CHAPTER XVI

“A rose fell to the lot of a monkey.”—Arabic Proverb.

“A rose fell to the lot of a monkey.”—Arabic Proverb.

Zarah and Al-Asad sat in consultation.

Two beautiful beings in whom cunning stood for brain and nether millstones for hearts—where others were concerned.

To enhance her beauty in the eyes of the white man, who looked upon her but indifferently, the Arabian had worn a transparentyashmak, dyed her finger tips, plastered her person with as many jewels as she could fasten on to her garments, and walked like a cat on hot bricks or a mannequin or a Spaniard. In the presence of the Nubian, who loved her with all the might of his half-savage soul, she sat cross-legged on a pile of cushions, smoking endless cigarettes, wound in a wrapping of silk, which she kept in its place by tucking the ends in, and with her bare feet thrust into heelless slippers. She was far more beautiful in her simplicity than in her most extravagant apparel, if she had only known it, and a furnace would have but mildly described the tumult of love which she aroused in her magnificent slave.

An hour had passed since she had hastily summoned him on her return from her meeting with her blind enemy at the beginning of the secret path—an hour in which they had talked and suggested and yet had failed to find a way out of the difficulty which had arisen out of her lie.

“Thinkest thou, O Al-Asad, that the blind oneknew?”

“I know not, mistress,” he said slowly. “Perchance ’tis Fate who guides his feet continually across thy path, or maybe the wind of chance. Yet can we do nothing.”

He touched an amulet of good luck at his neck; the Arabian made a circle in the air with her fingers.

“May the spirit of my father, who placed the safekeeping of the blind one in my hands, remain peacefully in Paradise.”

They got up solemnly, turned from left to right three times, and sat down again.

The heathens!

Whenwillthey learn to touch wood or to turn the whole chair or couch round three times, with themselves, as do their Christian and more civilized brethren!

“Thou dost worry overmuch, woman, about this white girl. She is but a fly to be blown from the rim of thy cup of happiness and good fortune. A word to thy slave and he pinches the fly between his thumb and finger.”

He illustrated his words, his splendid teeth flashing as he laughed, then ducked his handsome head so as to avoid the back-hander dealt him by the woman he worshipped.

“Thou fool!” she replied shortly. “Where findest thou the sense to drink when thou art thirsty or to eat when thou art empty? Have I not told thee that the white man believes the white woman to be dead, yea, buried in the sands, as she would verily have been buried this night if the thrice accursed blind one had not yet again crossed my path. If the white man who has, through the accursed foolishness of my tongue, been told that the girl is dead, speaks with one who tells him that she is alive, what then? Thou dullard! Canst thou not see a glimmer of light? Behold, art thou blinder than the blind one, thou imbecile offspring of foolish parents!” She got up and crossed to the door, from which nothing could be seen but the stars above great walls of rock, whilst the Nubian rose and followed her noiselessly.

Standing close to her, girt in his loin cloth, he towered above her. He bent his head so that the scented curls touched his lips, and gently stroked the silken wrapperwith his slender fingers, whilst his heart almost broke in the love he had for her.

He would have starved for her, endured torture for her, died for her; he was her rightful mate; she was his woman out of all the world; yet she hankered for the grapes which hung well beyond the reach of her crossbred hands, and he forgot his manhood in the fear of losing the little—which was yet so much—she gave him. He worked so hard to gain the barest word of gratitude; he found such joy in lying across the threshold o’ nights to keep her safe; he suffered such hell through jealousy; yet in his loyalty, in his desire to bring her happiness, he had not once thought of removing the white man from his own path. The white woman, yea, why not? What difference would one soulless woman more or less make in this world already overstocked with soulless women? Once she was removed and the woman of his heart’s desire married to the man she loved—and did Allah in His wisdom ever know of such a tangle—then he would ride out into the desert and die, or, better still, become chief of a band with which to harry the white man when he ventured across the quicksands.

Primitive reasoning, but not too bad for one who could neither read nor write, and whose idea of God was a vasty, corporeal deity who offered sweetmeats with one hand and struck one for taking them with the other.

He laughed as he spoke, on the spur of his primitive reasoning, and stroked the soft silk which wrapped his rightful mate.

“Mistress!”

At a certain tone in his voice with which she was unacquainted she turned her head and looked over her shoulder and up at him sideways, so that her yellow eyes gleamed through half-closed lids, just as gleamed the eyes of the wellnigh adolescent lion cub watching them from a corner of the luxurious room.

“Mistress, it were well if I broke the neck of the whitewoman within the hour, and fastening her dead body upon some horse, sent them floundering into the sands of death. Then will I spread a tale of the white woman’s betrayal of thy hospitality, and how she stole thy horse and attempted to escape, so——”

He laughed as she turned upon him in anger, then bent and looked down into her beautiful, furious eyes with a look she did not understand, but which caused her to draw back a pace.

“Behold, are thy words as bright as a rusty sword and thy reasoning as sharp as the blunt edge,” she cried. “The white woman has found favour in the eyes of thy brethren, thou fool! Thinkest thou that when they hear of her death that their lamentations will not reach to the mountaintops, yea, and to the ears of the white man, so that he turns upon me in rage? Behold, are the wits of the deaf boy who waits upon the white man like two-edged daggers compared to thine, O Al-Asad of the camel head!”

Al-Asad of the camel head made no sign of the storm caused within him by the nearness of the woman and her contemptuous words. He stood quite still, the perfume of her hair in his nostrils, the silk of her garment in his hands.

“Thou makest a pond of a raindrop, woman,” he answered. “What are my brethren but children, pleased to-day at a smile, angered to-morrow at a word? Make great promise of feasting and fighting, and their love belongs to the giver of food and promoter of battle; laugh at them, mock them, make sport of their words and their raiment and their countenance, and they kill without a word.”

Zarah put her little hands against his chest and pushed him away, and looked at him sideways as she crossed to the couch, and looked at him again when he did not follow, and beckoned him with a backward movement of the head, which showed him the beauty of her throat as he leant against the lintel and looked at her, and laughedat the simplicity of the plan that was formulating in his mind.

Dying of thirst, he stretched for the cup even if there was but a drop of water left; starving, he swept the very floor for a crust; destitute, he demanded the smallest coin as price for the way he had found for removing the obstacle from the Arabian girl’s path. When she beckoned he crossed to her and sat down, but not upon the floor at her feet. He sat beside her, close to her, and looked at her so that she shrank away.

“Shelter is given to the camel, meat to the dog, water to the horse at the end of a day of toil,” he said slowly. “What reward will be given this slave if he removes the cloud from before the sun of his mistress’s happiness?”

“Thou! A reward given unto thee?” She could hardly have shown more astonishment if he had asked for the heaped-up contents of her jewel safe. “My father gave thee shelter when thou didst flee from the wrath of those who desired thy life, dates when thy bones pierced thy skin, water when thou wast wellnigh dead from thirst. A reward? Behold, the whip across thy mouth will be thy reward for thy daring, thou mongrel!”

She had worked herself into a rare rage, and flung herself to the far end of the couch, so that an end of the silken wrapper became untucked; and she beat upon the cushions with clenched fists, thereby causing the loosened garment to slip yet lower still, until it exposed the splendid shoulders, which looked the more bewitching in that they were half draped.

Alas! that it be so hard a task to drill into the heads of women the simple truth that, wheredécollétageis concerned, a hint is far more potent than a whole hard fact.

“A reward for thee?” she repeated. “For thee?”

“Yea, a date, a drop of water....” He paused, then rose and walked to the door and looked up at the stars and laughed at the thought of the gift he would pluck from paradise. “Yea, a date for the camel and waterfor the horse, but a kiss—one kiss—from thy mouth, which is as a red flower fashioned in rubies and set with pearls which are thy teeth. Nay, fling not thyself upon thy slave, for he could break thee with one hand. The camel works not without reward, the horse dies without water, thy slave will not reveal his plan without the promise of that which he craves.”

“But the camel and the horse fulfil their tasks,” said Zarah sweetly, slowly, baiting her trap, into which the simple barbarian would ultimately fall. “The reward comes afterwards, O Al-Asad, when the heat of the day is o’er and the peace of the night falleth apace. Come!”

She held out her hand and he ran to her, ran as swiftly as a deer, as noiselessly as the lion watching them out of tawny, half-closed eyes, and knelt at her feet and encircled her with his arms without touching her withal.

“Thou wilt—thou wilt—when my plan is unfolded—my tale is told—thou wilt?”

Zarah the liar, the hypocrite, the merciless, smiled gently as she looked down into the handsome face so near her own, nodded her head as she listened, and pushed away the encircling arms as she rose to her feet and moved a few steps.

It was such a simple plan and such an effective plan for getting her out of her quandary, and the reward was such a simple one to grant—a solitary kiss, a thing of nothing, a sound, a fleeting second of rapture to him; yet she vowed in her treacherous heart that no man but the man she loved should hold her in his arms or other lips than his touch her beautiful, lying mouth.

“Yea, verily, ’tis a good plan and easy,” she said, watching him out of the corner of her eyes. “Thou wilt spread tales of this white woman’s ingratitude and of her mocking of our sisters, so that the men, infuriated, fall upon her and kill her, not this night, but upon the night of feasting.”

“Yea, mistress, upon the night of feasting, so that thewomen, occupied in the task of cooking, know nothing of her death, and knowing nothing, will say nothing. Mistress,” he ended in a whisper, “is it not a good plan and simple?”

Forgetting the Arabian proverb which teaches that “a spark can fire the whole quarter,” counting upon her power over the man, forgetting also that he was human even if he were a slave, she laughed mockingly as she answered: “Verily is it simple, and methinks that the little toil is not worthy of so great reward!”

He crossed the room in one bound and swept her, fighting desperately, into his arm. He crushed her down upon his heart and laughed at her when she met her teeth in his forearm until the blood ran, and caught her hands in one of his and held her beautiful head pressed against his shoulder with his arm and kissed her scented hair; then flung her upon the divan and, laughing, turned to meet the lion as it sprang.

He caught it in mid-air, grasping its throat with his left hand, and with a lightning sideways movement gripped its hind legs just at the joint with his right.

The beast’s front paws just reached his chest and tore it with great claws until the blood streamed; it roared and choked and moaned as, holding it at arm’s length as it struggled and fought, the gigantic man bent the head back to meet the feet of the hind legs, which he as slowly bent over the back to meet the head.

Zarah stood upon tiptoe, eyes blazing, hands clasped, insult forgotten in the wonderful feat of strength, of which even she did not think the man was capable.

“Wah! Wah!” she cried, a very child of the desert, as she watched the animal fighting for its life. “Wah! Wah!” she cried again, clapping her hands when Al-Asad, the magnificent half-caste, met the lion’s feet and head with a hardly perceptible effort, and at the little click which was all that announced the end, flung the carcass at the woman’s feet and walked towards the door.

“Al-Asad! Thy wounds!”

He turned and looked at the beautiful woman who, carried out of herself by the intoxication of the moment, held out her arms to him, then down at the mark of her teeth upon his arm.

“My wound, O woman, is thy seal upon me, which I shall carry to the day when Allah, the one and only God, shall bid me leave this maze which we call life. I go to work upon my plan, so that the desire of thy heart is granted thee.” He paused for one moment with his hand upon the curtain and took his revenge for all the bitterness of the past. “I have kissed thy hair, I have held thee upon my heart, I have bruised thee. Go to the white man an thou wilt; he will find thee marked by another man. I will have nothing, not even one kiss from thee, until of thy own free will thou givest it me.”

He was gone, leaving her staring at the curtain. She laughed, laughed at the thought of the white man’s love which awaited her, laughed at the memory of the just fled hour, and raised her hands to call her body-woman; then turned her head and listened.

From somewhere outside amongst the rocks came the sound of a man singing.

Over and over again he sang the Arabian proverb mockingly, sweetly.

“‘They wooed her and she resisted; they left her, and she fell in love.’”

Over and over again the Nubian sang the words in his golden tenor voice as he made his way to the men’s quarters.

Then she clapped her hands sharply, threw herself on the couch, and sought for the photograph of Ralph Trenchard, which she wore upon her heart in Helen Raynor’s golden locket.

“The fire of more than one war has been kindled by a single word.”—Arabic Proverb.

“The fire of more than one war has been kindled by a single word.”—Arabic Proverb.

The firelight shone on Al-Asad as he stood in the centre of an admiring circle. His bronzed skin glistened and his perfect teeth flashed and the blood upon his chest showed dark as he moved lightly upon his feet in describing the fight with the lion.

He had got the men interested and pleased and curious, and it would require but a very slight effort to get them angry.

Their splendid teeth flashed as they laughed and shouted encouragement, and their shadows danced as they answered the Nubian’s every movement. They stretched out their hands and brought them slowly together, and bent this way and that way as they breathed heavily, in unconscious imitation of the half-caste, as is the way of the Oriental when deeply interested in a story.

“Wah! Wah!” they yelled. “What then? What then?”

They shouted with laughter, gleefully, joyously, and exchanged remarks which were better left unprinted, when a youth ran forward and touched Al-Asad’s arm.

“Now, O brother, tell us the tale of the tiger-cat. The lion is dead; didst thou perchance also draw the tiger-cat’s teeth and claws,afterthey had mauled thy flesh?”

The youth wrapped his great cloak tight about himself and, copying Zarah’s walk, strolled back to his place, where he stood looking over his shoulder at the Nubian from half-closed eyes. The men roared with laughter and yelled encouragement and suggestion until the mountains echoed and re-echoed to the sound.

Al-Asad took advantage of the opening.

He sprang at the youth, caught him, tightly wrapped in the great white cloak, held him easily above his head in spite of his struggles, then, still holding him horizontally, swung him round and round, with much the same movement as one uses in swinging clubs, plumped him on hisfeet, shook him like a rat, and flung him like a sack ofdurraback to his place, whilst the men roared with delight.

“I break thy neck, O brother, and the neck of any who dares to make mock of Zarah the Beautiful. She is a woman, but is she not the child of our dead chief? Did she not give us shelter when we fled from the wrath of the pursuers? Food when our bones wellnigh pierced the skin? Water when we thirsted? Then....”

“’Tis well said, O Lionheart, verily is thy speech of gold....”

“Does she not reward us when the toil is done?” continued Al-Asad, taking no notice of the unseemly interruption. “When the heat of the day is o’er and the peace of the night falleth apace.” He glanced down at the mark upon his arm, well pleased at the effect his flowing, if borrowed, rhetoric was having upon his unsuspecting audience. “Shall we not be grateful? Shall we not show her our gratitude? Shall we not—shall we not help her against her enemies—even as she helped us in our need?”

He had the men in the hollow of his hand.

Their knives flashed as they leapt to their feet, their voices sounded like thunder as they shouted in execration, cursed in volume, and clamoured to be led against the foe.

Al-Asad gave them no time to collect their senses scattered by their desire for battle, murder and revenge. He hit whilst their wrath was at white heat, raining blows upon their pride and ultrasensitiveness. He seized the white cloak from the one nearest and wrapped it about him, and cleared a space by the strength of his good right arm.

“Her enemy, my brethren, and thine, is a woman, nay! give ear for a while. Our mistress, with a desire to help her white prisoner—yea! even she—sat with her anon, whilst I sat without the curtain, unseen by either of them.Before Allah, they were as night and day, sun and moon, in their beauty. Yea! and I will see that thou speakest not again in this life, my brother, if thou essayest once more to open thy mouth, which is as wide and ugly as the storm-swept desert. And, behold! this is what mine eyes saw and mine ears heard. She mocked, this white she-devil, mocked the people of the desert, walked like thee, brother, this wise”—with all the aptitude of the negro, he bowed his legs and rolled as he walked towards Bowlegs, the finest horseman in the Nejd—“and sat crosswise upon the cushions and rode like thee, little one”—he laughed and pointed at a youth who was noted for his ungainly seat upon horseback—“and made mock of our women as they draw water for her bath or grind thedurrafor her bread.” He imitated the surly negress with the gait of a lame hen, he also gave the quick movements of Namlah the Ant, then ran and barred the way as the men made a sudden, ugly rush. It was touch and go if he held them or if they overpowered him and, in one blinding moment of fury, rushed and killed Helen, thereby rousing the sleeping women and children and undoing all his cunning work. He laughed, laughed long and loud, until the place rang, laughed until, suspicious of being fooled, they hesitated and stopped.

Then he beckoned them and, squatting upon his haunches, spoke to them in whispers, thereby imparting a feeling of mystery to the tale he recounted of Zarah’s lie, which they thoroughly appreciated, and her dilemma, which they laughed at right heartily.

But he had reckoned without the love of gambling with which the Eastern is obsessed.

The Patriarch, who looked for all the world like Abraham at his most benevolent, and who was the hardest rider to hounds, or, rather, into battle, and the most inveterate gambler in Arabia, held up his hand, upon which the rest of the inveterate gamblers nudged each other with themijan, the small stick the Bedouin usuallycarries, and felt for their counters or dice or whatever they fancied most in games of chance.

“Thou sayest, O Asad, mighty of muscle and clear of understanding, that our mistress desires the death of the white woman, so that there shall be a portion of truth in the tale she has told the white man of the death of this white woman, who still lives.”

Al-Asad nodded. He was loth to see his plans go awry, but he would have been still more loth to lose the chance of an hour’s gambling.

“Wesay that for her mocking this white woman shall die this night,thousayest she must live until the night of the great feasting which our mistress prepareth for us, so that in the sounds of singing and dancing her passing shall be unnoticed by the women, who, were it otherwise, might prattle about her death. I will play thee for her death! Choose thou the game.”

Came a positive roar, which brought Helen upsitting upon her bed, as each man shouted to his neighbour, and Al-Asad drew from out his loin-cloth a set of cherished dice, whilst Yussuf drew nearer the fire with his counters in his hand.

Logs were thrown on the fires, so that orange, red and yellow flames shot skywards, against which the infuriated, excited men stood out in startling relief as they gesticulated and laughed and cursed; bets were laid against the time of Helen Raynor’s death, and the particular kind of death she should die for her breaking of the great law of hospitality, with side bets upon every conceivable trifle which by the wildest stretch of the most prolific Oriental imagination could be possibly connected with the case.

“Thou Yussuf!” shouted Bowlegs, as he walked towards the blind man with the roll of a sailing ship in the Bay. “My eldest daughter—who is as fair favoured as an ostrich without feathers—against thy spavined mare that the white woman dies upon the night of the feast.”

Yussuf leaned forward so that the firelight shone upon his terrible face whilst the men gathered about the two, forgetting their own concerns, for the moment, in the interest they always took in the doings and sayings of the afflicted man.

“I prefer the gentle company of my spavined mare, though she be useless for the chase or the battle, O my brother, but I will lay my jewel-encrustednagilehagainst a handful of dates that the white woman dies to-night. This woman without compassion, this breaker of the Arab’s law. I have suffered much, my brethren, but to the death I uphold our mistress against one who abuses her. For is it not written, ‘A well from which thou drinkest, throw not a stone in it’?” Yussuf was playing to the gallery and throwing sand across his brethren’s vision, whilst praying secretly to Allah the Compassionate and the Merciful to hold the scales of justice well balanced between the two women.

The benevolent looking Patriarch, who had more death notches in his favourite spear than any man in the Peninsula, once more held up his hand. He stroked his flowing white beard as he looked at Al-Asad, who sat with no sign of his inner perturbation upon his handsome face, whilst at the top of his voice Yussuf cursed the white woman in her past, present and future, as well as in her morals, looks and ancestry.

“So it has been arranged, O my children,” said the Patriarch, who looked as though he should have been patting the heads of the third or fourth generation clustering about his knees instead of gambling on a woman’s death. “If our brother Al-Asad throws the dice so that three sixes fall upwards at the same time, then the thrice-accursed woman dies upon the night of feasting and banqueting. If Fate decrees that I throw these three figures of the same value at the same time,kismet, ’tis the will of Allah that she dies to-night. Throw, my son!”

Al-Asad shook the dice between his slender hands andtossed them high into the air. The men backed as the ivory squares fell amongst them and made way for the Patriarch and Al-Asad to examine them.

The Patriarch raised his hands, Al-Asad laughed softly, the men howled in disappointment.

The half-caste had thrown three sixes.

In one brief second the chances of a whole night of gambling, to be followed by the exhilarating task of putting an offender to death, had been wiped out, yet by the decision of the dice did those uneducated, semi-savage, grievously disappointed men abide.

True, they turned in the direction of the dwelling wherein Helen slept and fingered their knives, but more from the rancour aroused by her insult than with any intention of disputing the untoward ending to what might have been such an enjoyable night.

The Patriarch looked at them and grieved for their disappointment, as much as for his own, and walked to a little distance, where he lifted his benign countenance to the stars as he worked his wits, which in their cunning could have given points to a monkey; then he turned and spread wide his arms, looking for all the world as though he had stepped out of a picture by some old master, and called his sons so that they ran to him, like the children they really were, in spite of their ferocious appearance and still more ferocious deeds.

“Al-Asad the Lion of nimble wit saith that ’twere wise to allow our mistress to wed this white man—for a space. Allah alone wots of this power which drives the white to the dark, the fat to the lean, the well-favoured to the ill-favoured, and which causes more trouble than the rat in the corn or the viper on the hearth.”

“And the tiger-cat to meet its teeth in the flesh of the slave,” shrilled the youth who had been swung like a club, but who had revived sufficiently to gamble with the best.

The men, restored to good humour by the promise inthe old man’s voice, shouted with laughter as they aimed friendly blows at the Nubian, who stood close to the Patriarch’s side.

“My son!” said the old man as he stroked his beard, which was about his one possession he would not have staked against fortune. “I will play thee for the death of the white man. If I throw three sixes he dies this night, if thou throwest three sixes then he takes Zarah the Gentle as wife for the length of six moons, after which he dies so that thou mayest take his place at her side. And may Allah show thee the path through the maze of love which spreads about thee and her and the white man.”

Helen, sitting on the edge of her bed, covered her ears with her hands at the savagery in the shouts of the men, whilst Yussuf strode forward with his counters in his hand.

“My spavined mare against a bowl of rice cooked by thy daughter—and may her cooking be better favoured than is her face—that the white man—and may his soul be as black inJehannamas his skin is white on earth—dieth this dawn in the stead of the thrice accursed white woman,” he cried, whilst praying secretly and fervently to Allah the Merciful to strike the Patriarch dead.

They threw the dice unavailingly till dawn, whilst the elder women, wakened by the gentle method of applying the foot to their slumbering persons, rose and made coffee for their lords, half of whom, at the last throw of the dice, were to find themselves minus coffee beans, daughters, horses, weapons orpiastres.

The sky shone like an opal in the east, the birds sang, the smoke of the fires in the women’s quarter clung like mist against the mountainside as Al-Asad shook the dice in his hands and flung them up to the flaming heavens.

The men backed as the ivory squares fell amongst them, and made way for the Patriarch and the Nubian to examine the result.

The Patriarch raised his hands, Al-Asad laughed, the men shouted with laughter and smote him friendly-wise, hip and thigh.

He had thrown three sixes.

And half an hour later Helen, little recking how near she and the man she loved had been to death, stood just inside her door, watching the magnificent sight of the shouting, laughing men as they rode their horses up the steep incline on their way to a gallop across the desert.

Her eyes were full of perplexity, her heart beat heavily in an unaccountable fear, but, determined that the spy should have naught to tell her mistress, she let drop the curtain and stretched herself upon her bed.

Al-Asad ran up the steps to his mistress’s dwelling and entered her room.

She watched him from under her arm as she lay upon the divan and smiled at the mastery of the man’s bearing, then looked up at him out of sleepy, opalescent eyes as he knelt beside her so that his face was on a level with hers.

“He is thine, woman. The white man is thine for a space. I, Al-Asad the slave, have given him unto thee. I have worked well for thee, mistress, I have worked well for thee!”

He rose as he spoke and swept her into his arms, and laughed down at her as she struggled desperately.

Then he kissed her scented hair, and held her down upon his heart so that she could not move.

“I give thee the white man! For a spell! I, thy mate!”

He crushed her until she lay as still as death in his arms, then flung her on the cushions and ran out of the dwelling and down the steps to the stables, where he led out his mare, and, without saddle or bridle or harness whatever, leapt across her back and rode her, shouting with the joy of life, up the steep path and out to the desert he loved.

“It is an hour’s poison.”—Arabic Proverb.

“It is an hour’s poison.”—Arabic Proverb.

If Ralph Trenchard had been a guest instead of a prisoner, if he had been the men’s blood-brother in crime instead of an intruder likely, for a space, to become their leader by marriage through the love-madness of the Sheikh’s daughter, more solicitude could not have been shown for his amusement and welfare in the days which preceded the great feast at which he was to be tricked or publicly coerced into a betrothal with Zarah.

As a rider and a shot, he had won the men’s hearts; as a foreigner who menaced the peace of the community, he stood in hourly danger of his life, if he had but known it.

He did not know.

With his thoughts given entirely to the memory of the girl he loved, lacking, through her death, the spur necessary to send him hot-foot back upon the road to civilization, he had unquestioningly accepted the explanation Zarah had given him of the mistake her men had made, and which had ended in the disastrous battle, and had set himself to live but for the passing day. He had longed for adventure, he had found adventure, and when the novelty passed off and the salt of hunting with cheetahs, racing across the moonlit desert, pitting his skill with rifle and horse against the finest riders and shots in the world, lost its savour, then he would make tracks for his own land, where the fare, if somewhat lacking in spice, is figuratively and literally less calculated to upset the digestion.

Having forgotten the European half of Zarah’s parentage, and lacking woman’s intuition and keener psychologicalperception, he put her almost extravagant hospitality down to friendliness arising out of her friendship with Helen and her meeting with him in the past, just as he put the men’s apparent friendliness down to the perfect and world-famed hospitality of the Arab. He failed to grasp the fact that their intense interest in the sports arose from an almost savage determination to beat him, or to notice the ring of triumph in their shouting, or the bitterness in their eyes when either they triumphed or failed against him.

He came to look forward to his daily meeting with the men in the company of their mistress, well content, in his British detestation of all outward show of feeling, to hide his grievous hurt under a cloak of seeming indifference.

It was an adventure, and would end, as all adventure must, if a taste of salt is to be left on Life’s palate.

He loathed the luxury of his dwelling, and longed to ask the meaning of many things, amongst them the cause of the dogs’ hatred for the Arabian woman and of the empty sockets in the face of the man he encountered so often on his path, but with whom he had not spoken.

But believing that his adventure must soon end, and knowing the Oriental’s dislike of investigation into what concerns him privately, he asked no questions, in which he showed his wisdom; truth, in an answer to a straight question, being about as rare in the East as moss in the desert. He rode and bathed and hunted and ate and slept whilst waiting for something to fix his departure, ignorant of the fact that Helen, watched closely day and night, a prey to an overwhelming, secret fear, bravely endured the discomforts of her restricted life on the far side of the jutting rock wall he could see from his door.

He had almost forgotten Zarah’s criminal reputation; had grown accustomed to her continual presence and well-meant, if tiresome, ministrations. He thought that the day of sport and night of feasting and dancing had beenarranged to celebrate her union with the handsome Nubian, against whom he had found himself so often pitted in the sports.

He turned to look for Al-Asad as he raced at Zarah’s side across the desert at the head of a hundred men and, carried out of himself at the magnificent sight, shouted as he rode, taking no more notice than they did of the extraordinary appearance of the sky to the south-east, mistaking the distant phenomenon for a part of the sunset, which was making a blazing, fiery furnace of the sky in the west.

Zarah and Ralph Trenchard headed fifty men, who, their white cloaks streaming behind them in the evening breeze, shouted and laughed as they rode, separated by the Patriarch, Al-Asad and Bowlegs from fifty of their brethren, who, their white cloaks streaming behind them in the evening breeze, shouted and laughed as they urged theirhejeen, or dromedaries, to their swiftest pace.

To mix camels and horses in a hunt, or at any other time, is a dire and foolish and fruitless task, giving rise to pitched battles between the beasts and broken heads amongst their riders. But Zarah’s men looked forward to the inevitable fight which decided the question of the horse or the camel’s precedence over the secret path at the end of a day’s hunting; it gave them all such a chance of paying off bad debts and old scores and such an appetite for the meal prepared for them by their patient, downtrodden womenfolk.

Al-Asad sang at the top of his golden tenor voice as he guided his magnificent dromedary from Oman with his feet, and with his spear prodded the cheetahs, with which they had been hunting, between the bars of the specially made cage strapped on the back of the dromedary he led. Bowlegs led another dromedary, upon whoseshedador baggage saddle were piled the gazelle, ostrich and bunches of kangaroo-rat which constituted the not particularly good bag for a day’s hunting in the desert.

The Patriarch, looking as must Moses have looked if he bestrode a camel in rounding up the trapesing tribes of Israel, rode between the two men, with whom he conversed as best he could for the laughter and shouts of the men and the rumblings of the camels.

He looked at Ralph Trenchard and Zarah as they rode together just ahead and shook his head.

“’Tis best for the horse to mate with the mare and the white with the white,” he said, “for the mule is but a beast of burden, to which is apportioned a grievous fare of blows, and the half-caste is but a thing of scorn even to the pure-bred donkey-boy of the cities.”

Al-Asad stopped his singing and stared towards the west, as Bowlegs made answer as best he could for the sounds which proceeded from his camel’s throat and which denoted fear.

“Yea, oh, father,” he shouted in gasps. “What afflicts this evil beast? The half-caste is of no account, as we have lately learned through the death of the great Sheikh Hamed’s first born by his white wife. Methinks danger threatens, for, behold, this thrice accursed child of sin trembles as he runs. And the offspring of yon two would have the blood of three countries in its veins, so ’twere well to fell the tree before it bears fruit. And may Allah, in His mercy, give me a camel in paradise in the stead of this bag of shivers I now bestride.”

Al-Asad shaded his eyes from the glare of the evening sky and pointed towards the west.

“What seest thou yonder? A string of ostrich, a fleeing herd of gazelle, or Yussuf hunting with his dogs?”

The Patriarch, with eyes like a hawk, looked in the direction and laughed.

“’Tis Blind Yussuf with ‘His Eyes,’ followed by his dogs. They fly like the wind towards the mountains. From whence do they come and for what reason do they fly like the wind?”

Al-Asad made a trumpet of his hands and sent a callringing across the miles of desert sand, upon which Ralph Trenchard, whose horse was in a sweat of terror, turned and looked at him and in the direction in which Zarah was also looking.

Yussuf had evidently heard the call.

Against the strangely angry-looking sky he stood out in black silhouette, with a team of dogs racing like the wind at his side, and the dumb youth, pillion-wise, behind him.

A strange couple truly, the one with the sight, the other with the speech, rendering each other service, until, when together, they each spoke and saw with the other’s vision and tongue.

They rode together now, and the youth pointed backwards and then forwards, and they stayed not their flight for a moment; neither did they try to change their course so as to approach their mistress.

Al-Asad looked behind to where the youth pointed and gave a shout of fear, upon which strange sound Zarah and Ralph Trenchard and the entire body of men looked back and, in a desperate effort, tried to check their beasts.

They might as well have tried to stop a runaway engine as horses and camels fleeing before the dreadsimoomwhich advanced slowly behind them like some great, evil, purple giant or monster of the underworld.

Thesimoom!

A column of poisonous gas, twin of the cyclone, with naught in common with thesirocco; a slowly moving column, whipping the air into gusts, as violent and hot as though blown straight out of the mouth of hell; a phenomenon peculiar to the tropics’ desert places, falling upon the desert wayfarer, over him and gone, in the passing of two or three minutes if he happens to be favoured by the gods, in fifteen if ill-luck dogs his path.

A terrible, writhing, twisting scourge of scorching air, with a centre as calm as a lake under a summer’s sky and as full of poison as a scandal-monger’s tongue. Ifthe wayfarer should not be mounted upon some four-footed beast, endowed with such speed and endurance as will carry him out of its range, then there is only one course left, and that is for him to lay flat upon the ground, to cover his head, to scrape a hole in the sand into which to bury his face, and to hang on to his breath and commend his spirit to his Maker, until the fell monster has passed over him and proceeded upon its death-dealing way.

Zarah was not a leader of men, or the mother of her children, or a child of the desert for nothing.

She turned and raised her right hand, and smiled at her men when they shouted and closed in a ring about her, the horses on her right, the camels on her left, whilst Al-Asad urged his dromedary to her side and caught her mare’s halter, so that she rode between him and Ralph Trenchard.

“It’s almost certain death,” she shouted to Ralph Trenchard as he pressed his horse against her mare as they tore like the wind in the direction of the mountains they could not even see. “Almost certain death if we cannot outride it. The horses are——” She gave a sharp cry as a great puff of scorching wind blew over them, then shouted to Al-Asad.

“Those on horses are to follow me, twenty yards ahead; they are to turn with me and ride back on the camels to stop their flight. When they meet they are to fling their cloaks over the camels’ heads. The camels are to be got to their knees; those who ride horses are to dismount and to let them go.” She was magnificent in her courage and beautiful in her seeming solicitude for her men, whereas, if only the truth had been known, she was merely revelling in the fight against almost overwhelming odds.

She turned to Ralph Trenchard and held out her hand as she swept forward at the head of the fifty horsemen, who rode with their knees, holding their cloaks in their hands.

“Turn!” she cried, though her words were drowned in the thunder of the gallop and the moaning of the wind, which blew like a furnace from the purple cloud close upon their heels. “Fight them back, fight them. Follow me!”

The terrified horses were turned almost in a line and, headed by Zarah, with Ralph Trenchard and Al-Asad on either side, charged the camels.

The impact was terrific.

The two lines of huge beasts met with a crash, which sounded to Ralph Trenchard like the splitting of rocks, as the fifty horsemen fought the camels back and to a standstill, flinging their cloaks over their heads.

“Dismount!” shouted Zarah, as she rode from end to end, whilst, swaying and bending, the column of poison gas crept slowly across the sands. “Let the horses go! Get the camels down! Dismount for your lives!”

She swung from the saddle and fought her way amongst the seething beasts to where Ralph Trenchard helped to force the camels down by kicks and blows upon the knees.

“Thy heavy boot,” she gasped; “bring that camel down, then lie beside it, and—and——”

She swayed and choked as a blast of poisonous wind blew right across them, then staggered closer to Ralph Trenchard as, choking, gasping, he brought the camel to the ground with the heel of his heavy riding-boot upon its knees, and fell. He fell beside Zarah, his arm across her.

Holding his breath for one perilous moment, he lifted his head and looked about him.

The camels lay humped together, their long necks stretched upon the ground, their muzzles buried in the sands; the men lay alongside, their heads pushed under the beasts’ heaving flanks, their faces wrapped in their cloaks and pressed into the sand. Far out in the desert, tails and manes flying in the scorching wind, the horses fled, close together, as though pursued by a thousand devils. The sound of their hoofs upon the sand camefaintly, like distant thunder, to be lost in the moaning of the dreadsimoomas it advanced slowly, writhing, bending, flinging its purple draperies heavenward like some gigantic dancer seen in nightmare.

It was a pillar of horror against the night sky, in front of which fled life, in the wake of which lay a path of death.

Then Ralph Trenchard, with heart hammering, blood thundering in his ears, and brain beating as though it must break the skull, struggled to his knees. The world, like a molten mass of red-hot lead, seemed to weigh upon his shoulders; a band of white-hot iron to encircle his chest; a sponge soaked with boiling water to lay upon his face as he struggled to get out of his coat.

He fell forward upon his hands, the sweat pouring down his agonized face; he raised himself and with a mighty effort pulled his coat off. The fringe of the air eddies lifted the loose ends of the men’s cloaks and tore at the coat he grasped between his teeth as he pressed close to the Arabian girl, who lay motionless on the ground. He laid himself down close beside her, so close that his cheek touched hers and lifting her head, with infinite pain spread the coat upon the ground and wrapped it about her head and his own head, even as the men had wrapped their cloaks, and held the edges tight as the full weight of thesimoom’spoison-filled centre passed over them.

Favoured of the gods, they lay for two minutes under the scorching weight—two minutes in which the camel, driven mad by the cheetahs which fought with frenzy in their cage upon its back, scrambled to its feet and fled into the centre of thesimoom, there to drop dead; a few seconds in which it seemed to the men that great steamrollers of red-hot steel passed backwards and forwards over them, as they prayed to Allah the Merciful, and held their breath for an eternity of time which was counted in one hundred and twenty ticks of the watch upon the white man’s wrist.

They lay long after the pillar of horror had passed, incapable of movement, their heads pressed under the heaving flanks of the camels, which lay there motionless, and were quite capable of lying there, in their camel-headed foolishness, until anothersimoomshould overtake them.

The desert stretched peacefully under the glittering stars when Al-Asad stirred, pulled the cloak from about his head and his head from under the camel’s flank. He stretched his aching limbs and felt his throbbing head, laughing huskily as he kicked the nearest camel into a consciousness of life and lifted his nearest unconscious neighbour and propped him against the camel’s back. He sat for awhile filling his lungs with the desert air, then rose stiffly and crossed to where Ralph Trenchard and the Arabian girl lay side by side as still as death. He fingered his dagger as he looked at the white man, then laughed and shook his head and removed the coat from about their heads and twined his slender hands in the woman’s hair, then removed Ralph Trenchard’s arm from about her shoulders and lifted her up against his heart.

“Mine!” he said gently, then laughed softly as he looked at the men and camels lying as though dead, and, with the touch of perversity which came, perhaps, from the mixing of the blood in his veins, bent and laid Zarah in Ralph Trenchard’s arms just as he regained his senses and, struggling to his knees, lifted her out of pure solicitude against his shoulder. There was nothing, however, to tell her that his arms had been placed about her simply out of anxiety for her well-being and not in love, so that when she opened her eyes and looked up into his handsome face, bent down so near her own, she naturally concluded that the game was almost won.

She looked at Al-Asad with eyes devoid of expression, but got to her feet at the smile in his and sat down upon the camel nearest to her.

“Kick them, Al-Asad, all of them, men and beasts, tosee if there are any alive,” she said curtly, anxious to be rid of him, and sat and indifferently watched the efforts of men and camels as they struggled back to life, and merely nodded at the Nubian when he reported that one man and two dromedaries would not respond to his drubbing.

She had fought for her men’s lives when danger threatened, but rather for the love of gaining a victory over so dire a foe than for any anxiety she felt for them, and now, thirsty, hungry, alive but uncomfortable, she did not care onepiastreif they or the camels struggled back to life or remained where they were to die. She wanted to get back to her own dwelling; she wanted to ride there alone with the white man who had held her in his arms, at least, so she thought, sheltering her from death; she frowned as the men swayed drunkenly upon their feet, laughing stupidly as they staggered amongst the camels.

“Asad!” she cried sharply, showing how little she understood of the white man’s character by so shamelessly exposing her want of pity and consideration for others. “Bring two camels, thine for our guest and yon for me. Thou canst return with one or two or more of thy brethren upon onehejeen, clustered like bees about a honey-pot if——”

She stopped and got to her feet and laid her hand on Ralph Trenchard’s arm.

“Camels!” she said briefly.

There was no sound, neither was there anything in the desert to be seen.

“I think you’re mistaken,” replied Ralph Trenchard. He spoke tersely, his admiration for the girl’s courage suddenly turned to a great dislike through her callous behaviour towards the visibly suffering men. “By Jove! you’re right, though!”

Headed by Yussuf, with “His Eyes” pillion-wise behind him, fifty men mounted on camels and leading fifty morecamels suddenly appeared out of the shadows in the far distance.

Zarah frowned and cursed under her breath at being thwarted in her intention of riding back to the Sanctuary alone with Ralph Trenchard.

“Splendid man, Yussuf,” he said, watching the approaching camels. “Absolutely devoted to you. I suppose he raced home in front of that poisonous pestilence so as to get you a relay of camels and emergency rations and remedies. You’re lucky to have anybody like that about you, don’t you think?”

Zarah did not answer. She crossed to Al-Asad, thereby giving Yussuf the opportunity he wanted and Ralph Trenchard the surprise of his life.

Guided by “His Eyes,” the blind man brought his camel to a halt within a foot or so of where the white man stood, whilst the fifty brace of camels deployed in a semicircle behind him.

He bent down and searched with his hand until he touched Ralph Trenchard’s shoulder; then he bent lower still.

“Helena!” he whispered, and pressed his hand down hard as Ralph Trenchard started.

“Helena!” he repeated, put his finger to his lips, straightened himself and rode, with much shouting, towards Zarah, followed by fifty brace of grunting camels.

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