XXX
In the morning he was still brooding over the message; and as theytravelled through the black desert on the way to Ghardaia and the hiddencities of the M'Zab, he fell into long silences. Then, abruptly, hewould rouse himself to gaiety and animation, telling old legends or newtales, strange dramas of the desert, very seldom comedies; for there arefew comedies in the Sahara, except for the children.
Sometimes he was in danger of speaking out words which said themselvesover and over in his head. "If I 'wait too long, I may wait for ever.'Then, by Allah, I will not wait." But he kept his tongue in control,though his brain was hot as if he wore no turban, under the blaze of thesun. "I will leave things as they are while we are in this blackGehenna," he determined. "What is written is written. Yet who has seenthe book of the writing? And there is a curse on all this country, tillthe M'Zab is passed."
After Bou-Saada, he had gradually forgotten, or almost forgotten, hisfears. He had been happy in the consciousness of power that came to himfrom the desert, where he was at home, and Europeans were helplessstrangers. But now, M'Barka's warnings had brought the fears back, likeflapping ravens. He had planned the little play of the sand-divining,and at first it had pleased him. M'Barka's vision of the dark man whowas not of Victoria's country could not have been better; and because heknew that his cousin believed in the sand, he was superstitiouslyimpressed by her prophecy and advice. In the end, he had forced her togo on when she would have stopped, yet he was angry with her forputting doubts into his mind, doubts of his own wisdom and the way tosucceed. With a girl of his own people, or indeed with any girl, if hehad not loved too much, he would have had no doubts. But he did not knowhow it was best to treat Victoria. His love for her was so strong, thatit was like fear, and in trying to understand her, he changed his mind adozen times a day. He was not used to this uncertainty, and hated tothink that he could be weak. Would she turn from him, if he broke thetacit compact of loyal friendship which had made her trust him as aguide? He could not tell; though an Arab girl would scorn him forkeeping it. "Perhaps at heart all women are alike," he thought. "And if,now that I am warned, I should risk waiting, I would be no man." Atlast, the only question left in his mind was, "When?"
For two days they journeyed through desolation, in a burnt-out worldwhere nothing had colour except the sad violet sky which at eveningflamed with terrible sunsets, cruelly beautiful as funeral pyres. Thefierce glow set fire to the black rocks which pointed up like dragons'teeth, and turned them to glittering copper; polishing the dead whitechalk of the chebka to the dull gleam of dirty silver. Far away therewere always purple hills, behind which it seemed that hope and beautymight come to life again; but travelling from morning to night theynever appeared any nearer. The evil magic of the black desert, whichMaieddine called accursed because of the M'Zabites, made the beautifulhills recede always, leaving only the ugly brown waves of hardenedearth, which were disheartening to climb, painful to descend.
At last, in the midst of black squalor, they came to an oasis like abright jewel fallen in the trough of swine. It was Berryan, the firsttown of the M'Zabites, people older than the Arabs, and hated by themwith a hatred more bitter than their loathing for Jews.
Maieddine would not pass through the town, since it could be avoided,because in his eyes the Beni-M'Zab were dogs, and in their eyes he,though heir to an agha, would be as carrion.
Sons of ancient Phoenicians, merchants of Tyre and Carthage, there neverhad been, never would be, any lust for battle in the hearts of theM'Zabites. Their warfare had been waged by cunning, and throughmercenaries. They had fled before Arab warriors, driven from place toplace by brave, scornful enemies, and now, safely established in theirseven holy cities, protected by vast distances and the barrier of theblack desert, they revenged their wrongs with their wits, being rich,and great usurers. Though Mussulmans in these days, the schisms withwhich they desecrated the true religion were worse in the eyes ofMaieddine than the foolish faith of Christians, who, at least, were notbacksliders. He would not even point out to Victoria the strange minaretof the Abadite mosque at Berryan, which tapered like a brown obeliskagainst the shimmering sky, for to him its very existence was adisgrace.
"Do not speak of it; do not even look at it," he said to her, when sheexclaimed at the great Cleopatra Needle. But she did look, having noneof his prejudices, and he dared not bid her let down the curtains of herbassour, as he would if she had been a girl of his own blood.
The extraordinary city, whose crowded, queerly-built houses were blocksof gold in the sunlight, seemed beautiful to Victoria, coming in sightof it suddenly after days in the black desert. The other six cities,called holy by the Beni-M'Zab, were far away still. She knew this,because Maieddine had told her they would not descend into the WadyM'Zab till next day. Berryan and Guerrara were on the upper plateau; andVictoria could hardly bear to pass by, for Berryan was by far the mostEastern-seeming place she had seen. She wondered if, should she ask himas a favour, Maieddine would rest there that night, instead of campingsomewhere farther on, in the hideous desert; for already it was lateafternoon. But she would ask nothing of him now, for he was no longerquite the trusty friend she had persuaded herself to think him. Onenight, since the sand-divining, she had had a fearful dream concerningMaieddine. Outside her tent she had heard a soft padding sound, andpeeping from under the flap, she had seen a splendid, tawny tiger, wholooked at her with brilliant topaz eyes which fascinated her so that shecould not turn away. But she knew that the animal was Maieddine; thateach night he changed himself into a tiger; and that as a tiger he wasmore his real self than when by day he appeared as a man.
They filed past Berryan; the meharis, the white stallion, thepack-camel, and the mule, in slow procession, along a rough road whichwound close to the green oasis. And from among the palm trees men andwomen and little children, gorgeous as great tropical birds, in theirrobes of scarlet, ochre-yellow, and emerald, peered at the littlecaravan with cynical curiosity. Victoria looked back longingly, for sheknew that the way from Berryan to the Wady M'Zab would be grim andtoilsome under the burning sun. Hill after hill, they mounted anddescended; hills stony yet sandy, always the same dull colour, and soshapeless as to daze the brain with their monotony. But towards evening,when the animals had climbed to the crest of a hill like a dingy wave,suddenly a white obelisk shot up, pale and stiff as a dead man's finger.Tops of tall palms were like the dark plumes on the heads of tenthousand dancing women of the Sahara, and as a steep descent began,there glittered the five hidden cities, like a strange fairyland lost inthe desert. The whole Wady M'Zab lay under the eyes of the travellers,as if they looked down over the rim of an immense cup. Here, some whowere left of the sons of Tyre and Carthage dwelt safe and snug,crouching in the protection of the valley they had found and reclaimedfrom the abomination of desolation.
It seemed to Victoria that she looked on one of the great sights of theworld: the five cities, gleaming white, and glowing bronze, closelybuilt on their five conical hills, which rose steeply from the flatbottom of the gold-lined cup--Ghardaia, Beni-Isguen, Bou-Noura, Melika,and El-Ateuf. The top of each hill was prolonged to a point by thetapering minaret of one of those Abadite mosques which the girl thoughtthe most Eastern of all things imported from the East. The oasis whichgave wealth to the M'Zabites surged round the towns like a green sea atebb tide, sucked back from a strand of gold; and as the caravan wounddown the wonderful road with which the Beni-M'Zab had traced the sheerside of their enchanted cup, the groaning of hundreds of well-chainscame plaintively up on the wind.
The well-stones had the obelisk shape of the minarets, in miniature; andNegroes--freed slaves of the rich M'Zabites--running back and forth inpairs, to draw the water, were mere struggling black ants, seen from thecup's rim. The houses of the five towns were like bleached skeletons,and the arches that spanned the dark, narrow streets were their ribs.
Arrived at the bottom of the cup, it was necessary to pass through thelongest and only modern street of Ghardai
a, the capital of the M'Zab. Awind had sprung up, to lift the sand which sprinkled the hard-troddenground with thick powder of gold dust, and whirl it westward against thefire of sunset, red as a blowing spray of blood. "It is a sign oftrouble when the sand of the desert turns to blood," muttered Fafann toher mistress, quoting a Bedouin proverb.
The men of the M'Zab do not willingly give lodging to strangers, leastof all to Arabs; and at Beni-Isguen, holy city and scene of strangemysteries, no stranger may rest for the night. But Maieddine, respectedby the ruling power, as by his own people, had a friend or two at everyBureau Arabe and military station. A French officer stationed atGhardaia had married a beautiful Arab girl of good family distantlyrelated to the Agha of the Ouled-Serrin, and being at Algiers onofficial business, his wife away at her father's tent, he had promisedto lend his house, a few miles out of the town, to Si Maieddine. It wasa long, low building of toub, the sun-dried sand-blocks of which mosthouses are made in the ksour, or Sahara villages, but it had beenwhitewashed, and named the Pearl.
There they slept, in the cool shadow of the oasis, and early nextmorning went on.
As soon as they had passed out of this hidden valley, where a whole raceof men had gathered for refuge and wealth-building, Victoria felt,rather than saw, a change in Maieddine. She hardly knew how to expressit to herself, unless it was that he had become more Arab. Hiscourtesies suggested less the modern polish learned from the French (inwhich he could excel when he chose) than the almost royal hospitality ofsome young Bey escorting a foreign princess through his dominions.Always "_tres-male_," as Frenchwomen pronounced him admiringly, SiMaieddine began to seem masculine in an untamed, tigerish way. He wasrestless, and would not always be contented to ride El Biod, beside thetall, white mehari, but would gallop far ahead, and then race back torejoin the little caravan, rushing straight at the animals as if he mustcollide with them, then, at the last instant, when Victoria's heartbounded, reining in his horse, so that El Biod's forefeet--shodArab-fashion--pawed the air, and the animal sat upon his haunches,muscles straining and rippling under the creamlike skin.
Or, sometimes, Maieddine would spring from the white stallion's back,letting El Biod go free, while his master marched beside Guelbi, withthat panther walk that the older races, untrammelled by the civilizationof towns, have kept unspoiled.
The Arab's eyes were more brilliant, never dreamy now, and he looked atVictoria often, with disconcerting steadiness, instead of lowering hiseyelids as men of Islam, accustomed to the mystery of the veil,unconsciously do with European women whom they respect, though they donot understand.
So they went on, travelling the immeasurable desert; and Victoria hadnot asked again, since Maieddine's refusal, the name of the place towhich they were bound. M'Barka seemed brighter, as if she lookedforward to something, each day closer at hand; and her courage wouldhave given Victoria confidence, even if the girl had been inclined toforebodings. They were going somewhere, Lella M'Barka knew where, andlooked forward joyously to arriving. The girl fancied that theirdestination was the same, though at first she had not thought so. Wordsthat M'Barka let drop inadvertently now and then, built up thisimpression in her mind.
The "habitude du Sud," as Maieddine called it, when occasionally theytalked French together, was gradually taking hold of the girl. Sometimesshe resented it, fearing that by this time it must have altogetherenslaved Saidee, and dreading the insidious fascination for herself;sometimes she found pleasure and peace in it; but in every mood theinfluence was hard to throw off.
"The desert has taken hold of thee," Maieddine said one day, when he hadwatched her in silence for a while, and seen the rapt look in her eyes."I knew the time would come, sooner or later. It has come now."
"No," Victoria answered. "I do not belong to the desert."
"If not to-day, then to-morrow," he finished, as if he had not heard.
They were going on towards Ouargla. So much he had told her, though hehad quickly added, "But we shall not stop there." He was waiting still,though they were out of the black desert and the accursed land of therenegades. He was not afraid of anything or anyone here, in thisvastness, where a European did not pass once a year, and few Arabs, onlythe Spahis, carrying mails from one Bureau Arabe to another, or tiredsoldiers changing stations. The beautiful country of the golden dunes,with its horizon like a stormy sea, was the place of which he said inhis thoughts, "It shall happen there."
On the other side of Ghardaia, even when Victoria had ceased to beactually impatient for her meeting with Saidee, she had longed to knowthe number of days, that she might count them. But now she had drunk sodeep of the colour and the silence that, in spite of herself, she waspassing beyond that phase. What were a few days more, after so manyyears? She wondered how she could have longed to go flying across thedesert in Nevill Caird's big motor-car; nevertheless, she never ceasedto wish for Stephen Knight. Her thoughts of him and of the desert wereinextricably and inexplicably mingled, more than ever since the nightwhen she had danced in the Agha's tent, and Stephen's face had comebefore her eyes, as if in answer to her call. Constantly she called himnow. When there was some fleeting, beautiful effect of light or shadow,she said, "How I wish he were here to see that!" She never named him inher mind. He was "he": that was name enough. Yet it did not occur to herthat she was "in love" with Knight. She had never had time to thinkabout falling in love. There had always been Saidee, and dancing; and toVictoria, the desire to make money enough to start out and find hersister, had taken the place which ideas of love and marriage fill inmost girls' heads. Therefore she did not know what to make of herfeeling for Stephen. But when a question floated into her brain, sheanswered it simply by explaining that he was different from any otherman she had met; and that, though she had known him only a few days,from the first he had seemed more a friend than Si Maieddine, or any oneelse whom she knew much better than Stephen.
As they travelled, she had many thoughts which pleased her--thoughtswhich could have come to her nowhere else except in the desert, andoften she talked to herself, because M'Barka could not understand herfeelings, and she did not wish to make Maieddine understand.
"Burning, burning," was the adjective which she repeated oftenest, in analmost awestruck whisper, as her eyes travelled over immense spaces; forshe thought that the desert might have dropped out of the sun. Thecolour of sand and sky was colour on fire, blazing. The whole Saharathrobbed with the unimaginable fire of creative cosmic force, deep,vital orange, needed by the primitive peoples of the earth who had notrisen high enough yet to deserve or desire the finer vibrations.
As she leaned out of the bassour, the heat of the sun pressed on herlightly veiled head, like the golden lid of a golden box. She could feelit as an actual weight; and invisible behind it a living power whichcould crush her in an instant, as the paw of a lion might crush a flowerpetal.
Africa itself was this savage power, fierce as fire, ever smouldering,sometimes flaming with the revolt of Islam against other creeds; but theheart of the fire was the desert. Only the shady seguias in the oasistowns cooled it, like children's fingers on a madman's forehead; or thesound of a boy's flute in a river bed, playing the music of Pan,changeless, monotonous yet thrilling, as the music of earth and allNature.
There were tracts in the desert which colour-blind people might havehated; but Victoria grew to think the dreariest stretches beautiful; andeven the occasional plagues of flies which irritated M'Barka beyondendurance, only made Victoria laugh.
Sometimes came caravans, in this billowing immensity between the M'Zaband Ouargla--city of Solomon, whither the Queen of Sheba rode on hermehari: caravans blazing red and yellow, which swept like slow lines offlame across the desert, going east towards the sunrise, or west wherethe sunset spreads over the sky like a purple fan opening, or the tailof a celestial peacock.
What Victoria had once imagined the desert to be of vast emptiness, andwhat she found it to be of teeming life, was like the difference betweena gold-bright autumn leaf seen by the
naked eye, and the same leafswarming under a powerful microscope.
The girl never tired of following with her eyes the vague tracks ofcaravans that she could see dimly sketched upon the sand, vanishing inthe distance, like lines traced on the water by a ship. She would begazing at an empty horizon when suddenly from over the waves of thedunes would appear a dark fleet; a procession of laden camels like aflotilla of boats in a desolate sea.
They were very effective, as they approached across the desert, thesesilent, solemn beasts, but Victoria pitied them, because they were madeto work till they fell, and left to die in the shifting sand, when nolonger useful to their unloving masters.
"My poor dears, this is only one phase," she would say to them as theyplodded past, their feet splashing softly down on the sand like big wetsponges, leaving heart-shaped marks behind, which looked like violets asthe hollows filled up with shadow. "Wait till your next chance on earth.I'm sure it will make up for everything."
But Maieddine told her there was no need to be sorry for the sufferingsof camels, since all were deserved. Once, he said, they had been men--ahaughty tribe who believed themselves better than the rest of the world.They broke off from the true religion, and lest their schism spread,Allah turned the renegades into camels. He compelled them to bear theweight of their sins in the shape of humps, and also to carry on theirbacks the goods of the Faithful, whose beliefs they had trampled underfoot. While keeping their stubbornness of spirit they must kneel toreceive their loads, and rise at the word of command. Remembering theirpast, they never failed to protest with roarings, against theseindignities, nor did their faces ever lose the old look of sullen pride.But, in common with the once human storks, they had one consolation.Their sins expiated, they would reincarnate as men; and some otherrebellious tribe would take their place as camels.
Five days' journeying from Ghardaia brought the travellers to a desertworld full of movement and interest. There were many caravans goingnorthward. Pretty girls smiled at them from swaying red bassourahs,sitting among pots and pans, and bundles of finery. Little children innests of scarlet rags, on loaded camels, clasped squawking cocks andhens, tied by the leg. Splendid Negroes with bare throats like columnsof black marble sang strange, chanting songs as they strode along.White-clad Arabs whose green turbans told that they had been to Mecca,walked beside their young wives' camels. Withered crones in yellowsmocks trudged after the procession, driving donkeys weighed down withsheepskins full of oil. Baby camels with waggling, tufted humps followedtheir mothers. Slim grey sloughis and Kabyle dogs quarrelled with eachother, among flocks of black and white goats; and at night, the skypulsed with the fires of desert encampments, rosy as northern lights.
Just before the walled city of Ouargla, Victoria saw her first mirage,clear as a dream between waking and sleeping. It was a salt lake, inwhich Guelbi and the other animals appeared to wade knee-deep in azurewaves, though there was no water; and the vast, distant oasis hovered soclose that the girl almost believed she had only to stretch out her handand touch the trunks of the crowding palm trees.
M'Barka was tired, and they rested for two days in the strange Ghuaratown, the "City of Roses," founded (according to legend), by Solomon,King of Jerusalem, and built for him by djenoum and angels in a singlenight. They lived as usual in the house of the Caid, whose beautifultwin daughters told Victoria many things about the customs of the Ghuarapeople, descendants of the ancient Garamantes. How much happier andfreer they were than Arab girls, how much purer though gayer was thelife at Ouargla, Queen of the Oases, than at any other less enlighteneddesert city; how marvellous was the moulet-el-rass, the dance cure forheadache and diseases of the brain; how wonderful were the womensoothsayers; and what a splendid thing it was to see the bridalprocessions passing through the streets, on the one day of the year whenthere is marrying and giving in marriage in Ouargla.
The name of the prettier twin was Zorah, and she had black curls whichfell straight down over her brilliant eyes, under a scarlet head-dress."Dost thou love Si Maieddine?" she asked the Roumia, with a kind ofinnocent boldness.
"As a friend who has been very kind," Victoria answered.
"Not as a lover, oh Roumia?" Zorah, like all girls of Ouargla, was proudof her knowledge of Arabic.
"No. Not as a lover."
"Is there then one of thine own people whom thou lovest as a lover, Roseof the West?"
"I have no lover, little white moon."
"Si Maieddine will be thy lover, whether thou desirest him or not."
"Thou mistakest, oh Zorah."
"I do not mistake. If thou dost not yet know I am right, thou wilt knowbefore many days. When thou findest out all that is in his heart forthee, remember our talk to-day, in the court of oranges."
"I will tell thee thou wert wrong in this same court of oranges when Ipass this way again without Si Maieddine."
The Ghuara girl shook her head, until her curls seemed to ring likebells of jet. "Something whispers to my spirit that thou wilt neveragain pass this way, oh Roumia; that never again will we talk togetherin this court of oranges."