A Desert Drama, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [best color ereader txt] 📗

are scattered in all directions. The twelve camels are close beside us here,--those twelve behind the acacia-tree. If we can only get mounted and started, I do not think that many can overtake us, and we shall have our rifles for them. The guards are not strong enough to stop so many of us. The waterskins are all filled, and we may see the Nile again by to-morrow night."

The Colonel could not follow it all, "That is excellent," said he. "But what are we to do about the three ladies?"

The black soldier shrugged his shoulders.

"Mefeesh!" said he. "One of them is old, and in any case there are plenty more women if we get back to Egypt. These will not come to any hurt, but they will be placed in the harem of the Khalija."

"What you say is nonsense," said the Colonel, sternly. "We shall take our women with us, or we shall not go at all."

"I think it is rather you who talk the thing without sense," the black man answered, angrily. "How can you ask my companions and me to do that which must end in failure? For years we have waited for such a chance as this, and now that it has come, you wish us to throw it away owing to this foolishness about the women."

He understood enough to set a little spring of hope bubbling in his heart. The last terrible day had left its mark in his livid face and his hair, which was turning rapidly to grey. He might have been the father of the spruce, well-preserved soldier who had paced with straight back and military stride up and down the saloon deck of the _Korosko_.

"What have we promised you if we come back to Egypt?" asked Cochrane.

"Two hundred Egyptian pounds and promotion in the army,--all upon the word of an Englishman."

"Very good. Then you shall have three hundred each if you can make some new plan by which you can take the women with you."

Tippy Tilly scratched his woolly head in his perplexity.

"We might, indeed, upon some excuse, bring three more of the faster camels round to this place. Indeed, there are three very good camels among those which are near the cooking-fire. But how are we to get the women upon them?--and if we had them upon them, we know very well that they would fall off when they began to gallop. I fear that you men will fall off, for it is no easy matter to remain upon a galloping camel; but as to the women, it is impossible. No, we shall leave the women, and if you will not leave the women, then we shall leave all of you and start by ourselves."

"Very good! Go!" said the Colonel, abruptly, and settled down as if to sleep once more. He knew that with Orientals it is the silent man who is most likely to have his way.

The negro turned and crept away for some little distance, where he was met by one of his fellaheen comrades, Mehemet Ali, who had charge of the camels. The two argued for some little time,--for those three hundred golden pieces were not to be lightly resigned. Then the negro crept back to Colonel Cochrane.

"Mehemet Ali has agreed," said he. "He has gone to put the nose-rope upon three more of the camels. But it is foolishness, and we are all going to our death. Now come with me, and we shall awaken the women and tell them."

The Colonel shook his companions and whispered to them what was in the wind. Belmont and Fardet were ready for any risk. Stephens, to whom the prospect of a passive death presented little terror, was seized with a convulsion of fear when he thought of any active exertion to avoid it, and shivered in all his long, thin limbs. Then he pulled out his Baedeker and began to write his will upon the fly-leaf, but his hand twitched so that he was hardly legible. By some strange gymnastic of the legal mind, a death, even by violence, if accepted quietly, had a place in the established order of things, while a death which overtook one galloping frantically over a desert was wholly irregular and discomposing. It was not dissolution which he feared, but the humiliation and agony of a fruitless struggle against it.

Colonel Cochrane and Tippy Tilly had crept together under the shadow of the great acacia tree to the spot where the women were lying. Sadie and her aunt lay with their arms round each other, the girl's head pillowed upon the old woman's bosom. Mrs. Belmont was awake, and entered into the scheme in an instant.

"But you must leave me," said Miss Adams, earnestly. "What does it matter at my age, anyhow?"

"No, no, Aunt Eliza; I won't move without you! Don't you think it!" cried the girl. "You've got to come straight away, or else we both stay right here where we are."

"Come, come, ma'am, there is no time for arguing," said the Colonel, roughly. "Our lives all depend upon your making an effort, and we cannot possibly leave you behind."

"But I will fall off."

"I'll tie you on with my puggaree. I wish I had the cummerbund which I lent poor Stuart. Now, Tippy, I think we might make a break for it!"

But the black soldier had been staring with a disconsolate face out over the desert, and he turned upon his heel with an oath.

"There!" said he, sullenly. "You see what comes of all your foolish talking! You have ruined our chances as well as your own!"

Half a dozen mounted camel-men had appeared suddenly over the lip of the bowl-shaped hollow, standing out hard and clear against the evening sky, where the copper basin met its great blue lid. They were travelling fast, and waved their rifles as they came. An instant later the bugle sounded an alarm, and the camp was up with a buzz like an overturned bee-hive. The Colonel ran back to his companions, and the black soldier to his camel. Stephens looked relieved, and Belmont sulky, while Monsieur Fardet raved, with his one uninjured hand in the air.

"Sacred name of a dog!" he cried. "Is there no end to it, then? Are we never to come out of the hands of these accursed Dervishes?"

"Oh, they really are Dervishes, are they?" said the Colonel, in an acid voice. "You seem to be altering your opinions. I thought they were an invention of the British Government."

The poor fellows' tempers were getting frayed and thin. The Colonel's sneer was like a match to a magazine, and in an instant the Frenchman was dancing in front of him with a broken torrent of angry words. His hand was clutching at Cochrane's throat before Belmont and Stephens could pull him off.

"If it were not for your grey hairs----" he said.

"Damn your impudence!" cried the Colonel.

"If we have to die, let us die like gentlemen, and not like so many corner-boys," said Belmont, with dignity.

"I only said I was glad to see that Monsieur Fardet had learned something from his adventures," the Colonel sneered.

"Shut up, Cochrane! What do you want to aggravate him for?" cried the Irishman.

"Upon my word, Belmont, you forget yourself! I do not permit people to address me in this fashion."

"You should look after your own manners, then."

"Gentlemen, gentlemen, here are the ladies!" cried Stephens, and the angry, overstrained men relapsed into a gloomy silence, pacing up and down, and jerking viciously at their moustaches. It is a very catching thing, ill-temper, for even Stephens began to be angry at their anger, and to scowl at them as they passed him. Here they were at a crisis in their fate, with the shadow of death above them, and yet their minds were all absorbed in some personal grievance so slight that they could hardly put it into words. Misfortune brings the human spirit to a rare height, but the pendulum still swings.

But soon their attention was drawn away to more important matters. A council of war was being held beside the wells, and the two Emirs, stern and composed, were listening to a voluble report from the leader of the patrol. The prisoners noticed that, though the fierce, old man stood like a graven image, the younger Emir passed his hand over his beard once or twice with a nervous gesture, the thin, brown fingers twitching among the long, black hair.

"I believe the Gippies are after us," said Belmont. "Not very far off either, to judge by the fuss they are making."

"It looks like it. Something has scared them."

"Now he's giving orders. What can it be? Here, Mansoor, what is the matter?"

The dragoman came running up with the light of hope shining upon his brown face.

"I think they have seen something to frighten them. I believe that the soldiers are behind us. They have given the order to fill the waterskins, and be ready for a start when the darkness comes. But I am ordered to gather you together, for the Moolah is coming to convert you all. I have already told him that you are all very much inclined to think the same with him."

How far Mansoor may have gone with his assurances may never be known, but the Mussulman preacher came walking towards them at this moment with a paternal and contented smile upon his face, as one who has a pleasant and easy task before him. He was a one-eyed man, with a fringe of grizzled beard and a face which was fat, but which looked as if it had once been fatter, for it was marked with many folds and creases. He had a green turban upon his head, which marked him as a Mecca pilgrim. In one hand he carried a small brown carpet, and in the other a parchment copy of the Koran. Laying his carpet upon the ground, he motioned Mansoor to his side, and then gave a circular sweep of his arm to signify that the prisoners should gather round him, and a downward wave which meant that they should be seated. So they grouped themselves round him, sitting on the short green sward under the palm-tree, these seven forlorn representatives of an alien creed, and in the midst of them sat the fat little preacher, his one eye dancing from face to face as he expounded the principles of his newer, cruder, and more earnest faith. They listened attentively and nodded their heads as Mansoor translated the exhortation, and with each sign of their acquiescence the Moolah became more amiable in his manner and more affectionate in his speech.

"For why should you die, my sweet lambs, when all that is asked of you is that you should set aside that which will carry you to everlasting Gehenna, and accept the law of Allah as written by His prophet, which will assuredly bring you unimaginable joys, as is promised in the Book of the Camel? For what says the chosen one?"--and he broke away into one of those dogmatic texts which pass in every creed as an argument. "Besides, is it not clear that God is with us, since from the beginning, when we had but sticks against the rifles of the Turks, victory has always been with us? Have we not taken El Obeid, and taken Khartoum, and destroyed Hicks and slain Gordon, and prevailed against every one who has come against us? How, then, can it be said