Part 57 (1/2)

”You're a rum chap,” the stranger said, as he noticed that a glint of humour had for the moment driven the expression of exhaustion from Michael's eyes. ”Anyhow, I hope you'll not feel too knocked up when you arrive in camp, and that we'll meet again.”

”I feel as if I could sleep for a year.”

”Have another whisky before you go?”

”No thanks. I think one has been more than enough--it's made me confoundedly tired.”

They were standing at the open front of the tent.

”Good-bye,” Michael said. ”And thanks most awfully for your hospitality. I suppose you won't settle on the work here until next season?”

”No, it will be hot enough at the end of three weeks, though it's cooler here than with Lampton in the Valley. If the money is forthcoming, we shall take up work again next October.”

They parted abruptly, as Englishmen do. Two _fellahin_, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, would have gone through a set formula of graceful words before they separated. They are ever mindful of the teachings of the Koran, which says:

”If you are greeted with a greeting, then greet ye with a better greeting. G.o.d taketh account of all things.”

Michael had turned his back on the stranger and the waving flag.

Mechanically he put his hand to his belt-pouch. Yes, the crimson amethyst was still there. He felt for it as though he were in a dream.

The bright light made him giddy. The stone was his link with and his tangible a.s.surance that the life which he had led for the past weeks was a reality; it was his sacred token that the vision of Akhnaton was no mere phantom of an over-imaginative brain. Yet, even as he felt its hard substance between his thumb and forefinger, he wondered if it was really there. He knew that imagination can create strange things; phantom tumours have been produced by imagination, tumours which are visible to a physician's eye while the patient is conscious and his mind obsessed with the conviction that it is there; he knew that such swellings disappear when the patient is asleep. He felt dazed, and as if he himself were unreal; his feet refused to tread firmly on the earth; they never managed to reach it. When he looked for Abdul and the camels, they were floating in the heavens above the horizon, miles and miles away; there was a belt of sky between them and the desert sand. If his legs had been paralysed, they could not have felt heavier or more useless.

He struggled on, but very soon the desert and the sky became one; the world in front of him rose suddenly up and stood on end. It was quite impossible to reach Abdul--he was receding as the horizon recedes when a clear atmosphere foreshortens the distance. In his brain there was a confused jumble; it was full of things which had no meaning or cohesion. Millicent was the centre of the absurd medley, Millicent, naked and unashamed, her slender figure as thickly covered with uncut jewels of huge dimensions as the statues of Diana of Ephesus are covered with b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The jewelled vision of Millicent dominated every other picture in his brain. It was clearer than the village of flies, or the African's cell in far-off el-Azhar, or the procession of white figures returning from the burial of the desert saint. It moved along in the clear air in front of him. He had no reasoning powers left, or he would have asked himself why his subconscious brain had fas.h.i.+oned this vision of Millicent wearing the sacred jewels when he still believed in her innocence. The clear voice, man's divine messenger, had kept him a.s.sured of the truth of his conviction.

Everything was dreadfully confused. He wished that the horizon would not come right forward and almost throw him off his balance. He seemed to be constantly hitting up against it. And Abdul, why was he floating further and further away? The harder he tried to get to him, the further he went. And yet he could actually hear him reciting his prayers. He was telling his rosary. Why did he tantalize him by coming so near and then floating off again? Sometimes he came so near that he could see his fine fingers automatically pulling the beads along the string; a ta.s.sel of red silk hung from the end of it. There were ninety-nine small red beads and one large one. He had reached the fifty-ninth. Michael could tell that, because the words ”O Giver of Life” came to him sonorously across the desert stillness. The next one would be ”O Giver of Death,” but Abdul had floated away again. Now he had come back; he had said ”O Living One,” ”O Enduring,” ”O Source of Discovery.”

That was the sixty-third bead. Why had Abdul stopped at that one? Why did he keep on repeating the words ”O Source of Discovery,” ”O Source of Discovery”? He ought to pa.s.s on to the next--”O Worthy of All Honour,” and after that the sixty-fifth, ”O Thou Only One.” No one ever stopped at the sixty-third bead; all the attributes of Allah had to be recited. But Abdul was still saying it over and over again. ”O Source of Discovery,” ”O Source of Discovery.” The words danced before Michael's eyes in letters of gold, like the advertis.e.m.e.nt of Bovril which he had watched so often from the Thames Embankment, as it appeared and disappeared in the sky across the river.

And then again the letters were obliterated by the nude figure of Millicent, with her hanging b.r.e.a.s.t.s of jewels. How delicate her limbs were, how white her skin! The sun would blister it; if he could only reach her, he would give her his coat. Like himself, she was walking in the clear air and not on the firm earth. She was walking as St.

Peter had walked on the waves of the sea.

Then something happened. He stumbled and would have fallen, but for a great strength which gathered him up and sheltered him under the shadow of Everlasting Arms.

Abdul, with Eastern philosophy, had sat himself down to wait while his master interviewed the director of the ”dig.” His soul was vexed and his mind was ill at ease. His master's health was the princ.i.p.al cause of his anxiety. His anger at the harlot, and his disappointment, mingled with this anxiety, made him unusually despondent.

He seated himself on a knoll where his master could easily see him when he left the excavator's tent. It was not yet time for the performance of his maghrib, or sunset prayer, which had to be said a few minutes after the sun had set. He began to recite his rosary, telling an attribute of G.o.d to each bead. When he had got about half-way through the long list of names which form the Mohammedan rosary and by which the Moslem addresses his Creator, he saw Michael leave the tent and walk out into the sunlight.

For a moment or two he seemed to be walking quite steadily and to be coming towards him. Then suddenly he began to stagger and lurch like a drunken man.

Abdul rose from his seat and hurried towards him. What had seemed such a long way to Michael had only been a few yards. His visions and fears and the constant repet.i.tion of the sixty-third attribute of Allah had been concentrated into the last few seconds before he stumbled and fell, just as our dreams are enacted in the last moments before we wake. Abdul had scarcely said the words ”O Source of Discovery” for the first time when he rose from his seat and hurried to his master, who had stumbled and fallen. In his Moslem arms was G.o.d's Everlasting Mercy.

CHAPTER XII

The heat in the Valley had become intense. The work in the excavation-camp was at a standstill; nothing more could be done on the actual site until the late autumn.

Margaret and Freddy were soon to say good-bye to the little hut which had been their home for many months.

No direct news had come to them of Michael. Freddy had heard many accounts and varying reports from unreliable sources of his travels in the eastern desert. He was almost convinced that Michael's silence was due to the fact that there was some foundation for the scandal, which was persistent, that Millicent was one of his party. The report had drifted to him from so many sources that he could scarcely doubt it.