The Seventeen Thieves of El-Kalil/Chapter 7

E HURRIED back to the Governorate as straight as you can go through the mazy streets of Hebron and found Jones asleep in his boots on the bench at the end of the hall. De Crespigny was dozing on the window-seat in the sitting-room, and made a show of being angry with Jones for not having gone to bed.

“Fat lot of use you’ll be this time tomorrow!”

“Do you see me bedded down, while you face the music alone?” Jones answered testily.

“Seems to me I’ve heard somewhere of juniors obeying orders!”

“You told me to go and get some sleep. I did.”

Grim recounted what had happened at the Haram, while de Crespigny mixed drinks and a sleepy Arab servant stripped Cohen and me of our slimy wet garments.

“So you can both sleep safely until morning,” Grim assured them. “Tell you what: I shan’t need Cohen until after breakfast. Let him sleep in the hall. He’ll give the alarm if a mouse breaks in. He’s nervous.”

“Noivous? Me? After breakin’ into a mosque an’ doin’ a Hippodrome high-divin’ stunt into a dark tank? You mean noivy!”

“I mean sleep,” said Grim. “There’s a bellyful in store for you tomorrow. Thought I’d try you out this evening. You’ve made good. Tomorrow you win the game for us.”

“If you’re countin’ on me to make a home run I’ll start now!” said Cohen. “Give me one o’ them camels and I’ll make it quicker! Mnyum-m! Never knew a hot cocktail could sink without makin’ you sick. Does the business, too. Saves ice. Start a new fashion if I live through this. Warm drinks! Sure, give me another one!”

“Can you spare me one policeman, Crep?”

“Which?”

“Any one at all who knows Abraham’s Oak and the caves thereabouts,” Grim answered.

“Righto! I’ll dig you out a man.”

“Tell him to bring handcuffs.”

“When d’you want him?”

“Now. I’ve got to move quickly. Our side-show’s scheduled for tomorrow night and we don’t want a rival act playing the same pitch. We’ve got to pull up that fire-gift by the roots. Besides, we need the makings. Some of the notables are likely to call on you at dawn, ’Crep, and tell you their version of tonight’s events. If I were you I’d take the line that you’ll permit crowds in the streets leading to the Haram tomorrow night to see the Jews return the fire-gift; but make them swear by their beards there shall be no bloodshed if the Jews don’t disappoint them. Take their pledge in writing for it. Then how would it be if you offered to grace the ceremony with your official presence?”

“Good. That’ll do to remind ’em of what they’ve promised. But Lord help us if you fail, Grim! Are you sure of the Jews?”

“That’s Cohen’s end.”

“Say, see here,” put in Cohen, “I’ve told you more’n once these Jews are Orthodox. They’d no more listen to me than if I was a Piute Indian. They’d sooner listen to an Indian!”

“Go to sleep on the bench and dream of a way of persuading them,” Grim suggested pleasantly. “Policeman ready, Crep?”

The servant had found me dry clothes belonging to the estate of an Arab who had been hanged for triple murder a couple of weeks before, and Grim and I left by the front door again with the policeman shouldering a loaded rifle just behind us.

This time instead of turning toward the city we went almost to the opposite direction, between orchard walls, by a path so stony that you tripped at every second step. The policeman’s steel-capped boots struck sparks behind us and the noise we made set little foxes scampering, then brought them back again to leap on the wall and look. Surely all nature wonders at the clumsiness of man.

░ WE WERE in open country at the end of half a mile, but that brought us small advantage, for the tilled hillsides to left and right of us were so much blackness, and how in the world Grim proposed to find any given cave, or the man who hid in it, was more than I could guess. You could see dim ghosts that were thousand-year-old olive-trees and goblins that were limestone rocks. Little owls screamed mockery from almost arm’s length and one or two hyenas dogged our steps snickering obscenity. The rest was black, unfathomable night.

But we came at last to a lane that led due northward by the pole-star and Grim led the way up that, following a cart-wheel track beside a wall. And presently we emerged into a clump of pine-trees that were startling because so unexpected in that land, where men have cut for fuel whatever bears no fruit that men can eat and the goats have seen to it that nothing grows again. There were thirty or forty pines with grass beneath them, clean and well-kept.

“Care to see Abraham’s Oak?” asked Grim—showman again; he could not rest until you had seen everything. “I think Ali Baba and his gang will come here before dawn; they always used to. We’ll have to beat it soon, but you’ve time to see the tree. There’ll be no time afterward.”

It stood within two hundred feet of us, surrounded by a stone wall and an iron railing—a veritable oak, so huge and ancient that a man’s life seemed an absurd thing as we stood beneath. Under the stars, with shadows all about, it looked vaster than by daylight, its dignity unmarred by signs of decay and only its age and hugeness to be wondered at—those and the silence that it seemed to breathe.

“They had to fence it to keep thieves away,” said Grim. “No, not only souvenir-sharps. The thieves of Hebron used to meet under the pines and set their fires against this oak. Abraham is supposed to have pitched his tent under this identical tree, so it must have been big then, and that’s three thousand years ago. It has been a rendezvous ever since. Ali Baba loves the spot. Come on.”

We passed through a gate and up-hill to where big buildings and a tower loomed lonely against the sky, I too busy wondering about Abraham and that old tree to take any interest in modern convents. The patriarch came from Ur of the Chaldees, wherever that was. What sort of tents did he have, and how many? According to Genesis he must have had a small tribe with him; what did they look like camped around that tree and how were his slaves and retainers armed?

Modern happenings amuse me more when I can follow their roots back into the subsoil of time; but that leads to and hurt shins. I barked mine against a modern American plow, as Grim turned aside along the hilltop and picked up a big stone, to thunder with it on the wooden door of a high square tower.

It stood apart from the convent buildings, modern and unlovely—might have been a belfry, for all you could tell in the dark—perhaps one of those vainglorious beginnings the religious congregations make with thousands of yet-to-be-solicited contributors in mind. The door was opened presently by an old Russian female in a night-cap, who screamed at sight of us.

She knew no Arabic—no English. Grim beckoned the policeman, and his rifle turned out to be a theme she comprehended, for she crossed herself in a quick-fire flurry and stood aside. Grim gave her a coin, for which she blessed him profusely—or so I suppose; the words were Russian—and we entered a square room dimly lighted by a night-light that burned before an ikon in a corner. It formed the whole ground-story of the tower, bedroom and living-room in one, and was chock-a-block with rubbishy furniture, but clean.

In the corner opposite the ikon was an iron stair with a hand-rail, like one of those that stokers use to emerge by from the boiling bowels of a ship. Grim started up it, but told the policeman to stay below and keep the door shut, presumably to prevent the old lady from communicating with her friends outside—for you never know in Palestine what innocents are earning money on the side by acting as thieves’ telegraph. I followed Grim.

Story after story the iron ladder twisted on itself in pitchy blackness, until we came out at last on a flat roof with a waist-high parapet, crossed by two ropes on which the beldame’s washing hung—not edifying as a spectacle, nor pleasant when the wind drove it in your face. There was nothing else to see there except the stars that looked almost within reach. Grim leaned his back against the parapet and proceeded to admire them.

“What next?” I asked, for since the only ones I can ever identify are the dipper and the pole-star I soon grow inattentive to astronomy.

“You’d better sleep. Nothing more till sunrise.”

So I did. It was pretty chilly up there without a blanket three thousand feet above sea-level, but some of the old lady’s damp laundry helped to temper it and the balance went under me to soften contact with the roof. For a few minutes I lay listening to Grim’s mellow voice chanting familiar lines, staring upward drowsily and growing almost dizzy with a sense of vastness.

“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained”

But when he changed to Hebrew and boomed out the psalm as it was written by a man who may have wondered at the same sky from the very hill on which we were, I dozed off. Nothing can send you to sleep quicker than a monolog in Hebrew, and I recommend it to the nurse-maids.

When I awoke Grim was still keeping watch, but the stars were paling in the mauve and gold of coming dawn. The policeman had come up. I suppose Grim had been below to fetch him without waking me, and an annoying sense of having been babied by both of them helped dissipate the stiff discomfort and the civilized yearning for a tooth-brush and hot coffee. Besides, I might have missed something.

I came and stood between them where they leaned over the parapet staring downhill past the convent in the direction of the clump of pines and the iron-fenced oak. The great tree developed slowly out of pearl-colored mist as the sun rose, looking weary and decrepit now that the cloak of night was off, its gnarled, gray lower limbs propped up on wooden beams and the huge trunk split under the weight of centuries.

But Grim had seen that tree a hundred times. It needed more than another view of it at dawn to make him and an Arab policeman, born within a mile of it, hang by the waist over that parapet and stare like mast-headed seamen in an Atlantic fog.

“''Dahrak! Shuf!''” said the policeman suddenly, and both men ducked until their heads were almost level with the masonry. A slight puff of wind rolled the mist apart, producing the effect of turning on more light, and through the iron railings above the wall surrounding the oak I could make out the figures of men squatted in a circle. They might have been gambling, for they faced inward and their heads were close together. Secretive and at least a bit excited they were certainly.

“Now watch ’em!” said Grim. “For ’s sake watch ’em!” I think he mistrusted his own eyes after the long vigil.

When the comet-tail of the mist had vanished along the valley in front of a wind that shook down the dew in jeweled showers, the men who sat under the tree rose in a hurry as if they had let time steal a march on them and helped one another over the fence in something of a panic. Then, in single file, they started across country toward the opposite hillside. I counted eighteen of them and the man who led was someone I had never seen before—a man who walked with a limp and wore a tarboosh wrapped in calico. The others were unmistakable even at that distance—old Ali Baba and his sons.

“If we lose sight of them we’re done for! Tell you what,” said Grim, “you and the policeman stay up here. I’ll follow them. We ought to manage it between us that way. If it seems to you I’m off the trail, give one long shout; they’ll think it’s a herdsman rounding up stray cattle, I’ll understand and cast again, or wait for you. If you see I’m surely on their heels, you two follow and catch up as fast as you can.”

░ HE repeated the instructions to the policeman in Arabic and vanished. While we watched him run down-hill the old woman came up panting, to abuse me in voluble Russian about her crumpled cotton underclothes; but Russian is one of several things I don’t know, so we didn’t grow intimate. The policeman bundled all her laundry up and threw it off the roof, which seemed to me hardly tactful in the circumstances; so I gave her a coin and she blessed me and we let it go at that.

Thereafter I could hardly watch Grim and the swiftly retreating eighteen for wondering at the view. You could see clear across the whole of Palestine—the Moab Hills beyond the Dead Sea to the eastward, and over to the west the blue of the Mediterranean and thirty miles of white surf pounding on golden sand. A little, little country, that had managed to make more impression on the world than many a big one!

Grim followed as far as the road we had come by in the night without troubling to conceal himself. After that, though, he took to hiding behind rocks and running forward in spurts when he dared. But all that trouble turned out to be unnecessary, for before long we saw all eighteen men disappear behind a scrawny olive-tree in such extraordinary fashion that a cave at that spot was the only possible explanation. It was two thirds of the way up the opposite hill, about a mile, or something less, from where we watched.

So the policeman shooed me off the roof as if I were a goat out of bounds—grumbled at me for taking so much time on the ladder and at the old dame downstairs for not having breakfast ready for us—and panted behind me down the hill with a running comment on the weight of his rifle and the absurdity of racing when a sensible man might walk. He was a perfectly good policeman, raised in the don’t-do-it school, and faithful as an old work-horse, with a horse’s sense of what is due him on the grades.

We found Grim waiting for us behind a big rock, and when the Arab had recovered breath enough to swear with we got orders to engage.

“Can you see the back of a man’s head just beyond the olive-tree? No, not that; that’s a hawk feeding; look ten feet to the left. There. See him move? Mahommed ben Hamza keeping lookout. Never occurred to the fool to look this way, or he’d have seen you two experts maneuvering! Now there’s just a chance they’ll prove ugly. One of us may go West this trip. Spread, and come on them from three sides; then if they cut up rough there’ll be at least one of us to break back with the news. I’ll snoop up this side and approach first. You two get over the brow of the hill and watch what happens to me. Reenforce me as required or when I beckon.”

So we made a short circuit and ran and lay a hundred yards apart on top of the hill. The policeman raised his rifle and as soon as Grim caught sight of it he left cover and walked straight forward, singing a shepherd song. But quite as clearly as Grim’s voice I could hear the drumming of an airplane flying low from the direction of Ludd; and the man outside the cave was watching that intently, so that he neither saw nor heard Grim until he was close up.

The plane circled twice over Hebron and departed. Grim went closer and spoke. I couldn’t hear what he said, but Mahommed at the cave-mouth jumped and then put his hands up. Grim ordered him down into the cave and beckoned to us. I did not know until then that Grim had as much as a pistol with him.

The cave was the usual thing. All that country is full of caves and every one of them has been a sepulcher until another generation or any army came and robbed it. There was a low, hewn entrance that you had to stoop to get by, and a short dark passage with a sharp turn, beyond which you could imagine anything you liked. You could enter at your peril; a man couldn’t possibly defend himself in the gut where the passage turned.

“They know now who’s here,” said Grim. “I’m going to take a chance. They’ve had time to make their minds up. You’d better stay outside.”

But I had not had that run on an empty stomach just to cool my heels outside a cave and told him so.

“All right,” he laughed. “Suit yourself. We’ll leave Mustapha.”

But the policeman wouldn’t hear of it either and got point-blank mutinous. He asked what sort of figure he would cut going back to the Governorate to report that we had had our throats cut while he looked on. He said he did not mind getting killed, since that was likely to happen just now at any time, and demanded to go in first. So Grim let him fix his bayonet and follow me, with strict orders not to start anything unless we were attacked first.

And after all that fuss there was not any opposition, although there well might have been. Twenty feet beyond the turn the passage opened into an egg-shaped cave, where all eighteen men sat solemnly around a lighted candle. The eighteenth—he of the tarboosh wrapped in calico—looked like a lunatic. They had taken his long knife away—old Ali Baba had it laid across his knees—and two of the sons—the giant and the fellow with the long arms—were sitting one on either side of him, leaning inwards, with the obvious purpose of seizing him if he tried to move.

░ I HAVE never seen a more ferocious-looking devil. He had a lean, mean face with scars on it and loose lips like an animal’s that seemed to have been given him for the purpose of hurling incentive language at a crowd; they made a sort of trumpet when he thrust them out. He had a cataract in one eye, but the other made up for it by being preternaturally bright and black and cunning; and his ears were set far back like an angry dog’s.

“Peace! Peace!” urged Ali Baba, as Grim and Mustapha and I stood upright with our backs to the entrance. Grim had put his pistol out of sight, but the policeman stood on guard like a terrier watching rats.

“Peace! Peace!” all sixteen sons repeated after the patriarch.

“Fools! Idiots!” yelled the eighteenth man and tried to spring to his feet, but the men on either side restrained him. I think even a gorilla would have been helpless in those titanic arms that pressed him downward like a cork into a bottle until he seemed a full foot shorter than he actually was and gasped under the strain.

“What will you, Jimgrim?” asked Ali Baba.

Grim nodded in the direction of the eighteenth man.

“I’ve come for him.”

But the gentleman did not propose to be fetched, and he had a way of his own of making the objection obvious. He couldn’t move, for the giant on one side and the monstrous-armed fellow on the other continued to lean their weight on him; but he could speak and yell blasphemy and threaten; and he surely did, filling the cave with a clamor like a dog-fight.

The blasphemy was his great mistake, for they were simply a pious gang of thieves, despite their own sacrilege, and his coarsely mouthed Egyptian liberties with sacred words hurt their feelings. They might have taken his part with more determination but for that.

“You fools! Kill them! Kill all three of them!” he yelled and followed it with frightful imprecations—foul, filthy epithets all mixed up with the names of angels and Allah so that Ali Baba protested and his sixteen sons clucked after him in chorus like a lot of scandalized hens.

“What else have you got in the cave besides that beauty?” Grim inquired.

“Nothing, Jimgrim. This is but a meeting-place,” said Ali Baba.

“Um-m-m! Nothing under that stone you’re sitting on?”

“Nothing, Jimgrim. I am old. The floor of the cave is cold. My sons give me the place of honor.”

“Suppose you let me look.”

Ali Baba hesitated and collected eyes like a hostess breaking up a dinner-party. It was perfectly obvious that at a word from their chief the whole gang would resist, but Grim stepped into the midst of the circle very coolly with his back to the most dangerous men and waited smiling. I knew what he had in mind. At the first symptom of attack he was going to put his foot on the candle. I got ready to bolt into the throat of the cave ahead of him where, with one rifle and one pistol he and I could keep the lot of them at bay while the policeman could run for help. He told me afterwards that he would have sent me running and kept the policeman by him; so the imaginary glory of a scrap that never happened is not mine after all.

What saved the situation was the Egyptian’s tactics. Fired by his own savage imagination he supposed Grim was going to lay hands on Ali Baba and he was one of the all-too-plentiful gentry who believe that numbers are the only unanswerable argument.

“Idiots! Kill him!” he screamed and began to struggle with the men who held him, burying his yellow teeth in the giant’s hand and striking out like a great ape simultaneously with arms and legs.

Now that giant was a great good-natured fellow—the apple of old Ali Baba’s eye and the pride of the gang. The blood squirted from his hand and the patriarch sprang up from his place to interfere, but not so quickly as the youngest, Mahommed, he who had helped us once at El-Kerak. He sprang across the floor from behind Grim and beat the Egyptian over the eyes with a fist like an olive-knot until he let go, stunned.

Then, while they crowded to make a fuss about the big man’s injury Grim very calmly lifted up the stone on which Ali Baba had been sitting. Funnily enough, I expected to see jewels and all the rest of the trimmings of the legendary robbers’ cave—golden money at any rate and perhaps a big iron chest with rings to lift it by. But Grim looked perfectly contented with the little paper packages that lay in the hole, neatly fastened with red string and laid in a circle like a clutch of flattened eggs.

“Who stole these from the doctor?” he asked, stowing them carefully away about his person. “You, Ali Baba?”

“Allah forbid! I would not rob the hakim. This dog of an Egyptian was in the hospital to have his eyes healed. He knows English and can read the names on labels.”

“Did you put him up to it?”

“Not I! He begged a meal from us afterwards and offered to show us how he fooled foreigners for money in the hotels of Massa (Egypt). So we came with him to this cave, where he had hidden what he stole; and here he breathed fire, and showed us how to do it. But he kept the secret to himself of how to mix the powders, putting the stuff on our tongues and teaching us until we could do it perfectly.”

“So you can’t work the fire-gift without him, eh?”

“More is the pity!”

“That settles that, then! Did you tell the people what I said about postponing action until tonight?”

“I and my sons. We all spoke of it. Some were angry with us. Some were pleased. Some doubted. But we, who had the fire-gift, had the last word. Jimgrim, we have kept faith.”

I went over and looked at the Egyptian, who was still stunned, gurgling through his gruesome mouth and bleeding pretty freely from Mahommed’s blows that would have felled a lion. The scars on his face looked like burns at close quarters; and that was likely, for they say that nearly all beginners at that trickster’s trade have ghastly accidents.

“What is this about the fire-gift going back, Jimgrim?” Ali Baba asked.

“It goes back tonight.”

“And we? Do you mean to put us to shame? Are we to have no hand in this? Is our honor not in your keeping?”

The gang crowded close on Grim to hear his answer, and Mustapha clucked nervously between his teeth, rattling the rifle to call attention to it. I was as scared as he was, but if Grim minded in the least he did not show it.

“What’s this talk about honor?” he asked. “Are you trying to add to the terms of a bargain after it is made?”

“No, no, no!” they chorused and he laughed at them.

“What then?”

“We are your friends,” said Ali Baba. “Inshallah, a man such as you is thoughtful for his friends!”

“Your friends, Jimgrim, don’t forget it!”

“Think of El-Kerak, Jimgrim!”

“Who provided camels for you when you went in pursuit of the Beersheba thieves?”

“When you were governor here, who brought word about the man from Bethesda—he who sought to knife you in the night? Remember that, Jimgrim!”

“Yes, and who slew the fakir who had gone mad?”

“Didn’t we save the life of the British officer, who had offended everybody and was mobbed?”

“Yes, and lied afterwards to save him from his own people! We have done everything that you ever asked of us, Jimgrim; isn’t our father Ali Baba’s honor in your keeping?”

“Well, what is it you want?” asked Grim.

“That we shall not be made the laughing-stock of El-Kalil!” Ali Baba answered solemnly. And at that they all sat down, in a circle as before, with Grim standing in the midst. So he moved the stone deliberately with his foot and sat down too, whereat they all clothed themselves in a new contentment. The Arab thinks far more highly of a judgment given sitting.

“This is a new bargain,” Grim began after a moment’s thought.

“Inshallah!”

“The terms are these: The old bargain continues until the end of this affair.”

“Na’am, na’am. (“Yes, yes.”)”

“Ali Baba shall retain such personal dignity as I can contrive for him, but the method must be mine.”

“Na’am, na’am.”

“In return for it, Ali Baba and all his sixteen sons and grandsons shall be the friends of the present governor, de Crespigny, and of his assistant Jones.”

“Taib! They are worthy of it. They are bold. The right spirit is in both of them! We agree!”

“And nothing in this agreement shall be construed to mean that Ali Baba and his gang shall not all or severally go to jail, if convicted of breaking the law in future. They go to jail in the proper spirit, without malice, if caught and convicted.”

“Taib! Agreed!”

“Very well,” said Grim. “Now three or four of you pick up that Egyptian, and take him to the jail at once!”