Immediately he saw the other machine close upon him, saw a spurt of fire from the muzzle of its gun. He dived. A belt of trees rushed up at him, fearfully close. Their dark foliage seemed to break into puffs of black smoke over his eyes. He swerved instinctively, saw a meadow burst through the dark smoke, fly skyward in a mist of blood. With a last desperate effort he banked. His hands slid from the controls—everything swam. He was vaguely conscious of a heavy impact from underneath——
Something was burning his throat—he opened his eyes, gazed into a man's face close to his. Consciousness came back in a rush. He pushed away the brandy flask that was being pressed against his teeth and struggled to his feet. Strong arms supported him. Several men were round him, looking at him. He was close to a road, and along that road he thought he saw batteries of artillery galloping at full speed. He was not certain of their reality. They passed like phantoms in his vision, wavering up and down. He wanted to do something—to ask something—what was it? He all but fixed the elusive thought—and lost it. His hand felt for the duplicate report-book in his pocket—his desire was connected with that. The report-book had gone. Then afragment of his intangible preoccupation floated, visible as it were, in his brain. He clutched at it.
"What—what guns are those?" he asked thickly.
"Divisional artillery—Sixth Division," came the reply. "All right. We got your message."
The scout put his hand to his brow and then, dropping it, stared at it stupidly. It was red.
"All right," said the voice. "You're hit—but not seriously. Lie down."
The scout collected all his faculties in an attempt to bring out one more thought from the obscurity which filled his brain.
"What—what time—now?" he asked.
"Just one o'clock." The voice appeared to recede to an enormous distance, although he felt the speaker's face close to his. "They're in time—don't worry. Lie down. The ambulances are coming in a minute or two."
The scout stood obstinately.
"The—the other—machines?"
"Bagged 'em both. You came down beautifully—like a kite." The voice sounded from worlds away.
The aviator put his hand to his head.
"In time!" He breathed the words rather than spoke them. They came like the sigh of a man utterly spent.
The man who had been supporting him turned round with a jump and focussed his binoculars on the wooded hill. A crowd of white puffs was breaking out in the air above it.
The scout, left unattended, swayed with hands stretched out like a blind man. The field whirledround and round suddenly with a fearful rapidity and then rushed up and struck him.
The man with the binoculars ignored his prone body.
"Beat 'em on the post!" he shouted in joyous excitement. "By the Lord! Beat 'em on the post!"
KULTUR (1915)
Thesubaltern commanding this section of the trench sat in a hunched position in the narrow corridor of earth topped with sandbags. His knees drawn up to serve as a support for the writing-pad, he wrote quickly between long pauses when he bit the end of his pencil and stared reflectively at the brown clay wall some two feet in front of his nose. At his side a man stood, bent and motionless, peering into the lower end of a long box, very narrow in proportion to its length, which he held against the side of the trench so that the other end just rose above the wall of sandbags. Further view down the trench in that direction was barred by the traverse—the thick dividing-wall of earth that would localise the effect of a shell-burst or a bomb. All was quiet. The subaltern might have imagined that only he and the look-out at his side remained buried in this flat landscape where once two armies had flung fire and noise and steel at one another, hidden from the sight of those who should have come to tell him that the war was over and the armies stolen away. He did not so imagine. Ever present to his mind was the parallel line of sandbags, some fifty yards away, between him and which stretched a tangle of wire overgrown with rank grasses and tufts of corn. That parallelline was the great permanent fact in his existence. He knew it in its every aspect better than he had ever previously known anything on this earth. Not a spot on that apparently deserted wall might change without his being interested to the quick. Even as he wrote, the feeling and the knowledge of it were concrete in his brain, constraining him to this cramped attitude.
Since October this wall of his had fronted the other wall and now it was June. For nine long months, through snow and rain and sunshine, from the long nights to the long pitiless days, these two walls had remained the same, sheltering the same lurking enmities though the individuals who temporarily incarnated them came and went. Sometimes ablaze with stabs of darting flame, erupting bombs lobbed with a deceptive innocent slowness through the air, belching a mass of men who ran and stumbled and fell in an infinite variety of ways—men who shouted and who screamed so that their voices pierced the appalling uproar; sometimes stretching blank across the fields in a deathly stillness as to-day; their position had never altered. The quagmire between them, criss-crossed with barbed wire, had grown up into a waste of grass and nodding poppies that nearly hid what looked like bundles of weather-stained old clothes whence came a sickening, all-pervading smell. Behind each wall, hundreds of men had died or been carried away, maimed and broken, a lifelong burden for some human heart. Not a sandbag of those piled to make the parapet which sheltered the subaltern, but might have had a man's name written on it inmemoriam of a life suddenly extinguished. The necrology of the opposing parapet would have been as full.
In the hush which brooded over so much death—past and to come—a pause, it would seem, where the overhanging invisible demon of war reflected on its work—a mood of questioning, of revolt, came over the subaltern as he scribbled his pencilled lines.
"On a quiet evening like this one cannot help moralising a little," he wrote, "wondering what it's all for and what we purchase with our death. This constant murdering of individuals on both sides who commit the crime of inadvertently showing an inch of head—how does this help matters?" The sharp crack of a rifle somewhere along the trench caused the officer to raise his head, listening with all his faculties at strain. The look-out at his side did not stir, no report followed the first, and he bent himself again to his letter. "I don't want to appear squeamish, fine-stomached in this rough game, but I don't think I shall ever be able to kill cold-bloodedly. I have been unfitted by long centuries of culture——"
He was interrupted by the appearance of another officer, who squirmed himself round the traverse with a pronounced stoop necessitated by his uncommon tallness. The fair-moustached, boyish face of the new-comer was radiant with glee.
"I say, Lennard!" he said impetuously. "Ripping luck! We've just bagged Fritz! You heard the shot just now? Folwell, my sergeant, got him. Been waiting for him for over an hour, without moving a muscle. Topping chap, Folwell. All hesaid was, 'Married life don't seem to 'ave spoilt my aim, sir.' You remember, he asked for leave to get married?"
Lennard abandoned his letter and lit a cigarette.
"I wonder whether Fritz was married," he said with a little malicious smile, the ideas recently in possession of him firing a final shot in a faint rearguard action with the returning everyday occupants.
"Well, that's one more nuisance abated."
"Rather!" said the other, seating himself and likewise lighting a cigarette. "Fritz must have bagged not less than a dozen of our chaps," he calculated, gazing reflectively at the thin spiral of tobacco smoke which ascended straight in the still evening air. "Well, he's gone, thank the Lord! and we got Hans yesterday and Karl the day before. I must have a pot at old Hermann. If we could bag him we might hope for a quiet life."
Lennard nodded. Each one of the German snipers—if sufficiently lucky to carry on his profession for a day or two—acquired an individuality and a name. Hermann was an especially dangerous neighbour who lurked somewhere in a ruined cottage that lay between the lines where they bent away slightly from each other. He rarely fired except to kill, and hid himself so well that not one of the numerous patrols sent out had succeeded in discovering his lair.
The two subalterns chatted awhile over their cigarettes, while the red gold of the western sky faded into rose. They talked of the little incidents of mess and trench, magnified by their isolation from the main stream of life, and then, harking back, of thethings that once had been so important to them in London town, and were now so dwindled and remote. A year ago Lennard was a critic who was read, and Wilson, the tall subaltern, a painter whose first success was hanging on the line. Both were, or had been, highly polished products of what we called, proudly, civilisation. As they talked the old scenes came back to them, obliterating the present. At last Wilson rose, responsive to a subtle inner sense of time measured, independent of his consciousness.
"Well, so long, old thing," he said, standing up and straightening his tall form, fatigued with so much bending. The momentary forgetfulness was fatal. On the instant a rifle cracked and the lanky subaltern collapsed as though his knees had been knocked from under him.
"My God!" cried Lennard, limb-paralysed by this brutally tragic reassertion of his environment. Trembling, his heart seeming to stop and swell within him, he bent down to his friend. He touched mere clothed flesh, heavy and inert, on which the flies had already settled. They buzzed away, indignantly asserting their right of pasture. A madness of anger at this wanton annihilation of a life that was not just a dull living but an irradiation of the spirit, connoting civilisation, highly conscious, swept over him. He burst into a torrent of incoherent wrathful curses.
"That was 'Ermann, sir," said the observer at the periscope. "I spotted the flash, in among them bricks."
Lennard rose, fiercely vengeful.
"Let me look. Where did you see the flash?"
"Three o'clock from that bit of greenstuff in the middle, sir," replied the man, ceding his place at the periscope. "You'll see a dark spot—that's 'is loophole."
Lennard gazed down into the mirror of the instrument. There was just light enough for him to pick up the spot indicated.
"Very good." He strode, with bent back, down the trench, muttering to himself.
It was night when, rifle in hand, he swung himself nimbly over the parapet. For some minutes he lay flat on the ground at the other side, not moving an inch. Over his head the crack of rifles and the loud, rapid hammer taps of the Maxims recommenced their fusillade against the heap of bricks. From the first shade of dusk he had arranged that a constant enfilading fire be kept up on the sniper's lurking-place. He had no intention of letting Hermann slip away—yet.
He raised his head slightly, fixed his bearings in the gloom and then, still prone, began to nip a way through the wire entanglements. A German flare went up, dazzling with a ghastly light, too brilliant for distinct vision. He lay motionless. As it descended and fizzled out upon the ground he had a clear view of his course. He was aiming at a point in front of the German wire, whence he could enfilade the gap between the heap of bricks and the hostile parapet. Over his head the hard, sharp cracks of his own men's fire followed one another continuously. They would not cease for nearly fifteen minutes yet. Meanwhile Hermann would be lying close. He cutand wrenched at the wire and wriggled forward, grimly disdainful of the barbs that plucked and tore his clothes.
Again and again a soaring German flare stopped his progress. Clearly, this incessant fusillade was making the enemy nervous. At each illumination he lay as if he were one of the bundles of old clothes that occasionally he pushed against. The British parapet darted with fire—awoke a sympathetic crackling somewhere to the right.
At last. He settled himself in a comfortable firing position, couched in the long damp grass. An insect, unaware in its littleness of the large death that whistled above its world, quitted a pendent blade, explored his cheek.
Crack—crack—crack! the last British rifles ceased. There was an instant's stillness, and then yet another flare shot up from the suspicious German trench. It fell, sizzled—illuminating the ruins that he watched with all his faculties focussed, all his nerves coming to a point on his trigger finger—and then the world plunged into blackness. There was silence and impenetrable darkness.
Minute after minute dragged slowly past in a dead hush. Finger on trigger, every fibre tense, the prone figure waited. A primeval self awoke in him—a savage who stalked and could indefinitely maintain his ambush. His senses were as keen as though hyper-stimulated by some strange drug. A grim, patient lust to kill reigned in him.
The minutes passed slowly, slowly. He looked to one of them, not yet arrived, as to a term. When?He felt it approaching, concentrated to a still acuter degree his attention. The trigger seemed to be pressing against his finger. What was that? Surely something was moving there in the gloom—by the ruin. Why did not the flare he had ordered go up? His whole soul went out in a desperate prayer for it as he held his breath and strove with baffled eyes against the darkness.
Suddenly the craved-for light shot up. Perception and trigger-pressure were instantaneous with the flash of its discharge. A running, stooping figure pitched headforemost before the stab of flame from the rifle.
Immediately a vicious fire from the German parapet answered this impertinence. The slayer lay still as death, listening with painfully acute perception to the uglyphat!of bullets in the earth around him. A bomb fell, burst with a deafening report and a blinding flash of flame so close that he marvelled at his escape. By an effort of will he choked down the cough that the fumes provoked.
Rifle-fire at night is infectious. A sporadic and probably harmless duel sputtered up and down the trenches. At last a gun, way back somewhere, sent over a shell, and, as though obedient to this protest from their big brother, the rifles were silenced, one by one. The opposing trenches again lay in darkness and quiet.
The subaltern, assuring himself that all was still, wriggled forward to the body of his victim, lay full-length beside it. Quickly he ran through the dead man's pockets, stuffed a bundle of papers into hisown. Then, a rifle in each hand, he crawled back to his own parapet, climbed over and lay down. In an instant he was sound asleep.
It was bright morning when he awoke. High up a lark was pouring out its cheerful song. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, saw the two rifles, and remembered with a smile. Close by him a man was heating some coffee in a mess-tin over a methylated flame. He asked for some and drank it with a pleasant physical sense of his body that was still alive, and could drink. It warmed him. Then he remembered the papers he had taken from the unlucky Hermann. Sipping at the coffee, he read a letter that was among them.
"Dearest Wife and Sweetheart," it ran, "I don't altogether like the hatred of these Englishmen that your letter expresses. They only do their duty as we do ours, and they fight well. Would all this killing were over and we were friends again! It is in a sacred cause, I know—we could not let our culture be stifled—but the sacrifices are heavy. I sometimes wonder whether the old days will ever return, and I shall once more write songs for you to sing in London and in Paris. I can faintly hear a nightingale somewhere, or is it you?—I must close now, as I am just ordered off to a dangerous post, and the dawn will soon be breaking."All the love ofKarl."
"Dearest Wife and Sweetheart," it ran, "I don't altogether like the hatred of these Englishmen that your letter expresses. They only do their duty as we do ours, and they fight well. Would all this killing were over and we were friends again! It is in a sacred cause, I know—we could not let our culture be stifled—but the sacrifices are heavy. I sometimes wonder whether the old days will ever return, and I shall once more write songs for you to sing in London and in Paris. I can faintly hear a nightingale somewhere, or is it you?—I must close now, as I am just ordered off to a dangerous post, and the dawn will soon be breaking.
"All the love ofKarl."
Lennard, moved by a sudden curiosity, looked at the superscription of the envelope, ready addressed. Evidently the sniper had put it in his pocket and forgotten to give it to his comrades before setting out. The name was familiar. He coupled it, Karl ——. His victim was a writer of songs that his wife loved to sing and he to hear. He sat for a moment gazing thoughtfully at the letter, yet without definite thoughts. Then, with a sigh, he rose.
Instantly a bullet smacked against the sandbags, missing his head by a couple of inches.
"Bad shot, that," he murmured as he ducked. "Lucky thing I bagged old Hermann!"
THE MAGIC OF MUHAMMED DIN
Theintense heat of the day was already a memory of uneasy sleep, and the distant hills seen across the plain of grey, sun-baked mud were soft in a soft sky. Right across the horizon, as seen from the Political Officer's bungalow, stretched the mountain range, rising from deep blue at the base through a gradation of fairy amethyst and turquoise to a delicate pink suffusing the summits. The Political Officer, his left elbow resting on his writing-table, his fingers caressing the bowl of the old briar whose stem was gripped between white teeth, tobacco-smoke wreathing away from him, contemplated it with bent brows and narrowed eyes. The gaze of that lean face, sallow with many Indian summers, roved not over the distant prospect, tempting though were the transitions and flaws of changing colour on crag and peak to left and right of the point on which his vision was fixed. His expression was stern, the thrust forward of his clean-cut jaw predominant. Æsthetic enjoyment of the aspect of the frontier hills thus perfidiously beautiful in the evening light had no part in his meditations.
The curtain of the door was plucked aside. A long-robed native, white-bearded, entered noiselessly,bowed, with arms outstretched from his sides, stood erect and waited for orders.
The Political Officer responded with a nod to the "Salaam, Sahib." His gaze detached itself from the distant view, ranged keenly over the tall figure in front of him. Under the swathes of the greenpagarithat narrowed the brown forehead a pair of dark eyes of strange intensity met his own. The disturbing effect of their direct gaze was heightened by the bushy white brows under which they glowed. The big, beaked nose, thin-bridged, emphasized their power. The long, white beard spreading over the breast solemnified them with a hint of ancient wisdom. The eyes of the white sahib and the asceticHaj(as his green turban proclaimed him) met unflinchingly.
"TheSahibasked for the fakir Muhammed Din—is it well,Sahib?"
"It is well,Haj," replied the Political Officer, a twinkle in his eye and a subtle emphasis on the title.
"Did not the Prophet throw his green mantle over Ali that he might himself escape from his enemies, O Protector of the Religion?" replied the fakir, a little piqued.
"Maloom" ("It is known"), said the Political Officer, curtly but with a tone of friendliness. "I called you not to discuss the religion, but to protect it. I have work for you, Muhammed Din—dangerous work."
"It is well,Sahib."
"An emissary of our foes is among the tribes, Muhammed Din, and is preaching a false gospel tothem. War and the woes of war will surely follow if we do not still his tongue. Listen! You have heard that the infidel Caliph Willem of the West has falsely proclaimed himself a follower of the Prophet that he may use the power of true believers to further his own wicked ends?"
"It is known,Sahib."
"He has sent one of his tribe, dressed as a fakir, into the hills to preach a new Jehad. Already themullahs(priests) are gathering about him. This fakir calls himself Abd-ul-Islam, but he is a Feringhi, no true believer, and no true friend to the religion. Yet he is leading many astray, for he deludes them with a false magic. You will see for yourself. You remember the magic pictures you saw at Karachi?"
"I remember,Sahib."
"It is such magic as that. There is none but Muhammed Din I might safely trust to close the mouth of such a rogue; therefore, Muhammed Din"—the eyes of whitesahiband Moslem fakir again looked into each other—"I am sending you on the mission. I asked you to come as a fakir because I judged that to be your best disguise. You have come as aHaj, which is even better. I do not want this impostor killed, if it can be helped. I want him exposed, discredited. I send you, Muhammed Din." He looked at him with significance as he added:
"You may find an old acquaintance."
The fakir stroked his long beard.
"He shall be brought to you riding backwardsupon an ass, and the women shall mock at him'Sahib. I swear it."
The Political Officer smiled.
"None can if you cannot, Muhammed Din. Now I will explain these things to you more fully."
The Political Officer spread a map across the table and pointed out the route of the German agent across the Persian frontier and among the hills. His present abiding-place was fairly accurately known. The pseudo-fakir attentively considered the ways to it. Then he drew himself erect.
"It is well,Sahib. I will now go."
"You have a plan, Muhammed?"
The fakir smiled grimly.
"This dog has his false magic,Sahib, but Muhammed Din knows many magics that are not false. I have sworn."
"Go, then. Allah be with you!"
"And with you,Sahib!"
Muhammed Din salaamed once more, lifted the curtain, and passed out. The Political Officer watched him go across the compound, and then bent down to his work again with a little outbreathing of satisfaction. The Secret Service had no more reliable man than Muhammed Din.
The squalid little village high up in a cleft of the brown and barren hills, that gleamed golden aloft where they cut sharply across the intense blue of the sky, was filled with an uncommon concourse of tribesmen. And yet more were arriving. Down the stony paths which led to the village from the heights,up the boulder-strewn, dried-up stream-bed which afforded the easiest passage from below, the hillmen hurried in little groups—a beardedkhan, a modern rifle on his shoulder, his cummerbund stuck full of knives, followed by a ragged rabble of retainers, variously armed. Their weapons were mementoes of generations of rifle-stealing and gun-running. Lee-Enfields, Lee-Metfords, Martinis, Sniders—all were represented. Not a few carried the old-fashionedjezail, the long-barrelled gun with inlaid, curved stock. All had knives.
They swarmed on the rough roadway between the squat stone, windowless houses whose loopholes were eloquent of their owners' outlook on life. They clustered round the stone-parapeted well in the centre of the village, so that the women with the water-pots were richly provided with an excuse for loitering. The clamour of excited voices resounding from the walls was re-echoed at a fiercer shout from the steep, towering hill-sides, stone-terraced near the village into plots of cultivated land.
This was no ordinary assemblage. From far and near the tribesmen swarmed in, and men met face to face whose habitual encounter would have sent both dodging to cover, rifle to the shoulder. The blood-feuds were laid aside. Families that for months had lived in terror of their neighbours across the village street, quitting their domiciles stealthily by the back way when they had occasion to go out, while the sudden rifle-shot of the concealed marksman added steadily to the tale of vendetta victims on both sides, mingled now with the throng, albeitcautiously. Men whose dwellings were a doorless tower which they entered and left by a basket on a rope, who tilled their fields with ever a rifle in their hand, strode now down the street, their dark eyes roving from side to side, and passed their adversaries with scarce a scowl. Mullahs, Koran in hand, their young disciples at their skirts, threaded their way through the crowd, giving and receiving pious salutation, exhorting, preaching, inflaming the fanaticism of passions naturally fierce. The blood-feuds between man and man, village and village, were forgotten in the reawakened, never-extinguished feud between Islam and the infidel. Behind the priests marched men armed to the teeth, their faces working in a frenzy, their eyes inflamed. They wereghazi—wrought up to the pitch of fervour where their own life is a predetermined sacrifice, so that they may first slay an unbeliever, sure of immediate Paradise as their reward.
Above the murmur of voices came the continual drone:
"La Allah il Allah!There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet!"
It re-echoed down the valley in sudden shouts.
Into this excited throng strode the green turban, the venerable figure of Muhammed Din, piously telling his beads. Men jostled one another out of his way, for this fakir was quite obviously an especially holy man, one who had made the pilgrimage. Giving and receiving the Moslem greeting, "May the peace of Allah be with you!" he inquired the house of the village mullah, and made his way towards it.
He met the priest just on the point of quitting his dwelling. The mullah had a busy and important look. It was a great day for him.
"The peace of Allah be with you!" said Muhammed Din.
"And with you, O holy man!" replied the mullah. He scented an application for hospitality. "Blessed is the day that you come to us, for Allah worketh wonders in my village. Many have come to witness them. Alas! that you did not come before, O holy one, or my house that I have already given up to others would be yours!"
"A corner and a crust of bread, O Mullah!"
"Alas! Allah be my witness! Neither remains to me, O holy one—but I will lodge you with a pious man when the saint whom Allah has sent to us has finished the wonders he is about to show. I must hurry, O holy one! for the moment is at hand. The peace of Allah be with you!"
"Allah has guided my footsteps to you, O Mullah, for I have come from a far land to see these wonders. I will accompany you, for it is His will."
"Hurry, then!" said the priest irritably, "or Shere Khan's house will be full. Allah knoweth that I praise Him for thy coming!" he added by way of afterthought.
The house of Shere Khan, the headman of the village, was besieged by a turbulent crowd of tribesmen, who jostled one another for entrance. In view of the limited space within, only those known to be most influential were admitted. They deposited their weapons as they entered.
Muhammed Din followed the mullah, who bustled in with an air of great importance. The largest room of Shere Khan's house, a gloomy, stone-walled apartment, almost completely dark since the loopholes high up were stuffed with rags, was set aside for the occasion. More than two-thirds of it was already filled with tribesmen, who squatted on the floor. The remaining portion was rigidly kept clear by one or two of Shere Khan's armed retainers. "Sit farther back, O Yakub Khan! More space, O Protector of the Poor! Farther back, O Yusuf, lest the miracles about to be performed by the will of Allah scorch thee! Back, back, O children of the Prophet! I entreat ye!" The entreaty was emphasized by sundry kicks which the sentries grinningly delivered with a sense of the privileges proper to such an occasion.
The wall at the end of the clear space was whitened. High up on the other wall, behind the tribesmen, was a newly erected box of wood, large enough to hold a man, supported on pillars of light timber, and only to be reached by a ladder, of which there was at the moment no sign. The tribesmen turned their heads curiously towards this unusual contrivance and nudged and whispered to one another.
"Behold the cage in which the saint keeps the devils over which Allah and the Prophet have given him power!"
Those who were nearest it stirred uneasily.
"What if it should be the will of Allah that they break out of the cage!"
"We are God's and unto God shall we return!"replied his neighbour nervously, quoting the verse of the Koran which gives protection in time of danger. "May Allah protect us!"
Muhammed Din sat modestly among the throng, telling his beads with bent head.
"What thinkest thou of these wonders, O holy one from a far land?" asked the man next to him.
"The wisdom of Allah is inscrutable and much that is hidden shall be yet revealed," replied Muhammed Din solemnly.
There was a stir of expectation throughout the gloomy apartment. The mullah entered by a door at the farther end, near the whitened wall, uttered a sonorous benediction, and sat down, with grave self-satisfaction, in the front row.
One minute more of tense waiting—and then, amid a low murmur from the assembly, the curtain at the far door was again lifted. The "Saint" appeared. For a moment he stood in a dramatic pose, illumined by a ray of light from without as he held back the curtain. Then, dropping it, he strode solemnly forward into the cleared space. Every eye gazed at him with an avid curiosity. The light in the doorway had revealed him as a youngish man, despite the full beard which lent him dignity. His stately carriage of the long Moslem robes, dimly perceived in the gloom, was worthy of hisrôle.
He stretched out his hands.
"The peace of Allah be with you!" he said in a deep tone that had only the faintest tinge of a European accent.
In a low deep chant of awed voices the assembly returned the salutation.
"O children of the Prophet! Men of the hills! Greeting! Greeting not from me but from the greatest Sultan of the world!" He spoke in their own dialect, but with a strong admixture of Persian words. "Listen! Ye know already—for his fame has passed the confines of the earth—that the great Sultan Willem of the Franks was visited by a vision from God, and that having had truth revealed unto him he turned aside from the error of his ways and embraced the true faith. Written in great letters of gold over the Sultan's palace shall ye find the sacred words: 'There is no God but God and Mohammed is His Prophet!'"
He stopped to allow his words their full effect. A murmur of wonderment came from his audience. "A-ah! God is great! Unto Him be the praise!"
He resumed.
"And with him turned all his vizirs and mullahs and khans from the false belief and called on Allah and Mohammed. I—even I, Abd-ul-Islam, who stand before you—am one of them. The Sultan Willem issued a decree to all his people that they should believe in the true faith—and lo! Allah wrought a miracle and they all believed, destroying their false mosques and building new ones to the glory of the Prophet. Great is Allah and Mohammed His Prophet that these things should have come to pass, O children of the Faith! They are hard of belief, for the Franks ye well know are a stiff-necked race. Yet such it is, and my Lord the Sultan hath sentme on an embassy to you that I may tell you these marvellous things. And that ye may more readily believe, Allah in His great mercy has given me power to show you these wonders with your own eyes." His tone took on a deeper, more sonorous solemnity. "O Allah! Allah! In the name of the Prophet, vouchsafe that these thy children may see the great Sultan Willem as he is at this moment!"
He clapped his hands sharply together.
Instantly a beam of intensely white light shot across the dark apartment from the "cage" and fell upon the white wall at the other end. The "Saint" stepped quickly out of the radiance. On the white surface there suddenly appeared a lifesize portrait of His Imperial Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm II—gowned in long robes and coiffed with a turban. A gasp of astonishment broke from the peering spectators in the dark room. Once more the "Saint" clapped his hands. The Imperial figure walked in stately fashion straight towards the audience—seeming that in another moment it would be walking out in the air over its heads—stopped, stretched out its right hand, smiled. The muscles of its face moved, the mouth opened—in a speech that none heard. "Aie! Aie!" broke from the spellbound tribesmen.
"Alas! that he is so far away that ye cannot hear his words!" lamented the "Saint." "But I can hear them. He tells you to believe in me, who am his messenger, by the grace of Allah and the Prophet. O Allah, vouchsafe that these Thy followersmay witness with their own eyes the conversion of the vizirs to the true faith!" Again a clap of the hands, and the picture on the wall changed.
The tribesmen gazed at what to a Western eye would have been an obviously cardboard imitation of an Oriental room with a dais on one side of it. On that dais stood the figure in Moslem robes. Filling the remainder of the room was a throng of men in German uniforms,pickelhaubeon their heads. They advanced one by one to the figure on the dais, knelt, offered up their spiked helmets, and received in exchange a turban from their graciously smiling lord.
"See, O people, and believe!" cried the "Saint."
"Aie! Aie!" came the response. "We see and we believe! God is great! There is none great but God, and unto Him be all the praise!"
"Listen! O true believers! The Holy Prophet laid a command on the great Sultan Willem that he should immediately convert all the Frankish nations to the true faith. And the Sultan Willem gave glory to Allah that this command was laid upon him. He sent forth his armies in the great Jehad. The Sultan's armies are the most numerous and bravest in the whole world—not Timur nor Rustum might have stood against them—and none may count the number of their victories in the great war against the infidel Franks. Their triumphs are as the rocks on the hill-sides, beyond reckoning and eternal. All the nations of the Franks fled before them, and were slain like dogs as they ran. And most of all fled before them and were slain the insolent English dogsthat, thinking themselves far away from the power of the Sultan Willem, are puffed up with a vain pride and tread upon the neck of the true believer in the land beyond the Indus—nay, who invade your hills and lay waste your crops, seeking to destroy the one true faith. Is it not so?"
"Allah knoweth! He speaketh through thy lips, O holy one!" was the chorused reply from the darkened room. There could be no denial of any statement from a source of such sanctity.
"Look then upon the battle and the destruction of the English dogs!" cried Abd-ul-Islam, giving the signal once more.
Immediately another picture appeared upon the wall—a picture of pseudo-British troops, uniformed so as to be familiar to the tribesmen, taking up a position for battle.
"Watch! O children of the Prophet!" cried the wonder-worker. "Behold the djinns which the Sultan Willem has under his command—for to him has the Prophet given the power of Solomon—behold the djinns that go before the Sultan's army destroying the English infidels!"
Great founts of black smoke leaped up among the soldiers on the wall—debris was flung high into the air—bodies lay upon the ground, visible where the smoke cleared. The soldiers fired quickly from behind cover, dodged, flung up their arms, and fell smitten by an invisible foe. The picture, though a "fake," was cleverly done and would have deceived more sophisticated spectators. The tribesmen did not suppress their exclamations of awe and wonder.
"Behold!" cried the showman. "The soldiers of the Sultan advance!" A serried line of German infantry swept across the picture, bayonets levelled, and the survivors of the defending troops fled before them. The line changed direction and marched straight towards the spectators, an irresistibly advancing menace, swelling larger and larger, uncannily silent.
Shrill cries of alarm broke out from the darkened room. "Aie! Aie!Allah protect us! We are God's and unto God shall we return!"
The line of infantry swelled to a superhuman immensity, seemed on the point of reaching the spectators—and then there was darkness.
From the gloom came the voice of the German emissary.
"You have beheld, O children of the true Faith, the infidel English ran like dogs!"
"Like dogs they ran! With our own eyes we have seen it, praise be to Allah! Death to the infidel!"
"Now see the soldiers of the Prophet, the victorious army of the Sultan, destroying the Christian mosques in the conquered country!" announced the showman, in a voice of triumph.
On the wall was thrown the picture of a Belgian village church. German soldiers were busy about it. Then volumes of smoke began to issue from the windows, tongues of flame. The roof fell in. The church was reduced to a ruin.
"Behold! Ye see with your own eyes!"
"We see, we see! God is great! Unto Himbe the praise!" came the reply from the spectators.
"Now see others!" cried the German. "This is the work of the Sultan's armies—will ye now doubt that he has set his face against the Christian infidels?"
Picture after picture of ruined and desolated churches followed upon the wall. The German authorities had evidently prepared a special film of them. Cries of wild approbation broke from the fanatical tribesmen, the mullahs loudest.
"Once more, O people, look upon the English prisoners, whose lives have been spared because they have embraced the true faith, being led through the Sultan's capital!"
A film of a few British prisoners from Gallipoli being marched through the streets of Constantinople was then shown, amid shouts of applause.
The picture was taken off, but the beam of light still blazed across the room. The German placed himself full in it.
"Ye have seen with your own eyes, O warriors of the hills! Praise be to Allah for His mercies! Ye will no longer doubt. In the name of the Prophet, the Sultan Willem, the protector of Islam, commands that ye rise up and sweep beyond the Indus. Everywhere the power of the English is broken. With your own eyes ye have seen it. Only on your borders do they still keep up a vain show. Rise up, O children of the Prophet, and sweep these dogs of infidels into the sea! The rich lands of India and much loot will be the reward of your valour. Paradise awaitsthose who fall in the sacred fight! The green banner of Islam shall wave over the entire earth, for there is no God but God, Mohammed is His Prophet, and the Sultan Willem is His chosen instrument!"
Karl Schultz felt an inward glow of triumph at his own histrionic power as, his words ringing sonorously through the stone apartment, he stood in the full blaze of light and raised his arm. It evoked loud shouts of fanatic frenzy from the excited assembly. They clamoured to be led against the infidel there and now. He kept his arm outstretched as though to still the tumult, as though his discourse were yet unfinished.
But the cries would not cease. "Great is Allah! Death to the infidel! Death! Allah! Allah! There is no God but God! Allah! Allah! Allah! Death to the infidel—death!"
Suddenly there was a new element in the vociferation, a movement among the assembly far back in the dark room. "Make way for the holy man with great tidings from India! Make way for theHaj! In the name of the Prophet—make way, dogs that ye are!"
Schultz looked towards the venerable figure of Muhammed Din pressing through the throng. A sudden doubt leaped up in him, was extinguished in self-confidence. The strange fakir approached. The wild clamour of the tribesmen was stilled in curiosity. They fell back in a sudden awe.
Schultz watched the venerable stranger advance solemnly, silently, into the blaze of light in which he himself stood. Again he was conscious of aninstinctive tremor. "The peace of Allah be with thee, OHaj!" he said, and he found that he had deliberately to control his own voice. There was something uncannily impressive in the advance of this silent, dignified old man.
"And with all the faithful!" came the sonorous reply, enigmatic to the German's ears.
He found himself looking into a pair of strangely disturbing eyes; heard, with a wild reeling shock of the spirit, his own tongue spoken in a low, level Oriental voice.
"Move not a finger and make not a sound, Schultz Sahib, or you are a dead man!" Schultz Sahib's eyes glimpsed the muzzle of a pistol not six inches from his chest. "Smile, Sahib!or your friends may interrupt us."
Having once ceded to the menace of the pistol, the German's brain could not resist the command of the imperative eyes that seemed to be boring deep into him. Hesmiled—a deathly smile.
"You have forgotten me, Schultz Sahib? It is not so long since we worked together on the railway. One of us at least learned a great deal about the other in those days,Sahib.Smile!—keep smiling!"
A wild revolt surged up in the German, subsided, without exterior evidence, under the glare of the dominating eyes which held his fascinated. He tried to turn away his gaze, was checked by the level, purposeful voice of the fakir.
"Keep your eyes on mine,Sahib! Look elsewhere and you are dead before you have looked!"
He heard the words reverberating through him,endlessly re-echoing in chambers of his soul magically open to them. He felt himself fixed, immobile, in a strange paralysis of the faculties. The terrible eyes looked into his that he could not close—he felt, as it were, waves of immeasurable strange force flowing from them, rolling over him, submerging him. And yet still he looked into the eyes of the fakir, his own eyes an open port to their influence.
A subtle, pervading odour ascended his nostrils, filled his lungs, mounted to his head. His brain grew dizzy with it. And still the compelling eyes held him, prevented him from turning his own eyes to the source of the odour. He lost the sense of his environment, was oblivious to the awed tribesmen staring silently at the pair in the blaze of light. He saw nothing but the eyes—lost consciousness of his own body. He stared—and lost consciousness even of the eyes at which he stared.
There was vacuity, oblivion, an annihilation of time—and then out of that vacuity a voice commenced to speak. He heard it with a shock of the nerves—it crashed through darkness with a mighty power. He seemed suspended like a lost spirit in everlasting night, fumbling around the vague yet massive foundations of the world—indefinitely remote from all that he had ever known. He could not detach himself from those foundations. They quivered under the booming voice, communicated an unpleasant thrill to the core of him. An awful unimaginable disaster seemed to envelop him. The tiny germ of consciousness that was still his fought for extension, strove to see. All was blackness—blackness. And still the voice went on relentlessly, driving through darkness, like a ploughshare thrust forward by the firm grip of a mighty and inexorable hand. Immeasurable results seemed dependent on its progress. He listened to it—and as he focused himself on the listening, a dim perception of his environment came to him. He was vaguely conscious of a sea of faces, upturned, listening—as he himself listened. Those faces—they were in some relation to him, there was a link between them and him—he could not determine it. He listened. The words rang like sounding brass, the vowels roaringly sonorous, the consonants clashing. He concentrated himself on their meaning—penetrated to it suddenly as through veils smitten asunder.
"Lies and again lies, O children of the Prophet! A mockery of lies! The Sultan Willem is a servant of Shaitan who feigneth religion that he may lure true believers to their damnation while they unwittingly serve the Evil One!" His perception leaped up, clawing at danger, and then was dragged down again, engulfed. He felt himself like a man drowning in black waters at night—down—down—and then, fighting obscurely, he shot up again, heard the inexorable voice continuing: "This magic you have looked upon is a false magic—the magic of unbelievers in league with Eblis!" He heard the re-echoing denunciation in a spasm of full consciousness—was suddenly cognizant of the sea of faces, of fierce passions exhaling from it—was completely aware of the menace of utter ruin. A great revulsion surged in him. This must be stopped—stopped! The necessity forinstant protest was an anguish in him. All of himself that he could summon from the darkness as his own shrieked the negative, and yet he did not utter a sound—knew that he did not. "Climb up into that box some of you, and ye shall find no magic but a Frank there!" He strained with all his soul towards the faculty of speech—felt his powers vanquishing the spell of dumbness—on the verge of utterance shaped his words of denial. "Lo! have I not spoken the truth? Yea, I cannot speak other than the truth, for I am the runaway servant of Muhammed Din, and his sanctity hath broken the compact between me and the Evil One!" In staggering horror he realized—the voice was his own!
He stood fixed, incapable of movement, and saw—like a man that has dreamed and cannot yet distinguish dream from reality—the mob of tribesmen surging obscurely in the long stone room, saw the blinding white eye of the lantern still shining steadfastly upon him—saw it waver, swing from side to side, and then, with one last blinding flash, disappear. In the utter darkness he heard shouts and shrieks and fierce derisive laughter. He heard crash upon crash as heavy objects were flung from a height at the other end of the room. He heard a piercing yell, an agonized, appealing utterance of his own name. For a brief second it shocked him into complete consciousness—his operator! Then, ere he could break his invisible bonds, he felt a pair of cool hands pressed tightly against his brow, over his eyes, and he relapsed totally—with a last little gasp—into nothingness.
He awoke again to see the tribesmen surging round him, fiercely shouting. The room re-echoed with reiterated cries of "Sharm! Sharm!"[1]and a howl that was so unmistakably for blood that it chilled him to the heart. The room was lighter now—the rags had been pulled down from the high loopholes in the wall. He saw Muhammed Din standing before him, fending off his adversaries. He was still incapable of voluntary movement. A great faintness swept over him. He reeled back; found himself supported by the angle of the wall. He had been thrust back there all unconscious of the movement.
Dazed and sick, he heard Muhammed Din speaking.
"O children of the Hills, Allah and His holy Prophet sent me to you to rescue you from the snare of the Evil One. On me is laid the charge of vengeance upon this wretch, who was my slave ere he became the possessed of Shaitan. But this much of vengeance will I grant ye, for this much is just. He made a mock of you. Make ye a mock of him. Let him be driven out of the village, face tailwards upon an ass. The women and children shall cry derision upon the runaway servant who came to deceive you as a saint with the false magic of Shaitan!"
Staring speechlessly before him, the exposed charlatan heard the howls of approval of the mob. His faintly working intellect wondered how the mullah was taking this deception—perhaps even yet—— He saw Muhammed Din hold up a largebag of money. He recognized it with a last hopelessness.
"This gold"—Muhammed Din emptied some of it upon his hand—"this gold hath my servant surely received from Shaitan. It is accursed unless some holy man receive it. Therefore to you, O Mullah, do I give it."
The mullah snatched at it.
"Great is Allah and for the meanest of His creatures doth He provide!" he said. "Thou speakest truth, O holy fakir. Praise be to Allah that I am here to protect the faithful from the accursed magic of this gold. As to this wretch, accursed of Allah, let him be driven quickly forth as thou sayest, O holy one! It is meet that thy vengeance should not have to linger."
There was a rush at the fallen magician. He swooned into their arms.
Some little time later, when the last stone had been flung and the last epithet of mocking insult had ceased to echo from the hills, Schultz Sahib, his hands bound behind his back, his feet tied under the belly of his mount, raised his eyes from the ass's tail that he had been contemplating.
"Thou hast won, O Muhammed Din—but even yet I do not understand. What happened?"
The fakir smiled.
"Thou hast thy magics, Schultz Sahib—what thinkest thou of the magic of Muhammed Din? Hurry, O Willem, hurry!" he cried, as his stick descended with a resounding thwack upon the hind-quarters of the ass. "Thou art laggard in thy invasion of the territories of the English!"
The Political Officer listened to the story, and, embracing hypnotism in the studies of his exile, made a note of it.