Part 26

The day had been dead hot. Under the weight of the afternoon one would have thought it could never be cool again in the Mzab. But immediately the sun had dipped behind the cliff that guards the western rim of the oasis the thin air emptied itself, and the night-chill, penetrating and treacherous, flowed over the dry bottom of the _oued_.

The town stirred. Under my gallery there came and went a word-fight between Berber muleteers from the north. After that I heard the evening call of the muezzin dropping down from the mosque-tower on the crowded hill, arid, sinuous, like the note of another wooden well-wheel shrilling above the desert floor. Then somewhere under a house arose the hollow voice of a tambour struck with a thumb, and a man sang. In a rift of silence a wandering breeze threshed all the date-fronds in the _oued_-bottom with a phantom of distant applause. Nearer at hand a foot-scuffle in the dusk. A choked laugh. And all around in the heavy shadows of that quarter the subdued giggling, the rustling, and jewel-clanking of the women of dark delight.

“What’s wrong with the Ouled Naïl girls to-night?” I asked along the gallery. Abd, son of Abdallah the Mozabite, rose to his feet on the tiles near the stair, a white wraith.

“_Kain kairouan ja, sidi._” (There is a caravan come.)

Drums banged; women scurried. The momentous night was established and stars sprinkled the sky, large and restless stars, always flickering a little to the eye in that air without body.

I sat at an island crossroads of the western Sahara, where the pale, blurred sand-courses, like the wakes of ships, come up the bald skin of the globe from the green mysteries that lie months away on the other side of the south.

“Abd!” I called, “where does the caravan come from, east or west?”

Abd was gone. On the tiles I heard the fall of a Christian boot. Borak, the Englishman, came toward me in the shadows.

“I wonder you’re not out,” he said. “The caravan comes from the south.”

“Not----!”

“Rather! This is a real one--like the old days again. Right away up from under. You’d better have a look at the beggars; you’re romantic, you know. Might not have another chance in a year.”

I put on my coat and went with him. Borak has been too long in Africa, one part and another. He has forgotten that it is the Dark Continent. As we walked he went on in his habitual vein of banter.

“It’s a tidy lot of heroes for you. You may imagine. Seven ‘moonlights’ on the trek, and I lay a pound sterling not a man in the crowd has washed in the thirty weeks.”

“Thirty weeks!” I couldn’t help echoing it. “Lord!”

“There ought to be a story there, eh? As a matter of fact there isn’t. I insist again that there’s more story, more poetry and romance in the life of a Whitechapel coster than you’ll hear in a year listening to these people. They lack imagination. They want the mental whip of civilization; that’s it in a nutshell.”

I felt like saying “Bosh!” Borak is too dogmatic.

We were passing into the thick of the “low town,” and on our right loomed the ugly oblong of the douane, the French custom-house that stands at the converging of the deep-Sahara routes. Borak looked at it and chuckled.

“Old Arnauld” (the customs official) “is in a fair pother. There’s a frighful mixture in the trek, blacks and browns from a dozen different basins down below, and you may imagine there’s a lack of passports. So that’s Arnauld’s job; to divine. Or rather it’s Bou Dik’s job, for the orderly has all the work. When I passed the market coming to you Bou Dik was tackling an old chap who claims to be Senegal but looks away east of that, a pot-bellied old swine, black as a chimney-pot, solemn as an archbishop, and blind as a bat. I gather all he wants is to be let pass quietly on his way to Holy Mekka, where he hopes to die. Bou Dik, though, is full of wild and horrid notions. He has crossed the trail lately of a dervish man who has the word that Mouley Saa[21] is now booked to descend in the guise of a blackamoor, and naturally, having a fat berth with the Infidel, Bou Dik isn’t going to let the Deliverer into _his_ department--not if he can help it. So just now Bou Dik is death and leprosy on niggers. I wish you could have heard the row.”

I was to hear it presently. We had arrived at a chain swung across the black street and, ducking under it, we came into the open market square. I had seen the place a hundred times, by sun and moon and stars, and still familiarity had not quite worn off my first sense of it as a haven between the winds, the anchorage of a remote white port of call lost in the ocean of stone. To-night that illusion was deepened a dozenfold. There is no other metaphor in speech so true as “ships of the desert.” They were here. To-night I knew that I had known before only the small fry of that dry sea world, only the shore-huggers, the humble brotherhood of the coastwise trade. Here to-night was the creature of the main, the deep-sea squadron, the tall fleet.

From where we stood, clear to the further shore of dim arcades, the ground was hidden under the mass of kneeling beasts and heaped bales, a tumbled thing, monstrous in sleep. We picked our way through the ruck, lighting matches from time to time when we found ourselves trapped in blind alleys between bales and humps, or felt our way barred by the hairy neck of a camel curving waist-high across the night. Mountains whisked fat tails at us; sleeping legs sprawled from beneath hills of cargo like dead men pinned under wreckage. Borak took hold of my elbow.

“This way,” he said. “I hear the voice of Bou Dik.”

I heard it too, impassive, obstinate. There was a small fire of brush-roots throwing a glow around a ring of specters in the center of the field of ruin. The burnooses, all the same color of desert dust, might indeed have been winding-sheets; the hooded faces, gaunt, bone-built, played upon by the weak and tricky illumination from beneath, might have been skulls. And in the midst of the communing dead Bou Dik, enveloped in his red robe of authority, was the devil himself presiding.

His voice had ceased. As we settled behind him a man got to his feet on the side beyond the fire. With a gesture which had in it something of the trained orator he put back the hood of his burnoose, baring his strong neck and his round, blue-black, kinky-polled negroid head.

“Thou hast demanded, sidi, who is this man who is the father of my father. Thou hast demanded whence he comes, whither he goes, what he desires. Now I will tell thee all these things, I, Belkano, who am not without power in the country which is under Kalgou.”

He spoke a quaint Arabic in which all the throat-sounds were brought forward and softened--such a tongue, Borak told me, as black boys pick up in the Mohammedan _zaouias_ at Sikasso and Timbuktu--quaint, and yet more easily understood in the Mzab than dialects not so far away, in Tunis, say, or the Moroccan uplands.

“The father of my father,” he said, “is a very great and holy man.”

In the pause that followed all the eyes turned upon the object deposited at the speaker’s feet. It was discerned to be human.

“Black as a chimney-pot, solemn as an archbishop, blind as a bat.” Like many of Borak’s observations, that one had everything in it but the essential. The essential thing was the man’s enormous separation. Whether it was the infirmity of his great age or whether it was his “holiness” (which may account for many things), he was removed to a distance which could not be measured. He lived on another planet. He lived within another sky, the sky of his own skin.

There was something majestic in the completeness of his immobility. Save for a faint, slow, rhythmical pulse of his swollen lower lip there was nothing visibly alive in him. Not once did the dead eyeballs, sustained in little cups of rheum, shift from the line of dead ahead. From the first to the last of that audience he remained in the attitude in which I imagine he must have been deposited, a sphinx thing in ebony, content with memories. Memories gorgeous or infernal. His lip fascinated me. I could not get my eyes away from that pendulous and extraordinary tissue, throbbing with faint, ordered convulsions in the orange light. It was as if the creature’s heart, appalled by something under the black sky of skin, had broken prison and escaped so far, only to be caught on the threshold and hang there eternally, beating.

I had to shake myself. In a whisper, to Borak: “What’s that he was saying? The tall one.”

“He says that his grandfather is bound on the pilgrimage to Mekka because he is tremendously holy, and he is tremendously holy because he has a huge sin on his soul. Not bad, eh? It has happened before.”

Bou Dik’s voice was heard. “What then is that sin?”

The dark orator looked around the circle beneath him.

“It is known in Andiorou and Adar. It is known in Damagarin country and even in Manga country in the east.” He looked at Bou Dik. “Now I will recount thee that history, sidi.”

His gaze returned to the fire. I shall not soon forget him as he stood there against the stars of the desert night, tall, glossy, vibrant, speaking out in a strong voice the story of the moribund flesh beside him.

“Know thou then that it was in the years before the missionaries of God (to whom be the prayer) and of his Prophet (be his bliss eternal by the streams that never cease!) had brought to my tribe the Word and the Flame of Islam. Glory to the One God!”

“Glory to the One God!” the echo rustled around the ring.

“In those days then the men of my people lived in darkness. They performed no ablutions. Their prayers were to images made with their hands. The strongest and bravest of the young men of that tribe was Djeba, who was later called Djim, as I will recount to thee, sidi, and who was to become the father of my father, and who is this man. The young man who was next to Djeba in strength and courage was Moa. These two were brothers of the milk. Of these two, each was the other’s breath. When these two went into the bush to hunt, the animals said to one another, ‘Strike if thou wilt amongst seven men, but avoid the Brothers of the Milk!’ So lived Djeba and Moa in those days. Djeba was the spear of Moa; Moa was Djeba’s shield.

“In those days then came a war-party from the south, from the country of Gando under Sokoto, the country of braggarts and thieves. They came out of the bush in the morning and moved toward the village, casting their spears aloft and beating on drums. The warriors of my people did not fail to answer them. They advanced out of the stockade. Nikato, the Headman, was in the forefront, and at his two shoulders went Djeba and Moa. That sunrise Djeba slew five of the sons of Gandoland. Moa slew five. Neither cut nor bruise was on their bodies. _Sing the Valor of the Brothers of the Milk!_”

The apostrophe rang out, absorbed, deep-throated, across the sleeping caravan. My eyes went to the flesh on the ground. Into that dark house had those words been able to penetrate? Had their ringing set some hidden echo ringing? How could one say? The lip that was like the man’s drawn heart pulsed in the same laggard, imperturbable count; the dead eyeballs did not shift. But perhaps they were dead only that they might see the better the sunlight of that vanished and heroic myth.

“_Sing the Valor and the Victory of the Brothers of the Milk!_

“That war-party was beaten; its dead soiled the ground; its living fled into the bush. That day the drums were beaten in the village and muttons were killed; that night a feast was made. The young men danced and the old men made sacrifice to their images.

“But the images of those days were idolatrous and had no power over good and ill. _La illah il allah!_[22] Accordingly then it was written that the survivors of that war-party, gathering again in the bush and being drunk with the desire of revenge, fell once more upon the village in the hour when the young men were full-fed and their weapons away. So in that night many of my tribe were slain. The stockades were thrown down; the houses were given to the flame. In the light of that flame many virgins were desecrated, many old men disemboweled, many children spun on spears. But those of good growth and being were taken away. Djeba and Moa were taken away.

“How can I recount to thee, sidi, the days of that march? Am I then another Errendi, that the words of my lamentation should fall like burning oil on a new wound? But the history is well known in all the country above the River, for my father’s brother, Ahmed ben Djeba, he who had it out of the mouth of Djeba, has made it a chant at a hundred feasts and sung it under a hundred council-trees. He has sung the days of that going, the weeks, each week after the other through the hotness of that bush-trail. He has told the tale of the moons. In the roof of his mouth he has recalled the song of the lash that fell on those men’s shoulders and made of their flesh the flesh of goats that is hung on the stockade to cure. He has stirred the dung-heaps to bring in memory the meat that was given them at evening before they fell down to sleep. With his tongue he has made the clank of the chain that bound them together, the heavy chain of iron that bound together even those two who were bound by the strong bond of the breast that gave them suck!

“Many among them died. When they died their bodies were cut from the chain with swords. Djeba and Moa grew thin. When Djeba looked at Moa he saw a skeleton that he did not know. When Moa looked at Djeba he saw a thing which filled him with terror. At night each bade the other farewell, saying, ‘In the morning I shall be dead.’ But they were strong and they did not die. Only their minds became empty.

“Then they came at last to the banks of a great lake. This lake was so great that when they had been sold to a white boatman and when they had come out in the boat so far that they could no longer see the bank behind them, then they could yet see no bank before, and the water was all about them to the sky like the sand in the desert of Djouf. To my father’s brother Djeba has recounted that they were more than the length of a moon in that going, but it must be recalled that his mind was empty, since no lake to be compared with that is in our knowledge. A wind arose on that lake and water came into the boat. They were athirst, but when they drank of that water it was sour and their thirst consumed them tenfold after. What man is there master of words sufficiently bitter to recount that going upon the lake of those men who were captive?

“Then they came at last to the other bank of that lake, and they were taken up swiftly into the bush of the country beyond, for there were war-boats of other white men on the water. And on another day they came to a great _ksar_ of a hundred shelters, and in the market-place of that _ksar_ they were exposed for sale. They were nine. Nine men left out of sevenscore strong men! What battle in the memory of the tribes so disastrous as that going! What ambush so bloody as that march of the companions of the Brothers of the Milk!”

For a moment after the outcry the orator’s lips closed over the firelit sheen of his white teeth. I suppose that he (like his paternal uncle) had recited this tropic saga a hundred times in the villages of the black south. I doubt not that at this point he had been accustomed to pause, to receive for a moment the sweet applause of a groan.

“And so,” he resumed, “they were sold that day into labor. And of the Brothers of the Milk, those whose eyes saw a single thing and whose lips spoke the same, Moa was taken one way and Djeba another, and their hearts died. Djeba, the blood-child of chieftains, was driven like a bullock up into the bush by a white driver, and when his weakness grew on him and he stumbled that driver struck him with a thong.

“That country beyond the great lake is a fat country, full of plantings of maize and cotton in the uplands where the bush is cleared. It is known by the name of Djoja, and in extent it lies from the banks of the lake into the interior many marches away. Djeba was taken to a certain planting and thrown into a _dar_ in a stockade as great as a small _ksar_. There he had the company of other captives from the River, from the Camaroun, and from the River Greater than the River in the south. Some there were who had been there so great a time that they had forgotten their own tongues and knew only the Djoja speech, and some had been born in that stockade.

“Then they were driven into the fields to labor. In his weakness the sun beat upon the head of Djeba and made him forget. Then he was driven back to the stockade, and the rain came through the thatch of the _dar_ and wet his body and fever consumed his heart. But already his heart was dead; only when he slept and saw Moa in a dream did he live.

“And that driver said to him, ‘How art thou called?’ And he said, ‘Djeba.’ And the driver laughed and cried, ‘That is no name for a black boy; I christen thee Djim; and Djim thou art!” And he went away, still laughing as if he had turned a word of wit. So a hate of him came into Djeba, and Djeba would have killed him, only that he was a tall, great-bodied man, and Djeba, who had been worth five warriors in his strength, was like a child in weakness now.

“That fever burned his heart and his bowels. He was given to eat of a cous-cous made of sour maize and swineflesh. Then his stomach turned over. He vomited. He said, ‘Now at last I am to die.’

“But then a woman came into that _dar_. She laid a hand on his head and called him Djim, but the hand was cool, and the anger went from his heart. She gave him milk to drink, and his pain ceased. His sickness passed. In the darkness of that shelter that woman was like the healing benignity of the moon when it has come an hour high in the east. She spoke in tones of compassion, and he was made whole.

“‘Who then is that woman?’ he asked of the men, ‘and how is she called?’

“‘She is Mis’us, and she lives in the _dar kebir_’ (the Big House).

“‘Is she then the woman of that driver?’ he asked.

“His companions laughed. ‘Nay, she is the woman of Maas Djo.’

“‘Who then is Maas Djo?’

“‘Maas Djo is the Maasa, the Headman. It is his silver with which thou wert got.’

“‘Why then have I not seen this Headman?’

“‘For the reason that since thou hast come he has been gone with a war-party to fight the Yankis to the north.’

“‘He has gone then to take other captives?’

“‘Nay he has gone to save those he has got.’ And then they recounted to Djeba: ‘The war-parties of the Yankis who come from behind the rivers of the north choke the trails. The bush never sleeps for the sound of their drums. Their torches are amongst the settlements. The long peace of the white men is broken; new confederations are formed; terror is loosed abroad. The lust of booty and of blood is aflame in the Yankis. It is said that they devour babes; it is known that when they make prayer in their holy places their ablutions are performed in the blood of a lamb. Such are they!’

“Then they recounted to Djeba how Maas Djo and the other Headmen, the holders of plantings, all the young men, how they had gathered to the war-drums in the trails, how they had chosen chiefs and gone away into the bush, and how the sky above them was that day the color of gore.

“And Djeba asked them, ‘Which is then the stronger?’ And they answered, ‘The party of Maas Djo is the stronger. Mayhap even now it has driven the Yankis back across their rivers. Mayhap to-morrow he will return home!’

“But one amongst them who had been born into labor in that stockade in Djoja and who was now an old man said, ‘Mayhap not.’ That same man, who was called by the name of Moz, came into the _dar_ at night and said in a low voice to Djeba, ‘The Yankis are like the leaves of the pepper-tree; they are small, but their number is beyond count. Hark thou well when the bush is sleeping and thou wilt hear their powder-guns in the north.’

“Then Djeba harkened, but he heard no guns. Nevertheless he sharpened his reaping-tool. But he was not yet strong from his sickness.

“From time to time that woman from the _dar kebir_ came to bring him sweet milk and speak in tones of compassion. And it was written that the heart of Djeba, the son of chieftains, should grow soft and meek. But when that driver perceived Mis’us ministering to the captive’s weakness he jeered with mocking laughter, and the woman cowered before it as though she had been afraid and fled away to the Big House. And Djeba’s hatred of that man grew like a pain.

“‘When I am stronger I will kill him,’ he said.

“So he grew stronger.