The Hawk of Egypt Part 32

That which distance had given the appearance of a mound grew more and more distinct. It was no mound nor hillock, verdant patch nor slowly-moving caravan of camel.

Three tents showed at last distinctly, and the following is the short explanation of their origin.

As it is not good for the Oriental youth to stay under the same roof as his mother, once he has come to man's estate--which is at any age after eleven in the lands of intense sun--the building of the House 'an Mahabbha near the Oasis of Khargegh had been begun within the first year of the birth of Hugh Carden Ali.

Owing to the entreaties of his English mother, the boy had not been affianced in extreme youth to a little maid of two or three or four summers, upon whom he would not have set eyes until the night of the marriage.

His mother had idolised him and he had worshipped her; he obeyed her, he would willingly have died for her; later, at her request, he even left his country of sunshine and vivid colouring for hers, so cold and bleak; but before that and at the age when other high-caste youths of Arabia settle down in their own house to contemplate seriously the taking of the reins into their own despotic hands, he had absolutely refused to go to the House 'an Mahabbha, built for him as his father's first-born.

Perhaps also it was the English blood in his veins which at that age filled him with the spirit of adventure.

A desire for solitude, a desire for something sterner than the everyday existence of his luxurious life had driven him out into the desert, where, bewitched, as it were of woman, he had followed the Spirit which ever held out her long fine hand with beckoning finger.

A mere boy? Absurd! Ridiculous!

Not at all; for the high-caste boy of twelve in the Orient is oft-times as much developed physically and mentally as the Occidental of over twenty.

He had followed the Spirit where she had beckoned, and, an Arab through the blood of his father, had caught her and crushed the body, slender to gauntness, in his arms; had twined his fingers in the coa.r.s.e, black hair and pulled it back from the different-coloured eyes; had sought the crimson mouth until his lips had rasped with the kisses a-grit with sand; slept with his hands clutching her tattered robes of saffron, purple and of gold; torn the misty veil from before her face and dreamed with her cool breath, which is the wind of dawn, upon his face.

He loved her and to her had pitched his tents.

He prayed that he might be with her when he died, and, convinced that his prayer would be answered, he had pitched him a funeral tent between those of Purple and of Gold.

Bewitched of the desert, the colour of the tents resembled those in which she decks herself in the pa.s.sing of a day and a night.

Outwardly they were just ordinary Bedouin tents, the tan and brown of camel-hide; flat-roofed and square, giving a full-grown man room in which to move and stand to his full stature without the fear--as in the peaked affair called bell--of bringing the whole thing down upon his crown. They lifted at each side to allow the desert wind to enter at any hour it listed; or the moon to pierce him with silvery spear; or the stars to blaze like jewels before his eyes, as he waited for sleep on a rug upon the sand.

The one in which he slept was hung inside with satin curtains of deepest purple, with here and there a star of silver, which glittered in the light of the cut-crystal lamp which hung from the cross-pole.

The Persian rug upon the floor was grey and old rose and faintest yellow, and glistened like the skin of woman; of the ordinary furnishings of an ordinary bedroom there was no sign--you would have to go much farther afield to find the tent with all the paraphernalia of the toilet. Just as you would have to go still farther and towards the west, to where were pitched the stables, and the quarters of the specially-chosen servants he took with him in his desert wanderings; just enough--and they had their work cut out--to look after the dogs and birds and horses. The camels, upon whom depended the supplies, were right out of sight, and any one of the servants would have preferred death by torture to approaching within a mile of his master's tents until he heard his call.

In the other tent he ate his bread and dates and drank his coffee or received the humblest of his pa.s.sing brothers; those who, scorched with heat, tortured with thirst or hunger, and blinded with flying sand, yet would not exchange one minute of their own free desert life for an eternity of soft couches and the most succulent effort of a _cordon bleu_ in the cramped surroundings of a crowded city.

It was hung with orange satin; cushions of every hue were flung upon a carpet of violent colours; the lamps of bronze with wicks floating in crimson saucers, hanging from the crosspole, were rarely lit; the satin curtains hid a smaller room behind filled with dates and coffee-beans, sweetmeats, beads and other things which bring joy to the grateful heart of the wandering Arab and his family.

The sand outside was marked and pressed, down with footprints of men and women and little children.

They had not to ask in order to receive.

But no foot but his had ever trod the fine matting of the tent between the other two.

Firmly convinced that his prayer would be granted and that in the desert he would find the answer to the many questions which had occurred to him to ask of life, he had sought for a covering under which he could lie after death until naught but his bones should be left for the wind of chance to play with.

He had all a Mohammedan's belief in the hand of destiny, but the English blood in his veins filled him with horror at the thought of being torn to pieces by vultures after death; his desert blood filled him with an equal horror at the thought of being weighted down by the regulation tomb of bricks and mortar.

And so it came to pa.s.s on this night of the full moon, when the girl he loved was racing towards him and Fate was disentangling the threads she had knotted so grievously, that he lay stretched upon the block of wood which stood three feet high in the centre of this tent. He lay face downwards, with chin in hand, looking out through the lifted flap in the direction of Mecca, whilst the moon hung as a silver shield above him, and the desert enfolded him on every side.

Outwardly the tent was as that of any Bedouin; tan and brown, the colour of the camel's hide, of which it was made; square-roofed, with one side only which lifted, the side which was towards Mecca.

Inside it was lined with a copy of the queen's funeral canopy of softest leather; stretched square; to the touch as soft, supple and fine as velvet.[1]

True, this copy had not taken year upon year to make, nor had scores and scores of nimble fingers st.i.tched and st.i.tched for days and months to finish it, as in the days of the XIXth dynasty. The panels in the copy were of one piece of hide st.i.tched finely by machinery, with the emblems painted upon them after the st.i.tching; in the original they are made by the st.i.tching together by hand of thousands and thousands of pieces of gazelle-hide, each of which had been painted either pink or blue or green or in various shades of yellow before the st.i.tching.

Look up with Hugh Carden Ali as he lifts his head to gaze at something far beyond the tent-roof.

You will see a copy of the central square which, divided into two, rested upon the top of the shrine which covered the dead queen who died about one hundred years after the siege of Troy. One side of the panel is sprinkled with yellow and pink rosettes on a pale-blue ground; the other side shows the vulture, the emblem of maternity, holding in its claws the feather of justice; six there are in all.

That is the ceiling.

The tent walls are lined with a copy of the flaps which hung down on each side of the shrine of the funeral-boat of the Egyptian queen who, some thousand years before Christ, crossed the blue-green Nile, followed by other boats filled with her priests and princes, her officers, her mourning women. North and south, the flaps are of chess-board pattern in squares of pink and green; behind one of which was hidden the small room which held naught but a crystal pitcher and crystal basin, filled to the brim with water for the ablutions at the Hour of Nazam, which is the Hour of Prayer.

Near the top the sides show bands of colour, red, yellow, green and blue, almost as bright in the original as on the day the paints were mixed, one thousand years ago. Beneath the bands upon one side you will see the signet-ring of the priest-King Pinotem--whose son Queen Isi em Kheb espoused--; also the royal asps and the scarab, the emblem of life out of death.

Upon the other wall you will see the lotus-flower, which opens at the rising of the sun and closes at its setting; the enigmatic double-headed ducklings and the picture of a gazelle, which is doubtless the representation of the pet which, bound in mummy trappings, was found beside its royal mistress in the tomb. Across the lotus-flowers, like a silver shaft, there hung a light throwing-spear.

A very technical description, taken down in rough notes at the museum, of a specimen of patchwork--even like the patchwork counterpanes of our great-grandmothers--st.i.tched together by dusky slender fingers in the days of the great King Solomon.

And to Hugh Carden Ali as he lay in this tent, looking towards Mecca, there came the sound, from a great distance, as of a horse running at full speed.

[1]This is a description of the funeral-tent of Queen Isi em Kheb, contemporary of the wise Solomon, mother-in-law of the Shishak who besieged Jerusalem and "carried away also the shields of gold which Solomon had made." (II Chron. 12.)

It served as a pall to cover the royal lady upon her last terrestrial journey, when she crossed the Nile in the funeral boat from her palace in Karnak (?) to her burial-chamber in Deir el-Bahari.

CHAPTER XXIX

"_La vie est breve: Un peu d'espoir, Un peu de reve Et puis--Bon soir_!"

MONTENAEKEN.

A great light shone in his eyes as he rose from the couch of wood upon which his dead body, with feet turned towards Mecca, was to lie.

The light from the lamp of bronze and cut-gla.s.s shade of deepest orange tint struck down upon him, throwing shadows from the snow-white turban which outlined the fine face to beneath the eyes, and round about the hawk-nose, and the mouth of which the gentleness was so belied by the dominant jaw; it gave an ivory shade to the snow-white satin of his raiment; it glistened on his only jewel, an amulet carved from an emerald in the shape of a scarab, set in gold and hung from a fine gold chain about his neck.

His beauty was of the East, but it was male; there was no trace of that effeminacy which so jars upon the sensibilities of those who are bred in colder climes and brought up on sterner lines than the luxurious dweller of the East.

He stood listening to the far-distant sound, then threw out his arms.

"By the mercy of Allah, G.o.d of G.o.ds, I am found worthy to serve thee, O my beloved! Within the hour, yea! in but a little over the pa.s.sing of half one hour, before the shadow of my tent shall reach yon rope, I shall have looked upon thee."

He knew!

His heart told him who was coming to him out of the night; his knowledge of the desert enabled him, by the drumming sound of the hoofs upon the sand--a sound which has not its semblance in the world--to know to a second when the mare would stop before the tent.

It was not the Hour of Nazam, the Hour of Prayer before dawn, the dawn which was to see his questions answered, but he turned and, pulling back the velvet-soft leather curtain, entered the small room lighted by a silver lamp hanging just above the crystal basin full to the brim with water.