Part 41

"If Jesus of Nazareth were not the Son of the Most High, O John, my cousin! after no other fashion will He come when He comes. Taking nothing from the world but a crust, and a garment to cover Him. Seeking the things that are held despicable by men. His Gospel Love, Forgiveness, Sacrifice. His only diadem the Shekinah. His path beset by thorns-- His triumph Failure.... His end a gibbet! ... What other could it have been?" ...

John admits....

"No other. For if there's one thing more prejudicial to a man than sheer Disinterestedness--I'm at a loss to name it! The world must have a motive--and it likes a mean one best. I don't pretend I've ever gone particularly deep into the subject, but I've sometimes thought--that if it were possible to see Jesus of Nazareth clearly for the Christians--we Jews might find Him to be very much a Jew!"

"Perhaps we shall see Him so, one day! ..."

She rises with noiseless, supple ease, and takes her bundle of sticks from the corner.

"Thou art weary. Deny it not, thy jaws ache with yawning, and already I have seen thee nod.... Take off thine upper garment and head-cloth, for it is warm here. Lie down and sleep, though the bed be somewhat short for legs as long as thine. For I have things to do--for the Master! '_What things?_' Oh! the man! ever asking questions! ... Broth to make, milk to scald, these pipe-stems," she shows her bundle of new, clean canes, five feet long, bound by a generous length of red India-rubber tubing, "to fit together after a plan. The Master shall not die of hunger to-night, the Most High being my helper. For I shall be helped!" She nods her small, veiled head. "It is borne in upon me, since I have found thee, the Bedawi who did not spit when I let him see my face. There is another Arab here," she gives her dry little rustling chuckle, "an Emir with his following. He did not spit or curse, either, and his grey eyes said, '_Poor thing!_'"

"The hell you say! ..." John, who has been horizontal, sits up suddenly and blurts out in English. "Forgive me, little Esther, but I happen to be on the track of an Arab with grey eyes. Where does the bloke hang out?"

"If thou speakest of the Emir Fadl Anga, he who lodges at the Khan et-Talab under that title--having with him two Bedu of the Beni Asir, and the horses of all three--"

"Good egg!" John sits up on the string bed in his brown camel's hair _kumbas_, grinning joyfully, and hugging his knees: "Does one of 'em carry a reed-cage chock-full of pigeons, strapped back of his saddle? Think!"

"Ay, verily, the Emir Fadl Anga being pigeon-master to one of the Princes of Mecca. Or such is the story that is told in the Bazâr." There is incredulity in the weary voice. "He hath brought the birds as a gift to the German General commanding at Nazareth, for use, so they say, in the Intelligence Department there. When the pigeon-master Sergeant Major comes from Nazareth, he will take them--and leave a cage of birds that have been trained by himself. All this I had in the Bazâr.... Where art thou going? ..."

John, lowering his feet to the stone floor, and reaching for his Arab head-cloth, very decidedly replies:

"To the Khan et-Talab, to dig out my man. For he's my man, this Fadl Anga."

"And how wilt thou get to the Khan, lame as thou art?"

"_I_ dunno!" John gingerly tests his bandaged leg: "You've handed me a poser. What's to be done?"

"What wouldst thou do, if it were possible for thee to go? Think now and say! ..."

He rests his brawny arms upon his knees, and says, slowly, as the fierce light in his black eyes dies out and leaves their surface dim and lustreless:

"I'd find out which was Fadl Anga's room--loaf into the courtyard among the horses, camels, goats, Arabs and Fellah grooms--squat down under his window, and sing--not out loud, but just between my teeth--"

Sagely she nods her little veiled head:

"_Bouche fermée_,--some English song that is a sign agreed upon between you. Sing it me now, for I will go, and carry thy disguised Englishman the message, while thou remainest here--watching the soup that it be not burned or boil over."

For all unnoticed while they talked, she has set a covered earthen pot containing water, and some kind of meat that she brought up with her, and has chopped fine and mixed with herbs, amongst the glowing ashes; and a faint steam, not unsavoury, is already beginning to spiral through the hole in the knobbed lid.

"Is it agreed upon? ..."

"I should smile! ..."

She understands the odd utterance as assent and says with a diamond sparkle between her veils:

"Now sing me thy song. And give me thy message, but otherwise advise me in nothing of how I am to do. For, verily, I am the Mother of Cunning as well as the Mother of Ugliness, and have carried the lives of many men between these hands of mine!" Laughing softly, she stretches them out. "And they are not as big as thy hands, my giant Cousin John."

"You blessed little brick!"

He reaches out and captures in his own, one of the little dusky hands, gently squeezes it, lets it go, and takes from his neck a square of parchment that hangs there, suspended by a slender green silk cord. On one side are two interlaced triangles outlined in thick black ink. On the other a square containing Arabic letters of the Sacred Name--within a double circle in which have been traced and thickly inked--the Signs of the Zodiac.

"That's that! ... Makes some Arab amulet, doesn't it? ... I cribbed the figures from the title-page of Pittaker's Almanac, and the Name off an inscribed tile. Two letters are stitched inside this--I've another letter hidden away inside my _tarbûsh_, but that I'll deliver myself to Father Forbis. Meanwhile, you're to get this somehow into Fadl Anga's hands. If--but mind you not _unless_ he tumbles to the first bars of 'Loch Lomond.'"

"Is it 'Loch Lomond'? That was one of the English songs we learnt to sing at my Paris boarding-school," says the Mother of Ugliness. "Hear now, O my cousin, if I remember it aright? ..."

She has a little faded voice, sweet but thin, and in this she sings to him the familiar refrain of the ballad that--hummed by a battered private of London Territorials--sitting on a captured bag of Turkish Army biscuits after Sheria--conjured up the chintz drawing-room at Kerr's Arbour, and Katharine Forbis singing at her piano in the twilight--before the stern, absorbed eyes of an Arab who knelt at prayer....

So it follows that, having taken a sparing meal of bread and fruit, and milk, the amulet containing the letters being hidden upon her person, and the song stowed away in her head, Ummshni-Esther sets forth, under the blaze of the sun of twelve o'clock midday (going by the watch under Ali Zaybuk's sheepskin wristlet, which is set at European time). He limps to the entrance of the tomb to let her out, and stands watching until the little slender, veiled figure--wrapped in the ample outer garment of coarse yellow-white sheeting, worn by Syrian women, passes from his sight.

"Good luck to you, you regular little Maccabee!" he mutters. "Now all You Big Old Men, butt in and help her! ... It's up to you to help her.... For she's thoroughbred to the backbone, if ever a woman was...."

"_Thud, thud--thud! Thud thud thud--thud! THUD!_"

The guns are still arguing heavily and persistently--in the hills west of Jerusalem, and in the vicinity of Hebron.... South, over Junction Station, the inflated grey bulks of three observation balloons wallow against the cloud-piled horizon, over the huge ark-like hangars that kennel them, as the experts in the dangling baskets read off, and transmit to their Headquarters by Wireless, the silvery flashes of helios from the hills. A Fokker biplane of pusher type with a Falk machine-gun mounted in her bows, is trying to drive down one of the observers; the rattle of the aviator's weapon sounding like the clickett of a typewriter. While a single-seater monoplane _Taube_ with a "Roland" bomb-dropping device, is endeavouring to deal in a similar manner with the other O.B.'s, and a British Anti-Aircraft gun mounted on a motor is spraying vicious little shells of H.E. and shrapnel at the Germans, from rapidly-changing vantages upon the ground below.

Even as John gets interested in the battle, the Fokker, hit in her petrol tank by a projectile, suddenly vomits flame, and drops like a singed moth, downwards. The Taube departs in haste for Hebron--seeing a half-squadron of D.H.6's coming over from the aërodrome near G.H.Q. further down south.... Germany has few eyes in the air in these days, and the Turk is well-nigh wingless. But difficulties of transport threaten to hold the British up at Nebi Samwil; and knowing this, the enemy's resistance stiffens. The sun will not sink on Ottoman dominion in Palestine, while the Turco-German forces hold the Jerusalem-Shechem road.

There is a glorious view from the summit of the Mount of Cursing, silvered with streams on her lower slopes, clothed with her groves of olive and almond, fig and apricot, orange and pomegranate, as high as there is soil enough to hold their roots. Through a gap in the Hills of Galilee, snow-crowned Hermon stands out in splendid relief against the deep blue sky. East, across the Jordan, are the Mountains of Gilead, Osha's summit conspicuously capped with a streaming panache of cirro-stratus; the coastal Plain of Sharon rolls emerald to the turquoise lip of the Mediterranean, and the huge bulk of Carmel thrusts out into the glittering distance a fortress defying the uttermost assaults of Time.

"Some view!" John comments, baldly, in his acquired idiom, narrowing his eyes under the hand that shields them from the sun. Yet in his heart he is drunken with the beauty--captive forever to the spell of this land of Palestine....

"_Thud, thud!_ ... BOOM! ..."

A colossal tree-shaped column of woolly brown vapour rises in the west where lies Jaffa. "We" are blowing up Turkish ammunition-dumps and provision stores.

"_Rat, tatt, tatt--tatt 't tat!_" go the machine-guns in the hills to the south....

"_Thud, hud, thud 'd 'd! ..._"

Great happenings are in the air. Trained as John Hazel is in the unimaginative school of London's Stock Exchange and the City, his keen Oriental brain is quickened to this consciousness. Time, after many ripening centuries, is giving birth to The Event foretold by and foreshadowed in prophecies, dreamed of by vision-seers. Can it be that after all these centuries of exile, Christianity is to give back Palestine to the Jews? ...

The onyx ring attracts the man's black eyes as he brings down the hand that shaded them. He tells himself that, after all, he wasn't quite such a blooming mug as little Esther thought. He remembers binding a cotton rag about the finger that wears the ancient heirloom, on the eve of the start from Ismailia. Somehow, the rag must have come off, either before, or when, he jumped from the aëroplane, at the signal of Essenian.

"The treacherous Egyptian brute! One of these days--" There is a promise in the hiatus that bodes ill for Essenian. There is also a token, adhering to the ring, that bodes not over-well for John. Only a speck of bright green sealing-wax, sticking in a fold of the lion-skin of Hercules, that was not there when its wearer left the house in the Rue el Farad, to dine with the Pasha at the Aviators' Club.

IX

The Khan of et Talab, or The Fox, is a thoroughly Oriental caravanserai; flat-roofed, two-storeyed, and built upon three sides of a square courtyard. The ground-floor rooms are deposits for travellers' baggage and stores, the windows of the guest-rooms look out upon the courtyard, the fourth side of which is a row of stables, with small rooms above them for Arab and Fellah camel-drivers and horse-keepers, cooks and scullions, and the tag-rag-and-bobtail of the Khan.

The rooms occupied by the Emir Fadl Anga, pigeon-master to the nephew of the King of the Hedjaz--purveyor of Intelligence to German Headquarters at Shechem, and owner of the dapple grey Arab mare, are upon the top floor, and possess the exclusive monopoly of the roof. Thus the smells which rise from the area of the courtyard and the harsh cries of itinerant fruit and sweetmeat sellers, pedlars of fish, hawkers of bread and vegetables; with the wrangling of servants and horse-boys, camel-drivers and muleteers, washermen and scullions, are somewhat tempered before they ascend to the nostrils and ears of the Emir.

The room is large, whitewashed and fairly lofty, with a cool tiled floor, on which are spread a few mats and Damascus carpets. Some stools, a few cushions, a low table; a carved chest with a huge, wooden lock, and the inevitable divan, are all its furniture. Opening on a broad balcony communicating by a staircase at each end with the housetop and the courtyard, the high, wide window is also the door.

On the right-hand side of the divan nearest the window, the Emir lies outstretched; pillowed on the embroidered saddlebags which contain his travelling-gear, and smoking his water-pipe. Its flexible tube snakes over the smoker's body, down across the dark red tiling; the roseleaves dance in the water that fills the glass vessel, the blue-brown incense of the good Persian tobacco spirals up from the burnt clay bowl. The carrier-pigeons in their reed cage upon the shaded balcony outside coo slumberously. The _argili_ gurgles as is its wont--the flies that blacken the remnants of the midday breakfast of soup, chicken stewed in rice, pancakes fried in fat and honey, melon and figs--maintain a steady, persistent buzzing, and the rapid, minute tap-tap-tap of small hard objects hitting the clean starched cover of the divan never ceases. For, if the King of the Fleas of Palestine reigns--as is reported, at Tiberias--Abu Brârit, the Father of Fleas, lives at Shechem.

Of the Emir's companions, a tall, grizzled, elderly Bedawi in a purple and black _jelabia_ with an ample white _jerd_ swathed over an orange silk _kuffiyeh_, and a short, broad-faced young man, dark-skinned as a roasted coffee-berry, with a fine mouthful of dazzling white teeth, and flashing black eyes, in a thin _kaftan_ of black camel's hair over an under-robe striped red and white, with a _kuffiyeh_ of white, bound with a green head-rope--the junior squats on his heels beside a little stove of burned clay in which glows charcoal, which is placed on the broad balcony outside the window-door. On the stove boils a coffee-kettle of _repoussé_ metal, whose fragrant vapours mingle with the smells of the Desert, and the smoke of the Persian weed. Meanwhile the little porcelain coffee-cups in their _repoussé_ metal holders, the coffee-pot, the mortar in which the berries have been crushed, the brass pestle belonging to it, and a lime-bark box of broken candy-sugar, sit naïvely on the floor. That the son of the Shaykh Gôhar, a noted leader in the guerilla war between the King of the Hedjaz and the Sultan of Turkey, should preside over the coffee-pot, is in strict accordance with Bedwân etiquette. For to drink coffee that has been prepared by a woman, is a thing derogatory to masculine dignity. Hence Namrûd, his striped mantle doffed, squats on his slipperless brown heels beside the burning charcoal, and watches the bubbling pot.

The coffee boils, the smoke spirals up from the thin, well-cut lips, closed on the amber mouthpiece of Fadl Anga's _argili_.

Of what is Fadl Anga thinking, as the roseleaves dance in the bowl? Some ancient Arab palace with palm-gardens and apricot-groves sheltered from the sandstorms of the Dehna by forests of cedar and oak-trees, shielded from the burning winds that blow from the Gulf of Aden, by the mountain-ranges of Hadramaut? Of his horses and hawks, pigeons and hunting-leopards, or of some slender bride, with gazelle-eyes and henna-reddened fingers, and the rounded oval face that Eastern Asiatics liken to the full-orbed moon....

Actually, Fadl Anga is watching a man in a shabby grey tweed shooting-suit, burying the Service uniform of a British field-officer of infantry, in a fox-earth in a wood. A plantation of snowy Scotch firs knee-deep in wintry bracken. He has rolled the things in a trench-coat, strapped with a sword-belt. Now he savagely jams them down, and rises from the burial of Edward Yaill, panting and with a streaming face, though the wind has the nip of February.... He rubs the dry dust from his hands--crashes to the stile through the frosty covert--leaps out on the high-road. And goes his lonely way, oblivious that the end of the lanyard attached to the silver whistle sticks out among the briars for Meggy Proodfoot's wee laddie to pounce on by and by....

The flies buzz, the pigeons coo, the roseleaves dance in the water-bowl.... Now through the smoke comes the low command in the Bedwân dialect of the ancient Semitic language that is even more archaic than the Babylonian Semitic of 6000 years ago:

"O Gôhar, Shaykh of the Beni Asir! and thou, Namrûd, son of Gôhar! hearken to my word! ..."

"We hear, O Emir! ..."

"Friends, I have taken tracings of the despatch that was in the bag, dropped by the airman who came at dawn yesterday, and before sunrise I launched near Mount Gerizim, a pigeon carrying one of these for British Intelligence Headquarters at Lydd. The wise old blue _dîk_ with the crumpled foot, who has served us well before, is my messenger. Now, here for safety's sake, is a duplicate tracing for each of you."

White teeth gleam in Namrûd's brown face as he takes the filmy square of tissue paper, touches it to his forehead, and says:

"O Fadl Anga! by thy favour, there is no place like the inner whorl of the ear-rim, for hiding a paper rolled up within a lump of bees-wax."

"O Fadl Anga!" the Shaykh's mimicry of his junior's self-important tone is really creditable, "by thy favour, since the clipping of the ears of spies hath not gone out of fashion, I will hide the tracing thou hast given me, in a place that is of all the safest, even beneath the eyelid of this my left eye."

"I will remember, O Gôhar! Yet a little pride is permitted when a young man hath carried out a stroke so cleverly." Namrûd's black eyes glow gratitude as the Emir continues: "Yesterday there was consternation at the Shechem Headquarters of General von Krafft, Chief of the German Secret Intelligence Department on this front, when the bag dropped from the aëroplane was opened, and found to hold a dummy message. And last night there was a smart young orderly Staff Sergeant-Major of the Department--who was exceedingly sorry for himself."

"Thou shouldst have seen, O Emir! to taste the jest of it. By Allah! 'twas like a monkey trying to carry two watermelons in one hand. Under the archway of the Street of Mabortha, looking on the Square yonder," the dark hand of Namrûd waves towards the rearward wall, "by the fifth hour after sunset I fell upon my prey."

"Had I not known, I had been gulled even as the German." The tone of the Shaykh is not untinged with fatherly pride. "When the old woman passed, and squalled like a peahen at the gleam of the white face under the archway--and then took courage because she found it fair! ..."

"Thou hast the wrong end of the stick, O my father! She dropped in the mud a letter she was carrying from her mistress, the wealthy young widow of Abu Husain the jeweller, to the handsome soldier of Germany, who waited under the arch."

"So, so, that was it! And was there a letter? ..."

"Nay, she could not find it, having trodden it into the mud.

"True, it rained heavily yesterday morning. And what kind of a tale didst thou spin to tangle the dupe?"

"But this, that having seen him thrice, close upon the blink of dawn, standing at his post under the archway, the jeweller's widow had fallen into the very rage of love. '_Her eyes, that were like torches, are extinguished with weeping. Verily thou wouldst have pity on her, O Sidi! if thou couldst see. Woe's me! this letter!_' (Thus I, the go-between,) '_May the mercy of Allah defend me if I have lost it! for truly she knew no better, poor demented creature! than to wrap up in it a costly ruby ring!_ ..."

"Ha, ha! ... That was well thought of!"

"It made my gull begin to hunt about in good earnest, and, under pretence of the ring's having rolled, I lured him farther down the street. While with his little electric torch he was groping amid the stenches of the gutter, I heard the song of the Bird while yet afar off.... But cackling of lust and vanity, and greed, now in one of his fat red ears--now in the other, I deafened him,--else at a move, my grip had fastened round his throat.... Then the signal pistol cracked, and the orange light flared, and he grunted an oath: '_Boppis_'--what tongue is '_boppis_'? ..."

Fadl Anga laughs.

"'_Potzblitz_,' it may have been...."

"And, like the pig he is, he charged for the archway, knocking all the breath out of the old woman, who had got in his way. And while we twain rolled among the garbage on the pavement, I, dealing him scratches and cuffs, and squealing,--but not too loud! the second cartridge cracked out, and the bag dropped into the Square...."

The Shaykh takes up:

"And I ran out from my lurking-place and changed it for the dummy, ere the German floundered, snorting, from under the archway.... He will be wiser in future,--if they ever trust him further." Gôhar lights another powerful cigarette. "He will lend his ear to no sugared tales told by old women--when next he is waiting for despatches to drop out of the sky...."

"It may be so. But once a fool, twice a fool. That is my experience," says the quiet voice of the Emir. "Now, friends of mine, be it understood! Our work here is done, with the capture of the despatch, and the proof that Essenian Pasha is a traitor to England. To-night we throw the salaam to Shechem, taking with us the English priest."

"_Wallah!_--but that is good hearing!" The Shaykh Gôhar nods beamingly. "My blood warms to the word of a raid. Look at the boy!"

Namrûd is wreathed in grins as he squats on his heels--clearing the boiling coffee with a dash of cold water, splashed in at the critical time.

"He is thy very son. Now, tell me once more, O Shaykh Gôhar! what the War Prisoner officer told thee yesterday. Secretly, at the _Mahatté_ (Station) of Nakr, before the German _Mudîr_ came."

"_Masha'llah_! At thy behest, O Emir! ..."

And the lean-faced Shaykh, sitting on a carpet beside the divan, in his purple and black silk _jelabia_ and silver-corded orange head-drapery, smoking innumerable cigarettes of strong Arab tobacco, re-commences the low-voiced tale: