Tales of Secret Egypt Part 29

He recovered himself by dint of a stupendous effort and turning a fiery glance upon the captive:

"Cast him down upon the floor," he cried, "that I may spit upon him, who is a scorn among swine and the son of a disease!"

To my unspeakable horror, the Sheikh then strode across the saloon and seated himself upon the alabaster couch! I almost choked with fear; I felt my teeth beginning to chatter and the beating of my heart sounded in my ears like the throb of a _darabukeh_. The Sheikh, fortunately ignorant of my proximity, thus addressed the unfortunate young man who lay at his feet:

"Know, O disgrace of thy mother, that thy death hath been decided upon, and it shall visit thee in a most painful and unfortunate manner. O thou sp.a.w.n of offal, learn that I have been aware of thy malevolent intentions since first thou didst seek to penetrate into my secret. What! am I heir to all the wisdom of the ages, that I should remain ignorant of the presence of such as thee, O thou gnat's egg, in my house? When the partner in thine infamy didst steal the key of the door from me, thinkest thou that mine eyes were blind to the theft, O thou foredoomed carrion? It was in order that thy culpability should be made manifest that I permitted thee to enter. Thy double stratagem for quelling and then exciting the dogs, in order that the guards might be drawn from their posts, was known to me, and the negroes had received my orders to run to the gate in seeming accordance with thine accursed desires, O filthy insect!"

Throughout the time that this dreadful old man thus addressed his victim, the latter crouched upon the floor, apparently paying no heed to his words but keeping an agonized glance fixed upon the lovely form of the girl. I was now in a condition of such profound and dejected fear as I had never known before and trust I may never know again. The Sheikh continued:

"Learn of the fate of some of those who sought the secret of Ismail before thee. One there was, Mustapha Mirza, a Persian, who came hither to despoil me. With his eyes did he behold my treasure. To-day _he hath no eyes_! And there was one Ha.s.san of the Khan Khalil. He dared to lay violent hands upon the treasure of my house--the 'treasure' not of gold nor jewels but of fairest flesh and blood. To-day _he hath no hands_! Wouldst like to know of Abdl Moharli, who learned much of this "secret" of mine, and would have spoken of it? His tongue I threw to the carrion crows! _Thou_, O sink of iniquity, hast not only seen with thine eyes, heard with thine ears and laid thy filthy hands upon the treasure of Ismail: thou hast approached thy foul lips to this peach of Allah's garden! thou hast...."

He choked in his utterance and seemed upon the point of hurling himself upon the young man before him: but again he recovered his composure after a great effort and proceeded:

"The unpleasant punishments visited upon those others shall likewise fall to thy portion, since thou hast committed like crimes; but this shall only be in order to prepare thee for a most protracted and painful death. Bear him forth into the courtyard."

As one who dreams an evil dream, I saw the company stream out of the saloon, the wretched prisoner in their midst. When at last the bronze door was reclosed and I found myself alone with the swooning girl, I could scarce believe that even this respite was mine.

I offered a prayer to St. Antony of the Thebaid--_my_ patron saint--as I listened to the sound of their receding footsteps; when I was aroused from the lethargy of fear into which I had fallen by a distant scream--a long wailing cry....

I have often asked myself: How did I make my escape from that dreadful village? You will remember that I had the purloined key of the bronze door in my possession? Then it was to this in the first place that I owed my preservation. To regain the garden was a simple matter, for the Sheikh and his bloodthirsty following were engaged in the courtyard of the house, but to St. Antony be all praise for the circ.u.mstance that the little door opposite the mosque had been left open--possibly by the unhappy Sad,--and to St. Antony be all praise that a second time I avoided the dogs....

Dawn found me staggering down into that friendly ravine which sheltered my camel. I was utterly exhausted, for I bore a burden, but triumphant, delirious with joy and rapture, because my burden was so sweet. You may question me of these matters, and I shall reply: As well as my cotton interests I have now another interest in the Delta--the lovely "Secret" of the Sheikh Ismail Ebn al As![D]

[D] Readers of _Tales of Ab Tabah_ will recognize Mizmna, "The Lady of the Lattice," the story of whose recovery by the bereaved Sheikh has already been related.

IV

HARN PASHA

I

I will tell you this story (said Ferrier of the Egyptian Civil) with one reservation; comments are to be reserved for some future time. I can only tell you what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears; I offer no explanation; I pa.s.s on the story; you can take it or leave it.

Some of you will remember Dunlap--I don't mean Robert Dunlap, who is chief officer of the _Pekin_, but Jack Dunlap his cousin, the irrigation man who used to be stationed at a.s.suan.

You remember the build of the beggar?--the impression of scaffolding his figure conveyed? I always used to think of him as an iron framework, and he had the most hard-bitten head-piece I have ever struck; steel blue eyes and a mouth that was born shut. The dash of ginger in his hair, complexion, and const.i.tution made up a Scotch brew that was very strongly flavored.

He came down to Cairo one spring, and a lot of us got together in the club--on a Sunday night, I remember, it was. The conversation got along that silly line; what we were all doing, and why we were doing it, what we had really intended to do, and how Fate had b.u.t.ted in and made sailors of those that had meant to be parsons, engineers of the poets, and tramps of the chaps who had proposed to become financiers.

Well, we had traveled up and down this blind alley for hours, I should think, when Dunlap mounted on his hind legs and took the rug with the proposition that nothing--_nothing_--was impossible of achievement to the man of single purpose. Someone put up an extreme case; asking Dunlap how he should handle the business of the son of a respectable greengrocer who, with singleness of purpose, proposed to become king of England.

He said it was not a fair case, but he accepted the challenge; and the way this junior greengrocer, under Dunlap's guidance, plunged into politics, got elected M.P., wormed himself into the confidence of the entire Empire by a series of brilliant campaigns conducted from John o' Groats to Van Diemen's Land; induced the reigning monarch, publicly, to advocate his own abdication; established a sort of commonwealth with his ex-Majesty on the board and Dunlap occupying a post between that of a protector and a Roman Caesar--well, it was wonderful.

Of course, you can judge of the lateness of the hour from the fact that a group of moderately intelligent men tolerated, and contributed to, a chat of this nature. But what brings me down to the story is the few words which I exchanged with Dunlap at the break-up of the party, when he was leaving.

His cousin Robert, as you know, is well on the rippity side; but Jack, with all his fine capacity for heather-dew, had always struck me as something of a psalmster. I've heard that Bacchus holds the keys of truth, and it may be right; for out on the steps of the club, I said to Jack Dunlap:

"It seems you don't practise what you preach?"

"Don't I?" he snapped hardly. "What do you suppose I am doing here?"

"Engineering, I take it. Do you aspire to a pedestal beside De Lesseps?"

"De Lesseps be d.a.m.ned!" he retorted sourly. "Look at these."

He held out his hands, hardened with manual toil--the hands of a grinder.

"Clearly you are a glutton for work," I said.

"I am aiming at never doing another hand's stroke in my life," he replied, with an odd glint in his blue eyes. "My idea of life--_life_, mind you, not mere existence--is to be a pasha--one of the old school, with gate porters, orange trees, fountains, slaves, mosaic pavements, a marble bath."

He mixed his ambitions oddly.

"Someone to do all the shifting for me, and even the thinking; to hold a book in front of me if I wanted to read, to poke my pipe in my mouth, and to take it out when I wanted to blow smoke rings--and to _know_ when I wanted it taken out without being told."

"On your showing, you are traveling by the wrong road."

"Am I?" he snapped viciously. "Just wait awhile."

That was all the indication I had of Dunlap's ideas, and remembering the time of night and other circ.u.mstances, I did not count upon it worth a bra.s.s farthing; putting it down to the heather-dew rather than to any innate viciousness of the man. But listen to the sequel, which shifts us up just about twelve months, to the spring of the following year, in fact.

II

I had seen no more of Dunlap, and concluded that he was back in a.s.suan, or somewhere on the river, foozling with his irrigation again.

I never had the clearest conception of the work of his department, by the way. An irrigation man once started to explain to me about his section, mixing up surveying paraphernalia in his talk, telling me something about an allowance of half an inch variation in half a mile of bank, or chat to that effect; but I couldn't quite make it out. My impression of Dunlap at business was very hazy; I pictured him measuring the bank of the Nile with a six-foot rule, and periodically kneeling down in the smelly mud to footle with a spirit-level. But he was a Senior Wrangler, as you remember, and a man, too, of more substantial accomplishments, and he drew five hundred a year from the Egyptian Government; so that probably I underestimated his usefulness.

At any rate, I had forgotten his iron framework and mahogany countenance, together with his response (under the afflatus of heather-dew) at the time of which I am now speaking.

A little matter had cropped up which touched me on a weak spot; and with a mob of jabbering Egyptians and one very placid Bedouin flooding my room, I found myself thinking again of Dunlap and envying him his intimate acquaintance with Arabic.

Although I had been in the country quite twice as long as Dunlap, my Arabic was far from perfect, for I have always been a rotten linguist.

Dunlap, as I now remembered, might have pa.s.sed for a native (excepting his Scottish headpiece), and I ascribed his proficiency to an inherent trick of mimicry. There was something of the big ape about him; and after one function at which we both were present, I remember how he convulsed the entire club with an imitation of a certain highly placed Egyptian dignitary, voice and gesture being equal in comic effect to Cyril Maude at his best. In fact, if you notice, you will find that the best linguists, as a rule, have a marked apish streak in their composition.

Well, here was I at my wits' ends to grasp twenty points of view at one and the same time; no two expressed in quite the same dialect, and each orator more excited than another. You know the brutes?

That got me thinking of Dunlap, and even after the incident was closed, I found myself thinking of him. Some friends from home were staying at Shepheard's, and of course they had claimed me as dragoman; not that I objected in the least, for one of the party--when it was possible to dodge her mother--was, well, a very agreeable companion, you understand.

On this particular morning we were doing the bazaars. I have found by comparison that the average tourist knows far more of the Mski than the average resident; in the same way, I suppose that for information regarding the Tower of London or the British Museum, one must go, not to a c.o.c.kney, but to an American visitor. At any rate, my party told me more than I could tell them, and my job degenerated into that of a mere interpreter. In the matter of purchases, I possibly saved them money, but their knowledge of the wares was miles ahead of my own.

These up-to-date guide books must be very useful reading, I think.

Although I had tried hard to rush them past that dangerous quarter, the _Gohargiya_, the ladies of the party had discovered a shop where little trays of loose gems, turquoises, rubies, bits of lapis-lazuli, and so forth, were displayed snarefully.