Part 31 (1/2)

”Thou hast my word that I will take thee to the place where she is. Thou gavest me thy trust. Give it me again.”

”I have not taken it away. It is thine,” said Victoria.

XXIX

That night they spent in a caravanserai, because, after the brief deluge of rain, the ground was too damp for camping, when an invalid was of the party. When they reached the place after sunset, the low square of the building was a block of marble set in the dull gold of the desert, carved in dazzling white against a deep-blue evening sky. Like Ben Halim's house, it was roughly fortified, with many loopholes in the walls, for it had been built to serve the uses of less peaceful days than these. Within the strong gates, on one side were rooms for guests, each with its own door and window opening into the huge court. On another side of the square were the kitchens and dining-room, as well as living-place for the Arab landlord and his hidden family; and opposite was a roofed, open-fronted shelter for camels and other animals, the ground yellow with sand and spilt fodder. Water overflowed from a small well, making a pool in the courtyard, in which ducks and geese waddled, quacking, turkey-c.o.c.ks fought in quiet corners, barked at impotently by Kabyle puppies. Tall, lean hounds or sloughis, kept to chase the desert gazelles, wandered near the kitchens, in the hope of bones, and camels gobbled dismally as their tired drivers forced them to their knees, or thrust handfuls of date stones down their throats. There were sheep, too, and goats; and even a cow, the ”perpetual mother” loved and valued by Arabs.

M'Barka refused to ”read the sand” that night, when Maeddine suggested it. The sand would yield up its secrets only under the stars, she said, and wished to wait until they should be in the tents.

All night, outside Victoria's open but shuttered window, there was a stealthy stirring of animals in the dark, a gliding of ghostly ducks, a breathing of sheep and camels. And sometimes the wild braying of a donkey or the yelp of a dog tore the silence to pieces.

The next day was hot; so that at noon, when they stopped to eat, the round blot of black shadow under one small tree was precious as a black pearl. And there were flies. Victoria could not understand how they lived in the desert, miles from any house, miles from the tents of nomads; where there was no vegetation, except an occasional scrubby tree, or a few of the desert gourds which the Arabs use to cure the bite of scorpions. But she had not seen the cages of bones, sometimes bleached like old ivory, sometimes of a dreadful red, which told of wayside tragedies. Always when they had come in sight of a skeleton, Maeddine had found some excuse to make the girl look in another direction; for he wanted her to love the desert, not to feel horror of its relentlessness.

Now for the first time he had full credit for his cleverness as an organizer. Never before had they been so remote from civilization. When travelling in the carriage, stopping each night at the house of some well-to-do cad or adel, it had been comparatively easy to provide supplies; but to-day, when jellied chicken and cream-cheese, almond cakes and oranges appeared at luncheon, and some popular French mineral water (almost cool because the bottles had been wrapped in wet blanket) fizzed in the gla.s.ses, Victoria said that Si Maeddine must have a tame djinn for a slave.

”Wait till evening,” he told her. ”Then perhaps thou mayest see something to please thee.” But he was delighted with her compliments, and made her drink water from the gla.s.s out of which he had drunk, that she might be sure of his good faith in all he had sworn to her yesterday. ”They who drink water from the same cup have made an eternal pact together,” he said. ”I should not dare to be untrue, even if I would. And thou--I think that thou wilt be true to me.”

”Why, certainly I will,” answered Victoria, with the pretty American accent which Stephen Knight had admired and smiled at the night he heard it first. ”Thou art one of my very best friends.”

Maeddine looked down into the gla.s.s and smiled, as if he were a crystal-gazer, and could see something under the bright surface, that no one else could see.

Night folded down over the desert, hot and velvety, like the wings of a mother-bird covering her children; but before darkness fell, the tents glimmered under the stars. There were two only, a large one for the women, and one very small for Maeddine. The Negroes would roll themselves in their burnouses, and lie beside the animals. But sleeping-time had not come yet; and it was the Soudanese who prepared the evening meal.

One of them was a good cook, and for that reason Maeddine had begged him from the Agha. He made desert bread, by mixing farina with salted water, and baking it on a flat tin supported by stones over a fire of dry twigs. When the thin loaf was crisply brown on top, the man took it off the fire, and covered it up, on the tin, because it was to be eaten hot.

While Victoria waited for all to be got ready, she strolled a little away from the tents and the group of resting animals, having promised Maeddine to avoid the tufts of alfa gra.s.s, for fear of vipers which sometimes lurked among them. He would have liked to go with her, but the unfailing tact of the Arab told him that she wished to be alone with her thoughts, and he could only hope that they might be of him.

Here, it was no longer beautiful desert. They had pa.s.sed the charming region of dayas, and were entering the grim world through which, long ago, the ever harried M'Zabites had fled to find a refuge beyond the reach of greedy pursuers. Nevertheless the enchantment of the Sahara, in all its phases, had taken hold of Victoria. She did not now feel that the desert was a place where a tired soul might find oblivion, though once she had imagined that it would be a land of forgetfulness. Arabs say, in talking idly to Europeans, that men forget their past in the desert, but she doubted if they really forgot, in these vast s.p.a.ces where there was so much time to think. She herself began to feel that the illimitable skies, where flamed sunsets and sunrises whose miracles no eye saw, might teach her mysteries she had s.n.a.t.c.hed at and lost, in dreams. The immensity of the desert sent her soul straining towards the immensity of the Beyond; and almost, in flashes elusive as the light on a bird's wing, she understood what eternity might mean. She felt that the last days of her childhood had been left behind, on the threshold of these mysterious s.p.a.ces, this vastness into which she had plunged, as into an ocean. Yet she did not regret the loss, if it were a loss.

Never, she thought, whatever might happen, would she wish not to have known this experience, not to have entered upon this great adventure, whose end Maeddine still hid behind a veil of secrecy.

It was true, as she had told him, that she was not impatient, though she would have liked to count the days like the beads of a rosary. She looked forward to each one, as to the discovery of a beautiful thing new to the world and to her; for though the s.p.a.ces surrounding her were wide beyond thinking, they were not empty. As s.h.i.+ps, great and small, sail the sea, so sailed the caravans of the nomad tribes in the desert which surges on unchecked to Egypt: nomads who come and go, north and south, east and west, under the burning sun and the throbbing stars, as Allah has written their comings and goings in His book: men in white, journeying with their women, their children, and their trains of beasts, singing as they pa.s.s, and at night under the black tents resting to the music of the tom-tom and rata.

Victoria's gaze waded through the shadows that flow over the desert at evening, deep and blue and transparent as water. She searched the distances for the lives that must be going on somewhere, perhaps not far away, though she would never meet them. They, and she, were floating spars in a great ocean; and it made the ocean more wonderful to know that the spars were there, each drifting according to its fate.

The girl drew into her lungs the strong air of the desert, born of the winds which bring life or death to its children.

The scent of the wild thyme, which she could never again disentangle from thoughts of the Sahara, was very sweet, even insistent. She knew that it was loved by nomad women; and she let pictures rise before her mind of gorgeous dark girls on camels, in plumed red ba.s.sourahs, going from one desert city to another, to dance--cities teeming with life, which she would never see among these s.p.a.ces that seemed empty as the world before creation. She imagined the ghosts of these desert beauties crowding round her in the dusk, bringing their fragrance with them, the wild thyme they had loved in life, crushed in their bosoms; pathetic ghosts, who had not learned to rise beyond what they had once desired, therefore compelled to haunt the desert, the only world which they had known. In the wind that came sighing to her ears from the dark ravines of the terrible chebka, she seemed to hear battle-songs and groans of desert men who had fought and died ages ago, whose bones had crumbled under her feet, perhaps, and whose descendants had not changed one whit in religion, custom, or thought, or even in dress.

Victoria was glad that Maeddine had let her have these desert thoughts alone, for they made her feel at home in the strange world her fancy peopled; but the touch of the thyme-scented ghosts was cold. It was good to turn back at last towards the tents, and see how the camp-fire crimsoned the star-dusk.

”Thou wert happy alone?” Maeddine questioned her jealously.

”I was not alone.”

He understood. ”I know. The desert voices spoke to thee, of the desert mystery which they alone can tell; voices we can hear only by listening closely.”

”That was the thought in my mind. How odd thou shouldst put it into words.”

”Dost thou think it odd? But I am a man of the desert. I held back, for thee to go alone and hear the voices, knowing they would teach thee to understand me and my people. I knew, too, that the spirits would be kind, and say nothing to frighten thee. Besides, thou didst not go to them quite alone, for thine own white angel walked on thy right hand, as always.”