Burning Sands Part 38

"Ah, then there _is_ a secret: I thought as much," she replied, with a knowing smile. "There's always a secret about the movements of such men as Mr. Lane."

"Yes," answered Muriel, suddenly seeing red, as the saying is; "absolute frankness and absolute honesty must always seem fishy to those who can't conceive what such things mean. If you want to know, Daniel Lane has gone away because he was fed up with the rotten life we lead here in Cairo. The sham of it all sickened him. He has gone away to escape from the pretences and the hatefulness and the pettiness of people like you and me. He's gone to get some fresh air: he was being suffocated here."

Lady Smith-Evered stared at her in blank astonishment, and the pinkness of her face turned to a deeper red. "Oh, that's what he has told you, is it?" she scoffed. "He must think you very gullible."

Muriel rose from the sofa, and faced her visitor with blazing eyes. "I said you wouldn't be able to understand," she exclaimed. "There's no mystery about it: he was just frankly disgusted, and off he went. But he'll come back one day, when the hot weather begins and we've all gone home. Then he and Father will be able to get on with their work, with England's work, without being distracted by fussy little interruptions from women like you and me...."

Lady Smith-Evered managed to raise herself with some dignity from the sofa. "I wanted to speak to you about plans," she said, stiffly; "but that can wait now till another day. I don't know what is the matter with you, but I know we shall quarrel if I remain. I don't care to be spoken to as you are speaking to me."

Her large bosom was heaving threateningly, and Muriel was abashed.

"I'm sorry," she answered, the light of battle dying in her eyes.

Lady Smith-Evered took her departure without many more words, and thereon Muriel went directly up to her room again, her heart aching within her. Here at the open window she stood staring out across the lawn to the translucent Nile. A native boat, with huge bellying sails, was making its way slowly up stream; and she could hear the wailing song of the blue-gowned youth at the rudder. Away in the distance the Pyramids marked the edge of the placid desert, now bathed in sunlight; and above, the cloudless sky stretched in tranquil splendour.

She was ashamed of herself, ashamed of her inconsistency. Her mind was confused, but in its confusion she was conscious of one clear thought, namely that Daniel would have rebuked her for her show of temper. "Look away over there at the quiet desert," he would have said. "Do you see how it is smiling at you for your angry thought and for that flush in your face? You won't get at the root of things by raising your little voice in protest."

"O Daniel, Daniel," she whispered, her eyes filling with tears, "you oughtn't to have left me here alone. You oughtn't, you oughtn't."

And some time later, still staring out of the window, she said: "Did you go away because you wanted me to follow you? Must I humiliate myself and come to you? O Daniel, my darling, how I hate you!"

CHAPTER XXIV-THE GREAT ADVENTURE

As the days pa.s.sed, and the Bindanes' departure for the Oases drew near, Muriel's rather feeble resolution not to accompany them steadily weakened. Lord Blair had done his best to alter her decision, and the Great Man could be a clever strategist: his daughter, indeed, would have had little chance of opposing his wishes successfully in this matter even had she battled against him with a whole heart, but in the vacillating condition to which love had brought her she had no chance at all.

"Don't be a dam' fool," Kate Bindane said to her one morning at the Residency. "What's the good of moping about outside the ropes like a heavyweight with a stomach-ache? You know you're fed up with everybody here: Gor' blimy!-why don't you swallow your maidenly pride, and put on the gloves, and have three rounds with Fate? It's better to be counted out than never to have boxed at all. Tennyson."

Thus it came about that at the end of February, when Lord Blair took the train southwards upon his journey to the Sudan, Lady Muriel set out westwards as a member of the Bindanes' elaborate caravan. The start was made one morning from Mena House, and so great was the general confusion and hullabaloo that Muriel's thoughts did not begin to clarify themselves until a ride of two hours had brought them to the rocky valley wherein they halted to eat their luncheon.

Here, seating herself upon the rocks at the foot of the cliff, she shaded her eyes with her hand, and surveyed the animated scene with amused interest. There was Kate, in a white coat and skirt, and a sun-helmet, stumping over the sand to cure the "pins-and-needles" from which she was suffering; her husband, in a grey flannel suit and a green-veiled helmet, was still seated upon his camel as though he had forgotten to dismount; his man, Dixon, rather fat and red, and wearing his new gaiters apparently back to front, was hastening to his master's a.s.sistance; and the two imposing native dragomans, in silks all aflutter in the wind, were shouting unnecessary orders to the Egyptian cook and _sofragi_ to hasten the luncheon.

A few yards down the valley a khaki-clad Egyptian police-officer, wearing his red _tarboush_, or fez, at a rakish angle, was giving instructions to his four negro troopers; a fat native gentleman from the Ministry of Agriculture was mopping his forehead as he stood beside his grumbling camel, and the Egyptian secretary to the party, a dapper youth with mud-coloured complexion and coal-black eyes, had just thrown himself down in the shade and had removed the _tarboush_ from his close-cropped head, in conscious defiance of local etiquette.

The baggage camels, carrying the camp equipment, the stores, and the tanks of water, were lurching at a walking pace along the valley, led by blue-robed camel-men, under the orders of the caravan-master, a grey-bearded Arab who rode sleepily at the head of the line. These were not to halt at the midday hour, but, pushing ahead, they would be overtaken later in the day by the swifter riding-camels; and Muriel watched them now as they slowly jogged along the little-used track between the yellow cliffs, the brilliant sun striking down upon them from a deep blue sky in which compact little bundles of snow-white cloud went scudding past.

There was a boisterous breeze blowing, and the tingling glow of the sun and wind upon her cheeks, as she sat perched high upon the rocks, seemed to match the exhilaration of her heart. The morning's ride had shaken her brain free from the heavy gloom of the last three weeks; and already the shining open s.p.a.ces of the desert had produced their effect upon her, so that she felt as though her mind had had a cold bath.

It was good to be up and doing; it was good to be setting out upon this adventure, the ambiguousness of which seemed every moment to be growing less disconcerting; it was good to be in this great playground where the rules of her life's schoolroom were mainly in abeyance. Up here in these splendid s.p.a.ces it would not matter if she pulled her skirt off, or let her hair down, or turned a cartwheel, or stood on her head. Already she was whistling loudly, and throwing fragments of stone into the valley before her, in the manner of a child upon the seash.o.r.e; and all her love-sick sorrows of yesterday seemed to have vanished in the exaltation of youth and youth's well-being.

She watched the servants, in the distance at the other side of the valley, spreading the picnic luncheon on a white tablecloth laid upon a shaded patch of sand; and when at length the meal appeared to be ready, she took a flying leap down from the rock where she had been sitting, and landed sprawling upon the sand-drift below. The sensation pleased her, and, clambering up the rocks once more, she repeated the jump, this time arriving with a considerable thud upon her back, and sliding down the drift with her legs in the air.

She hopped across the valley, rubbing herself, and was presently joined by the Bindanes.

"I feel about twelve years old," she told them; and indeed at the moment she did not look much more than that age. "The desert is having an extraordinary effect on me."

"But we're only ten or twelve miles into it so far," said the practical Kate. "You wait another week...."

"If I go on at this rate," Muriel laughed, "I'll be in arms by the time we reach the Oases."

"I wonder whose," muttered Kate, with a smile; but her friend's face at once became serious. It was a jarring note, and it nearly ruined the joviality of the picnic.

The afternoon ride carried them another fifteen miles; and towards sunset they came to a halt in the midst of a wide flat plain of sand, across which a winding ribbon of stunted tamarisks and spa.r.s.e vegetation marked the bed of a primeval river now reduced to a mere subterranean infiltration. In the far distance on all sides the low hills hemmed them in, like a rugged wall encircling a sacred and enchanted area.

The tents were pitched amongst the low-growing bushes in the dry, shingly bed of the stream; and the hobbled camels were turned loose to crop such twigs and gra.s.ses as they found edible. Muriel, meanwhile, wandered away into the open desert; and presently, like warm sand, and resting her chin on her hands, watched the sun go down behind the purple hills.

For some time the excitements of the day, and the physical exhilaration produced by her long ride in the sun and wind, held her from thought.

But at length the dreamlike silence of the wilderness, the amazing sense of isolation from the outside world, began to release her mind from the captivity of the flesh, so that becoming one with the immensity of nature, her spirit drifted out into the sunset with the freedom of light or air.

The little deeds of all her yesterdays appeared suddenly insignificant to her, and she began to feel that life, and the happiness of life, was something far greater than she had supposed. She wondered why she had been troubled with regard to Daniel: he was just an expression of nature, as she was: and here, in the solitude he so dearly loved, she seemed to understand for the first time his scorn of the intricacies of modern civilization. Here all was so simple, so devoid of complexities, that she laughed aloud. It was only her wits, the mere fringe of her mind, which had veiled her spirit from his spirit; but now she had shaken herself loose from these ornamentations of life, and stood as it were, revealed like a lost fragment dropped at last into place in the great design.

She rose to her feet at length, with a sense of light-heartedness such as she had never before known; and, returning to the camp in the gathering dusk, she looked with amused pity at Benifett Bindane who sat in a deck-chair reading the _Financial News_ by the light of a gla.s.s-protected candle.

"Just look at him!" said Kate, who, herself, had been admiring the sunset. "Isn't it pitiful?"

Mr. Bindane laid the paper down, and stared at his wife with uncomprehending eyes.

"The market is showing a good deal of weakness in Home Rails," he said to his wife; "but your South Africans are all buoyant enough, so you needn't worry."

"Worry!" exclaimed Kate, contemptuously, and turned from him to the fading light in the west.

"I'm glad I bought those Nitrates," he went on, addressing the back of her neck; "they're improving, so far as one can tell from the closing quotations given here."

He held the newspaper out, but she struck at it viciously with her hand.

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake shut up!" she cried. "It's money, money, money all the time with you."

"I was speaking," he said, very slowly, and as though he had been hurt, "of stock I had bought for you, my dear."

Kate turned to him, and her friend observed that her face softened, as though at the thought that in his own way he was showing his affection for her. But the picture was, nevertheless, pathetic; and the recollection pa.s.sed through Muriel's mind, in sudden illumination, that Daniel was entirely free from financial interests. So long as he earned a reasonable living he never seemed to trouble himself about money.

Next morning they were in the saddle by eight o'clock, while yet the sun was low in the heavens and the air cold and sharp. Crossing the wide plain in which they had camped, they pa.s.sed into the echoing valleys amongst the hills; and for the next three days they made their way through rugged and broken country, now mounting some eminence whence they surveyed a wide prospect in which range behind range of rugged peaks was revealed to them, now losing themselves in the intricate valleys, where they rode in the blue shadow of the cliffs, and where the sound of their voices and their laughter was flung back at them from the walls of rock.

Each night they camped beside some water-hole or well, known by name to their guides, but which to them seemed to be a deserted and unvisited place, frequented only by the unseen gazelle whose footprints were marked upon the sand. It was cold here in the high ground, and they were glad of all the blankets which they had brought; but in the mornings the sun soon warmed them, and by noon they were glad to take their rest in the shade.

It was in the afternoon of the fifth day of their journey that, descending from the higher level, they came into sight of the little Oasis of El Homra, set like an emerald in the golden bowl of the desert.

Muriel was riding beside Kate Bindane when, emerging from the maze of the hills, they first looked down into this wide basin in the centre of which the Oasis was situated; and both she and her friend uttered a cry of delight.

In the case of Muriel the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n was a response to the grandeur of the scene; but in that of her friend the exclamation was one of devout thankfulness that the outward journey was nearing its end. Being heavily built and somewhat stout Kate had suffered very much more severely from the long-protracted jolting than she had been willing to admit; and there were many very sore places upon her body which caused the thought of much further exercise of this kind to be intolerable.

"You won't catch me coming out here again," she declared, "until the Company has built its light railway. Five days of blinkin'

torture!-that's what it's been. And to think that five hours by train would have done it...!"

Muriel looked at her in dismay. "I'd much rather not think we were so near Cairo as that," she answered. "The whole pleasure of the thing is that we're so cut off from civilization."

Kate groaned. "Well, I'm glad to say I've brought a bit of civilization with me in the shape of a pot of ointment and a roll of lint."