Jimgrim and Allah's Peace, Talbot Mundy [ebook reader browser .TXT] 📗

next hour Ahmed was kept busy interpreting to me the lies invented by every member of the escort for my especial benefit. If they were true, each man had slain his dozen; but nobody would say who the opposing faction were. When I put that question they all dried up and nobody would speak again for several minutes.

It turned out afterward that there had been a sort of armistice proclaimed, and all the local chiefs had undertaken to observe it and cease from blood-feuds for three days, provided that each chief should prove peaceful intention by bringing with him only two men. Three men in a party, and not more than three, had right of way. The engagement may have been a simple protest against breach of the terms of the armistice, but I suspect there was more than that in it.

At any rate, we were not attacked again on the road, although there were men who showed themselves now and then on inaccessible-looking crags, who eyed us suspiciously and made no answer to the shouted challenge of Anazeh's men. When the track passed over a spur, or swung round the shoulder of a cliff, we could sometimes catch sight of other parties—always, though of three, before and behind us, proceeding in the same direction.

We sighted the stone walls of El-Kerak at about midafternoon, and rode up to the place through a savage gorge that must have been impregnable in the old days of bows and arrows. It would take a determined army today to force itself through the wadys and winding water-courses that guard that old citadel of Romans and crusaders.

We approached from the Northwest corner, where a tower stands that they call Burj-ez-Zahir. There were lions carved on it. It looked as if the battlements had been magnificent at one time; but whatever the Turks become possessed of always falls into decay, and the Arabs seem no better.

Beside the Burj-ez-Zahir is a tunnel, faced by an unquestionable Roman arch. Outside it there were more than a dozen armed men lounging, and a lot of others looked down at us through the ruined loop-holes of the wall above. Their leader challenged our numbers at once, and refused admission. Judging by Anazeh's magnificently insolent reply it looked at first as if he intended fighting his way in. But that turned out to be only his diplomatic manner—establishing himself, as it were, on an eminence from which he could make concessions without losing dignity.

The arrangement finally agreed to was Anazeh's suggestion, but showed diplomatic genius on both sides. The old man divided up his party into sets of three, and asserted that every set of three was independent. There were twenty-two of us all told, including Ahmed, but he described Ahmed as a prisoner, and offered to have him shot if that would simplify matters.

There was a great deal of windy discussion about Ahmed's fate, during which his face grew the color of raw liver and he joined in several times tearfully. Once he was actually seized and half-a-dozen of the castle guards aimed at him; but they compromised finally by letting him go in with hands tied. Nobody really wanted the responsibility of shooting a man who had smuggled stolen cartridges across the Dead Sea, and might do it again if allowed to live.

We rode for eighty or a hundred paces through an echoing tunnel into a city of shacks and ruined houses that swarmed with armed men, and it was evident that we were not the only ones who had ignored the rule about numbers. Anazeh explained in an aside to me that only those would obey that rule who did not dare break it.

"Whoever makes laws should be strong enough to enforce them," he said sagely. "And whoever obeys such a law is at the mercy of those who break it," he added presently, by way of afterthought. To make sure that I understood him he repeated that remark three times.

Every house had its quota of visitors, who lounged in the doorways and eyed us with mixed insolence and curiosity. There were coffee-booths all over the place that seemed to have been erected for the occasion, where, under awnings made of stick and straw, men sat with rifles on their knees. Those who had provender to sell for horses were doing a roaring trade—short measure and high price; and the noise of grinding was incessant. The women in the back streets were toiling to produce enough to eat for all that host of notables.

To have had to hunt for quarters in that town just then would have been no joke. There was the mosque, of course, where any Moslem who finds himself stranded may theoretically go and sleep on a mat on the floor. But we rode past the mosque. It was full. I would not have liked a contract to crowd one more in there. Perhaps a New York Subway guard could have managed it. The babel coming through the open door was like the buzzing of flies on a garbage heap.

I was trying to sit upright in that abominable saddle and look dignified, as became the honoured guest with a twenty-man escort, when a courteous-looking cut-throat wearing an amber necklace worth a wheat-field, forced his way through a crowd and greeted Anazeh like a long lost brother. I examined him narrowly to make sure he was not Grim in disguise, but he had two fingers missing, and holes in his ears, which decided that question.

After he had welcomed me effusively he led us through a rat-run maze of streets to a good-sized house with snub-nosed lions carved on the stone doorposts and a lot of other marks of both Roman and crusader. No part of the walls was less than three feet thick, although the upper story had been rebuilt rather recently on a more economical and much less dignified scale. Nevertheless, there was a sort of semi-European air about the place, helped out by two casemented projections overhanging the narrow street.

There was no need to announce ourselves. The clatter of hoofs and shouts to ordinary folk on foot to get out of the way had done that already. Sheikh ben Nazir opened the door in person. His welcome to me was the sort that comes to mind when you read the Bible story of the prodigal son returning from a far-off country. I might have been his blood-relation. But perhaps I am wrong about that; bloodfeuds among blood-relations are notoriously savage. He was the host, and I the guest. Among genuine Arabs that is the most binding relation there is.

He was no longer in blue serge and patent-leather boots, but magnificent in Arab finery, and he was tricked out in a puzzling snowy-white head-dress that suggested politics without your knowing why. He had told me, when I met him at the American Colony, that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca more than once; but that white linen thing had nothing to do with his being a haji, any more than the expensive rings on the fingers of both hands had anything to do with his Arab nationality.

After he had flattered and questioned me sufficiently about the journey to comply with etiquette I asked him whether Ahmed might not be untied. The thong cutting the man's wrists. Sheikh hen Nazir gave the necessary order and it was obeyed at once. The liquid-eyed rascal with the priceless amber necklace then led away the escort, Ahmed included, to some place where they could stall the horses, and—side-by-side, lest any question of precedence should be involved, Anazeh and I followed ben Nazir into the house.

We were not the only guests there. He ushered us into a square room, in which outrageous imported furniture, with gilt and tassels on it, stood out like loathsome sores against rugs and cushions fit for the great Haroun-al-Raschid's throne room. Any good museum in the world would have competed to possess the rugs, but the furniture was the sort that France sends eastward in the name of "culture"—stuff for "savages" to sit on and be civilized while the white man bears the burden and collects the money.

There were half-a-dozen Arabs reclining on two bastard Louis- something-or-other settees, who rose to their feet as we entered. There was another man, sitting on a cushion in a corner by himself, who did not get up. He wore a white head-dress exactly like our host's, and seemed to consider himself somebody very important indeed. After one swift searching glance at us he went into a brown study, as if a mere sheikh and a Christian alien were beneath his notice.

We were introduced first of all to the men who had stood up to greet us, and that ceremony took about five minutes. The Arab believes he ought to know all about how you feel physically, and expects you to reciprocate. When that was over ben Nazir took us to the corner and presented, first me, then Anazeh to the solitary man in the white head-dress, who seemed to think himself too important to trouble about manners.

Anazeh did not quite like my receiving attention first, and he liked still less the off-handed way in which the solitary man received us. We were told his name was Suliman ben Saoud. He acknowledged my greeting. He and old Anazeh glared at each other, barely moving their heads in what might have been an unspoken threat and retort or a nod of natural recognition. Anazeh turned on his heel and joined the other guests.

In some vague way I knew that Saoud was a name to conjure with, although memory refused to place it. The man's air of indifference and apparently unstudied insolence suggested he was some one well used to authority. Presuming on the one thing that I felt quite sure of by that time—my privileged position as a guest—I stayed, to try to draw him out. I tried to open up conversation with him with English, French, and finally lame Arabic. He took no apparent notice of the French and English, but he smiled sarcastically at my efforts with his own tongue. Except that he moved his lips he made no answer but went on clicking the beads of a splendid amber rosary.

Ben Nazir, seeming to think that Anazeh's ruffled feelings called for smoothing, crossed the room to engage him in conversation, so I was left practically alone with the strange individual. More or less in a spirit of defiance of his claim to such distinction, I sat down on a cushion beside him.

He was a peculiar-looking man. The lower part of his cheek—that side on which I sat—was sunk in, as if he had no teeth there. The effect was to give his whole face a twisted appearance. The greater part of his head, of course, was concealed by the flowing white kaffiyi, but his skin was considerably darker than that of the Palestine Arab. He had no eyebrows at all, having shaved them off—for a vow I supposed. Instead of making him look comical, as you might expect, it gave him a very sinister appearance, which was increased by his generally surly attitude.

Once again, as when I had entered the room, he turned his head to give me one swift, minutely searching glance, and then turned his eyes away as if he had no further interest. They were quite extraordinary eyes, brimful of alert intelligence; and whereas from his general appearance I should have set him down at somewhere between forty and fifty, his eyes suggested youth, or else that keen, unpeaceful spirit that never ages.

I tried him again in Arabic, but he answered without looking at me, in a dialect I had never heard before. So I offered him a gold-tipped cigarette, that being a universal language. He waived the offer aside with something between astonishment and disdain. He had lean, long-fingered hands, entirely unlike those of the desert fraternity, who live too hard and fight too frequently to have soft, uncalloused skin and unbroken finger-nails.

He did not exactly fascinate me. His self-containment was annoying. It seemed intended to convey an intellectual and moral importance that I was not disposed to concede without knowing more about him. I suppose an Arab feels the same sensation when a Westerner lords it over him on highly moral grounds. At any rate, something or other in the way of pique urged me to stir him out of his self-complacency,