Part 34
"Rather, if you don't mind!--" John grinned. "It's my latest mascot." He took back the bullet, avoiding the other's touch, and dropped it in his pocket again.
"How did you get it?" Avidly the sharp glance had followed the
## action. "How can you be certain--that it is the bullet that killed
the man?"
"I helped to lift--the body--out of the observer's cockpit, and mine was the head end...."
"_Th' h h!_ ..."
It was a sound like the hiss of a snake, betraying desperate interest.
"He--Usborn--had been shot through the head.... There was a scorch on the left temple. On the right--a clot of brains and blood. And--when I took hold of his head the bullet came away with that, and dropped into my hand. That's curious, now I come to think of it ..."
"What is curious?"
"That burn on his left temple...."
"Perhaps the bullet was incendiary. The Germans use such things."
"You forget! I've got it--and it isn't!"
"Ah!" The voice had recovered its suavity. "I am now able to account for its being a revolver-bullet. There were German officers on the defence-works at Shechem--that they have strengthened since the evacuation of Beersheba. And as they directed the gunners--we circling the while and reconnoitring--Usborn also photographing--they potted at us with their revolvers now and then...."
"How high were you flying?"
"A mile. I remember I looked at the indicator the moment before--it happened."
"You're kidding, Essenian Pasha.... You know lots better than I do that the range of a revolver taking a bullet of this calibre would be barely 1,550 yards...."
"_Wannebi!_" Foam stood on the writhing lips, and the veins on the back of the clenched hand that shook at John across the roses stood out against the bronze skin like knotted blue cords. "By the Prophet! though I am no son of his,--you, Hazel, tax my patience.... Usborn is dead, and buried two marches from Sheria. Let us discuss the cause of his death when we have time to lose. Aid me to gain enlightenment as only you can aid me!--and I help you to rescue this Christian priest--this tonsured Franghi dervish--from the barbed-wire cage at the Prison Camp of Shechem. Is it agreed? Speak, for suspense devours my liver!"
"All right." John glanced round at the clock over the door of the dining-room. "Nine-fifteen. I'm at your disposal till the long hand marks the half-past."
"Give me time to get something I shall need from my room, and swallow a draught of stimulant." Essenian beckoned one of the Levantine waiters, gave a rapid order in his fluent French and clapped his hands for his own man.
"_Saiyad_, I am here!" The Mohammedan body-servant who had waited, erect and immovable in the background appeared at his master's elbow. "What does my lord command?"
"Go to the room where I sleep, and bring me the velvet case from the table at my bedside."
"My lord has said," the man quavered, paling under his coffee-coloured skin, "that the low-born may not lay a hand upon the Eye of Radiance, but at peril of blasting as by fire from the skies!"
"Unless thou art commanded. Go, and return in safety!"
The servant vanished and Essenian commented, with his little contemptuous shrug:
"Even as the beasts are the rough and unlettered. What says Shaikh Saadi in _The Garden of Roses_? I would quote the original,--but it may be you do not know Arabic sufficiently well to appreciate the pun."
"Some play upon _wahish_ and _wahsh_, I suppose?" Hazel suggested, unexpectedly, as the servants stripped the table and fenced it round with screens. "What's your poison this time? Something extra special?" he inquired, as Essenian, with a shaking hand, drew his little case of medicines again from his pocket and half-filled a liqueur-glass from another of the vials it held.
"Something I seldom need to take, my King of Damascus. Unless after severe physical exertion,--or unusual mental strain. To your health! _Sirrak!_"
He swallowed the colourless, scentless contents of the liqueur-glass; drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders,--and under the surprised stare of John, became the man he had been....
"That is good! Now we get to what you call 'biz.' ..." He was smiling again suavely as he took a shabby green velvet case from the willing hands of his servant, banished the man beyond the enclosure of the screens with a look and a brief order couched in the vernacular,--and placed the case carefully on the cleared table-cloth before his guest.
"Fine stone! What is it?" John asked curiously.
"A beryl, merely. Do not touch it with your finger lest the contact dim its brightness."
Essenian had opened the case out flat upon the smooth white linen surface, disclosing a sphere of radiance, resting on the slender base of a little metal stand.
"Sit easily in your chair," he went on; "rest your hands on either side of it.... Ah, I had forgotten! Where are those _mallâhe_?" He took a pile of common native glass salt-cellars from a corner of the table, where a demure-faced Levantine waiter had just placed them. "Raise yourself on the chair a little. So! Now sit down again." John complied, finding the seat rather higher than it had been before. "Now I place one of the _mallâhe_ under each leg of the table...." The table kicked four times gently. "Now the Earth-currents cannot deviate astral--or Other Influences--and the table is not too low. You are comfortable?"
"Fairly cushy, thanks! ..."
Dentists had asked John a similar question.
"You are not nervous, Mr. Hazel? ..."
"Why on earth should I be? ..."
"There is no reason. Look at the beryl, and do not remove your eyes."
"All right, I'm on! ... Mind! From the word 'Go!' fifteen minutes."
"Fifteen minutes.... Look steadily in the beryl. Now give the word!"
"Go! ..."
* * * * * * *
Resting a hand lightly on the table, on each side of the little cup-topped pedestal supporting the gleaming, spherical stone, John leaned forwards, steadily looking in it,--and the fold between his beetling eyebrows smoothed, and the spark of excitement that had kindled in his black eyes slowly smouldered out....
He had gone much further than he meant to have done, but there had been no help for it. Katharine's desperate need of help, the more desperate need of Julian, had thrust him over the edge of this pit the astute Egyptian had dug. But whether Essenian were a wizard or a charlatan--and at moments John was inclined to the wizard idea--he had struck a bargain with the man, and he meant to stick to it. So he held himself motionless, breathing easily, letting his mind range whither it would, as he stared in the depths of the stone....
He had thought it shallow, and it was unfathomably deep; clear, and it was opaquely green as sea-water.... And yet translucent as sea-water can be,--with smooth swirls and rounded folds below the jewelled surface--suggesting veils wrapped on veils, hiding some mystery....
He checked an inclination to yawn. He was feeling sleepy and stoggy. To keep awake he clung to the details of a certain September evening in 1914. News had come that day to the office of the death of young Dannahill,--and he, John, had returned by taxi to the family roof-tree, to break to his mother and his brother Maurice--Maurice who was now piloting a Handley-Page bomb-carrier 'plane on the Western Front--the news that he, J.B.H.,--the John of the "Tubs" Club in Werkeley Street, the John who was a votary of "Tango" and Progressive Bridge; who talked knowingly of Russian Ballet, Musical Comedy and smart Revues; the John whose cherished ambition was to make a pile big enough to buy Covent Garden and turn it into a Pleasure City to be run on American lines--was going to the Front.
He--the said J.B.H., had dined, and was comfortably full, after the lean weeks of bully beef and rubber-tough Palestine mutton.... And he had had a deuce of a lot of hock, of Heidseick Dry Monopole, and three, or was it five Benedictines with coffee, to take away the bitterness of that over-lauded Arab stuff....
Enough, perhaps, to make an ordinary man squiffy, but J.B. Hazel was no ordinary man.... In fact, going by what Essenian Pasha said,--was that Essenian Pasha talking? ... Or whose was that voice, mumbling, mumbling.... Not in Arabic, of which John had a smattering, or in Hebrew--he knew a little Hebrew--
In whatever language the voice was talking it was trying to push John over the brink of Things Normal, into the abyss of Things that are Not.
The launch of a battleship at Portsmouth Dockyard, witnessed years previously, now came vividly back to the protagonist; a picture thrown by the passing moment upon the screen of Memory. As Royalty with mallet and chisel had severed the cord supporting the bow--weights, whose fall knocked away the last dog-shores propping the Dreadnaught, her vast steel hull had shuddered visibly.... The thin wind keening through her glassless upper port holes and along her vast unfitted decks--gaily beflagged, and speckled with adventurous human pigmies--had sounded as though she wept.... Then a hand had touched an electric stud--a bottle in a ribboned net had crashed against the cliff-like bows of grey-painted steel, figured with Roman numerals--and the giant, vibrating from stem to stern, had begun to slide down the well-greased slipway,--towards the oily-looking expanse of chill green water, speckled with floating chips and orange-peel--smoking with little drab-white curls of clammy Solent fog....
And John Hazel was the ship ... the sinister, relentless will that thrust him down must be resisted.... He would not go! ... Had he not promised somebody called Katharine...
Who was Katharine? ... He was rushing to the dreadful brink.... Without the anticipated shock or jar, he glided smoothly over....
* * * * * * *
"The big Inglizi soldier is very drunk," a Levantine waiter--one of a silent group gathered near the dining-room door, whispered to a comrade behind the shoulder of Essenian's Mohammedan body-servant. "Hark, how he snores behind the screens!"
"_I_ do not think the _tomi_ drunk," whispered a countryman of the Levantine's, speaking the same bastard Turkish-Egyptian dialect. "For when the Effendim called for sealing-wax I peeped between the screens, slily, and the Inglizi seemed to me more like one drugged with the smoke of henbane sprinkled on the embers of a charcoal fire.... Thus did he sit, with open eyes, staring into that thing that shines so.... And--and the eyes were empty as the eyes of a dead man--it was not good to look in them!"
"O son of a Maghribi dog! What is that to thee?" Essenian's Mohammedan body-servant, who had overheard, hissed fiercely at the offender. "Since when hast thou found it good for thee or thy like to speak of the doings in this house! My lord and his guest confer together upon matters too high for thee. What has it to do with thee if they practise the _es Semiya?_ Do not persons of known probity work magic both White and Black--and cast nativities! Cudgel thy stupid wits and tell me how long since thou didst stop the clock there? ... 'An hour-and-a-half....' Watch now for the signal! ... When my lord's hand flickers between the screens, the weight is to be set a-wagging.... Have the _ôtomôbilyâ_ ready at the door--the Effendim travels with the Englishman this night to Ismailia--I, Yakub Ali, sitting in front with the _wûgâkgi_ who drives,--running on the solid earth made by Allah for the sons of Adam--instead of flying in the air like a Jinni of the Jann."
_Book the Fourth:_ THE PASSING
I
In the Central Range of Western Palestine is an ancient Samaritan township, the Shechem of the Patriarchs. High set above shore-level, sheltered by mighty mountains on the North, East and South, looking down a wady beaten in by-gone days by the hoofs of the cavalry of Omri,--rutted by the silver and ivory chariot-wheels of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel,--across low, undulant hill-ranges, to the twenty-mile distant sea.
High set above sea-level, it lies on the floor of a long, fish-shaped valley, between two towering limestone mountains. Distant a mile-and-a-half at their summits, their bases nearly meet. One is Ebal, the other Gerizim. They are the mounts by which the Chosen stood to receive blessings and cursings.
The Samaritan Temple, that place of sinister mysteries, once stood where are now great terebinth-trees, shading the ruins of an ancient fortress upon Mount Gerizim. The rock of their Place of Sacrifice shows its channelled surface above ground. To-day, a man standing with the wind at his back, upon the crown of Ebal or Gerizim and speaking loudly, would be heard at the summit of the opposite Mount, and in the streets of the town....
The town, upon which the towering limestone heads of Ebal and Gerizim and their fellows look down sternly, was in its heyday a place of wealth, where luxury and lust ran riot, and men and women walked in purple robes, or were carried in ivory litters; crowned with high jewelled head-dresses, dust of gold powder lying thick in the spiral curls of their jet black beards, and the frizzled waves or towering coils of richly-luxuriant hair. Now their ancient place of abiding is set about with ruinous stone mansions, girt with groves of waving palms, fig-trees, olives and mulberries. Mean dwellings crowd on narrow vaulted streets, under whose pavement you can hear the water rushing. For there is no lack of water in Shechem. The crowded mud Barracks behind the bazar has a well of pure water in its courtyard. So cheap is the element that no one grudges this solace to the prisoners of War.
Before the War the chief seat of the Turkish administration in Palestine, the old town boasted a population of some 25,000 souls. Thinned by conscription of the younger Jews, Samaritans, Arabs and native Syrian Christians, it might have contained some fifteen thousand, counting the garrison of Turkish infantry officered by monocled and braceleted Germans,--when the fortified area of Beersheba fell to the strategy of Allenby, and the routed left wing of the Fourth Army Corps of Djemal Pasha, with the formidable motor-driven siege-guns from the boasted stronghold fell back in rout and confusion upon the area of Shechem.
Some directing Teutonic mind ordained, weeks previous to the evacuation, that the Allied prisoners from the camps of Beersheba and its vicinity, packed on Railway cattle-trucks or Army motor-lorries,--should be transferred by railway to the town of Shechem. It was to be converted by German gold, forced labour and modern resources, into a stronghold of Ottoman power, against which the expeditionary army of Britain should expend itself in vain....
There are already British War prisoners in the mud-walled Barracks at Shechem, built round the courtyard containing the well. When on these hunger-gnawed, vermin-ridden men rolls the flood of human wretchedness from the camps of Beersheba and its neighbourhood,--they are to learn the bitter truth that there are grades in Misery.
For a squat, sandy, pale-eyed Lieutenant-General of Turkish gendarmerie, who acted as Commandant of the Beersheba prison-camps, now supersedes the tyrant who has ruled at Shechem. The inmates of the prisons there have been robbed, stripped, and beaten. They have slept in tattered blankets upon mud or stone floors,--lived on a daily quarter of a coarse brown loaf per soul--and a handful of beans in oil.... They have undergone insult, and occasionally kicks and blows, but Home parcels have occasionally reached them, and though pinched, they were not famished.... Now the parcels are looted or their contents rendered uneatable.... A loaf is shared amongst twenty men, the pannikin of boiled beans yields each a bare spoonful. Driven out at dawn by Turks with loaded hide-whips, to dig trenches south and east of the old fortifications,--make emplacements for Austro-German artillery, and lay down a system of interchangeable rails for the Krupp motor-guns,--they are herded back at night to the filthy pens where they are packed so closely that they cannot lie down to sleep without lying on each other. Whence in the mornings men suffocated by the press of the bodies of their comrades are taken out dead....
These victims belong to the rank and file. Some officers are quartered in the old stone-built prison. Yet others live in Turkish Army tents in a barbed-wire enclosure at the eastern end of the town. A ramshackle hut serves as their mess, when they have anything to mess on. But they are not too crowded for decency, and sickness spares them. Presently the officers are drafted away, four only remaining,--and the congestion at the mud-built Barracks is somewhat relieved. But Hunger, Overcrowding and Dirt have bred Dysentery, septic skin-eruptions and Typhus Fever, and these claim their victims by the score.
The Hospital near the new Turkish Barracks by the Arsenal, staffed by the German Red Cross and the nurses and orderlies of the Red Crescent,--being crowded with Turkish and German wounded--cannot admit more than a few of the gravest cases of dysentery. The typhus patients are removed to the Hospital under the auspices of the Established Church of England Missionary Society, and another,--devotedly tended by the Catholic Sisters of the Cross. Helpers come from the Mission House of the Latin Patriarchate, who unweariedly give their services wherever there is need.... But desperate indeed would be the plight of the War prisoners--save that through the blizzard of misery raging through the mud Barracks--the courage and charity of one man shine like a steadfast star....
The man is a Catholic chaplain who has served with the Expeditionary Forces at Gallipoli; has been taken prisoner and kept for awhile in Hospital at Constantinople; has been drafted to Smyrna, and later, by such haphazard chance as governs the lives of prisoners, has been shifted to Beersheba, and thence to Shechem.
Unweariedly he alleviates, whilst sharing, the common misery. Shaking with fever, hunger-bitten to the bone, ragged as any scarecrow, red-eyed with sleeplessness, he moves from room to room distributing such poor comforts as are obtainable. Helping the convalescent, ministering to the sick, dispensing the Sacraments of the Mother Church to the Catholic dying--cheering those of other creeds with the words that are of God....
On a day in November, half-an-hour later than the morning prayer-call from the minaret of the Great Mosque that was once a Church of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre--you are to see Father Julian Forbis going his daily round.... The mud-walled courtyard is closed in on three sides by the mud-built Barracks, and on the fourth by a high wall topped by rusty iron spikes--a wall in which there is an archway closed by a double gate, flanked on either side by guard-rooms. Over the gateway is the office of the Turkish Commandant.
To-day the courtyard of the mud-built Barracks is full of sunshine and packed with prisoners. Lying, squatting or standing, the majority are squalid spectres on whose gaunt frames their foul and tattered clothing hangs baggily, though some are bloated like the corpses of men who have been long drowned. Though the assemblage is sprinkled with Roumanians, Syrians, Jews, Armenians and Arabs,--these last having a dungeon to themselves, of unutterable filthiness, the bulk are of the rank and file of Britain's Crusading Forces. Australians, Indians, New Zealanders, and British Territorials.... Actors, clerks, printers, shopwalkers and jockeys; farm-labourers, electricians, gardeners, photographers, bakers, University students,--representatives of every class and calling. One and all strung to endurance by the spirit that makes heroes of ordinary men....
The shadows of Ebal and Gerizim as yet fall westward. Their towering summits and those of the lesser mountains, and the minarets of the Great and the two smaller mosques look down into the dirty mud-walled court, baking in the rays of the early sun, though the November nights are chilly. Every stench the prison fosters seems intensified by the heat. The loud buzzing of millions of flies mingles in a bagpipe-drone with the noise of many voices, Eastern and European,--talking in half-a-dozen languages and a hundred dialects--and the hubbub has for its accompaniment the thudding of distant guns. From the southwest, where the 54th British Division is engaged with the enemy between the sea and Gaza. Nearer South, where a bitter struggle is being waged by British Cavalry, armoured cars, and the bombers and machine-gunners of the Royal Flying Corps, for the possession of Junction Station--the next point after the fall of Gaza, of tactical importance in Palestine. From the hills towards Hebron those enemy forces, who have previously retreated to this vantage, have descended into the Coastal Plain, to relieve the pressure and stiffen the resistance of their comrades by demonstrating a counter-attack. For if Junction Station, the key of the northern railway-system, with its vast dumps of rolling-stock, supplies, War-material and its camps of prisoners, shall fall into the hands of the British--Jerusalem will be cut off from communication save by Wireless with Turkey and Germany....
Day wears apace.... The winged hordes of Baal Zebub, like the humans whom they feast on, are making the most of the sunshine. Fat white maggots that will be flies presently,--and vermin still more loathsome--crawl in the dirty straw on which the prisoners are squatting or lying. Deep in the well the clear water shines like a huge blue eye, reflecting the shadowless heavens above.
A man hanging over, seems to stare in the water, apparently sheltering his eyes with both hands from the glare. He has the crowned wings of the R.F.C. on the shoulder of his ragged shirt of khaki flannel, and the clear water of the brimming well reflects the three chevrons and crown of a Flight Sergeant, tacked upon its tattered sleeve. Also the glittering lenses of a small pair of folding binoculars, cunningly concealed by the curve of their owner's hands.
"What be 'ee lookin' vor, Tom?" cautiously whispers a freckled trooper of Devon Yeomanry, digging a painfully sharp elbow in the airman's lean ribs.
Barney Mossam takes it on himself to answer,--being the accredited wit and jester of the knot gathered about the well. He is a little, broad-shouldered, bow-legged London Territorial, with a nose that has suffered in bouts of fisticuffs; a carroty head, a broad humorous grin, and a squint that points a joke. He speaks with the thick catarrhal snuffle of the East End. Even in khaki his type proclaims him of the Race of Costermongers.... Covent Garden Market is thick with Barneys, all alike as peas from the pod....
"Ticklebats, my flash top," says Barney winking, "kind you used to ketch a while back, wiv' a bottle tied on a string." He adds in a thick whisper directed at the ear of the absorbed Flight Sergeant, "Wot d'yer pipe, old Sky-gazer? Thinkin' it's abaht time we 'ad another look-in from ours affectionately the Two-Faced Nightingale?"
"Ay. Unless he happened to come in the night!" The cautious whisper of the reply only just reaches the ears for which it is intended....