CHAPTER IIIDuring the next few days the Consul-General was closely occupied. The Law of Public Security being promulgated, he called upon the Minister of the Interior to call upon the Commandant of Police to issue a warrant for the arrest of Ishmael Ameer."But whereisIshmael Ameer?" asked the Minister.When this was reported to the Consul-General his stern face smiled, and he said—"Let him wait and see."Early one morning his Secretary came to his room to say that the Sirdar had arrived from Khartoum, and had gone on to headquarters, but would give himself the pleasure of calling upon his lordship before long."Tell him it must be soon—there is much to do," said the Consul-General.Later the same day the Commandant of Police came, with a knowing smile on his ruddy face, to say that the Bedouin had reached Cairo, and that he had been followed to the Serai Fum el Khalig, the palace of the Chancellor of El Azhar, where he had already been visited by the Grand Mufti, some of the Ministers, certain of the Diplomatic Corps and nearly the whole of the Ulema."Was he alone?" asked the Consul-General."Quite alone, your lordship, and now he is as safely in our hands as if he were already under lock and key.""Good! What did you say his address was?""Serai Fum el Khalig.""Palace Fum el Khalig," repeated the Consul-General, making a note on a marble tablet which stood on his desk.Later still, very late, the Grand Cadi came with the same news. The suave old Moslem judge was visibly excited. His pale, lymphatic, pock-marked cheeks, his earth-coloured lips, his base eyes, and his nose as sharp as a beak, gave him more than ever the appearance of a fierce and sagacious bird of prey. After exaggerated bows, he began to speak in the oily, half-smothered voice of one who lives in constant fear of being overheard."Your Excellency will remember that when on former occasions I have had the inestimable privilege of approaching your honourable person in order to warn you that if you did not put down a certain Arab innovator the result would be death to the rule of England in Egypt, your Excellency has demanded proofs.""Well?""I am now in a position to provide them.""State the case precisely," said the Consul-General."Your Excellency will be interested to hear that a person of some consequence has arrived in Cairo."Trained to self-control, the Consul-General conquered an impulse to say, "I know," and merely said, "Who is he?""He calls himself Sheikh Omar Benani, and is understood to be the wise and wealthy head of the great tribe of the Ababdah Bedouins who inhabit the country that lies east of Assouan to the Red Sea.""Well?""The man who calls himself Omar Benani is—Ishmael Ameer."At that the base eyes glanced up with a look of triumph, but the Consul-General's face remained immovable."Well?""No doubt your Excellency is asking yourself why he comes in this disguise, and if your Excellency will deign to give me your attention I will tell you.""I am listening.""Ishmael Ameer pretends to be a reformer intent upon the moral and intellectual regeneration of Islam, and he preaches the coming of a golden age in which unity, peace and brotherhood are to reign throughout the earth."Well?""With this ridiculous and impracticable propaganda he has appealed to many wild and ardent minds, so that a vast following of half-civilised people whom he has gathered up in the Soudan are to start soon—may have started already—for this city, which they believe to be the Mecca of the new world.""Well?""Ishmael Ameer pretends to have come to Cairo in advance of his followers to prepare for that millennium.""And what has he really come for?""To establish a political State."Down to that moment the Consul-General had been leaning back in his chair in the attitude of one who was listening to something he already knew, but now he sat up sharply."Is this a fact?""It is a fact, your Excellency. And if your Excellency will once more deign to grant me your attention, I will put you in possession of a secret.""Go on," said the Consul-General.Instinctively the suave old judge drew his legs up on his chair and fingered his amber beads."Your Excellency will perhaps remember that owing to differences of opinion with the Khedive—may Allah bless him!—you were compelled to require that for a while he should leave the country.""Well?""He went to Constantinople with the intention of laying his grievances against England before His Serenity the Sultan—may the Merciful give him long life!""Well?""The Sultan is a friend of England, your Excellency—the Khedive was turned away.""And then?""Then he went to Paris, as your Excellency is probably aware.""Well?""Perhaps your Excellency supposes that he occupied himself with the frivolities of the gay capital of France—dinners, theatres, dances, races? But no! He had two enemies now, England and Turkey, and he presumed to think he could punish both.""How? In what way?""By founding a secret society for the conquest of Syria, Palestine and Arabia, and the establishment of a great Arab Empire with himself as its Caliph and Cairo as its capital.""Well? What happened?""Need I say what happened, your Excellency? By means of his great wealth he was able to send out hundreds of paid emissaries to every part of the Arabic world, and Ishmael Ameer was the first of them."The Consul-General was at length startled out of all his composure."Can you prove this?" he said."Your Excellency, if I say anything I can always prove it."The Consul-General's brow grew more and more severe."And his name—his assumed name—what did you say it was?""Sheikh Omar Benani.""Sheikh Omar Benani," repeated the Consul-General, making another note on his marble tablet."That is enough for the present," he said. "I have something to do to-night. I must ask your Eminence to excuse me."After the Grand Cadi had gone, with many sweeping salaams, various oily compliments, and that cruel gleam in his base eyes which proceeds only from base souls, the Consul-General rang sharply for his Secretary."We have not yet made out our invitations for the King's dinner—let us do so now," he said.He threw a sheet of paper across the table to his Secretary, who prepared to make notes."First, the Diplomatic Corps—every one of them.""Yes, my lord.""Next, our Egyptian Ministers and the leading members of the Legislative Council.""Yes, my lord.""Next, the more prominent Pashas and Notables.""Yes!""Of course our own people as usual, and finally——""Yes?""Finally, the Ulema of El Azhar."The Secretary looked up in astonishment."Oh, I know," said the Consul-General. "They have never been invited before, but this is a special occasion.""Quite so, my lord."The Consul-General fixed his eyeglass and took up his marble tablet."In writing to the Chancellor of El Azhar at the Palace Fum el Khalig," he said, "enclose a card for the Sheikh Omar Benani.""Sheikh Omar Benani.""Say that hearing that one so highly esteemed among his own people is at present on a visit to Cairo, I shall be honoured by his company.""Yes, my lord.""That will do. Good-night!""Good-night, my lord."It was early morning before the Consul-General went to bed. The Grand Cadi's story, being so exactly what he wanted to believe, had thrown him entirely off his guard. It appeared to illuminate everything that had looked dark and mysterious—the sudden advent of Ishmael, the growth of his influence, the sending out of his emissaries, his projected pilgrimage, and the gathering up of camels and horses in such enormous quantities as even the Government could not have commanded in time of war.It accounted for Ishmael's presence in Cairo, and his mission (as described by Helena) of drawing off the allegiance of the Egyptian army. It accounted, too, for the treachery of the Ministers, Pashas and Notables, who were too shrewd and too selfish (whatever the riff-raff of the Soudan might be) to risk their comfortable incomes for a religious chimera.Yes, the Khedive's money and the substantial prospect of establishing a vast Arab Empire, not the vague hope of a spiritual millennium, had been the power that worked these wonders.It vexed him to think that his old enemy whom he had banished had been more powerful in exile than at home, and it tortured him to reflect that Ishmael had developed, with the religious malady of the Mahdi, his political mania as well.But no matter! He would be more than a match for all these forces, and when his great historical drama came to be played before the eyes of astonished humanity, it would be seen that he had saved, not England only but Europe, and perhaps civilisation itself.Thus, for three triumphant hours, the Consul-General saw himself as a patriot trampling on the enemies of his country; but hardly had he left the library and begun to climb the stairs of his great, empty, echoing house, switching off the lights as he ascended, and leaving darkness behind him, than the statesman sank back on the man—the broken, bereaved human being—and he recognised his motives for what they were.A few minutes after he had reached his bedroom Fatimah entered it with a jug of hot water, and found him sitting with his head in his hands, looking fixedly at the portrait in the black-and-gilt frame of the little lad in an Arab fez."Ah, everybody loved that boy," she said, whereupon the old man raised his head and dismissed her brusquely."You ought to be in bed by this time—go at once," he said."Dear heart, so ought your lordship," said the Egyptian woman.The Consul-General could dismiss Fatimah, but there was some one he could not get rid of, the manly, magnificent, heart-breaking young figure that always lived in his mind's eye, with its deadly white face, its trembling lower lip, and its quivering voice, which said, "General, the time may come when it will be even more painful to you to remember all this than it has been to me to bear it."Where was he now? What was he doing? His son, his only son, all that was left to him!There was only one way to lay that ghost, and the Consul-General did so by telling himself with a sort of fierce joy that wherever Gordon might be he must soon hear that Ishmael, in a pitiful and tricky disguise, had been discovered in Cairo, and then he would see for himself what an arrant schemer and unscrupulous charlatan was the person for whom he had sacrificed his life.With that bitter-sweet thought the lonely old man forced back the tears that had been gathering in his eyes and went to bed.CHAPTER IVI"SERAI FUM EL KHALIG,"CAIRO."MY DEAREST HELENA,—Here I am, you see, and I am not arrested, although I travelled in the same train with the Sirdar, met him face to face on the platform at Khartoum, again on the platform at Atbara, again on the landing place at Shelal, and finally in the station at Cairo, where he was received on his arrival by his officers of the Egyptian army, by my father's first Secretary, and by the Commandant of Police."I was asking myself what this could mean, whether your black boy had reached his destination, and if your letter had been delivered, when suddenly I became aware that I was being observed, watched and followed to this house, and by that I knew that in this land of mystery my liberty was to be allowed to me a little longer for reasons I have still to fathom."This is the home of the Chancellor of El Azhar, and I have delivered Ishmael's letter announcing the change of plan whereby I have come into Cairo instead of him, but I have pledged the good old man to secrecy on that subject, for the present at all events, giving him my confident assurance that in common with the best of the Ulema he is being wickedly deceived and made an innocent instrument for the destruction of his own cause."My dear Helena, I was right. My vague suspicions of that damnable intriguer the Grand Cadi were justified. Already I realise that after fruitless efforts to inveigle Ishmael into schemes of anarchical rebellion it was he who conceived the conspiracy, which has taken our friend by storm, in the form of a passive mutiny of the Egyptian army. The accursed scoundrel knows well it cannot be passive, that somewhere and somehow it will break into active resistance, but that is precisely what he desires. As I told you, it is the old trick of Caiaphas over again, and that is the lowest, meanest, dirtiest thing in history."Query, is he playing the same game with the Consul-General? I am sure he is, and when I think that England and my father may be in as much danger as Egypt and Ishmael from the man's devilish machinations, I am more than ever certain that Providence had a purpose in bringing me to Cairo, and I feel reconciled to the necessity of living here in this threefold disguise, being one thing to Ishmael, another to the Grand Cadi and Co., and a third to the Government and police. I feel reconciled too, or almost reconciled, to the necessity of leaving you where you are, for the present at all events, although it rips me like a sword-cut as often as I think of it."I have sent for Hafiz and expect to hear through him what is happening at the Agency, but I am hoping he will not come until morning, for to-night I can think of nothing but ourselves. When I left you at Khartoum I felt that higher powers were constraining and controlling me, and that I was only yielding at last to an overwhelming sense of fatality. I thought I had made every possible effort, had exhausted every means and had nothing to reproach myself with, but hardly had I got away into the desert when a hand seemed to grasp me at the back of my neck and to say, 'Why did you leave her behind?'"In Ishmael's house and in that atmosphere of delirious ecstasy in the mosque it was easy to think it necessary for you to remain, otherwise my purpose in going away must from the first be frustrated, but awakening in the morning in my native compartment, with men and boys lying about on sacks, the sandy daylight filtering through the closed shutters of the carriage and the train full of the fetid atmosphere of exhausted sleep, I could not help but protest to myself that at any cost whatever I should have found a way to bring you with me."Thank God, if I have left you behind in that trying and false position it is with no Khalifa, no corrupt and concupiscent fanatic, but a man of the finest and purest instincts, who is too much occupied with his spiritual mission, praise the Lord, to think of the beautiful woman by his side, so I tell myself it was the will of Providence, and there is nothing to do now but to leave ourselves in the hands of fate."Good-night, dearest!D.V.I'll write again to-morrow."II"Have just seen Hafiz. The dear old fellow came racing up here at six o'clock this morning, with his big round face like the aurora borealis, shining in smiles and tears. Heavens, how he laughed and cried and swore and sweated!"He thought his letter about my mother's death had brought me back, and when I gave him a hint of my real errand he nearly dropped with terror. It seems that among my old colleagues in Cairo my reputation is now of the lowest, being that of a person who was bribed—God knows by whom—to do what I did. As a consequence it will go ill with me, according to Hafiz, if I should be discovered, but as that is pretty certain to happen in any case I am not too much troubled, and find more interest in the fact that your boy Mosie is staying at the Agency and that consequently my father must have received your letter."My dear Helena, my 'mystic sense' has been right again. The Grand Cadi continues to pay secret visits to the Consul-General. That much Hafiz could say from his intercourse with his mother, and it is sufficient to tell me that, by keeping a running sore open with my father, the scoundrel counts on destroying not only Ishmael but England, by leading her to such resistance as will result in bloodshed, and thus dishonour her in the eyes of the civilised world and leave Egypt a cockpit in which half the foreign Powers will fight for themselves, no matter who may suffer."What should I do? God knows! I have an almost unconquerable impulse to go straight to my father and open his eyes to what is going on. He is enveloped by intrigues and surrounded by enemies in high places—his Egyptian Ministers, the creatures of his own creation; some of the foreign diplomats, the European leeches who suck his blood while they pretend to be his friends, and above all this rascally Cadi, with his sleek face and double-sword game."But what can I say? What positive fact can I yet point to? Will my father believe me if I tell him that Ishmael's following which is coming up to Cairo is not, as he thinks, an armed force? That the Grand Cadi & Co. are a pack of lying intriguers, each one playing for his own hand?"My father is a great man who probably does not need and would certainly resent my compassion, but, Lord God, how I pity him! Alone, in his old age, after all he has done for Egypt! As for his Secretaries and Advisers, he has not brought them up to help him, and I would enlarge the Biblical warning about not putting one's trust in princes to include parvenus as well."My dear Helena, where are you now, I wonder? What is happening to you? What occurred after I left Khartoum? These are the questions which during half the day and nearly the whole of the night are hammering, hammering, hammering on my brain. Ishmael was to follow me in a few days, so I suppose you are on the desert by this time. The desert! In the midst of that vast horde! The scourings of a whole continent! Poor old Hafiz had something like a fit when I told him you were not in England but in the Soudan, yet as a fatalist he feels bound to believe that everything will work out for the best and he asks me to send his high regard to you."It gives one a strange sensation, and is almost like seeing things from another state of existence, to be here in Cairo walking about unrecognised amid the familiar sights, and hearing the gun fired from the Citadel every day; but the sharpest twinge comes of the hacking thought of whereyouare and what circumstances surround you. In fact, memory is always playing some devilish trick with me and raking up thoughts of the condition in which I found you in Khartoum."Helena, my dear Helena, I have an immense faith in your strength and your courage. You are mine, mine, mine—remember that!Ido—I have to—all the time. That is what sets me at ease in my dark hours and gives sleep, as the Arabs say, to my eyelids. For the rest, we must resign ourselves and continue to wait for the direction of fate. The fact that I was not arrested in the character of Ishmael immediately on my arrival in Cairo makes me think Hafiz may be right—that,D.V.one way or another, God knows how, everything is working out for the best. It's damned easy to say that, I know, but, upon my soul, dearest, I believe it. So keep up heart, my poor old girl, and God bless you! GORDON."P.S.—I'll hold this letter back until I think you must be nearing Assouan, and then send itD.V.by safe hands to be delivered to you there."P.P.S.—I open my envelope to tell you of a new development! I am invited with the Chancellor of El Azhar to the Consul-General's dinner in honour of the King's Birthday. This, in the character of Sheikh Omar Benani, who is, it seems, the chief of the tribe of the Ababdah, inhabiting the wild country between Assouan and the Red Sea, a person with a great reputation for wealth and wisdom, and a man whose word is truth."What does it mean? One thing certainly—that acting on the information contained in your letter the authorities are mistaking me for Ishmael Ameer, and proposing some scheme to capture me. But why don't they take me without further ado? What unfathomable reason can there be for the delay in doing so? Intrigue on intrigue! I must wait and see."Meantime I am asking myself where the real Ishmael is and what he is doing now? Is the belief in his 'divine' guidance increasing? Is he acquiring the influence of a Mahdi? If so, God help him! God help his people! God help my father! God help everybody!"But sit tight, my girl! Something good is going to happen to us! I feel it, I know it! All my love to you, Helena! Maa-es-salamah!"CHAPTER VI"KHARTOUM."MY DEAR, DEAR GORDON,—Gone! You are actually gone! I can hardly believe it. It must be like this to awaken from chloroform after losing one's right hand, only it must be something out of my heart in this instance, for though I have not shed a tear since you went away and do not intend to shed one, I have a wild sense of weeping in the desolate chambers of my soul."Writing to you? Certainly I am. Gordon, do you know what you have done for me? You have given me faith in your 'mystic senses,' and by virtue of certain of my own I am now sure that you are not dead, and that you are not going to die, so I am writing to you out of the chaos that envelops me, having no one here to speak to, literally no one, and being at present indifferent to the mystery of what is to become of my letter."It seems I fainted in the mosque after that wild riot of barbaric sounds, and did not come back to full consciousness until next morning, and then I found the Arab woman and the child attending on me in my room. Naturally I thought I might have been delirious and I was in terror lest I had betrayed myself, so I asked what I had been saying in my sleep, whereupon Zenoba protested that I had said nothing at all, but Ayesha, the sweet little darling, said I had been calling upon the great White Pasha (meaning General Gordon) whose picture (his statue) was by the Palace gates. What an escape!"Of course my first impulse was to run away, but at the next moment I saw that to do so would be to defeat your own scheme in going, and that as surely as it had been your duty to go into Cairo, it was mine to remain in Khartoum. But all the same I felt myself to be a captive—as surely a captive as any white woman who was ever held in the Mahdi's camp—and it did not sweeten my captivity to remember that I had first become a prisoner of my own free will."If I am a captive I am under no cruel tyrant, though, and Ishmael's kindness is killing me. I was certainly wrong about him in Cairo, and his character is precisely the reverse of what I expected. Little Ayesha tells me that during the night I lay unconscious her father did not sleep at all, but kept coming into the guest-room every hour to ask for news of me, and now he knocks at my door a dozen times a day, asking if I am better, and saying 'To morrow, please God, you will be well.' It makes me wretched, and brings me dreadfully near to the edge of tears, remembering what I have done to him and how certainty his hopes will be destroyed."Naturally his people have taken his cue, and last night Black Zogal gathered up a crowd of half-crazy creatures like himself to say a prayer for me at the Saint's house which is just outside my window."'Thou knowest our White Lady, O Father Gabreel, that she is betrothed to our Master, and that his heart is low and his bread is bitter because she is sick. Make her well if it please God, O Father Gabreel!' Thus the simple-hearted children of the desert called down God's spirit to their circle of fire for me, and after loud cries of 'Allah! Allah!' going on for nearly an hour, they seemed to be content, for Zogal said—"'Abu Gabreel hears, O my brothers, and to-morrow, please God, our sister will be well.'"I had been reaching up in bed to look and listen, and when all was over I wanted to lay down my head and howl."The time has come for the people to start on their pilgrimage, but Ishmael insists upon postponing the journey until I have quite recovered. Meantime Zenoba is trying to make mischief, and to-day when the door of my room was ajar, I heard her hinting to Ishmael that the White Lady was not really ill but only pretending to be—a bit of treachery for which she got no thanks, being as sharply reproved as she was on the morning of your mother's letter."That woman makes a wild cat of me. I can't help it—I hate her! Of course I see through her, too. She is in love with Ishmael, and though I ought to pity her pangs of jealousy there are moments when I want to curse her religion and the dawn of the day of her birth and her mother and her grandmother."There! You see I have caught the contagion of the country; but I am really a little weak and out of heart to-night, dear, so perhaps I had better say good-night! Good-night, my dearest!"II"Oh dear! Oh dear! I could not bear to play the hypocrite any longer, so I got up to-day and told Ishmael I was well, and therefore he must not keep back his pilgrimage any longer. Such joy! Such rejoicing! It would break my heart, if I had any here, but having sent all I possess to Cairo I could do nothing but sit in the guest-room and look on at the last of the people's preparations for the desert journey—tents and beds being packed, and camels and horses and donkeys brought in to a continuous din of braying and grunting and neighing."We are to start away to-morrow morning, and this afternoon when that fact was announced to me I was so terrified by the idea of being dragged over the desert like a slave that I asked Ishmael to leave me behind. His face fell, but—would you believe it?—he agreed, saying I was not strong enough to travel and Zenoba should stay to nurse me. At that I speedily repented of my request and asked him to allow me to go, whereupon his face lightened like a child's, and with joy he agreed again, saying the Arab woman should go to take care of me, for Ayesha was a big girl now and needed a nurse no longer. This was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire, and I protested that I was quite able to look after myself; but, out of his anxiety for my health, Ishmael would not be gainsaid, and the Arab woman said, 'I'll watch over you like my eyes, my sister.' I am sure she will, the vixen!"III"We have left Khartoum and are now on the desert. The day had not yet dawned when we were awakened by a tattoo of pipes and native drums—surely the weirdest sound in the darkness that ever fell on mortal ear, creeping into the pores and getting under the very skin. Then came a din, a roar, a clamour—the grunting and gurgling and braying of five thousand animals and as much shouting and bellowing of human tongues as went to the building of the tower of Babel."The sun was rising, and there was a golden belt of cloud in the Eastern sky by the time we were ready to go. They had brought a litter on a dromedary for me, and I was almost the last to start. It was hard to part from the child, for though her sweet innocence had given me many a stab and I felt sometimes as if she had been created to torture me, I had grown to love her, and I think she loved me. She stood as we rode away, with a big tear ready to drop on to her golden cheek and looked after me with her gazelle-like eyes. Sweet little Ayesha, creature of the air and the desert, I shall see her no more!"Crossing the Mahdi's open-air mosque at Omdurman, where we said morning prayers, we set our faces northward over the wild halfa grass and clumps of mimosa scrub, and as soon as we were out in the open desert with its vast sky I saw how gigantic was our caravan. The great mass of men and animals seemed to stretch for miles across the yellow sand, and looked like an enormous tortoise creeping slowly along."We camped at sunset in the Wadi Bishara, the signal for the bivouac being the blowing of a great elephant-horn which had a thrilling effect in that lonesome place. But more thrilling still was the effect of evening prayers, which began as soon as the camels and horses and donkeys had been unsaddled, and their gruntings and brayings and gurglings, as well as the various noises of humanity, had ceased."The afterglow was flaming along the flat sand, giving its yellow the look of bronze, when all knelt with their faces to the East—Ishmael in front with sixty or seventy rows of men behind him. It was really very moving and stately to see, and made me understand what was meant by somebody who said he could never look upon Mohammedans at prayers, and think of the millions of hearts which at the same hour were sending their great chorus of praise to God, without wishing to be a Moslem. I did not wish to be that, but with the odious Arab woman always watching me, I found myself fingering my rosary and pretending to be a good Muslemah, though in reality I was repeating the Lord's Prayer."It is dark night now, the fires at which the people baked their durah and cooked their asida are dying down, and half the camp is already asleep in this huge wild wilderness, under its big white stars."I must try to sleep too, so good-night, dearest, and God bless you! I don't know what is to be the end of all this, or where I am to dispatch my letter, or when you are to receive it, but I am sure you are alive and listening to me—and what should I do if I could not talk to you? HELENA."CHAPTER VII"SOUDAN DESERT (somewhere)."It is ten days, my dear Gordon, since I wrote my last letter, and there has never been an hour between when I dared pretend to this abomination of Egypt (she is now snoring on the angerib by my side, sweetheart) that I must while away an hour by writing in my 'Journal.'"Such a time! Boil and bubble, toil and trouble! Every morning before daybreak the wild peal of the elephant-horn, then the whole camp at prayers with the rising sun in our faces, then the striking of tents and the ruckling, roaring, gurgling and grunting of camels which resembles nothing so much as a styful of pigsin extremis; then twelve hours of trudging through a forlorn and lifeless solitude with only a rest for the midday meal; then the elephant-horn again and evening prayers, with the savage sun behind us, and then settling down to sleep in some blank and numb and soundless wilderness—such is our daily story."My goodness, Ishmael is a wonderful person! But all the same the 'divine' atmosphere that is gathering about him is positively frightening. I suspect Black Zogal of being the author and 'only begetter' of a good deal of this idolatry. He gallops on a horse in front of us, crying, 'There is no god but God,' and 'The Messenger of God is coming,' with the result that crowds of people are waiting for Ishmael at every village, with their houses swept, their straw mats laid down, and their carpets spread on the divans, all eager to entertain him, to open their secret granaries to feed his followers, or at least to kiss the hem of his caftan."Every day our numbers increase, and we go off from the greater towns to the beating of copper war-drums, the blowing of antelope horns, and sometimes to the cracking of rifles. It is all very crude in its half-savage magnificence, but it is almost terrifying, too, and the sight of this emotional creature, so liable to spasms of religious ecstasy, riding on his milk-white camel through these fiercely fanatical people like a god, makes one tremble to think of the time that will surely come when they find out, andhefinds out, that after all he is nothing but a man."What sights, what scenes! The other day there was a fearful sand-storm, in which a fierce cloud came sweeping out of the horizon, big with flame and wrath, and fell on us like a mountain of hell. As long as it lasted the people lay flat on the sand or crouched under their kneeling camels, and when it was over they rose in the dead blankness with the red sand on their faces and sent up, as with one voice, a cry of lamentation and despair. But Ishmael only smiled and said, 'Let us thank God for this day, O my brothers,' and when the people asked him why, he answered, 'Because we can never know anything so bad again.'"That simple word set every face shining, and as soon as we reached the next village—Black Zogal as usual having gone before us—lo, we heard a story of how Ishmael had commanded a sand-storm to pass over our heads without touching us—and it had!"Another day we had stifling heat, in which the glare of the sand made our eyes to ache and the air to burn like the breath of a furnace. The water in the water-bottles became so hot that we dared not pour it on to the back of our hands, and even some of the camels dropped dead under the blazing eye of the sun."And when at length the sun sank beneath the horizon and left us in the cool dark night, the people could not sleep for want of water to bathe their swelling eyelids and to moisten their cracking throats, but Ishmael walked through their tents and comforted them, telling them it was never intended that man should always live well and comfortably, yet God, if He willed it, would bring them safely to their journey's end."After that the people lay down on the scorching sand as if their thirst had suddenly been quenched; and next day, on coming to the first village, we heard that in the middle of a valley of black and blistered hills, Ishmael smote with his staff a metallic rock that was twisted into the semblance of a knotted snake, and a well of ice-cold water sprung out of it, and everybody drank of it and then 'shook his fist at the sun.'"Nearly all last week our people were in poor heart by reason of the mirages which mocked and misled them, showing an enchanted land on the margin of the sky, with beautiful blue lakes and rivers and green islands and shady groves of palm, and sweet long emerald grasses that quivered beneath a refreshing breeze; but when, from their monotonous track on the parched and naked desert, the poor souls would go in search of these phantoms, they would find nothing but a great lone land, in the fulness of a still deeper desolation."Then they would fling themselves down in despair and ask why they had been brought out into the wilderness to die, but Ishmael, with the same calm smile as before, would tell them that the life of this world was all a mirage, a troubled dream, a dream in a sleep, that the life to come was the awakening, and that he whose dream was most disturbed was nearest the gates of Paradise."Result—at the next town we came to, we were told that when we were in the middle of the wilderness Ishmael had made an oasis to spring up around us, with waving trees and rippling water and the air full of the songs of birds, the humming of bees, and the perfume of flowers, and we all fell asleep in it, and when we awoke in the morning we believed we had been in Heaven!"Good-night, my dear—dear! Oh, to think that all this wilderness divides us! But ma'aleysh! In another hour I shall be asleep, and then—then I shall be in your arms."II"Oh my! Oh my! Two incidents have happened to-day, dearest, that can hardly fail of great results. Early in the morning we came upon the new convict settlement, a rough bastioned place built of sun-dried bricks in the middle of the Soudan desert. It contains the hundred and fifty Notables who were imprisoned by the Special Tribunal for assaults on the Army of Occupation when they were defending the house of your friend the Grand Cadi. How Ishmael discovered this I do not know, but what he did was like another manifestation of the 'mystic sense.'"Stopping the caravan with an unexpected blast of the elephant-horn, he caused ten rows of men to be ranged around the prison, and after silence had been proclaimed, he called on them to say the first Surah: 'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures.'"It had a weird effect in that lonesome place, as of a great monotonous wave breaking on a bar far out at sea, but what followed was still more eerie. After a breathless moment, in which everybody seemed to listen and hold his breath, there came the deadened and muffled sound of the same words repeated by the prisoners within the walls: 'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures.'"When this was over Ishmael cried, 'Peace, brothers! Patience! The day of your deliverance is near! The Redeemer is coming! All your wrongs will be righted, all your bruises will be healed! Peace!'"And then there came from within the prison walls the muffled answer, 'Peace!'"The second of the incidents occurred about midday. When crossing a lifeless waste of gloomy volcanic sand, we came upon a desert graveyard, with those rounded hillocks of clay which make one think that the dead beneath must be struggling in their sleep."At a word from Ishmael all the men of our company who belong to that country stepped out from the caravan and riding round and round the cemetery, shouted the names of their kindred who were buried there: 'Ali!' 'Abdul!' 'Mohammed!' 'Mahmud!' 'Said!'"After that Ishmael himself rode forward, and addressing the dead as if they could hear, he cried, 'Peace to you, O people of the graves! Wait! Lie still! The night is passing! The daylight dawns!'"It was thrilling! Strange, simple, primitive, crude in its faith perhaps, but such love and reverence for the dead contrasted only too painfully with the vandalism of our 'Christian' vultures (yclept Egyptologists), who rifle the graves of the old Egyptians for their jewels and mummy beads, and then leave their bones in tons to bleach on the bare sand—a condition that is sufficient of itself to account for Jacob's prayer, 'Bury me not, I pray thee, in the land of Egypt.'"And so say all of us! But seriously, my dear Gordon, I quite expect to hear at the next stopping-place a story of how Ishmael recited the Fatihah and the walls of a prison fell down before him, and how he spoke to the dead and they replied."
CHAPTER III
During the next few days the Consul-General was closely occupied. The Law of Public Security being promulgated, he called upon the Minister of the Interior to call upon the Commandant of Police to issue a warrant for the arrest of Ishmael Ameer.
"But whereisIshmael Ameer?" asked the Minister.
When this was reported to the Consul-General his stern face smiled, and he said—
"Let him wait and see."
Early one morning his Secretary came to his room to say that the Sirdar had arrived from Khartoum, and had gone on to headquarters, but would give himself the pleasure of calling upon his lordship before long.
"Tell him it must be soon—there is much to do," said the Consul-General.
Later the same day the Commandant of Police came, with a knowing smile on his ruddy face, to say that the Bedouin had reached Cairo, and that he had been followed to the Serai Fum el Khalig, the palace of the Chancellor of El Azhar, where he had already been visited by the Grand Mufti, some of the Ministers, certain of the Diplomatic Corps and nearly the whole of the Ulema.
"Was he alone?" asked the Consul-General.
"Quite alone, your lordship, and now he is as safely in our hands as if he were already under lock and key."
"Good! What did you say his address was?"
"Serai Fum el Khalig."
"Palace Fum el Khalig," repeated the Consul-General, making a note on a marble tablet which stood on his desk.
Later still, very late, the Grand Cadi came with the same news. The suave old Moslem judge was visibly excited. His pale, lymphatic, pock-marked cheeks, his earth-coloured lips, his base eyes, and his nose as sharp as a beak, gave him more than ever the appearance of a fierce and sagacious bird of prey. After exaggerated bows, he began to speak in the oily, half-smothered voice of one who lives in constant fear of being overheard.
"Your Excellency will remember that when on former occasions I have had the inestimable privilege of approaching your honourable person in order to warn you that if you did not put down a certain Arab innovator the result would be death to the rule of England in Egypt, your Excellency has demanded proofs."
"Well?"
"I am now in a position to provide them."
"State the case precisely," said the Consul-General.
"Your Excellency will be interested to hear that a person of some consequence has arrived in Cairo."
Trained to self-control, the Consul-General conquered an impulse to say, "I know," and merely said, "Who is he?"
"He calls himself Sheikh Omar Benani, and is understood to be the wise and wealthy head of the great tribe of the Ababdah Bedouins who inhabit the country that lies east of Assouan to the Red Sea."
"Well?"
"The man who calls himself Omar Benani is—Ishmael Ameer."
At that the base eyes glanced up with a look of triumph, but the Consul-General's face remained immovable.
"Well?"
"No doubt your Excellency is asking yourself why he comes in this disguise, and if your Excellency will deign to give me your attention I will tell you."
"I am listening."
"Ishmael Ameer pretends to be a reformer intent upon the moral and intellectual regeneration of Islam, and he preaches the coming of a golden age in which unity, peace and brotherhood are to reign throughout the earth.
"Well?"
"With this ridiculous and impracticable propaganda he has appealed to many wild and ardent minds, so that a vast following of half-civilised people whom he has gathered up in the Soudan are to start soon—may have started already—for this city, which they believe to be the Mecca of the new world."
"Well?"
"Ishmael Ameer pretends to have come to Cairo in advance of his followers to prepare for that millennium."
"And what has he really come for?"
"To establish a political State."
Down to that moment the Consul-General had been leaning back in his chair in the attitude of one who was listening to something he already knew, but now he sat up sharply.
"Is this a fact?"
"It is a fact, your Excellency. And if your Excellency will once more deign to grant me your attention, I will put you in possession of a secret."
"Go on," said the Consul-General.
Instinctively the suave old judge drew his legs up on his chair and fingered his amber beads.
"Your Excellency will perhaps remember that owing to differences of opinion with the Khedive—may Allah bless him!—you were compelled to require that for a while he should leave the country."
"Well?"
"He went to Constantinople with the intention of laying his grievances against England before His Serenity the Sultan—may the Merciful give him long life!"
"Well?"
"The Sultan is a friend of England, your Excellency—the Khedive was turned away."
"And then?"
"Then he went to Paris, as your Excellency is probably aware."
"Well?"
"Perhaps your Excellency supposes that he occupied himself with the frivolities of the gay capital of France—dinners, theatres, dances, races? But no! He had two enemies now, England and Turkey, and he presumed to think he could punish both."
"How? In what way?"
"By founding a secret society for the conquest of Syria, Palestine and Arabia, and the establishment of a great Arab Empire with himself as its Caliph and Cairo as its capital."
"Well? What happened?"
"Need I say what happened, your Excellency? By means of his great wealth he was able to send out hundreds of paid emissaries to every part of the Arabic world, and Ishmael Ameer was the first of them."
The Consul-General was at length startled out of all his composure.
"Can you prove this?" he said.
"Your Excellency, if I say anything I can always prove it."
The Consul-General's brow grew more and more severe.
"And his name—his assumed name—what did you say it was?"
"Sheikh Omar Benani."
"Sheikh Omar Benani," repeated the Consul-General, making another note on his marble tablet.
"That is enough for the present," he said. "I have something to do to-night. I must ask your Eminence to excuse me."
After the Grand Cadi had gone, with many sweeping salaams, various oily compliments, and that cruel gleam in his base eyes which proceeds only from base souls, the Consul-General rang sharply for his Secretary.
"We have not yet made out our invitations for the King's dinner—let us do so now," he said.
He threw a sheet of paper across the table to his Secretary, who prepared to make notes.
"First, the Diplomatic Corps—every one of them."
"Yes, my lord."
"Next, our Egyptian Ministers and the leading members of the Legislative Council."
"Yes, my lord."
"Next, the more prominent Pashas and Notables."
"Yes!"
"Of course our own people as usual, and finally——"
"Yes?"
"Finally, the Ulema of El Azhar."
The Secretary looked up in astonishment.
"Oh, I know," said the Consul-General. "They have never been invited before, but this is a special occasion."
"Quite so, my lord."
The Consul-General fixed his eyeglass and took up his marble tablet.
"In writing to the Chancellor of El Azhar at the Palace Fum el Khalig," he said, "enclose a card for the Sheikh Omar Benani."
"Sheikh Omar Benani."
"Say that hearing that one so highly esteemed among his own people is at present on a visit to Cairo, I shall be honoured by his company."
"Yes, my lord."
"That will do. Good-night!"
"Good-night, my lord."
It was early morning before the Consul-General went to bed. The Grand Cadi's story, being so exactly what he wanted to believe, had thrown him entirely off his guard. It appeared to illuminate everything that had looked dark and mysterious—the sudden advent of Ishmael, the growth of his influence, the sending out of his emissaries, his projected pilgrimage, and the gathering up of camels and horses in such enormous quantities as even the Government could not have commanded in time of war.
It accounted for Ishmael's presence in Cairo, and his mission (as described by Helena) of drawing off the allegiance of the Egyptian army. It accounted, too, for the treachery of the Ministers, Pashas and Notables, who were too shrewd and too selfish (whatever the riff-raff of the Soudan might be) to risk their comfortable incomes for a religious chimera.
Yes, the Khedive's money and the substantial prospect of establishing a vast Arab Empire, not the vague hope of a spiritual millennium, had been the power that worked these wonders.
It vexed him to think that his old enemy whom he had banished had been more powerful in exile than at home, and it tortured him to reflect that Ishmael had developed, with the religious malady of the Mahdi, his political mania as well.
But no matter! He would be more than a match for all these forces, and when his great historical drama came to be played before the eyes of astonished humanity, it would be seen that he had saved, not England only but Europe, and perhaps civilisation itself.
Thus, for three triumphant hours, the Consul-General saw himself as a patriot trampling on the enemies of his country; but hardly had he left the library and begun to climb the stairs of his great, empty, echoing house, switching off the lights as he ascended, and leaving darkness behind him, than the statesman sank back on the man—the broken, bereaved human being—and he recognised his motives for what they were.
A few minutes after he had reached his bedroom Fatimah entered it with a jug of hot water, and found him sitting with his head in his hands, looking fixedly at the portrait in the black-and-gilt frame of the little lad in an Arab fez.
"Ah, everybody loved that boy," she said, whereupon the old man raised his head and dismissed her brusquely.
"You ought to be in bed by this time—go at once," he said.
"Dear heart, so ought your lordship," said the Egyptian woman.
The Consul-General could dismiss Fatimah, but there was some one he could not get rid of, the manly, magnificent, heart-breaking young figure that always lived in his mind's eye, with its deadly white face, its trembling lower lip, and its quivering voice, which said, "General, the time may come when it will be even more painful to you to remember all this than it has been to me to bear it."
Where was he now? What was he doing? His son, his only son, all that was left to him!
There was only one way to lay that ghost, and the Consul-General did so by telling himself with a sort of fierce joy that wherever Gordon might be he must soon hear that Ishmael, in a pitiful and tricky disguise, had been discovered in Cairo, and then he would see for himself what an arrant schemer and unscrupulous charlatan was the person for whom he had sacrificed his life.
With that bitter-sweet thought the lonely old man forced back the tears that had been gathering in his eyes and went to bed.
CHAPTER IV
I
"CAIRO.
"MY DEAREST HELENA,—Here I am, you see, and I am not arrested, although I travelled in the same train with the Sirdar, met him face to face on the platform at Khartoum, again on the platform at Atbara, again on the landing place at Shelal, and finally in the station at Cairo, where he was received on his arrival by his officers of the Egyptian army, by my father's first Secretary, and by the Commandant of Police.
"I was asking myself what this could mean, whether your black boy had reached his destination, and if your letter had been delivered, when suddenly I became aware that I was being observed, watched and followed to this house, and by that I knew that in this land of mystery my liberty was to be allowed to me a little longer for reasons I have still to fathom.
"This is the home of the Chancellor of El Azhar, and I have delivered Ishmael's letter announcing the change of plan whereby I have come into Cairo instead of him, but I have pledged the good old man to secrecy on that subject, for the present at all events, giving him my confident assurance that in common with the best of the Ulema he is being wickedly deceived and made an innocent instrument for the destruction of his own cause.
"My dear Helena, I was right. My vague suspicions of that damnable intriguer the Grand Cadi were justified. Already I realise that after fruitless efforts to inveigle Ishmael into schemes of anarchical rebellion it was he who conceived the conspiracy, which has taken our friend by storm, in the form of a passive mutiny of the Egyptian army. The accursed scoundrel knows well it cannot be passive, that somewhere and somehow it will break into active resistance, but that is precisely what he desires. As I told you, it is the old trick of Caiaphas over again, and that is the lowest, meanest, dirtiest thing in history.
"Query, is he playing the same game with the Consul-General? I am sure he is, and when I think that England and my father may be in as much danger as Egypt and Ishmael from the man's devilish machinations, I am more than ever certain that Providence had a purpose in bringing me to Cairo, and I feel reconciled to the necessity of living here in this threefold disguise, being one thing to Ishmael, another to the Grand Cadi and Co., and a third to the Government and police. I feel reconciled too, or almost reconciled, to the necessity of leaving you where you are, for the present at all events, although it rips me like a sword-cut as often as I think of it.
"I have sent for Hafiz and expect to hear through him what is happening at the Agency, but I am hoping he will not come until morning, for to-night I can think of nothing but ourselves. When I left you at Khartoum I felt that higher powers were constraining and controlling me, and that I was only yielding at last to an overwhelming sense of fatality. I thought I had made every possible effort, had exhausted every means and had nothing to reproach myself with, but hardly had I got away into the desert when a hand seemed to grasp me at the back of my neck and to say, 'Why did you leave her behind?'
"In Ishmael's house and in that atmosphere of delirious ecstasy in the mosque it was easy to think it necessary for you to remain, otherwise my purpose in going away must from the first be frustrated, but awakening in the morning in my native compartment, with men and boys lying about on sacks, the sandy daylight filtering through the closed shutters of the carriage and the train full of the fetid atmosphere of exhausted sleep, I could not help but protest to myself that at any cost whatever I should have found a way to bring you with me.
"Thank God, if I have left you behind in that trying and false position it is with no Khalifa, no corrupt and concupiscent fanatic, but a man of the finest and purest instincts, who is too much occupied with his spiritual mission, praise the Lord, to think of the beautiful woman by his side, so I tell myself it was the will of Providence, and there is nothing to do now but to leave ourselves in the hands of fate.
"Good-night, dearest!D.V.I'll write again to-morrow."
II
"Have just seen Hafiz. The dear old fellow came racing up here at six o'clock this morning, with his big round face like the aurora borealis, shining in smiles and tears. Heavens, how he laughed and cried and swore and sweated!
"He thought his letter about my mother's death had brought me back, and when I gave him a hint of my real errand he nearly dropped with terror. It seems that among my old colleagues in Cairo my reputation is now of the lowest, being that of a person who was bribed—God knows by whom—to do what I did. As a consequence it will go ill with me, according to Hafiz, if I should be discovered, but as that is pretty certain to happen in any case I am not too much troubled, and find more interest in the fact that your boy Mosie is staying at the Agency and that consequently my father must have received your letter.
"My dear Helena, my 'mystic sense' has been right again. The Grand Cadi continues to pay secret visits to the Consul-General. That much Hafiz could say from his intercourse with his mother, and it is sufficient to tell me that, by keeping a running sore open with my father, the scoundrel counts on destroying not only Ishmael but England, by leading her to such resistance as will result in bloodshed, and thus dishonour her in the eyes of the civilised world and leave Egypt a cockpit in which half the foreign Powers will fight for themselves, no matter who may suffer.
"What should I do? God knows! I have an almost unconquerable impulse to go straight to my father and open his eyes to what is going on. He is enveloped by intrigues and surrounded by enemies in high places—his Egyptian Ministers, the creatures of his own creation; some of the foreign diplomats, the European leeches who suck his blood while they pretend to be his friends, and above all this rascally Cadi, with his sleek face and double-sword game.
"But what can I say? What positive fact can I yet point to? Will my father believe me if I tell him that Ishmael's following which is coming up to Cairo is not, as he thinks, an armed force? That the Grand Cadi & Co. are a pack of lying intriguers, each one playing for his own hand?
"My father is a great man who probably does not need and would certainly resent my compassion, but, Lord God, how I pity him! Alone, in his old age, after all he has done for Egypt! As for his Secretaries and Advisers, he has not brought them up to help him, and I would enlarge the Biblical warning about not putting one's trust in princes to include parvenus as well.
"My dear Helena, where are you now, I wonder? What is happening to you? What occurred after I left Khartoum? These are the questions which during half the day and nearly the whole of the night are hammering, hammering, hammering on my brain. Ishmael was to follow me in a few days, so I suppose you are on the desert by this time. The desert! In the midst of that vast horde! The scourings of a whole continent! Poor old Hafiz had something like a fit when I told him you were not in England but in the Soudan, yet as a fatalist he feels bound to believe that everything will work out for the best and he asks me to send his high regard to you.
"It gives one a strange sensation, and is almost like seeing things from another state of existence, to be here in Cairo walking about unrecognised amid the familiar sights, and hearing the gun fired from the Citadel every day; but the sharpest twinge comes of the hacking thought of whereyouare and what circumstances surround you. In fact, memory is always playing some devilish trick with me and raking up thoughts of the condition in which I found you in Khartoum.
"Helena, my dear Helena, I have an immense faith in your strength and your courage. You are mine, mine, mine—remember that!Ido—I have to—all the time. That is what sets me at ease in my dark hours and gives sleep, as the Arabs say, to my eyelids. For the rest, we must resign ourselves and continue to wait for the direction of fate. The fact that I was not arrested in the character of Ishmael immediately on my arrival in Cairo makes me think Hafiz may be right—that,D.V.one way or another, God knows how, everything is working out for the best. It's damned easy to say that, I know, but, upon my soul, dearest, I believe it. So keep up heart, my poor old girl, and God bless you! GORDON.
"P.S.—I'll hold this letter back until I think you must be nearing Assouan, and then send itD.V.by safe hands to be delivered to you there.
"P.P.S.—I open my envelope to tell you of a new development! I am invited with the Chancellor of El Azhar to the Consul-General's dinner in honour of the King's Birthday. This, in the character of Sheikh Omar Benani, who is, it seems, the chief of the tribe of the Ababdah, inhabiting the wild country between Assouan and the Red Sea, a person with a great reputation for wealth and wisdom, and a man whose word is truth.
"What does it mean? One thing certainly—that acting on the information contained in your letter the authorities are mistaking me for Ishmael Ameer, and proposing some scheme to capture me. But why don't they take me without further ado? What unfathomable reason can there be for the delay in doing so? Intrigue on intrigue! I must wait and see.
"Meantime I am asking myself where the real Ishmael is and what he is doing now? Is the belief in his 'divine' guidance increasing? Is he acquiring the influence of a Mahdi? If so, God help him! God help his people! God help my father! God help everybody!
"But sit tight, my girl! Something good is going to happen to us! I feel it, I know it! All my love to you, Helena! Maa-es-salamah!"
CHAPTER V
I
"KHARTOUM.
"MY DEAR, DEAR GORDON,—Gone! You are actually gone! I can hardly believe it. It must be like this to awaken from chloroform after losing one's right hand, only it must be something out of my heart in this instance, for though I have not shed a tear since you went away and do not intend to shed one, I have a wild sense of weeping in the desolate chambers of my soul.
"Writing to you? Certainly I am. Gordon, do you know what you have done for me? You have given me faith in your 'mystic senses,' and by virtue of certain of my own I am now sure that you are not dead, and that you are not going to die, so I am writing to you out of the chaos that envelops me, having no one here to speak to, literally no one, and being at present indifferent to the mystery of what is to become of my letter.
"It seems I fainted in the mosque after that wild riot of barbaric sounds, and did not come back to full consciousness until next morning, and then I found the Arab woman and the child attending on me in my room. Naturally I thought I might have been delirious and I was in terror lest I had betrayed myself, so I asked what I had been saying in my sleep, whereupon Zenoba protested that I had said nothing at all, but Ayesha, the sweet little darling, said I had been calling upon the great White Pasha (meaning General Gordon) whose picture (his statue) was by the Palace gates. What an escape!
"Of course my first impulse was to run away, but at the next moment I saw that to do so would be to defeat your own scheme in going, and that as surely as it had been your duty to go into Cairo, it was mine to remain in Khartoum. But all the same I felt myself to be a captive—as surely a captive as any white woman who was ever held in the Mahdi's camp—and it did not sweeten my captivity to remember that I had first become a prisoner of my own free will.
"If I am a captive I am under no cruel tyrant, though, and Ishmael's kindness is killing me. I was certainly wrong about him in Cairo, and his character is precisely the reverse of what I expected. Little Ayesha tells me that during the night I lay unconscious her father did not sleep at all, but kept coming into the guest-room every hour to ask for news of me, and now he knocks at my door a dozen times a day, asking if I am better, and saying 'To morrow, please God, you will be well.' It makes me wretched, and brings me dreadfully near to the edge of tears, remembering what I have done to him and how certainty his hopes will be destroyed.
"Naturally his people have taken his cue, and last night Black Zogal gathered up a crowd of half-crazy creatures like himself to say a prayer for me at the Saint's house which is just outside my window.
"'Thou knowest our White Lady, O Father Gabreel, that she is betrothed to our Master, and that his heart is low and his bread is bitter because she is sick. Make her well if it please God, O Father Gabreel!' Thus the simple-hearted children of the desert called down God's spirit to their circle of fire for me, and after loud cries of 'Allah! Allah!' going on for nearly an hour, they seemed to be content, for Zogal said—
"'Abu Gabreel hears, O my brothers, and to-morrow, please God, our sister will be well.'
"I had been reaching up in bed to look and listen, and when all was over I wanted to lay down my head and howl.
"The time has come for the people to start on their pilgrimage, but Ishmael insists upon postponing the journey until I have quite recovered. Meantime Zenoba is trying to make mischief, and to-day when the door of my room was ajar, I heard her hinting to Ishmael that the White Lady was not really ill but only pretending to be—a bit of treachery for which she got no thanks, being as sharply reproved as she was on the morning of your mother's letter.
"That woman makes a wild cat of me. I can't help it—I hate her! Of course I see through her, too. She is in love with Ishmael, and though I ought to pity her pangs of jealousy there are moments when I want to curse her religion and the dawn of the day of her birth and her mother and her grandmother.
"There! You see I have caught the contagion of the country; but I am really a little weak and out of heart to-night, dear, so perhaps I had better say good-night! Good-night, my dearest!"
II
"Oh dear! Oh dear! I could not bear to play the hypocrite any longer, so I got up to-day and told Ishmael I was well, and therefore he must not keep back his pilgrimage any longer. Such joy! Such rejoicing! It would break my heart, if I had any here, but having sent all I possess to Cairo I could do nothing but sit in the guest-room and look on at the last of the people's preparations for the desert journey—tents and beds being packed, and camels and horses and donkeys brought in to a continuous din of braying and grunting and neighing.
"We are to start away to-morrow morning, and this afternoon when that fact was announced to me I was so terrified by the idea of being dragged over the desert like a slave that I asked Ishmael to leave me behind. His face fell, but—would you believe it?—he agreed, saying I was not strong enough to travel and Zenoba should stay to nurse me. At that I speedily repented of my request and asked him to allow me to go, whereupon his face lightened like a child's, and with joy he agreed again, saying the Arab woman should go to take care of me, for Ayesha was a big girl now and needed a nurse no longer. This was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire, and I protested that I was quite able to look after myself; but, out of his anxiety for my health, Ishmael would not be gainsaid, and the Arab woman said, 'I'll watch over you like my eyes, my sister.' I am sure she will, the vixen!"
III
"We have left Khartoum and are now on the desert. The day had not yet dawned when we were awakened by a tattoo of pipes and native drums—surely the weirdest sound in the darkness that ever fell on mortal ear, creeping into the pores and getting under the very skin. Then came a din, a roar, a clamour—the grunting and gurgling and braying of five thousand animals and as much shouting and bellowing of human tongues as went to the building of the tower of Babel.
"The sun was rising, and there was a golden belt of cloud in the Eastern sky by the time we were ready to go. They had brought a litter on a dromedary for me, and I was almost the last to start. It was hard to part from the child, for though her sweet innocence had given me many a stab and I felt sometimes as if she had been created to torture me, I had grown to love her, and I think she loved me. She stood as we rode away, with a big tear ready to drop on to her golden cheek and looked after me with her gazelle-like eyes. Sweet little Ayesha, creature of the air and the desert, I shall see her no more!
"Crossing the Mahdi's open-air mosque at Omdurman, where we said morning prayers, we set our faces northward over the wild halfa grass and clumps of mimosa scrub, and as soon as we were out in the open desert with its vast sky I saw how gigantic was our caravan. The great mass of men and animals seemed to stretch for miles across the yellow sand, and looked like an enormous tortoise creeping slowly along.
"We camped at sunset in the Wadi Bishara, the signal for the bivouac being the blowing of a great elephant-horn which had a thrilling effect in that lonesome place. But more thrilling still was the effect of evening prayers, which began as soon as the camels and horses and donkeys had been unsaddled, and their gruntings and brayings and gurglings, as well as the various noises of humanity, had ceased.
"The afterglow was flaming along the flat sand, giving its yellow the look of bronze, when all knelt with their faces to the East—Ishmael in front with sixty or seventy rows of men behind him. It was really very moving and stately to see, and made me understand what was meant by somebody who said he could never look upon Mohammedans at prayers, and think of the millions of hearts which at the same hour were sending their great chorus of praise to God, without wishing to be a Moslem. I did not wish to be that, but with the odious Arab woman always watching me, I found myself fingering my rosary and pretending to be a good Muslemah, though in reality I was repeating the Lord's Prayer.
"It is dark night now, the fires at which the people baked their durah and cooked their asida are dying down, and half the camp is already asleep in this huge wild wilderness, under its big white stars.
"I must try to sleep too, so good-night, dearest, and God bless you! I don't know what is to be the end of all this, or where I am to dispatch my letter, or when you are to receive it, but I am sure you are alive and listening to me—and what should I do if I could not talk to you? HELENA."
CHAPTER VI
I
"SOUDAN DESERT (somewhere).
"It is ten days, my dear Gordon, since I wrote my last letter, and there has never been an hour between when I dared pretend to this abomination of Egypt (she is now snoring on the angerib by my side, sweetheart) that I must while away an hour by writing in my 'Journal.'
"Such a time! Boil and bubble, toil and trouble! Every morning before daybreak the wild peal of the elephant-horn, then the whole camp at prayers with the rising sun in our faces, then the striking of tents and the ruckling, roaring, gurgling and grunting of camels which resembles nothing so much as a styful of pigsin extremis; then twelve hours of trudging through a forlorn and lifeless solitude with only a rest for the midday meal; then the elephant-horn again and evening prayers, with the savage sun behind us, and then settling down to sleep in some blank and numb and soundless wilderness—such is our daily story.
"My goodness, Ishmael is a wonderful person! But all the same the 'divine' atmosphere that is gathering about him is positively frightening. I suspect Black Zogal of being the author and 'only begetter' of a good deal of this idolatry. He gallops on a horse in front of us, crying, 'There is no god but God,' and 'The Messenger of God is coming,' with the result that crowds of people are waiting for Ishmael at every village, with their houses swept, their straw mats laid down, and their carpets spread on the divans, all eager to entertain him, to open their secret granaries to feed his followers, or at least to kiss the hem of his caftan.
"Every day our numbers increase, and we go off from the greater towns to the beating of copper war-drums, the blowing of antelope horns, and sometimes to the cracking of rifles. It is all very crude in its half-savage magnificence, but it is almost terrifying, too, and the sight of this emotional creature, so liable to spasms of religious ecstasy, riding on his milk-white camel through these fiercely fanatical people like a god, makes one tremble to think of the time that will surely come when they find out, andhefinds out, that after all he is nothing but a man.
"What sights, what scenes! The other day there was a fearful sand-storm, in which a fierce cloud came sweeping out of the horizon, big with flame and wrath, and fell on us like a mountain of hell. As long as it lasted the people lay flat on the sand or crouched under their kneeling camels, and when it was over they rose in the dead blankness with the red sand on their faces and sent up, as with one voice, a cry of lamentation and despair. But Ishmael only smiled and said, 'Let us thank God for this day, O my brothers,' and when the people asked him why, he answered, 'Because we can never know anything so bad again.'
"That simple word set every face shining, and as soon as we reached the next village—Black Zogal as usual having gone before us—lo, we heard a story of how Ishmael had commanded a sand-storm to pass over our heads without touching us—and it had!
"Another day we had stifling heat, in which the glare of the sand made our eyes to ache and the air to burn like the breath of a furnace. The water in the water-bottles became so hot that we dared not pour it on to the back of our hands, and even some of the camels dropped dead under the blazing eye of the sun.
"And when at length the sun sank beneath the horizon and left us in the cool dark night, the people could not sleep for want of water to bathe their swelling eyelids and to moisten their cracking throats, but Ishmael walked through their tents and comforted them, telling them it was never intended that man should always live well and comfortably, yet God, if He willed it, would bring them safely to their journey's end.
"After that the people lay down on the scorching sand as if their thirst had suddenly been quenched; and next day, on coming to the first village, we heard that in the middle of a valley of black and blistered hills, Ishmael smote with his staff a metallic rock that was twisted into the semblance of a knotted snake, and a well of ice-cold water sprung out of it, and everybody drank of it and then 'shook his fist at the sun.'
"Nearly all last week our people were in poor heart by reason of the mirages which mocked and misled them, showing an enchanted land on the margin of the sky, with beautiful blue lakes and rivers and green islands and shady groves of palm, and sweet long emerald grasses that quivered beneath a refreshing breeze; but when, from their monotonous track on the parched and naked desert, the poor souls would go in search of these phantoms, they would find nothing but a great lone land, in the fulness of a still deeper desolation.
"Then they would fling themselves down in despair and ask why they had been brought out into the wilderness to die, but Ishmael, with the same calm smile as before, would tell them that the life of this world was all a mirage, a troubled dream, a dream in a sleep, that the life to come was the awakening, and that he whose dream was most disturbed was nearest the gates of Paradise.
"Result—at the next town we came to, we were told that when we were in the middle of the wilderness Ishmael had made an oasis to spring up around us, with waving trees and rippling water and the air full of the songs of birds, the humming of bees, and the perfume of flowers, and we all fell asleep in it, and when we awoke in the morning we believed we had been in Heaven!
"Good-night, my dear—dear! Oh, to think that all this wilderness divides us! But ma'aleysh! In another hour I shall be asleep, and then—then I shall be in your arms."
II
"Oh my! Oh my! Two incidents have happened to-day, dearest, that can hardly fail of great results. Early in the morning we came upon the new convict settlement, a rough bastioned place built of sun-dried bricks in the middle of the Soudan desert. It contains the hundred and fifty Notables who were imprisoned by the Special Tribunal for assaults on the Army of Occupation when they were defending the house of your friend the Grand Cadi. How Ishmael discovered this I do not know, but what he did was like another manifestation of the 'mystic sense.'
"Stopping the caravan with an unexpected blast of the elephant-horn, he caused ten rows of men to be ranged around the prison, and after silence had been proclaimed, he called on them to say the first Surah: 'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures.'
"It had a weird effect in that lonesome place, as of a great monotonous wave breaking on a bar far out at sea, but what followed was still more eerie. After a breathless moment, in which everybody seemed to listen and hold his breath, there came the deadened and muffled sound of the same words repeated by the prisoners within the walls: 'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures.'
"When this was over Ishmael cried, 'Peace, brothers! Patience! The day of your deliverance is near! The Redeemer is coming! All your wrongs will be righted, all your bruises will be healed! Peace!'
"And then there came from within the prison walls the muffled answer, 'Peace!'
"The second of the incidents occurred about midday. When crossing a lifeless waste of gloomy volcanic sand, we came upon a desert graveyard, with those rounded hillocks of clay which make one think that the dead beneath must be struggling in their sleep.
"At a word from Ishmael all the men of our company who belong to that country stepped out from the caravan and riding round and round the cemetery, shouted the names of their kindred who were buried there: 'Ali!' 'Abdul!' 'Mohammed!' 'Mahmud!' 'Said!'
"After that Ishmael himself rode forward, and addressing the dead as if they could hear, he cried, 'Peace to you, O people of the graves! Wait! Lie still! The night is passing! The daylight dawns!'
"It was thrilling! Strange, simple, primitive, crude in its faith perhaps, but such love and reverence for the dead contrasted only too painfully with the vandalism of our 'Christian' vultures (yclept Egyptologists), who rifle the graves of the old Egyptians for their jewels and mummy beads, and then leave their bones in tons to bleach on the bare sand—a condition that is sufficient of itself to account for Jacob's prayer, 'Bury me not, I pray thee, in the land of Egypt.'
"And so say all of us! But seriously, my dear Gordon, I quite expect to hear at the next stopping-place a story of how Ishmael recited the Fatihah and the walls of a prison fell down before him, and how he spoke to the dead and they replied."