The Pipe of Zaidee
BY FRANK E. ANDERSON
“Mr. Lomax, seek your evening’s pleasure with me—”
At this unexpected sentence in English, addressed to him by name in Constantinople. Page Lomax wheeled sharply from the railing over which he had been watching the shadows of silver minarets dissolve like Cleopatra’s pearl in the Golden Horn, now amber as Rhine wine beneath the dying sun. By his elbow stood a Turk, whose snowy turban capped bold features from which only one eye glittered. A sabre scar, which ran across the man’s cheek until it lost itself in his flowing beard, accounted for the absence of the other. The fellow was of middle stature, but powerfully made. A loose caftan hanging from his broad shoulders framed within its folds of vermilion the white linen swathing his chest and the orange sash—whence the arabesqued head of a stiletto scolded at its neighbor, a Mussulman rosary of russet beads—and the green trousers of zouave cut stretching to his saffron half-boots. He extended a card, on which Page Lomax read:
THE BRISTOLBoulevard des Petit Champs,PERA.Hosein Aga, Chief Dragoman.
“My hotel!” Mr. Lomax commented. “I reckon you’re all right.”
So Mohammedan and Christian strode off together across the Sultana Bridge, of which the uneven timbers were creaking with each undulation of its ever-plashing pontoons. Except themselves, no living thing wason it other than gaunt dogs, which flashed snarling tusks at them as they groped through the gathering twilight. Near the shore Hosein whistled. Forthwith his negro bond-servant, Nakir, met them and bore a torch before them to the Theatre Osmaniyeh, where actresses from Paris were already in their final pirouettes. An infinite sadness possessed Page Lomax, as he beheld these daughters of Europe dancing before the sons of Asia, but his dragoman muttered:
“I brought you not hither to witness the antics of those painted harlots. My slave, Zaidee, will follow them.”
While Hosein was speaking, Nakir set on the stage a wicker basket, whence a brown and yellow cobra de capello wriggled forth. Hissing with wrath, it sat up on its tail and spread its hood, embroidered with the spectacles of Buddha. On its slender girth each false scale was gleaming, as the creature coiled and, opening its savage mouth, bared those bent fangs of which a mere scratch bestows that rest where no dreams lift the tent-flap. Then Zaidee appeared. Timing her pace to the weird tune throbbing from the reed between her lips, she neared the viper, which launched itself viciously at her. But an invisible force halted the snake. Falling in with the rhythm of her flute, it wavered to and fro—a flame flickering in the wind—until the damsel stilled her strains, when it lay quiet, so tamed that she wound it as a girdle round her waist.
“Her term of hire expires tonight,” quoth Hosein, “And I am about convoying her to my villa. Would you spend some time in the home of a Turk? Nakir, saddle Al Borak for Mr. Lomax.”
Enveloped in a cloak but with no veiling yashmak, Zaidee was on her palfry when they joined her. As Hosein turned to his own stirrup, the girl shook her raven tresses at the newcomer and pointed at the gate, with a gesture, which said: “Leave us!” He might have done so, had he not intercepted the look which Nakir was bending on the maiden, as, with a devilish grin, which distorted his sooty visage, he tapped the whip at his belt. That was enough for Page Lomax. With generous folly, he bestrode his horse for the adventure. On their arrival at the house, Zaidee disappeared behind that ebony door, through which no male other than Hosein might pass even in his thoughts. Again the bold young man was foolhardy, for he gazed after her as one in a dream, from which, however, he was roused by Nakir, who was striding toward him with an executioner’s bow-string in his hand. But here Hosein interposed.
“Put up your cord,” said he. “Mr. Lomax meant no offense. He is unfamiliar with our Eastern etiquette, that’s all. The Ethiop,” he continued, this time speaking to his guest, “shall guide you to your bed.”
The young man had fallen into a fitful doze, when he heard the pipe of Zaidee, followed by the rattle of small pebbles against his casement. An instant later, Nakir growled out hoarse words, which the listener could not understand. But the sound of heavy blows, under which Zaidee’s voice leapt into shrieks, then fell to sobs, needed no knowledge of a foreign tongue to be understood. Page Lomax rushed to the window. Jerking it open, he leaned out, but he could discern no one and the unbroken stillness seemed deathly to his overwrought nerves.
To his great relief, Hosein’s maid floated in before them at breakfast the next morning. She came to dance, while they ate, as the raiment which she wore showed but too plainly to even the inexperienced eye of the American. From beneath a veil of fleecy gauze, which floated back freely instead of hiding her face (as is the custom with Moslem women), her loose locks rolled their midnight over her shoulders. Her bell-shaped sleeves had wrinkled back from bare uplifted arms, on which silver chains were throbbing in unison with the rising and falling of her white bust, caught in the snare of the ample V in her tight scarlet jacket. Below that, a third of her supple figure’s living satin blushed in full sight above the dark-green band, which clasped in place her divided skirt of pearly transparent stuff shimmering down thence to her naked round ankles. For a brief space the girl drooped her head and Page Lomax saw red shame feeding on her white cheek, while up from the dark depths of her mysterious eyes bitter tears were welling. But now hidden music swelled into a loud insistent fugue. With a faint sigh, almost a sob, Zaidee drifted forward as slowly and as softly as a summer cloud thro’ picture after picture of that old, old pantomime of the Orient, which illustrates the one text, true in every creed, “Male and female created He them.” With all his heart uncovered in his gaze, the young man hung on her every motion until, with a brusque finale, she snapped in twain the thread of wedded harmony and movement with the whirling gesture of one hand pointed toward the threshold. Her agonized glance searched his very brain. Her writhing lips syllabled the word, “Depart!” Then she vanished.
To Hosein, this posturing to music was nothing new. With a strange and baffling smile, he had been scrutinizing Page Lomax, instead of Zaidee. Now he leaned toward him.
“Were I to judge you by your looks,” quoth he, “I would swear that my Persian hussy has cast a spell upon you. Well, you shall hear her story. Seven years ago we had a Holy War. I chanced to be at Khorsabad, while our Circassian troops were there, uprooting from the garden of the faith those weeds, the Yezidees. As I was nearing a cabin, out strode one of our men. He was a strapping fellow, with big black whiskers, and so tall that he had knocked awry his bearskin shako as he forgot to stoop in coming forth. One hand held his sword, smoking with blood. The other gripped Zaidee. Flinging her in front of me, he roared: ‘Will you buy? She’s yours for thirty liras. But I warn you—she’s the serpent-tamer’s daughter.’ Before I could answer, she was clinging to my knees, screaming: ‘Oh! save me, save me from that dreadful butcher!’ Well—I brought her home; but she’s but an ingrate. These seven seasons have I labored to convert her to God and His Prophet Mohammed, but I can not wean her from the faith of Zoroaster. So this week I shall sell her at public auction, if I am bid a thousand mejedieh for her. She’s worth that, if she’s worth a piastre.”
The last word had hardly left Hosein’s lip ere Page Lomax had whipped forth from his pocket his fountain-pen and traveler’s circular cheque-book and was writing rapidly. Through eyes narrowed to a contemptuous slit, the Turk watched his companion in silence, until the latter had laid the writing on his lap, when he said: “What’s this for?”
“The girl,” replied Page Lomax. “That’s the price you named. The Stamboul Branch of the Credit Lyonnaise will pay it to you in gold, when you present this to it.”
“Your swift Western way of trafficking is indeed bewildering to a slow Turk,” rejoined Hosein, in honeyed tones, which barely hid a bitter sneer. “Wewould have smoked our narghiles and drank coffee and chaffered for a week, while as for you—youfire a cheque at one, hair-trigger fashion. Nakir.” Here he turned to the sullen African, “Get that cashed. The jade goes with the American hence. But, ere you leave, Mr. Lomax. I must show you the most beautiful scene on earth, so they say—Constantinople from a distance. And my own poor fields have somewhat of charm, too, about them, I believe. Let me guide you through them. You shall witness things, which—being strange—perchance may thrill you as familiar sights can not. Nay, Nakir, there is no haste about the cheque. Tomorrow will do. Get you now to the harem and prepare Zaidee for her departure. Come, Mr. Lomax, we’ll fare forth.”
At a pavilion, which was perched on the wrinkled lip of an abyss—a sheer thousand feet in depth—the Turk paused and, with sweeping gesture, brought to the notice of Page Lomax’s eye a range of lofty mountains, which kissed the horizon at their left.
“There!” he exclaimed. “Are not those sublime? But they are deadly, too; for in them lurk huge spiders, as big as tigers and twice as fierce. You smile, as if in doubt. I do not blame you. Itishard to believe. But they are there. I am no zoologist, so I can not explain it, but I have been told that spiders came ages ahead of man on this earth, as their fossils are found in rock of the primary epoch, while we appear first with the quaternary. If this be so, perhaps these ogres are survivals of gigantic prehistoric spider forebears. But I don’t pretend to know anything about it, except that they are there. No hunter has ever tamed them; but I have caught and caged one. You shall see it, before you leave. Look now to the right.”
Afar off, yet perfectly plain in every line, thanks to the limpid clearness of the air, lying in the arms of emerald meadows with her head pillowed on undulating hills crowned with cypresses as brunette as the Queen of Sheba, lay Constantinople, many-colored yet shimmering iridescently under the sapphire tent of heaven, while the Golden Horn poured the waters of the East at her pearly feet. So noble was the sight that Page Lomax’s gaze lingered long upon it ere, following the sky-line, it rested at last on a frowning stronghold, whence a road wound down to a wharf at which a skiff was moored. So grim and threatening was this heap of stone that the young man asked Hosein:
“What is that old keep?”
“That,” replied his host, “I have named the Tower of Vengeance. During the late Muscovite war, my brother, Selim, held it as an outpost. But the boy’s soldiers were too few, our supporting column too far away. At dawn one day, the Russians hurled a regiment against it, stormed it, butchered its garrison, fired it. I was too late to save the boy, but I headed the cavalry, which cut off retreat for his murderers. As I charged in, their Colonel quenched this eye for me, but in ten minuteshe and all his followers were dead. Selim is buried there. Thither I repair each afternoon to lament and feed his grave.”
“To feed his grave?” echoed Page Lomax, inquiringly.
“Yes. In each believer’s tomb is bored a hole, through which he can hearken to the weeping of those who love him, and can receive food from them. The hour for my observance of that rite is nigh. Can you respect it? If so, you may accompany me thither.”
As the two paused before the door of the keep, Page Lomax glanced through the lattice across the vault to the wall on the other side. Through this, a postern gate opened, close to which he saw a prism-shaped mound, ending at head and foot in two marble posts on which—each opposing the other—the angels, Nekir and Munkir, will sit, as they debate whether the soul of Selim shall arise to heaven or descend to hell. Roses decked the hillock. In an orifice at its head, a yellow apple and a purple fig awaited the dead man’s appetite. But why was this grave fenced in with stout steel bars, set close together; and why was it screened overhead with them? Before the Christian had time to consider this problem till he might solve it, Hosein threw back the outside bar, which held the door to, and, whirling it round on its well-oiled hinges, exclaimed:
“To you, my guest, I yield first place. Enter!”
But when Page Lomax was crossing the sill, he felt himself gripped in a grasp of iron. His feet were knocked from under him with a swift and dexterous trip, and he fell heavily to the floor. Ere he could stagger up, dazed as he was, clang went the portal. He was a prisoner, with Hosein glaring at him through the grating.
“Pray to your Nazarene now and see if he can help you,” chuckled his jailer. “Not even Mohammed himself could help you now. I vowed to sacrifice a hecatomb of unbelievers to my brother. Ninety and nine have already tapped at his tomb. You will make the hundredth victim.”
The young man was a sinewy six-footer, robust and brave; but the boding indefiniteness of this threat so overwhelmed him that his fair hair bristled up and his blue eyes dilated to black, then faded to gray. He circled the dungeon, frantically seeking an exit, which yet he knew he would not find. Cursing himself for all sorts of a fool, because he had not taken his pistol with him, when he left the hotel, he ran to a corner, where something, which looked like a heaped-up pile of slender white sticks, was faintly gleaming beneath the dim light coming from above. But, when he saw that they were not sticks but bones, he staggered back, almost screaming, and made for the door, which he reached just in time to be knocked down by a body, which Hosein and Nakir were pitching in. It was Zaidee. Springing up, she wailed forth:
“Oh! why did you not heed my warnings? Did I not sign to you to depart in the courtyard, and again under your window and still once more, as I was dancing? Now we are lost, both of us. Look up there!”
Far above, an octagon of lustrous woof and warp was oscillating slowly. In it, something vast and dark was cradled.
“My God! It’s Hosein’s spider!” gasped the young man.
And now across her web the tigress of the air shot her curved and toothed claws and buff-colored grappling-hooks and dull-red jaws and six of her eight powerful black legs, covered with down and splotchedwith stiff tufts. Up-rearing her round head and thorax and baring thus the rich and flexible dark-green fur, as soft as velvet, which clothed her abdomen, she bent at her wasp-like waist and, balancing on the verge, fastened her eight eyes—great immovable trance-producing lenses of terrible crystal—with a gloating stare, full on Hosein’s captives, huddled together there below her. And now she swung out. Swaying just beneath her hammock, she whetted one of her scythes against the other. But, as with horror-stricken gaze, fixed on this monstrous thing, he and she waited for that to come from which there was no escape, a sudden inspiration possessed the damsel.
“Steal along the wall,” she cried to Page Lomax, “And leap from behind her upon her back at the same instant when I spring thither from in front.”
“But—”
“No buts about it, Fool! Do you want to be eaten alive? Go!”
As he obeyed, the maid plucked from her bodice the pipe of charm and began breathing from it the melody with which she had quelled the wrath of the cobra de capello. At its first tremulous notes, the grim executioner of the ninety and nine hesitated—stopped reeling out her cord—no longer was opening and closing her grappling-hooks—sheathed her dull-red jaws. One awful minute she hovered near, wriggling her eight great curving legs. Then, half asleep under the spell of those drowsily sweet sounds, she lowered herself to earth and spread herself out for slumber. Without ceasing to play, Zaidee inched forward. Close enough now, she sprang upon the immense spider. That same instant, Page Lomax was by her side.
“Lie down!” she screamed, suiting her own action to her advice to him. “Press your toes against the ridge of horn, back of her head! Seize that other, yonder, stretching across, just this side her spinneret, and hold on—do you hear?—hold on with all your might? She’s going to rise and she’ll toss us off, if she can!”
Even now the great creature was hauling in her cable. Up she darted violently. Whirling round and round, she threshed the air furiously with her legs. Finding out that she could not thus throw off her burden, she reared herself aloft into her web. With frenzied rage, she gripped the edges of her house and shook it with all her immense strength, until it shot back and forth with dizzying speed, at times almost perpendicular to its axis. But, with the desperate power of despair, her riders clung to her, until, tiring from her fruitless efforts to dislodge them, the spider became quiet. Gradually the silken orb slackened from its semi-vertical position to its normal horizontal. Its whirring lapsed into silence, as it slowly became still. Except for a horrible quivering, which was going on under the translucent shell of horn on which the two were lying, the huge spinner was at last crouching motionless. They sat up cautiously and looked around them. No roof hemmed them in. But, in order to keep his monster from fleeing to her native hills, Hosein had inserted one beam running from East to West, with three others above it contrariwise from North to South.
“Play again, Zaidee,” said the young man. “It’s my time now to work.”
As the girl’s lulling music once more soothed the spider, he set about digging out with his pocketknife that part of the nearest upper rafter, which had rotted at the wall. Soon he could slide this end out. Tugging the beam across the main girder, he heaved the extricated timber athwart the coping of the tower, whence, plunging down, it smote Hosein to the earth, at the same time striking Nakir, too, and felling him also. A screech of anguish burst from the Turk. Unable to rise unaided, he seized the honeysuckle, which was clambering aloft on the masonry, and dragged himself up, only to drop again with a frightful groan, as his back was broken. Two of the eunuch’s ribs had been fractured, too, but, as his master groaned that awful groan, he hastened to him and, lifting his head, wiped the bloody froth from Hosein’s lips. The Turk’s eyes, of which nothing except the whites had been showing, now rolled down and fixed their failing glance on the faithful slave.
“Bury me by Selim’s side, Nakir,” he whispered, “And—and don’t let the Giaour and his jade escape.”
His eyes rolled back again—he shivered—there was a deep sigh—then the jaw fell.
“Something’s hurt down there,” cried Page Lomax exultingly. “I only hope it’s Hosein or his nigger. As wishes cost nothing, I wish it were both. Here goes for beam number two!”
In a crevice in the wall, just over the end of the second rafter of the upper three, the wind had lodged a seed one day and from it a sturdy little pine had sprung up. Hunting for food, it had thrust down the hungry fibres of its roots to feed upon the mortar. It had been nodding good cheer to the young man, as the breezes played leap-frog with it, and he hated to hurt it, but he had to. Grasping it, he wrenched it from its lodging-house. Its roots could not bear to bid adieu to being. They clung so closely to the rough ashlar round which they had twined that the stone was twisted out with them and crashed to the tiles below, leaving the second beam free at this end, so that Page Lomax could send it after the first one.
The third rafter of the upper three was fat with turpentine. Scratching a match, the young man held it under the oiliest streak, until a feeble blaze stole up. Waxing lustier, it parted with sparkling fingers its blue veil of smoke that it might the better gnaw through the bar on which it was at work. When the beam had nearly burned in two, Page Lomax shoved it upward. It broke. In a twinkling, it had gone outside to join the others.
“Now, Zaidee,” he cried, as he cast himself face downward on the great spider’s back, “Throw yourself here beside me. Rest your toes against that same little ledge back of her head. Grip the other as you did before. She’ll bounce over that wall, in the next ten seconds. When she hits the ground and settles down on her hind-legs, jump, jump for your life, and run for the boat with me.”
Mad with the exhilaration of approaching liberty, the huge creature dived out over her prison wall, alighting noiselessly and without a jar. Giving no heed to Page Lomax and Zaidee, as they fled, she raced like the wind along her shortest line of approach toward Nakir. He was too far from Hosein’s home ever to reach it, with her in pursuit. She was between him and the summer-house. The tower alone remained. Rushing to it, he threw the bar, tore the door open and, plunging headlongthrough it, whirled it to. It had no fastenings on the inner side. As it swung outward, he must keep it closed in some way or be devoured. Flinging himself down, he dug his nails between its stout oak transverse and its upright panels and bore on with all his weight. The spider tapped once or twice on the door. It still remaining closed, she squatted down before it. After a few seconds, during which she seemed to be studying, her terrible eyes dwelt at last on the crack between the door and the doorstep. In a trice, she reached her claws through and sank them into the door on the inner side. In spite of Nakir’s frantic struggling, she fetched it round. With her fierce grappling-hooks, she pounced upon him. Bellowing with mingled fear and pain, he struck at her with his dagger, but she fell back on her haunches, haling him to her. Her grappling-hooks raised him close to her red jaws. A sudden flash of savage color—and the blades of those jaws sprang apart—another—as they snapped together—a blood-curdling scream—a sickening gush of blood—then silence. Hosein’s spider had sacrificed her hundredth man.