The night descended, and the ship shrouded in mist grew ghostly and unnatural, whilst great drops of moisture hung on the backstays and the shrouds.
The Arab crew lay sleeping, huddled round the windlass, looking mere masses of white dirty rags; the seaman keeping the anchor-watch loomed like a giant, and from the shore occasionally the voices of the guards at the town prison came through the mist, making the boarhound turn in his sleep and growl. The missionary paced to and fro a little,settling his pith tureen-shaped hat upon his head, and fastening a woollen comforter about his neck.
Then going to the rail, he looked into the night where the boat bearing off his brethren had disappeared; his soul perhaps wandering towards some Limbo as he gazed, and his elastic-sided boots fast glued to the dirty decks by the half-dried-up blood of the discarded fish.
Outsidethe little straw-thatchedcaféin a small courtyard trellised with vines, before a miniature table painted in red and blue, and upon which stood a dome-shaped pewter teapot and a painted glass half filled with mint, sat Amarabat, resting and smoking hemp. He was of those whom Allah in his mercy (or because man in the Blad-Allah has made no railways) has ordained to run. Set upon the road, his shoes pulled up, his waistband tightened, in his hand a staff, a palm-leaf wallet at his back, and in it bread, some hemp, a match or two (known to him as el spiritus), and a letter to take anywhere, crossing the plains, fording the streams, struggling along the mountain-paths, sleeping but fitfully, a burning rope steeped in saltpetre fastened to his foot, he trotted day and night—untiring as a camel, faithful as a dog. In Rabat as he sat dozing, watching the greenish smoke curl upwards from his hemp pipe, word came to him from the Khalifa of the town. So Amarabat rose, paid for his tea with half a handful of defaced and greasy copper coins, and took his way towards the white palace with the crenelated walls, which on the cliff, hangingabove the roaring tide-rip, just inside the bar of the great river, looks at Salee. Around the horseshoe archway of the gate stood soldiers, wild, fierce-eyed, armed to the teeth, descendants, most of them, of the famed warriors whom Sultan Muley Ismail (may God have pardoned him!) bred for his service, after the fashion of the Carlylean hero Frederic; and Amarabat walked through them, not aggressively, but with the staring eyes of a confirmed hemp-smoker, with the long stride of one who knows that he is born to run, and the assurance of a man who waits upon his lord. Some time he waited whilst the Khalifa dispensed what he thought justice, chaffered with Jewish pedlars for cheap European goods, gossiped with friends, looked at the antics of a dwarf, or priced a Georgian or Circassian girl brought with more care than glass by some rich merchant from the East. At last Amarabat stood in the presence, and the Khalifa, sitting upon a pile of cushions playing with a Waterbury watch, a pistol and a Koran by his side, addressed him thus:—
“Amarabat, son of Bjorma, my purpose is to send thee to Tafilet, where our liege lord the Sultan lies with his camp. Look upon this glass bowl made by the Kaffir, but clear as is the crystal of the rock; see how the light falls on the water, and the shifting colours that it makes, as when the Bride of the Rain stands in the heavens, after a shower in spring. Inside are seven gold fish, eachscale as bright as letters in an Indian book. The Christian from whom I bought them said originally they came from the Far East where the Djin-descended Jawi live, the little yellow people of the faith. That may be, but such as they are, they are a gift for kings. Therefore, take thou the bowl. Take it with care, and bear it as it were thy life. Stay not, but in an hour start from the town. Delay not on the road, be careful of the fish, change not their water at the muddy pool where tortoises bask in the sunshine, but at running brooks; talk not to friends, look not upon the face of woman by the way, although she were as a gazelle, or as the maiden who when she walked through the fields the sheep stopped feeding to admire. Stop not, but run through day and night, pass through the Atlas at the Glaui; beware of frost, cover the bowl with thine own haik; upon the other side shield me the bowl from the Saharan sun, and drink not of the water if thou pass a day athirst when toiling through the sand. Break not the bowl, and see the fish arrive in Tafilet, and then present them, with this letter, to our lord. Allah be with you, and his Prophet; go, and above all things see thou breakest not the bowl.” And Amarabat, after the manner of his kind, taking the bowl of gold fish, placed one hand upon his heart and said: “Inshallah, it shall be as thou hast said. God gives the feet and lungs. He also gives the luck upon the road.”
So he passed out under the horseshoe arch,holding the bowl almost at arm’s length so as not to touch his legs, and with the palmetto string by which he carried it, bound round with rags. The soldiers looked at him, but spoke not, and their eyes seemed to see far away, and to pass over all in the middle distance, though no doubt they marked the smallest detail of his gait and dress. He passed between the horses of the guard all standing nodding under the fierce sun, the reins tied to the cantles of their high red saddles, a boy in charge of every two or three: he passed beside the camels resting by the well, the donkeys standing dejected by the firewood they had brought: passed women, veiled white figures going to the baths; and passing underneath the lofty gateway of the town, exchanged a greeting with the half-mad, half-religious beggar just outside the walls, and then emerged upon the sandy road, between the aloe hedges, which skirts along the sea. So as he walked, little by little he fell into his stride; then got his second wind, and smoking now and then a pipe of hemp, began, as Arabs say, to cat the miles, his eyes fixed on the horizon, his stick stuck down between his shirt and back, the knob protruding over the left shoulder like the hilt of a two-handed sword. And still he held the precious bowl from Franquestan in which the golden fish swam to and fro, diving and circling in the sunlight, or flapped their tails to steady themselves as the water danced with the motion of his steps. Never before in his experience had hebeen charged with such a mission, never before been sent to stand before Allah’s vicegerent upon earth. But still the strangeness of his business was what preoccupied him most. The fish like molten gold, the water to be changed only at running streams, the fish to be preserved from frost and sun; and then the bowl: had not the Khalifa said at the last, “Beware, break not the bowl”? So it appeared to him that most undoubtedly a charm was in the fish and in the bowl, for who sends common fish on such a journey through the land? Then he resolved at any hazard to bring them safe and keep the bowl intact, and trotting onward, smoked his hemp, and wondered why he of all men should have had the luck to bear the precious gift. He knew he kept his law, at least as far as a poor man can keep it, prayed when he thought of prayer, or was assailed by terror in the night alone upon the plains; fasted in Ramadan, although most of his life was one continual fast; drank of the shameful but seldom, and on the sly, so as to give offence to no believer, and seldom looked upon the face of the strange women, Daughters of the Illegitimate, whom Sidna Mohammed himself has said, avoid. But all these things he knew were done by many of the faithful, and so he did not set himself up as of exceeding virtue, but rather left the praise to God, who helped his slave with strength to keep his law. Then left off thinking, judging the matter was ordained, and trotted, trotted over the burning plains, the gold fishdancing in the water as the miles melted and passed away.
Duar and Kasbah, castles of the Caids, Arabs’ black tents, suddra zaribas, camels grazing—antediluvian in appearance—on the little hills, the muddy streams edged all along the banks with oleanders, the solitary horsemen holding their long and brass-hooped guns like spears, the white-robed noiseless-footed travellers on the roads, the chattering storks upon the village mosques, the cow-birds sitting on the cattle in the fields—he saw, but marked not, as he trotted on. Day faded into night, no twilight intervening, and the stars shone out, Soheil and Rigel with Betelgeuse and Aldebaran, and the three bright lamps which the cursed Christians know as the Three Maries—called, he supposed, after the mother of their Prophet; and still he trotted on. Then by the side of a lone palm-tree springing up from a cleft in a tall rock, an island on the plain, he stopped to pray; and sleeping, slept but fitfully, the strangeness of the business making him wonder; and he who cavils over matters in the night can never rest, for thus the jackal and the hyena pass their nights talking and reasoning about the thoughts which fill their minds when men lie with their faces covered in their haiks, and after prayer sleep. Rising after an hour or two and going to the nearest stream, he changed the water of his fish, leaving a little in the bottom of the bowl, and dipping with his brass drinking-cup into the streamfor fear of accidents. He passed the Kasbah of el Daudi, passed the land of the Rahamna, accursed folk always in “siba,” saw the great snowy wall of Atlas rise, skirted Marakesh, the Kutubieh, rising first from the plain and sinking last from sight as he approached the mountains and left the great white city sleeping in the plain.
Little by little the country altered as he ran: cool streams for muddy rivers, groves of almond-trees, ashes and elms, with grape-vines binding them together as the liana binds the canela and the urunday in the dark forests of Brazil and Paraguay. At mid-day, when the sun was at its height, when locusts, whirring through the air, sank in the dust as flying-fish sink in the waves, when palm-trees seem to nod their heads, and lizards are abroad drinking the heat and basking in the rays, when the dry air shimmers, and sparks appear to dance before the traveller’s eye, and a thin, reddish dust lies on the leaves, on clothes of men, and upon every hair of horses’ coats, he reached a spring. A river springing from a rock, or issuing after running underground, had formed a little pond. Around the edge grew bulrushes, great catmace, water-soldiers, tall arums and metallic-looking sedge-grass, which gave an air as of an outpost of the tropics lost in the desert sand. Fish played beneath the rock where the stream issued, flitting to and fro, or hanging suspended for an instant in the clear stream, darted into the dark recesses of the sides; and inthe middle of the pond enormous tortoises, horrid and antediluvian-looking, basked with their backs awash or raised their heads to snap at flies, and all about them hung a dark and fetid slime.
A troop of thin brown Arab girls filled their tall amphora whilst washing in the pond. Placing his bowl of fish upon a jutting rock, the messenger drew near. “Gazelles,” he said, “will one of you give me fresh water for the Sultan’s golden fish?” Laughing and giggling, the girls drew near, looked at the bowl, had never seen such fish. “Allah is great; why do you not let them go in the pond and play a little with their brothers?” And Amarabat with a shiver answered, “Play, let them play! and if they come not back my life will answer for it.” Fear fell upon the girls, and one advancing, holding the skirt of her long shift between her teeth to veil her face, poured water from her amphora upon the fish.
Then Amarabat, setting down his precious bowl, drew from his wallet a pomegranate and began to eat, and for a farthing buying a piece of bread from the women, was satisfied, and after smoking, slept, and dreamed he was approaching Tafilet; he saw the palm-trees rising from the sand; the gardens; all the oasis stretching beyond his sight; at the edge the Sultan’s camp, a town of canvas, with the horses, camels, and the mules picketed, all in rows, and in the midst of the great “duar” the Sultan’s tent, like a great palace all of canvas,shining in the sun. All this he saw, and saw himself entering the camp, delivering up his fish, perhaps admitted to the sacred tent, or at least paid by a vizier, as one who has performed his duty well. The slow match blistering his foot, he woke to find himself alone, the “gazelles” departed, and the sun shining on the bowl, making the fish appear more magical, more wondrous, brighter, and more golden than before.
And so he took his way along the winding Atlas paths, and slept at Demnats, then, entering the mountains, met long trains of travellers going to the south. Passing through groves of chestnuts, walnut-trees, and hedges thick with blackberries and travellers’ joy, he climbed through vineyards rich with black Atlas grapes, and passed the flat mud-built Berber villages nestling against the rocks. Eagles flew by and moufflons gazed at him from the peaks, and from the thickets of lentiscus and dwarf arbutus wild boars appeared, grunted, and slowly walked across the path, and still he climbed, the icy wind from off the snow chilling him in his cotton shirt, for his warm Tadla haik was long ago wrapped round the bowl to shield the precious fish. Crossing the Wad Ghadat, the current to his chin, his bowl of fish held in one hand, he struggled on. The Berber tribesmen at Tetsula and Zarkten, hard-featured, shaved but for a chin-tuft, and robed in their “achnifs” with the curious eye woven in the skirt, saw he was a “rekass,” or thought thefish not worth their notice, so gave him a free road. Night caught him at the stone-built, antediluvian-looking Kasbah of the Glaui, perched in the eye of the pass, with the small plain of Teluet two thousand feet below. Off the high snow-peaks came a whistling wind, water froze solid in all the pots and pans, earthenware jars and bottles throughout the castle, save in the bowl which Amarabat, shivering and miserable, wrapped in his haik and held close to the embers, hearing the muezzin at each call to prayers; praying himself to keep awake so that his fish might live. Dawn saw him on the trail, the bowl wrapped in a woollen rag, and the fish fed with bread-crumbs, but himself hungry and his head swimming with want of sleep, with smoking “kief,” and with the bitter wind which from El Tisi N’Glaui flagellates the road. Right through the valley of Teluet he still kept on, and day and night still trotting, trotting on, changing his bowl almost instinctively from hand to hand, a broad leaf floating on the top to keep the water still, he left Agurzga, with its twin castles, Ghresat and Dads, behind. Then rapidly descending, in a day reached an oasis between Todghra and Ferkla, and rested at a village for the night. Sheltered by palm-trees and hedged round with cactuses and aloes, either to keep out thieves or as a symbol of the thorniness of life, the village lay, looking back on the white Atlas gaunt and mysterious, and on the other side towards the brown Sahara, land of the palm-tree(Belad-el-Jerid), the refuge of the true Ishmaelite; for in the desert, learning, good faith, and hospitality can still be found—at least, so Arabs say.
Orange and azofaifa trees, with almonds, sweet limes and walnuts, stood up against the waning light, outlined in the clear atmosphere almost so sharply as to wound the eye. Around the well goats and sheep lay, whilst a girl led a camel round the Noria track; women sat here and there and gossiped, with their tall earthenware jars stuck by the point into the ground, and waited for their turn, just as they did in the old times, so far removed from us, but which in Arab life is but as yesterday, when Jacob cheated Esau, and the whole scheme of Arab life was photographed for us by the writers of the Pentateuch. In fact, the self-same scene which has been acted every evening for two thousand years throughout North Africa, since the adventurous ancestors of the tribesmen of to-day left Hadrumut or Yemen, and upon which Allah looks down approvingly, as recognizing that the traditions of his first recorded life have been well kept. Next day he trotted through the barren plain of Seddat, the Jibel Saghra making a black line on the horizon to the south. Here Berber tribes sweep in their razzias like hawks; but who would plunder a rekass carrying a bowl of fish? Crossing the dreary plain and dreaming of his entry into Tafilet, which now was almost in his reach not two days distant, the sun beating on hishead, the water almost boiling in the bowl, hungry and footsore, and in the state betwixt waking and sleep into which those who smoke hemp on journeys often get, he branched away upon a trail leading towards the south. Between the oases of Todghra and Ferkla, nothing but stone and sand, black stones on yellow sand; sand, and yet more sand, and then again stretches of blackish rocks with a suddra bush or two, and here and there a colocynth, bitter and beautiful as love or life, smiling up at the traveller from amongst the stones. Towards midday the path led towards a sandy tract all overgrown with sandrac bushes and crossed by trails of jackals and hyenas, then it quite disappeared, and Amarabat waking from his dream saw he was lost. Like a good shepherd, his first thought was for his fish; for he imagined the last few hours of sun had made them faint, and one of them looked heavy and swam sideways, and the rest kept rising to the surface in an uneasy way. Not for a moment was Amarabat frightened, but looked about for some known landmark, and finding none started to go back on his trail. But to his horror the wind which always sweeps across the Sahara had covered up his tracks, and on the stony paths which he had passed his feet had left no prints. Then Amarabat, the first moments of despair passed by, took a long look at the horizon, tightened his belt, pulled up his slipper heels, covered his precious bowl with a corner of his robe, and started doggedly back uponthe road he thought he traversed on the deceitful path. How long he trotted, what he endured, whether the fish died first, or if he drank, or, faithful to the last, thirsting met death, no one can say. Most likely wandering in the waste of sandhills and of suddra bushes he stumbled on, smoking his hashish while it lasted, turning to Mecca at the time of prayer, and trotting on more feebly (for he was born to run), till he sat down beneath the sun-dried bushes where the Shinghiti on his Mehari found him dead beside the trail. Under a stunted sandarac tree, the head turned to the east, his body lay, swollen and distorted by the pangs of thirst, the tongue protruding rough as a parrot’s, and beside him lay the seven golden fish, once bright and shining as the pure gold when the goldsmith pours it molten from his pot, but now turned black and bloated, stiff, dry, and dead. Life the mysterious, the mocking, the inscrutable, unseizable, the uncomprehended essence of nothing and of everything, had fled, both from the faithful messenger and from his fish. But the Khalifa’s parting caution had been well obeyed, for by the tree, unbroken, the crystal bowl still glistened beautiful as gold, in the fierce rays of the Saharan sun.
Thegiant cypresses, tall even in the time of Montezuma, the castle of Chapultepec upon its rock (an island in the plain of Mexico), the panorama of the great city backed by the mountain range; the two volcanoes, the Popocatepetl and the Istacihuatl, and the lakes; the tigers in their cages, did not interest me so much as a small courtyard, in which, ironed and guarded, a band of Indians of the Apache tribe were kept confined. Six warriors, a woman and a boy, captured close to Chihuahua, and sent to Mexico, the Lord knows why; for generally an Apache captured was shot at once, following the frontier rule, which without difference of race was held on both sides of the Rio Grande, that a good Indian must needs be dead.
Silent and stoical the warriors sat, not speaking once in a whole day, communicating but by signs; naked except the breech-clout; their eyes apparently opaque, and looking at you without sight, but seeing everything; and their demeanour less reassuring than that of the tigers in the cage hard by. All could speak Spanish if they liked, some a word or two of English, but no one heard themsay a word in either tongue. I asked the nearest if he was a Mescalero, and received the answer: “Mescalero-hay,” and for a moment a gleam shone through their eyes, but vanished instantly, as when the light dies out of the wire in an electric lamp. The soldier at the gate said they were “brutes”; all sons of dogs, infidels, and that for his part he could not see why the “Gobierno” went to the expense of keeping them alive. He thought they had no sense; but in that showed his own folly, and acted after the manner of the half-educated man the whole world over, who knowing he can read and write thinks that the savage who cannot do so is but a fool; being unaware that, in the great book known as the world, the savage often is the better scholar of the two.
But five-and-twenty years ago the Apache nation, split into its chief divisions of Mescaleros, Jicarillas, Coyoteros, and Lipanes, kept a great belt of territory almost five hundred miles in length, and of about thirty miles in breadth, extending from the bend of the Rio Gila to El Paso, in a perpetual war. On both sides of the Rio Grande no man was safe; farms were deserted, cattle carried off, villages built by the Spaniards, and with substantial brick-built churches, mouldered into decay; mines were unworkable, and horses left untended for a moment were driven off in open day; so bold the thieves, that at one time they had a settled month for plundering, which they calledopenly the Moon of the Mexicans, though they did not on that account suspend their operations at other seasons of the year. Cochise and Mangas-Coloradas, Naked Horse, Cuchillo Negro, and others of their chiefs, were once far better known upon the frontiers than the chief senators of the congresses of either of the two republics; and in some instances these chiefs showed an intelligence, knowledge of men and things, which in another sphere would certainly have raised them high in the estimation of mankind.
The Shis-Inday (the people of the woods), their guttural language, with its curious monosyllable “hay” which they tacked on to everything, as “Oro-hay” and “plata-hay”; their strange democracy, each man being chief of himself, and owning no allegiance to any one upon the earth; all now have almost passed away, destroyed and swallowed up by the “Inday pindah lichoyi” (the men of the white eyes), as they used to call the Americans and all those northerners who ventured into their territory to look for “yellow iron.” I saw no more of the Apaches, and except once, never again met any one of them; but as I left the place the thought came to my mind, if any of them succeed in getting out, I am certain that the six or seven hundred miles between them and their country will be as nothing to them, and that their journey thither will be marked with blood.
At Huehuetoca I joined the mule-train, doingthe twenty miles which in those days was all the extent of railway in the country to the north, and lost my pistol in a crowd just as I stepped into the train, some “lepero” having abstracted it out of my belt when I was occupied in helping five strong men to get my horse into a cattle-truck. From Huehuetoca we marched to Tula, and there camped for the night, sleeping in a “meson” built like an Eastern fondak round a court, and with a well for watering the beasts in the centre of the yard. I strolled about the curious town, in times gone by the Aztec capital, looked at the churches, built like fortresses, and coming back to the “meson” before I entered the cell-like room without a window, and with a plaster bench on which to spread one’s saddle and one’s rugs, I stopped to talk with a knot of travellers feeding their animals on barley and chopped straw, grouped round a fire, and the whole scene lit up and rendered Rembrandtesque by the fierce glow of an “ocote” torch. So talking of the Alps and Apennines, or, more correctly, speaking of the Sierra Madre, and the mysterious region known as the Bolson de Mapimi, a district in those days as little known as is the Sus to-day, a traveller drew near. Checking his horse close by the fire, and getting off it gingerly, for it was almost wild, holding the hair “mecate” in his hand, he squatted down, the horse snorting and hanging back, and setting rifle and “machete” jingling upon the saddle, he began to talk.
“Ave Maria purisima, had we heard the news?” What! a new revolution? Had Lerdo de Tejada reappeared again? or had Cortinas made another raid on Brownsville? the Indios Bravos harried Chihuahua? or had the silver “conduct” coming from the mines been robbed? “Nothing of this, but a voice ran (corria una voz) that the Apache infidels confined in the courtyard of the castle of Chapultepec had broken loose. Eight of them, six warriors, a woman and a boy, had slipped their fetters, murdered two of the guard, and were supposed to be somewhere not far from Tula, and, as he thought, making for the Bolson de Mapimi, the deserts of the Rio Gila, or the recesses of the mountains of the Santa Rosa range.”
Needless to say this put all in the meson almost beside themselves; for the terror that the Indians inspired was at that time so real, that had the eight forlorn and helpless infidels appeared I verily believe they would have killed us all. Not that we were not brave, well armed—in fact, all loaded down with arms, carrying rifles and pistols, swords stuck between our saddle-girths, and generally so fortified as to resemble walking arsenals. But valour is a thing of pure convention, and these men who would have fought like lions against marauders of their own race, scarce slept that night for thinking on the dangers which they ran by the reported presence of those six naked men. The night passed by without alarm, as was to be expected, seeingthat the courtyard wall of the meson was at least ten feet high, and the gate solid “ahuehuete” clamped with iron, and padlocked like a jail. At the first dawn, or rather at the first false dawn, when the fallacious streaks of pink flash in the sky and fade again to night, all were afoot. Horsemen rode out, sitting erect in their peaked saddles, toes stuck out and thrust into their curiously stamped toe-leathers; their “chaparreras” giving to their legs a look of being cased in armour, their “poblano” hats, with bands of silver or of tinsel, balanced like halos on their heads.
Long trains of donkeys, driven by Indians dressed in leather, and bareheaded, after the fashion of their ancestors, crawled through the gate laden with “pulque,” and now and then a single Indian followed by his wife set off on foot, carrying a crate of earthenware by a broad strap depending from his head. Our caravan, consisting of six two-wheeled mule-carts, drawn by a team of six or sometimes eight gaily-harnessed mules, and covered with a tilt made from the “istle,” creaked through the gate. The great meson remained deserted, and by degrees, as a ship leaves the coast, we struck into the wild and stony desert country, which, covered with a whitish dust of alkali, makes Tula an oasis; then the great church sank low, and the tall palm-trees seemed to grow shorter; lastly church, palms and towers, and the green fields planted with aloes, blended together andsank out of sight, a faint white misty spot marking their whereabouts, till at last it too faded and melted into the level plain.
Travellers in a perpetual stream we met journeying to Mexico, and every now and then passed a straw-thatched “jacal,” where women sat selling “atole,” that is a kind of stirabout of pine-nut meal and milk, and dishes seasoned hot with red pepper, with “tortillas” made on the “metate” of the Aztecs, to serve as bread and spoons. The infidels, it seemed, had got ahead of us, and when we slept had been descried making towards the north; two of them armed with bows which they had roughly made with sticks, the string twisted out of “istle,” and the rest with clubs, and what astonished me most was that behind them trotted a white dog. Outside San Juan del Rio, which we reached upon the second day, it seemed that in the night the homing Mescaleros had stolen a horse, and two of them mounting upon him had ridden off, leaving the rest of the forlorn and miserable band behind. How they had lived so far in the scorched alkali-covered plains, how they managed to conceal themselves by day, or how they steered by night, no one could tell; for the interior Mexican knows nothing of the desert craft, and has no idea that there is always food of some kind for an Apache, either by digging roots, snaring small animals, or at the last resort by catching locusts or any other insect he can find. Nothing so easy as to concealthemselves; for amongst grass eight or nine inches high, they drop, and in an instant, even as you look, are lost to sight, and if hard pressed sometimes escape attention by standing in a cactus grove, and stretching out their arms, look so exactly like the plant that you may pass close to them and be unaware, till their bow twangs, and an obsidian-headed arrow whistles through the air.
Our caravan rested a day outside San Juan del Rio to shoe the mules, repair the harness, and for the muleteers to go to mass or visit the “poblana” girls, who with flowers in their hair leaned out of every balcony of the half-Spanish, half-Oriental-looking town, according to their taste. Not that the halt lost time, for travellers all know that “to hear mass and to give barley to your beasts loses no tittle of the day.”
San Juan, the river almost dry, and trickling thirstily under its red stone bridges; the fields of aloes, the poplars, and the stunted palms; its winding street in which the houses, overhanging, almost touch; its population, which seemed to pass their time lounging wrapped in striped blankets up against the walls, was left behind. The pulque-aloes and the sugar-canes grew scarcer, the road more desolate as we emerged into the “terra fria” of the central plain, and all the time the Sierra Madre, jagged and menacing, towered in the west. In my mind’s eye I saw the Mescaleros trotting like wolves all through the night along its base,sleeping by day in holes, killing a sheep or goat when chance occurred, and following one another silent and stoical in their tramp towards the north.
Days followed days as in a ship at sea; the waggons rolling on across the plains; and I jogging upon my horse, half sleeping in the sun, or stretched at night half dozing on a tilt, almost lost count of time. Somewhere between San Juan del Rio and San Luis Potosi we learned two of the Indians had been killed, but that the four remaining were still pushing onward, and in a little while we met a body of armed men carrying two ghastly heads tied by their scalp-locks to the saddle-bow. Much did the slayers vaunt their prowess; telling how in a wood at break of day they had fallen in with all the Indians seated round a fire, and that whilst the rest fled, two had sprung on them, as they said, “after the fashion of wild beasts, armed one with a stick, and the other with a stone, and by God’s grace,” and here the leader crossed himself, “their aim had been successful, and the two sons of dogs had fallen, but most unfortunately the rest during the fight had managed to escape.”
San Luis Potosi, the rainless city, once world-renowned for wealth, and even now full of fine buildings, churches and palaces, and with a swarming population of white-clothed Indians squatting to sell their trumpery in the great market-square, loomed up amongst its fringe of gardens, irrigated lands, its groves of pepper-trees, its palms, itswealth of flowering shrubs; its great white domes, giving an air of Bagdad or of Fez, shone in the distance, then grew nearer, and at last swallowed us up, as wearily we passed through the outskirts of the town, and halted underneath the walls.
The city, then an oasis in the vast plateau of Anáhuac (now but a station on a railway-line), a city of enormous distances, of gurgling water led in stucco channels by the side of every street, of long expanses of “adobe” walls, of immense plazas, of churches and of bells, of countless convents; hedged in by mountains to the west, mouth of the “tierra caliente” to the east, and to the north the stopping-place for the long trains of waggons carrying cotton from the States; wrapped in a mist as of the Middle Ages, lay sleeping in the sun. On every side the plain lapped like an ocean, and the green vegetation round the town stopped so abruptly that you could step almost at once from fertile meadows into a waste of whitish alkali.
Above the town, in a foothill of the Sierra Madre about three leagues away, is situated the “Enchanted City,” never yet fouled by the foot of man, but yet existent, and believed in by all those who follow that best part of history, the traditions which have come down to us from the times when men were wise, and when imagination governed judgment, as it should do to-day, being the noblest faculty of the human mind. Either want of time, or that belittling education from which few canescape, prevented me from visiting the place. Yet I still think if rightly sought the city will be found, and I feel sure the Mescaleros passed the night not far from it, and perhaps looking down upon San Luis Potosi cursed it, after the fashion that the animals may curse mankind for its injustice to them.
Tired of its squares, its long dark streets, its hum of people; and possessed perhaps with that nostalgia of the desert which comes so soon to all who once have felt its charm when cooped in bricks, we set our faces northward about an hour before the day, passed through the gates and rolled into the plains. The mules well rested shook their bells, the leagues soon dropped behind, the muleteers singing “La Pasadita,” or an interminable song about a “Gachupin”[131]who loved a nun.
The Mescaleros had escaped our thoughts—that is, the muleteers thought nothing of them; but I followed their every step, saw them crouched round their little fire, roasting the roots of wild “mescal”; marked them upon the march in single file, their eyes fixed on the plain, watchful and silent as they were phantoms gliding to the north.
Crossing a sandy tract, the Capataz, who had long lived in the “Pimeria Alta,” and amongst the Maricopas on the Gila, drew up his horse andpointing to the ground said, “Viva Mexico!—look at these footmarks in the sand. They are the infidels; see where the men have trod; here is the woman’s print and this the boy’s. Look how their toes are all turned in, unlike the tracks of Christians. This trail is a day old, and yet how fresh! See where the boy has stumbled—thanks to the Blessed Virgin they must all be tired, and praise to God will die upon the road, either by hunger or some Christian hand.” All that he spoke of was no doubt visible to him, but through my want of faith, or perhaps lack of experience, I saw but a faint trace of naked footsteps in the sand. Such as they were, they seemed the shadow of a ghost, unstable and unreal, and struck me after the fashion that it strikes one when a man holds up a cane and tells you gravely, without a glimmering of the strangeness of the fact, that it came from Japan, actually grew there, and had leaves and roots, and was as little thought of as a mere ash-plant growing in a copse.
At an “hacienda” upon the road, just where the trail leads off upon one hand to Matehuala, and on the other to Rio Verde, and the hot countries of the coast, we stopped to pass the hottest hours in sleep. All was excitement; men came in, their horses flecked with foam; others were mounting, and all armed to the teeth, as if the Yankees had crossed the Rio Grande, and were marching on the place. “Los Indios! si, señor,” they had beenseen, only last night, but such the valour of the people of the place, they had passed on doing no further damage than to kill a lamb. No chance of sleep in such a turmoil of alarm; each man had his own plan, all talked at once, most of them were half drunk, and when our Capataz asked dryly if they had thought of following the trail, a silence fell on all. By this time, owing to the horsemen galloping about, the trail was cut on every side, and to have followed it would have tried the skill of an Apache tracker; but just then upon the plain a cloud of dust was seen. Nearer it came, and then out of the midst of it horses appeared, arms flashed, and when nearing the place five or six men galloped up to the walls, and stopped their horses with a jerk. “What news? have you seen anything of the Apaches?” and the chief rider of the gallant band, getting off slowly, and fastening up his horse, said, with an air of dignity, “At the ‘encrucijada,’ four leagues along the road, you will find one of them. We came upon him sitting on a stone, too tired to move, called on him to surrender, but Indians have no sense, so he came at us tired as he was, and we, being valiant, fired, and he fell dead. Then, that the law should be made manifest to all, we hung his body by the feet to a huisaché tree.” Then compliments broke out and “Viva los valientes!” “Viva Mexico!” “Mueran los Indios salvajes!” and much of the same sort, whilst the five valiant men modestly took a drink, sayingbut little, for true courage does not show itself in talk.
Leaving the noisy crew drinking confusion to their enemies, we rolled into the plain. Four dusty leagues, and the huisaché tree growing by four cross trails came into sight. We neared it, and to a branch, naked except his breech-clout, covered with bullet-wounds, we saw the Indian hang. Half-starved he looked, and so reduced that from the bullet-holes but little blood had run; his feet were bloody, and his face hanging an inch or two above the ground distorted; flies buzzed about him, and in the sky a faint black line on the horizon showed that the vultures had already scented food.
We left the nameless warrior hanging on his tree, and took our way across the plain, well pleased both with the “valour” of his slayers and the position of affairs in general in the world at large. Right up and down the Rio Grande on both sides for almost a thousand miles the lonely cross upon some river-side, near to some thicket, or out in the wide plain, most generally is lettered “Killed by the Apaches,” and in the game they played so long, and still held trumps in at the time I write of, they, too, paid for all errors, in their play, by death. But still it seemed a pity, savage as they were, that so much cunning, such stoical indifference to both death and life, should always finish as the warrior whom I saw hang by the feet from thehuisaché, just where the road to Matehuala bifurcates, and the trail breaks off to El Jarral. And so we took our road, passed La Parida, Matehuala, El Catorce, and still the sterile plateau spread out like a vast sea, the sparse and stunted bushes in the constant mirage looming at times like trees, at others seeming just to float above the sand; and as we rolled along, the mules struggling and straining in the whitish dust, we seemed to lose all trace of the Apaches; and at the lone hacienda or rare villages no one had heard of them, and the mysterious hegira of the party, now reduced to three, left no more traces of its passing than water which has closed upon the passage of a fish.
Gomez Farias, Parras, El Llano de la Guerra, we passed alternately, and at length Saltillo came in sight, its towers standing up upon the plain after the fashion of a lighthouse in the sea; the bull-ring built under the Viceroys looking like a fort; and then the plateau of Anáhuac finished abruptly, and from the ramparts of the willow-shaded town the great green plains stretched out towards Texas in a vast panorama; whilst upon the west in the dim distance frowned the serrated mountains of Santa Rosa, and further still the impenetrable fastnesses of the Bolson de Mapimi.
Next day we took the road for Monterey, descending in a day by the rough path known as “la cuesta de los fierros,” from the cold plateau to a land of palms, of cultivation, orange-groves, offruit-trees, olive-gardens, a balmy air filled with the noise of running waters; and passing underneath the Cerro de la Silla which dominates the town, slept peacefully far from all thoughts of Indians and of perils of the road, in the great caravansary which at that time was the chief glory of the town of Monterey. The city with its shady streets, its alameda planted with palm-trees, and its plaza all decorated with stuccoed plaster seats painted pale pink, and upon which during both day and night half of the population seemed to lounge, lay baking in the sun.
Great teams of waggons driven by Texans creaked through the streets, the drivers dressed in a “défroque” of old town clothes, often a worn frock-coat and rusty trousers stuffed into cowboy boots, the whole crowned with an ignominious battered hat, and looking, as the Mexicans observed, like “pantomimas, que salen en las fiestas.” Mexicans from down the coast, from Tamaulipas, Tuxpan, Vera Cruz and Guatzecoalcos ambled along on horses all ablaze with silver; and to complete the picture, a tribe of Indians, the Kickopoos, who had migrated from the north, and who occasionally rode through the town in single file, their rifles in their hands, and looking at the shops half longingly, half frightened, passed along without a word.
But all the varied peoples, the curious half-wild, half-patriarchal life, the fruits and flowers, thestrangeness of the place, could not divert my thoughts from the three lone pathetic figures, followed by their dog, which in my mind’s eye I saw making northward, as a wild goose finds its path in spring, leaving no traces of its passage by the way. I wondered what they thought of, how they looked upon the world, if they respected all they saw of civilized communities upon their way, or whether they pursued their journey like a horse let loose returning to his birthplace, anxious alone about arriving at the goal. So Monterey became a memory; the Cerro de la Silla last vanishing, when full five leagues upon the road. The dusty plains all white with alkali, the grey-green sage-bushes, the salt and crystal-looking rivers, the Indians bending under burdens, and the women sitting at the cross roads selling tortillas—all now had changed. Through oceans of tall grass, by muddy rivers in which alligators basked, by “bayous,” “resacas,” and by “bottoms” of alluvial soil, in which grew cotton-woods, black-jack, and post-oak, with gigantic willows; through countless herds of half-wild horses, lighting the landscape with their colours, and through a rolling prairie with vast horizons bounded by faint blue mountain chains, we took our way. Out of the thickets of “mezquite” wild boars peered upon the path; rattlesnakes sounded their note of warning or lay basking in the sun; at times an antelope bounded across our track, and the rare villages were fortifiedwith high mud walls, had gates, and sometimes drawbridges, for all the country we were passing through was subject to invasions of “los Indios Bravos,” and no one rode a mile without the chance of an attack. When travellers met they zigzagged to and fro like battleships in the old days striving to get the “weather gauge,” holding their horses tightly by the head, and interchanging salutations fifty yards away, though if they happened to be Texans and Mexicans they only glared, or perhaps yelled an obscenity at one another in their different tongues. Advertisements upon the trees informed the traveller that the place to stop at was the “Old Buffalo Camp” in San Antonio, setting forth its whisky, its perfect safety both for man and beast, and adding curtly it was only a short four hundred miles away. Here for the first time in our journey we sent out a rider about half-a-mile ahead to scan the route, ascend the little hills, keep a sharp eye on “Indian sign,” and give us warning by a timely shot, all to dismount, “corral” the waggons, and be prepared for an attack of Indians, or of the roaming bands of rascals who like pirates wandered on the plains. Dust made us anxious, and smoke ascending in the distance set us all wondering if it was Indians, or a shepherd’s fire; at halting time no one strayed far from camp, and we sat eating with our rifles by our sides, whilst men on horseback rode round the mules, keeping them well in sight, as shepherds watch their sheep.About two leagues from Juarez a traveller bloody with spurring passed us carrying something in his hand; he stopped and held out a long arrow with an obsidian head, painted in various colours, and feathered in a peculiar way. A consultation found it to be “Apache,” and the man galloped on to take it to the governor of the place to tell him Indians were about, or, as he shouted (following the old Spanish catchword), “there were Moors upon the coast.”
Juarez we slept at, quite secure within the walls; started at daybreak, crossing the swiftly-running river just outside the town, at the first streak of light; journeyed all day, still hearing nothing of the retreating Mescaleros, and before evening reached Las Navas, which we found astir, all lighted up, and knots of people talking excitedly, whilst in the plaza the whole population seemed to be afoot. At the long wooden tables set about with lights, where in a Mexican town at sundown an al fresco meal of kid stewed in red pepper, “tamales” and “tortillas,” is always laid, the talk was furious, and each man gave his opinion at the same time, after the fashion of the Russian Mir, or as it may be that we shall yet see done during debates in Parliament, so that all men may have a chance to speak, and yet escape the ignominy of their words being caught, set down, and used against them, after the present plan. The Mescaleros had been seen passing about a league outsidethe town. A shepherd lying hidden, watching his sheep, armed with a rifle, had spied them, and reported that they had passed close to him; the woman coming last and carrying in her arms a little dog; and he “thanked God and all His holy saints who had miraculously preserved his life.” After the shepherd’s story, in the afternoon firing had been distinctly heard towards the small rancho of Las Crucecitas, which lay about three leagues further on upon the road. All night the din of talk went on, and in the morning when we started on our way, full half the population went with us to the gate, all giving good advice; to keep a good look-out, if we saw dust to be certain it was Indians driving the horses stolen from Las Crucecitas, then to get off at once, corral the waggons, and above all to put our trust in God. This we agreed to do, but wondered why out of so many valiant men not one of them proffered assistance, or volunteered to mount his horse and ride with us along the dangerous way.
The road led upwards towards some foothills, set about with scrubby palms; not fifteen miles away rose the dark mountains of the Santa Rosa chain, and on a little hill the rancho stood, flat-roofed and white, and seemingly not more than a short league away, so clear the light, and so immense the scale of everything upon the rolling plain. I knew that in the mountains the three Indians were safe, as the whole range was Indian territory; and as Isaw them struggling up the slopes, the little dog following them footsore, hanging down its head, or carried as the shepherd said in the “she-devil’s” arms, I wished them luck after their hegira, planned with such courage, carried out so well, had ended, and they were back again amongst the tribe.
Just outside Crucecitas we met a Texan who, as he told us, owned the place, and lived in “kornkewbinage with a native gal,” called, as he said, “Pastory,” who it appeared of all the females he had ever met was the best hand to bake “tortillers,” and whom, had she not been a Catholic, he would have made his wife. All this without a question on our part, and sitting sideways on his horse, scanning the country from the corner of his eye. He told us that he had “had right smart of an Indian trouble here yesterday just about afternoon. Me and my ‘vaquerys’ were around looking for an estray horse, just six of us, when close to the ranch we popped kermash right upon three red devils, and opened fire at once. I hed a Winchester, and at the first fire tumbled the buck; he fell right in his tracks, and jest as I was taking off his scalp, I’m doggoned if the squaw and the young devil didn’t come at us jest like grizzly bars. Wal, yes, killed ’em, o’ course, and anyhow the young ’un would have growed up; but the squaw I’me sort of sorry about. I never could bear to kill asquaw, though I’ve often seen it done. Naow here’s the all-firedest thing yer ever heard; jes’ as I was turning the bodies over with my foot a little Indian dog flies at us like a ‘painter,’ the varmint, the condemndest little buffler I ever struck. I was for shootin’ him, but ‘Pastory’—that’s my ‘kornkewbyne’—she up and says it was a shame. Wal, we had to bury them, for dead Injun stinks worst than turkey-buzzard, and the dodgasted little dog is sitting on the grave, ’pears like he’s froze, leastwise he hastn’t moved since sun-up, when we planted the whole crew.”
Under a palm-tree not far from the house the Indians’ grave was dug, upon it, wretched and draggled, sat the little dog. “Pastory” tried to catch it all day long, being kind-hearted though a “kornkewbyne”; but, failing, said “God was not willing,” and retired into the house. The hours seemed days in the accursed place till the sun rose, gilding the unreached Santa Rosa mountains, and bringing joy into the world. We harnessed up the mules, and started silently out on the lonely road; turning, I checked my horse, and began moralizing on all kinds of things; upon tenacity of purpose, the futility of life, and the inexorable fate which mocks mankind, making all effort useless, whilst still urging us to strive. Then the grass rustled, and across an open space a small white object trotted, looking furtively around, threwup its head and howled, ran to and fro as if it sought for something, howled dismally again, and after scratching in the ground, squatted dejectedly on the fresh-turned-up earth which marked the Indians’ grave.
Religiouspersecution with isolation from the world, complete as if the Lebanon were an atoll island in the Paumotus group; a thousand years of slavery, and centuries innumerable of traditions of a proud past, the whole well filtered through the curriculum of an American missionary college, had made Maron Mohanna the strange compound that he was. Summer and winter dressed in a greasy black frock-coat, hat tilted on his head, as if it had been a fez; dilapidated white-topped mother-of-pearl bebuttoned boots, a shirt which seemed to come as dirty from the wash as it went there; his shoulders sloping and his back bent in a perpetual squirm, Mohanna shuffled through the world with the exterior of a pimp, but yet with certain aspirations towards a wild life which seldom are entirely absent from any member of the Arab race. So in his village of the Lebanon he grew to man’s estate, and drifted after the fashion of his countrymen into a precarious business in the East. Half proxenete, half dragoman, servile to all above him and civil for prudence’ sake to all below, he passed through the various degrees of hotel tout, seller ofcigarettes, and guide to the antiquities of whatever town he happened to reside in, to the full glory of a shop in which he sold embroideries, attar of roses, embroidered slippers and all the varied trash which tourists buy in the bazaars of the Levant. But all the time, and whilst he studied French and English with a view to self-advancement, the ancient glories of the Arab race were always in his mind. Himself a Christian of the Christians, reared in that hotbed of theology the Lebanon, where all the creeds mutually show their hatred of each other, and display themselves in their most odious aspects; and whilst hating the Mohammedans as a first principle of his belief, he found himself mysteriously attracted to their creed. Not that his reason was seduced by the teachings of the Koran, but that somehow the stately folly of the whole scheme of life evolved by the ex-camel-driver appealed to him, as it has oftentimes appealed to stronger minds than his. The call to prayers, the half-contemplative, half-militant existence led by Mohammedans; the immense simplicity of their hegemony; the idea of a not impossible one God, beyond men’s ken, looking down frostily through the stars upon the plains, a Being to be evoked without much hope of being influenced, took hold of him and set him thinking whether all members of the Arab race ought not to hold one faith. And in addition to his speculations upon faith and race, vaguely at times it crossed his mind, as Ibelieve it often crosses the minds of almost every Arab (and Syrians not a few), “If all else fail, I can retire into the desert, join the tribes and pass a pleasant life, sure of a wife or two, a horse, a lance, a long flint gun, a bowl of camel’s milk, and a black tent in which to rest at night.”
Little indeed are the chances of a young educated Syrian to make his living in the Lebanon. A certain modicum of the young men is always absorbed into the ranks of the various true faiths which send out missionaries to convert Arab-speaking races, and those so absorbed generally pass their lives preaching shamefacedly that which they partially believe, to those whose faith is fixed. Others again gravitate naturally to Cairo to seek for Government employment, or to write in the Arabic press, taking sides for England or for France, as the editors of the opposing papers make it worth their while. But the great bulk of the intellectual Syrian proletariat emigrates to New York and there lives in a quarter by itself, engaging in all kinds of little industries, dealing in Oriental curiosities, or publishing newspapers in the Arab tongue. There they pass much of their time lounging at their shop-doors with slippers down at heel, in smoking cigarettes, in drinking arrack, and in speculating when their native country shall be free.
To none of these well-recognized careers did Maron Mohanna feel himself impelled. Soon tiring of his shop he went to Egypt, worked on anewspaper, and then became a teacher of Arabic to Europeans; was taken by one of them to London, where he passed some years earning a threadbare livelihood by translating Arabic documents and writing for the press. When out of work he tramped about the streets to cheat his hunger, and if in funds frequented music-halls, and lavished his hard-earned money on the houris who frequent such places, describing them as “fine and tall, too fond of drink, and perhaps colder in the blood than are the women of the East.” Not often did his fortunes permit him such extravagances, and he began to pass his life hanging about the City in the wake of the impossible gang of small company-promoters, who in the purlieus of the financial world weave shoddy Utopias, and are the cause of much vain labour to postmen and some annoyance to the public, but who as far as I can see live chiefly upon hope deferred, for their prospectuses seem to be generally cast into the basket, from which no share list ever has returned. But in the darkest of poor Maron Mohanna’s blackest days, his dreams about the Arab race never forsook him, and he studied much to master all the subtleties of his native tongue, talking with Arabs, Easterns, Persians, and the like in the lunch-room of the British Museum, where scholars of all nations, blear-eyed and bent, eat sawdust sandwiches and drink lemonade, whilst wearing out their eyes and lives for pittances which a dock labourer wouldturn from in disgust. Much did the shivering Easterns confabulate, much did they talk of grammar, of niceties of diction, much did they dispute, often they talked of women, sometimes of horses, for on both all Easterns, no matter how they pass their lives, have much to say, and what they say is often worth attention, for in both matters their ancestors were learned when ours rode shaggy ponies, and their one miserable wife wrestled with fifteen fair-haired children in the damp forests where the Briton was evolved. How long Maron Mohanna dwelt in London is matter of uncertainty, to what abyss of poverty he fell, or if in the worst times he tramped the Embankment, sleeping on a bench and dreaming ever of the future of the Arab race, is not set down. The next act of his life finds him the trusted manager of the West African Company at Cape Juby. There he enjoyed a salary duly paid every quarter, and was treated with much deference by the employees as being the only man the company employed who could speak Arabic. Report avers he had embraced either the Wesleyan or the Baptist faith, as the chief shareholders of the affair were Nonconformists, whose ancestors having (as they alleged) enjoyed much persecution for their faith, were well resolved that every one who came within their power should outwardly, at least, conform to their own tenets in dogma and church government.
Established at Cape Juby, Maron Mohanna forthe first time enjoyed consideration, and for a while the world went well with him. He duly wrote reports, inspected goods, watched the arrival of theSahara, the schooner which came once a month from Lanzarote, and generally endeavoured to discharge the duties of a manager, with some success. The chiefs Mohammed-wold-el-Biruc and Bu-Dabous, with others from the far-distant districts of El Juf, El Hodh, and from Tishit, all flattered him, offering him women from their various tribes and telling him that he too was of their blood. So by degrees either the affinity of race, the community of language or the provoking commonness of his European comrades, drew him to seek his most congenial friends amongst the natives of the place. Then came the woman: the woman who always creeps into the life of man as the snake crept into the garden by the Euphrates; and Mohanna knowing that by so doing he forfeited all chance of his career, gave up his post, married an Arab girl, and became a desert Arab, living on dates and camel’s milk in the black Bedouin tents. Children he had, to whom, though desert-born, he gave the names of Christians, feeling perhaps the nostalgia of civilization in the wilds, as he had felt before the nostalgia of the desert, in his blood. And living in the desert with his hair grown long, dressed in the blue “baft” clothes, a spear in his hand and shod with sandals, he yet looked like a European clerk in masquerade.
The bushy plains stretched like an ocean towards the mysterious regions of El Juf and Timbuctoo, Wadan, Tijigja, Atar and Shingiet, and the wild steppes where the Tuaregs veiled to the eyes roam as they roamed before they hastened to the call of Jusuf-ibn Tachfin to invade El Andalos and lose the battle at Las Navas de Tolosa: the battle where San Isidro in a shepherd’s guise guided the Christian host. Men came and went, on camels, horses, donkeys and on foot; all armed, all beggars, from the rich chief to the poorest horseman of the tribe; and yet all dignified, draped in their fluttering rags, and looking more like men than those whom eighteen centuries of civilization and of trade have turned to apes. Men fought, careering on their horses on the sand, firing their guns and circling round like gulls, shouting their battle-cries; men prayed, turning to Mecca at the appointed hours; men sat for hours half in a dream thinking of much or nothing, who can say; whilst women in the tents milked camels, wove the curious geometric-patterned carpets which they use, and children grew up straight, active and as fleet of foot as roe.
Inside the factory the European clerks smoked, drank, and played at cards: they learned no Arabic, for why should those who speak bad English struggle with other tongues? Meanwhile the time slipped past, leaving as little trace as does a jackal when on a windy day he sneaks across the sand. Only Maron Mohanna seemed to have no place in thedesert world which he had dreamed of as a boy; and in the world of Europe typified by the factory on the beach his place was lost. On marrying he had, of course, abjured the faith implanted in him in the Lebanon, and yet though now one of the “faithful” he found no resting-place. Neither of the two contending faiths had sunk much into his soul, but still at times he saw that the best part of any faith is but the life it brings. For him, though he had dreamed of it, the wild desert life held little charm; horses he loathed, suffering acutely when on their backs, and roaming after chance gazelles or ostriches with the horsemen of the tribe did not amuse him; but though too proud to change his faith again, at times he caught himself longing for his once-loathed shop in the Levant. So that clandestinely he grew to haunt the factory and the fort, as before, in secret, he had hung round the straw-thatched mosque, and loitered in the tents. His one amusement was to practise with a pistol at a mark, and by degrees he taught his wife to shoot, till she became a marksman able to throw an orange in the air and hit it with a pistol bullet three times out of five. But even pistol-shooting palled on his soul at last, and he grew desperate, not being allowed to leave the tribe or go into the fort except in company with others, and keenly watched as those who change their faith and turn Mohammedans are ever watched amongst the Arab race. But in his darkest hour fate smiled upon him, andthe head chief wanting an agent in the islands sent him to Lanzarote, and in the little town of Arrecife it seemed to him that he had found a resting-place at last. Once more he dressed himself in European clothes, he handled goods, saw now and then a Spanish newspaper a fortnight old; talked much of politics, lounged in the Alameda, and was the subject of much curiosity amongst the simple dwellers in the little town. Some said he had denied his God amongst the heathen; others again that he suffered much for conscience’ sake; whilst he attended mass occasionally, going with a sense of doing something wrong, and feeling more enjoyment in the service than in the days of his belief. His wife dressed in the Spanish fashion, wore a mantilla, sometimes indeed a hat, and looked not much unlike an island woman, and was believed by all to have thrown off the errors of her faith and come into the fold.
But notwithstanding all the amenities of the island life, the unlimited opportunities for endless talk (so dear to Syrians), the half-malignant pleasure he experienced in dressing up his wife in Christian guise, sending for monstrous hats bedecked with paroquets from Cadiz, and gowns of the impossible shades of apple-green and yellow which in those days were sent from Paris to Spain and to her colonies, he yet was dull. And curiously enough, now that he was a double renegade his youthful dreams haunted him once again. He saw himself(in his mind’s eye) mounted upon his horse, flying across the sands, and stealthily and half ashamed he used to dress himself in the Arab clothes and sit for hours studying the Koran, not that he believed its teachings, but that the phraseology enchanted him, as it has always, both in the present and the past, bewitched all Arabs, and perhaps in his case it spoke to him of the illusory content which in the desert life he sought, but had not found.
He read the “Tarik-es-Sudan,” and learned that Allah marks even the lives of locusts, and that a single pearl does not remain on earth by him unweighed. The Djana of Essoyuti, El Ibtihaj, and the scarce “Choice of Marvels” written in far Mossul by the learned Abu Abdallah ibn Abderrahim (he of Granada in the Andalos), he read; and as he read his love renewed itself for the old race whose blood ran in his veins. He read and dreamed, and twice a renegade in practice, yet remained a true believer in the aspirations of his youth. He sailed in schooners, running from island port to island port down the trade winds; landed at little towns, and hardly marked the people in the rocky streets, Spanish in language, and in type quite Guanche, and but a step more civilized than the wild tribesmen from the coast that he had left. Then thinking maybe of his sojourn in London, and its music-halls, frequented uninterestedly the house of Rita, Rita la Jerezana; sat in the courtyard under the fig-tree with its trunk coated withwhite-wash, and listened to the “Cante Hondo,” saw the girls dance Sevillanas; and drinking zarzaparilla syrup, learned that of all the countries in the world Spain is the richest, for there even the “women of the life” cast their accounts in ounces.
Then growing weary of their chatter and their tales of woe, each one of them being, according to herself, fallen from some high estate, he wandered to the convent of the Franciscan friars. They saw a convert in him, and put out all their theologic powers; displayed, as they know how, the human aspect of their faith, keeping the dogma out of sight; for well they knew, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any man, if the fires of hell are to be clearly seen. Long hours Mohanna talked with them, enjoying argument for its own sake after the Scottish and the Eastern way; the friars were mystified at the small progress that they made, but said the renegade spoke “as he had a nest of nightingales all singing in his mouth.” And all the time his wife, an Arab of the Arabs, sighed for the desert, in her Spanish clothes. The “Velo de toalla” and the high-heeled shoes, the pomps and miseries of stays, and all the circumstance and starch of European dress, did not console her for the loss of the black tents, the familiar camels kneeling in the sand, the goats skipping about the “sudra” bushes; and the church bells made her but long more keenly for the call to prayers, rising at evening from the straw-thatched mosque. Herchildren, left with the tribe, called to her from the desert, and she too found neither resting-place nor rest in the quiet island life.
At last Maron Mohanna turned again to trade, and entered into partnership with one Benito Florez; bought a schooner, and came and went between the islands and the coast. All things went well with him, and in the little island town “el renegado” rose to be quite a prosperous citizen, till on a day he and his partner quarrelled and went to law. The law in every country favours a man born in the land against a foreigner; and the partnership broke up, leaving Mohanna almost penniless. Whether one of those sudden furies which possess the Arabs, turning them in a moment and without warning from sedate well-mannered men to raving maniacs frothing at the mouth, came over him, he never told; but what is certain is that, having failed to slay his partner, he with his wife went off by night to where his schooner lay, and instantly induced his men to put to sea, and sailed towards the coast. Mohanna drew a perhaps judicious veil of mystery over what happened on his arrival at the inlet where his wife’s tribe happened to be encamped. One of the islanders either objecting to the looting of the schooner upon principle, or perhaps because his share of loot was insufficient, got himself killed; but what is a “Charuta” more or less, except perhaps to his wife and family in Arrecife or in some little dusty townin Pico or Gomera? Those who assented or were too frightened to protest found themselves unmolested, and at liberty to take the schooner back. Maron Mohanna and his wife, taking the boat rowed by some Arabs, made for the shore, and what ensued he subsequently related to a friend.
“When we get near the shore my wife she throw her hat.” One sees the hideous Cadiz hat floating upon the surf, draggled and miserable, and its bunch of artificial fruit, of flowers or feathers, bobbing about upon the backwash of the waves. “She throw her boots, and then she take off all her clothes I got from Seville, cost me more than a hundred ‘real’; she throw her parasol, and it float in the water like a buoy, and make me mad. I pay more than ten real for it. After all things was gone she wrap herself in Arab sheet and step ashore just like an Arab girl, and all the clothes I brought from Cadiz, cost more than a hundred real, all was lost.” What happened after their landing is matter of uncertainty. Whether Mohanna found his children growing up semi-savages, whether his wife having thus sacrificed to the Graces, and made a holocaust of all her Cadiz clothes, regretted them, and sitting by the beach fished for them sadly with a cane, no man can tell.
Years passed away, and a certain English consul in Morocco travelling to the Court stopped at a little town. Rivers had risen, tribes had cut the road, our Lord the Sultan with his camp was on ajourney and had eaten up the food upon the usual road, or some one or another of the incidents of flood or field which render travel in Morocco interesting had happened. The town lay off the beaten track close to the territory of a half-wild tribe. Therefore upon arrival at the place the consul found himself received with scowling looks; no one proceeded to hostilities, but he remained within his tent, unvisited but by a soldier sent from the Governor to ask whether the Kaffir, son of a Kaffir, wished for anything. People sat staring at him, motionless except their eyes; children holding each other’s hands stood at a safe distance from his tent, and stared for hours at him, and he remarked the place where he was asked to camp was near a mound which from time immemorial seemed to have been the common dunghill of the town. The night passed miserably, the guards sent by the Governor shouting aloud at intervals to show their vigilance, banished all chance of sleep.
Cursing the place, at break of day the consul struck his camp, mounted his horse, and started, leaving the sullen little town all wrapped in sleep. But as he jogged along disconsolately behind his mules, passing an angle of the “Kasbah” wall, a figure, rising as it seemed out of the dunghill’s depths, advanced and stood before him in the middle of the way. Its hair was long and matted and its beard ropy and grizzled, and for sole covering it had a sack tied round its waist with a stringof camel’s hair; and as the consul feeling in his purse was just about, in the English fashion, to bestow his alms to rid himself of trouble, it addressed him in his native tongue. “Good-morning, consul, how goes the world with you? You’re the first Christian I have seen for years. My name was once Mohanna, now I am Sidi bu Zibbala, the Father of the Dunghill. Your poet Shakespeare say that all the world’s a stage, but he was Englishman. I, Syrian, I say all the world dunghill. I try him, Syria, England, the Desert, and New York; I find him dung, so I come here and live here on this dunghill, and find it sweet when compared to places I have seen; and it is warm and dry.”
He ceased; and then the consul, feeling his words an outrage upon progress and on his official status, muttered “Queer kind of fish,” and jerking at his horse’s bridle, proceeded doggedly upon his way.