Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/84

604 munificence of Allah the Compassionate and Merciful.

As soon as I had fixed my signature upon the scroll the old man changed completely. He was now the urbane, gracious host, solicitous for my comfort, anxious that I do his poor house the honor of accepting entertainment.

We dined together, eating kous-kous, flat, small bread-loaves baked with poppy seeds and anise, pastries made of sweetened dates and ground pistache beaten into soured milk, and innumerable cups of almost mud-thick coffee. All through the meal and the postprandial coffee my host talked fluently, almost garrulously, and—surprisingly, in view of his bereavement—the subject of his discourse was the education of the high-caste Moslem woman according to the orthodoxies of the faith. The reverence due to man by woman, the duty of a woman to her father and her husband, the admonition of the Prophet—on him the Peace!—against letting women learn to read, were dwelt upon at tiresome length, and before an hour had passed I felt my eyelids growing heavy, despite the coffee I had drunk. A black slave entered with profound salaams and whispered to his master, "They have come!" but I was so sleepy I could scarcely understand his words. Neither did the sudden flash in Yousouf Pasha's eyes warn me that I was in any way concerned in the message.

"If only I could rest my eyes a minute," I remember thinking, and experimentally I closed them Too drugged with sleep to offer any fight, I felt a pair of hands grasp me beneath the arms and other hands upon my ankles. Somehow, I couldn't raise my lids to see where they were carrying me, but as I swung between my bearers like a hammock I heard old Yousouf Pasha's voice raised in a paean of triumphant praise:

"Ya Allah! Thou All-Knowing, All-Compassionate! Thou healer of the wounded heart"

next thing I remember I was lying in the vaulted room where I had first wakened, and the body of the dead girl had been moved so close to me that we were like two people lying in a bed. The brass lamps had been taken out and in their place a torch of fat wood blazed with a dull, smoky light. At the foot of the pallets on which the body and I lay, a tripod with a charcoal brazier stood, and before it knelt a pair of the most precious vagrants I had ever seen.

They were a man and woman dressed in positively filthy rags, mat-haired and grime-encrusted, almost incredibly wrinkled, but without a shred of the dignity old age usually imparts. As they blew upon the charcoal in the fire-pot they wheezed and moaned a sort of singsong chant, and when their lips snarled back I saw that they were almost toothless, but retained a tusk or two apiece, creating an effect far more repugnant than bare gums would have made.

A single word flashed through my brain: "Torturers!" Somewhere I'd heard or read that an ancient punishment for murderers was to sew them up in sacks with bodies of their victims and leave them there bound tight against the putrefying corpses. I tried to rise, to scream, to curse them, but the drug that Yousouf Pasha had administered in my coffee made me helpless as a paralytic.

Now the necromancers rose and wound long bandages of sopping cloth around their faces, covering nose and mouth, and if volition had not gone