The Lion of Petra/Chapter 12

OU can expect anything, of course, of Arabs. People who will pitch black cotton tents in the scorching sun, and live in them in preference to gorgeous cool stone temples because of the devils and ghosts that they believe to haunt those habitable splendors, will believe anything at all except the truth, and act in any way except reasonably. So I tried to believe it was all right to be unreasonable too.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that a man who had set himself up to be the holy terror of a countryside, and put his heel on the necks of all the tribes for miles around, would have made use at least of the caves and tombs to strengthen his position. There were thousands of them all among those opal-colored cliffs, to say nothing of ruined buildings; yet not one was occupied. Ayisha had told most of the truth when she said in El-Kalil that her people lived in tents.

We walked down the paved street of a city between oleander-bushes that had forced themselves up between the cracks, toward an enormous open amphitheater hewn by the Romans out of a hillside, with countless tiers of ruined stone seats rising one above the other like giant steps.

In the center of that the tents were pitched, and the only building in use was a great half-open cave on another hillside, in which Ayisha told us Ali Higg himself lived, overlooking the entire camp and directing its destinies.

On the top of the mountain in front of us was the tomb of Aaron, Moses’ brother. On another mountain farther off stood a great crusader castle all in ruins; and to left and right were endless remains of a civilization that throve when the British were living in mud-and-wattle huts. The dry climate had preserved it all; but there was water enough; it only needed the labor of a thousand men to remake a city of it.

We avoided the amphitheater with its hundreds of tents pitched inside and all about it, because Ayisha said the women would come running out to greet her, and she did not desire that any more than we did. So we turned to the right, and started up a flight of steps nearly a mile long that led to an ancient place of sacrifice; two hundred yards up that the track turned off that led to Ali Higg’s cavern.

It was there, where the broken steps and side-track met, that the first men came hurrying to meet us and blocked our way—four of them, active as goats, and looking fierce enough to scare away twice their number. But they recognized Ayisha, and stood aside at once to let us pass, showing her considerable gruff respect and asking a string of questions, which she countered with platitudes. They did not follow us, but stayed on guard at the corner, as if the meeting between Ali Higg and his wife were something to keep from prying eyes.

So the far-famed Ali Higg was alone in his great cave when we reached it, sitting near the entrance propped on skins and cushions with a perfect armory of weapons on the floor beside him. The interior was hung with fine Bokhara embroideries, and every inch of the floor was covered with rugs.

There was another cave opening into that in which he sat; and it, too, was richly decorated; but the sound of women’s voices that we heard came from a third cave around the corner of the cliff wall, not connected. Ali Higg was apparently in no mood for female company—or any other kind.

In the shadow of the overhanging rock he looked so like Grim it was laughable. He was a caricature of our man, with all the refinement and humor subtly changed into irritable anger. He looked as if he would scream if you touched him, and no wonder; for the back of the poor fellow’s neck, half hidden by the folds of his head-cloth, was a perfect mess of boils that made every movement of his head an agony.

His eyes were darker than Grim’s, and blazed as surely no white man’s ever did; and his likeness to Grim was lessened by the fact that he had not been shaved for a day or two, and the sparse black hair coarsened the outline of his chin and jaw. In spite of his illness he had not laid aside the bandoleer that crossed his breast, nor the two daggers tucked into his waist-cloth. And he laid his hand on a modern British army rifle the minute he caught sight of us.

ARAYAN SINGH and I both bowed and, after greeting him with the proper sonorous blessing, stood aside to let Ayisha approach. We should have demeaned ourselves in his eyes, and hers as well, if we had walked behind her. He nodded to us curtly, and almost smiled at her; but that one wry twist of the lips was his nearest approach to pleasantry that morning.

She knelt and kissed his hands and feet, waiting to speak until she was spoken to; and he did not speak to her at all, but signed to her with a tap on the head and a gesture to take her place on the rug behind him. Then at a motion from me Ali Baba’s two sons brought forward the presents and the medicine;chest, setting them down before him in the cave mouth.

The presents were pretty good, I thought. I would not have minded owning them myself; but he eyed them dully. There was a set of Solingen razors, marked in Arabic with the days of the week; a cloak of blue-and-white-striped cloth, fit for any prince of Bedouins; and an ormolu clock with a gong inside it that would have graced the chimney-piece of a Brooklyn boarding-house.

“Mar'haba! he said at last, by way of acknowledging our existence, after he had stared at the presents for about two minutes sourly; and I took that for permission to say my little piece.

So I delivered Grim’s message, saying that he was a most God-fearing and hard-fighting sheikh from Palestine, who had had the honor to escort his mightiness’ wife to Petra, and now, learning of the illness of the famous Lion of Petra, whom might Allah bless forever, rather than postpone his devotions had sent me, his hakim, schooled in medicine at Lahore University, and a darwaish to boot, to offer such relief as my modest skill might compass.

That was a good long speech to get off in Arabic, for a comparative beginner. I rather expected him to smile or say something pleasant in return, but he didn’t.

“By Allah, you have come to poison me!” he growled. “All hakims are alike. There was an Egyptian tried it a month ago. Look yonder on the ledge, where his skull hangs. May devils burn his soul!”

It was easy enough to look shocked at that suggestion. He had the drop on me for one thing; and for another, Ayisha was whispering to him, and I couldn’t guess whether she was betraying me or not. It turned out that that young woman was much too bent on swapping owners to do anything but smooth our path; but I wasn’t so sure of that then as Narayan Singh seemed to be, and as, for that matter, Grim was too.

But he seemed to grow a little less irascible, until she leaned too close to him and touched his neck. Then he went off like a pent-up volcano, and cursed her until she shuddered; and her fright gave him no satisfaction, because he could not turn his head to look at her.

“Where is this cursed person?” he demanded, meaning Grim, of course.

“He rests at the treasury of Pharaoh,” said I, hoping that as Narayan Singh and I both stood exactly in front of him he might not catch sight of Grim’s movements in the valley below.

“How did he enter Petra without my leave?” he demanded.

I took a good long pause, for that was an awkward question. I could not very well admit that Grim had seized and imprisoned his watchmen. But Narayan Singh strode into the breach.

“The Lion’s jackals slept,” he announced in a voice of righteous indignation. “ There was none to give our great Sheikh Jimgrim as much as Allah’s blessing. Nevertheless, he sends these presents.”

Without answering that Ali Higg clapped his hands twice, and a woman came around the corner from a near-by cave. By her bearing she was either a junior wife or a concubine, and she greeted Ayisha like a sister with a great pow wow of blessing and reply. But Ali Higg cut all that short. He was no sentimentalist.

“Find Shammas Abdul,” he ordered her. “Order him to take camel and meet the men returning from the Beni Aroun raid. Let him bid them hurry. Go!”

She obeyed on the run. There was discipline in that man’s camp, as long as he was looking. But Ayisha followed the woman out, and whether she herself found Shammas Abdul, or whether she contrived to pervert the junior wife, Grim presently became aware of that move to summon forty men, and governed himself accordingly.

For about a minute Ali Higg fixed baleful eyes on me.

“You are a Shia!” he snapped suddenly. “A Persian! A cursed heretic!”

A look of pained surprize was the best retort I could accomplish, but Narayan Singh came to the rescue again. He thumped a fist on his chest as if it were a drum, and glared indignantly.

“Would I, a Pathan of the Orakzai, demean myself by being servant to a Persian?” he demanded. “Lo! We bring gifts. What manner of desert man are you that reward us with insults!”

“Peace!” I said. “Peace!” remembering the Sikh’s counsel about the middle course I should pursue. “The Lion is sick. May Allah take pity on him!”

Narayan Singh growled in his beard by way of submitting to the mild rebuke, and Ali Higg—a little bit impressed perhaps—proceeded to question me on doctrine and theology, showing a zeal for splitting hairs that would have done credit to a Cairo m'allim. But I had had lots of instruction on those points, and in fact surprized him with a trite fanaticism equal to his own, ending up with a statement that whoever did not believe every article and precept of the Sunni faith not only was damned forever beyond hope, but should be dispatched in a hurry to face the dreadful consequences.

His eyes softened considerably at that; and for the moment I think he almost approved of me, in spite of the foreign accent that must have grated on his ears, and his national dislike of any one who hailed from India. He actually told both of us to be seated, and clapped his hands again. Another woman came, looking dreadfully afraid of him.

“Coffee!” he ordered.

We sat down on the ledge of rock in front of him, for although it was hardly wise to seem too deferent it would have been more unwise to move away and give him an unobstructed view of the valley, where Grim might be in sight or might not be. Our job was to gain time.

He did not say a word until the coffee came, beyond swearing scandalously when he moved his head and hurt the boils.

“O Allah, may Your neck hurt You as mine does me!”

I thought that pretty good for such a hard-and-fast doctrinaire, but it was almost mild compared to some of his other remarks.

HE woman brought the coffee on a tray in little silver cups—as good and as well served as if our host were a Cairene pasha; but our irascible host took none, for Ayisha called out and warned him not to, saying it would heat his boils.

She came like the wife of Heber the Kenite, who slew Sisera, “bringing forth butter in a lordly dish.” She held in both hands a marvelous Persian rose-bowl half-filled with clabber, saying she had prepared it for her lord-herself, and offered it to him on bended knees.

I could not see her face, for her back was toward me and she had the shawl over her head, but I thought of that little vial of croton oil Narayan Singh had given her instead of poison, and the Sikh caught my eye meaningly.

Ali Higg was pleased to condescend. He took the bowl in both hands, muttered a blessing, and drank deep, swallowing about half the stuff before he noticed its strange flavor. Then he flung the priceless bowl away from him, smashing it to atoms, and picked up his rifle to take aim at Ayisha.

“By Allah, the bint has poisoned me!”

She screamed and ran. He fired, but she was already past the corner, and the bullet grazed the rock. Moreover, croton oil is a drastic strong cathartic, and waits on no man’s convenience. He dropped the rifle, groaned—and I would rather not set down quite all the rest.

Sufficient that it gave Narayan Singh and me our opportunity. It made him too weak to resist, and we took care of him. I let him go on believing he was poisoned, and gave him harmless doses that he presently believed had saved his life; so that even that tyrannical fanatic felt a kind of gratitude.

Held like a baby in the Sikh’s enormous arms, with no less than half a dozen terrified women looking on—for they had all run one way while Ayisha ran the other—he slowly recovered control of his emotions, while the women loudly praised my medicinal skill.

And since I knew almost nothing at all of medicine, and therefore could say anything I chose without feeling guilty—like the fellow on a soap-box who harangues a crowd on politics—I told him he must have the boils lanced there and then or otherwise the poison might get to them and inflame them beyond all hope.

I suppose the men who had met us at the corner of the great flight of steps did not come and interrupt because they had had enough of his temper for one morning and did not choose to sample it again uninvited. The rifle-shot did not bring them because it was nothing new for him to vent displeasure by shooting at folk; and if there were a corpse, and it had not fallen over the cliff or been kicked over, they would come and remove it when ordered, but certainly not sooner.

Ali Higg had strength enough left to assure me that if I killed him he would wait for me in the next world and settle the account there. I told him what was perfectly true, that I would rather lose my hand than kill him, so he added that if I hurt him more than was reasonable four camels should be told off afterward to hurt me.

Seeing he was to be sole judge of what was reasonable pain, and having no means of guessing whether Grim was still alive and able to protect me, I decided to give him a hypodermic, and put a shot into his arm that would have quieted a must elephant. Maybe I rather overdid that, but as I have no medical diploma nobody can call me to account.

And the operation was successful, if unpleasant. I used one of the presentation razors.

HEN Grim came, striding up the mountain-ledge with Ali Baba and all the rest of the gang at his tail, but no sign anywhere of Jael Higg. He stood and boomed out a sonorous Arab blessing; and if ever a man felt and looked like a trapped wild beast it was that Lord of the Limits of the Desert and Lion of Petra, Ali Higg.

However, Narayan Singh and I had played our part and got him weak enough; he could not even jump to grab his rifle. The rest was clearly up to Grim, who looked in no hurry at all.

He stood in the cave entrance with the light behind him, turning slightly sidewise to let Ali Higg see him in profile. The Lion’s jaw dropped. Grim’s very head-dress was striped like Ali Higg’s. His cloak was the same color. He had been dressed rather differently when I last saw him, so he must have been doing some pretty careful spy-work.

Of course, a close examination showed a dozen differences between the two men, but in his weak state following that drastic physic and the operation Ali Higg believed for a moment that he saw his own ghost! One or two of the women checked a scream, which helped matters, and the others shrank into a corner, staring with wild-eyes. One woman laughed, but not from amusement.

“Salamun alaik, O Ali Higg” said Grim after a full minute’s silence.

“Wa alaik issalam! Who are you, in the name of Allah?”

Instead of answering Grim strode in, and Ali Baba lined up his sons across the cave mouth. Unless Grim had left undone some precaution in the camp below it looked as if we had the Lion caged to rights, and you could tell by the look in Ali Baba’s usually mild old eyes that there would have been short shrift for somebody if his advice were taken. For a moment I caught sight of Ayisha, peering timidly between the end man and the wall—to see, I suppose, whether the Lion was dead yet—but the minute I caught her eye she disappeared.

Grim stooped down over Ali Higg, who was sprawling on his stomach on a Persian rug.

“Has my hakim relieved your honor’s pain?” he asked.

The Lion managed to sit upright. Three of the women piled cushions behind him and ran back again to their corner.

“Who are you in my likeness?”

“A friend, inshallah,” answered Grim.

He squatted down cross-legged on the mat in front of him; for though the Lion’s neck was pretty nicely bandaged and the hypodermic had not lost its power, yet it hurt him quite a little to look up.

“I had three brothers, but thou art none of them. I had one son, but neither art thou he. In the name of the All-Knowing, name thyself!”

“I am he,” said Grim, “who brought your honor’s wife from El-Kalil.”

“Oh! And a million curses on the bint! She tried within the hour to poison me. But for this Indian of thine I were a dead man now. Stay! Send for her!”

He clapped his hands.

“Let her be flung over the cliff. Go bring her!”

But nobody moved to do his bidding, and it dawned on him a second time that he was cornered. He wasn’t a man who took such discovery mildly.

“Ayisha shall be dealt with at the proper time!” he snarled. “I have not accepted those gifts. Take them up! You who have entered Petra without my leave shall account to my men presently. Thereafter we will talk of gifts.”

“Which men?” Grim asked him blandly. “Surely not the forty and four, who went to raid the Beni Aroun? Nay, I took the liberty of sending them a message signed with your honor’s seal. They will not come for a day or two, so we can make friends undisturbed.”

“Shu halalk? With my seal?”

“With your honor’s seal. Observe; I have it.”

“Then—then— Where is she into whose hands I gave it?”

That was the first sign Ali Higg had given of the slightest affection for any one. His face looked ghastly at the thought of losing that strange, half-western wife of his.

He had called Ayisha by her name in front of strangers, out of disrespect. Jael he would not name, even when confronted by the proof that she had broken trust and lost his precious seal.

“I took another liberty,” said Grim. “I sent word by messenger, who bore a letter sealed with that same seal, to Ibrahim ben Ah. He will neither raid El-Maan nor return to Petra.”

“He is defeated?” asked the Lion, dumbfounded. “And she—is she a prisoner?”

Grim did not answer either question.

“And I met a man named Yussuf. You know him?”

“Naam.” (Yes.)

“He has been lying to your honor. He has said that the British are helpless. He brought your honor a report from Palestine that was a skein of falsehood hung up on little pegs of truth. He told you the British are not able to defend themselves, he knowing better; for he is one of those men who say always what the hearer would like to hear.”

“What has that to do with thee?” demanded Ali Higg.

He was looking about him furtively, and Narayan Singh picked up his rifle off the rug and stood it against the wall. Grim turned toward Ali Baba.

“Bring Yussuf!” he ordered.

The ranks opened, and Yussuf was thrust forward into the cave, where he stood looking like a felon awaiting sentence.

“Did you speak truth, or did you lie to the Lion of Petra?” Grim demanded.

“Who am I that should know the truth of such matters?” the man whined, his voice squeaking like a cart-wheel. “I obeyed. I looked. I asked. Perhaps I did not understand all I saw and what was told me.”

“Is the Lion of Petra with tenscore fighting men able to stand against the British with twenty thousand?” Grim asked him.

“Inshallah. The Lion is brave. Who knows? Yet I forgot to speak of the twenty aeroplanes at Ludd, each having ten bombs of a hundred pounds weight that could make short work in an hour or two of ten score men.”

“Why don’t they come?” snarled Ali Higg.

“They take no delight in slaying the women and children,” answered Grim. “Those black tents below there would be an easy mark to aim at; but who would gain? It is better that peace were kept.”

“Throw that Yussuf over the cliff!” commanded Ali Higg.

But once more nobody moved to obey him and Yussuf had the indecency to smirk, for which Grim cursed him with whip-lash sarcasm.

Then Ali Higg put both hands before his face and prayed aloud:

“Q Allah, Lord of mercies and of wisdom and rebuke, if I am in the hands of enemies and she who was the mother of good plans is taken away from me; have I not, nevertheless, smitten the heretic in thy name and raised thy banner over Petra? Give me then wisdom, that I deal with these men and confound thy enemies. La Allah illa Allah!”

He dropped his hands and looked up with a hard, fanatical frenzy in his eyes. But they changed almost instantly. The ranks of Ali Baba’s men opened once more; and Jael Higg stepped through, dressed like a fighting Bedouin, bandoleer and all. Grim had even let her have a rifle and cartridges. As he promised, he had put her to no indignity.