Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/82

602 wrist and dragged me through the doorway leading to a flat-faced house.

It was dark as moonless midnight in the place, but my guide knew the way. We could hear the shouting and the tumult in the street outside, but it faded every second as he led me down a zig-zag passage choked with utter blackness, through a door that creaked and whined on rusty hinges, and out into a narrow lane between high walls that reeked with dreadful smells and was paved with better left unguessed-at debris. We stumbled through the muck a dozen feet or so, then brought up at a dead-end.

"What's this?" I cried. "There's no way out! We're trapped"

For the first time I had a good look at my conductor. He was a giant Negro, and no eunuch. A brown burnoose of camel's hair was wrapped about him, and from its updrawn hood his broad face with its startlingly white teeth and liver-colored lips grinned at me like a fiend fresh out of Erebus. In one wide short-fingered hand he held a square-cut length of rhinoceros hide, and I saw the blow descending even as I saw the weapon. "This is the ending of thy pathway, O eater-up of helpless maidens, O murderer, O infidel!" It seemed to me I heard the slapping impact of the rawhide on my temple, but I can't be sure, for when it struck I ceased remembering anything.

up in a big room, windowless and vaulted like a tomb. Two brass lamps lighted it, and from a pair of censers incense spiraled lazily. I was lying on a cotton mattress upon the floor beside the wall; by the other wall upon a similar pallet lay the body of a young girl wrapped in a white winding-sheet. She had been a pretty thing, with curling russet hair, white, creamy skin and small, cleanly cut features. Across her temple was a gash which might have been a sword cut, or a cut from splintered glass, and another half-closed wound showed in her throat. Facing me, between the body and the mattress where I lay, an old man squatted cross-legged.

He was dressed in a white cotton djebba, and on his head he wore a turban wound with green which marked him as a pilgrim to the holy places and Mecca. His face was pale, lined, ascetic; the beard that hung down to his waist was almost white as his bleached robe and seemed to have a silky, almost iridescent texture. As I whimpered with the pain of waking he looked at me. He did not turn his head, but just moved his eyes, and I quailed before his glance as from a physical attack.

Yet there seemed no anger in his look; rather it was reproachful, infinitely sad and, it seemed to me, a little puzzled. They were strange, violet-blue eyes he had, and I wondered at their lightness until I recalled many Egyptians have Turkish blood, and Turks are often blonds. "Behold thy handiwork, O guelbi," he commanded, gesturing toward the body with a motion of his eyes. "She was my sole remaining child, my soul, my heart, my eyes, and thou hast brought her to the grave. Is it not enough for thee to drive thy devil-wagons through the streets where women walk unveiled and men are drunk on the forbidden wine? Must thou also come into our quarter, scattering death and misfortune?"

I got up on my elbow rather weakly, for the knockout blow had left me faint and dizzy. "I'm terribly sorry," I apologized, "but it was not all my fault. Your coachman turned the carriage right before my car, and it was impossible to stop"