction and laughed.
“’Tis Blind Yussuf with ‘His Eyes,’ followed by his dogs. They fly like the wind towards the mountains. From whence do they come and for what reason do they fly like the wind?”
Al-Asad made a trumpet of his hands and sent a call[210] ringing across the miles of desert sand, upon which Ralph Trenchard, whose horse was in a sweat of terror, turned and looked at him and in the direction in which Zarah was also looking.
Yussuf had evidently heard the call.
Against the strangely angry-looking sky he stood out in black silhouette, with a team of dogs racing like the wind at his side, and the dumb youth, pillion-wise, behind him.
A strange couple truly, the one with the sight, the other with the speech, rendering each other service, until, when together, they each spoke and saw with the other’s vision and tongue.
They rode together now, and the youth pointed backwards and then forwards, and they stayed not their flight for a moment; neither did they try to change their course so as to approach their mistress.
Al-Asad looked behind to where the youth pointed and gave a shout of fear, upon which strange sound Zarah and Ralph Trenchard and the entire body of men looked back and, in a desperate effort, tried to check their beasts.
They might as well have tried to stop a runaway engine as horses and camels fleeing before the dread simoom which advanced slowly behind them like some great, evil, purple giant or monster of the underworld.
The simoom!
A column of poisonous gas, twin of the cyclone, with naught in common with the sirocco; a slowly moving column, whipping the air into gusts, as violent and hot as though blown straight out of the mouth of hell; a phenomenon peculiar to the tropics’ desert places, falling upon the desert wayfarer, over him and gone, in the passing of two or three minutes if he happens to be favoured by the gods, in fifteen if ill-luck dogs his path.
A terrible, writhing, twisting scourge of scorching air, with a centre as calm as a lake under a summer’s sky and as full of poison as a scandal-monger’s tongue. If[211] the wayfarer should not be mounted upon some four-footed beast, endowed with such speed and endurance as will carry him out of its range, then there is only one course left, and that is for him to lay flat upon the ground, to cover his head, to scrape a hole in the sand into which to bury his face, and to hang on to his breath and commend his spirit to his Maker, until the fell monster has passed over him and proceeded upon its death-dealing way.
Zarah was not a leader of men, or the mother of her children, or a child of the desert for nothing.
She turned and raised her right hand, and smiled at her men when they shouted and closed in a ring about her, the horses on her right, the camels on her left, whilst Al-Asad urged his dromedary to her side and caught her mare’s halter, so that she rode between him ............