Page:Oriental Stories v01 n01 (1930-10).djvu/104

 stores, the vast warehouses, the gaudy picture-houses, and the lots of waste ground littered with bricks and paper and timber, all these were cloaked in merciful shadow by a setting moon, whose slanting silver beams lent romance even to the unbeautiful environs of Bleecker Street.

Lights shone dimly here and there as Gissing hurried along, but the small square window of Isaac Volk's house was in darkness, and the door was uncompromisingly shut.

Gissing put out a cautious hand and lifted the rusty latch of the battered door, and to his amazement found that the bolt had not been drawn within. The door opened slowly inward as he pushed it from him, and, as he stood hesitating, the murky fetid atmosphere of the room within rose like an evil cloud to his face.

Very cautiously he stole inside, very softly he closed the door behind him, and stood listening intently, his eyes wide and strained, trying to pierce the inky evil-smelling darkness of the den.

Gradually his heart slowed down, and he licked his dry lips and swallowed convulsively. He got out his torch and sent a slender pencil of light athwart the gloom, moving it across and across the dirty place as he grew bolder.

Suddenly the moving light was still, pointing at an obscure corner where Volk had stowed away an ancient four-post bed on which was piled some unspeakable bedding and a few mangy-looking fur coats.

Paralyzed by shock, Gissing held the light steady for an appreciable time, his eyes on the bold outline of a drawing sketched in black charcoal on the wall by the bed. It was the presentment of a camel—a black camel—which his torch revealed.

Not only that there was something else something at which Gissing stared and stared with dropped jaw and a cold sickness in his breast.

He began to back to the door at last, with a queer sobbing catch of his breath, afraid to turn his back on what he saw. When, with groping hand behind, his cold fingers touched the latch, he dashed down his torch, flung open the door, and, leaving it to swing to and fro in the night wind, he fled under the shadow of the iron roof of the "L" until he could run no farther.

He knew without shadow of a doubt who possessed the Wrath of Allah now!

It was Buzak, ruler of El Zoonda—that Arab city in the desert, the stronghold of the terrible brethren of the Black Camels.

Buzak the White-footed One, so called because of his burned foot, the skin of which was permanently bleached and wrinkled by its injury.

Buzak, who had pursued over desert and plain, across cities and the broad ocean, until he had found his jewels again.

Gissing's hands stole trembling to his throat as he recalled the bloated, distorted features of Isaac Volk, as he had dangled dreadfully from his own rafters. Volk had died slowly—inch by inch—the breath squeezed out of his body by infinitesimal degrees—with many pauses between the torture that the victim's lungs might fill again. Yes! Volk had died many deaths that night, Gissing knew well.

The latter had lived long enough in El Zoonda to be horribly familiar with Buzak's methods: for there, protected by his clever disguise, his intimate knowledge of the ways and speech of the Arabs, and above all by his painful initiation to the membership of the Black Camels, he had witnessed many unforgettable crimes of the White-footed One.

And yet yet the shimmering