Chapter V

In consideration of great services rendered to the Empire, the ex-Prætor of the Egyptian Taxes was beheaded without torture. The body, exposed upon the public execution-ground according to the law, mysteriously disappeared. It was whispered that it had been spirited away by persons with Christian leanings, and secretly buried in the crypt of some unknown church.

For three days following the death of his patron, the house of Hazaël was strictly closed.... The Jew, with hair and beard sprinkled with ashes, mourned, sitting on the floor in a coarse black tunic, rent at the hem; and observing silence, ate bread and drank water once a day at the sunset hour. He even said Kaddish for his dead benefactor, though an act so presumptuous would have scandalised the Rabbinate. On the fourth day he rose: washed and reclothed himself, and returned to his family as though nothing had transpired. But on a day following the celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, the large white mule on which Hazaël made his journeys, with the beast that usually carried his attendant Ephraim, stood waiting with the pack-mule at the Chief Secretary's door.

A long basket of woven osiers now being brought out by Ephraim and another servant, and carefully strapped upon the burden of necessaries carried by the pack-mule, the Chief Secretary, armed as before, and in the plain travelling garb that he had worn previously, bade farewell to his wife and family; thrust his mighty bronze-shod staff once more into its leathern bucket; and rode out of the City of the Pharos with his small following, by the Gate of the Moon.

A flat-bottomed boat paddled by four negroes, conveyed both men and beasts across the vineyard-fringed Lake of Mareotis, and for some miles south-eastwards along the Canal of Alexandria, between palm-groves, gardens, orchards and the estates of wealthy Greeks, Egyptians and Roman officials. Above Andron, the ancient city fast falling through Roman misrule into neglect and dilapidation, the party landed; Hazaël gave money to the master of the rowers, received his salutations, and the four negroes, reversing their positions, soon conveyed the boat away.

Then the Jew, no longer hiding the anxiety that had devoured him, leaped with fierce energy upon the pack-mule, unstrapped the heavy osier basket and with the aid of Ephraim, carefully lowered it to the ground. With shaking hands he unfastened the lid of the pannier, and as the smiling but bewildered face of a boy of twelve years old looked up at him, with blue eyes blinking in the sudden glare of the sun:

"Now thanks be to the Holy One that all is well with thee!" he stammered. "Not a word, not a movement--your father's true son! See now--this pad from under thy head, my hands beneath thy armpits. Leap--and fresh as a salmon from the British Thamesis--a sturgeon from the Hyperborean Ocean, or a lamprey from Lake Moeris--out you come!"

He hugged the boy against his breast with almost womanly tenderness, and running his hands rapidly over the slight body, assured himself that all was well. Then mounting Florens before the saddle of his own mule, and followed by Ephraim with the other animals; the Secretary, following a southward-running road that crossed some ripening cotton-fields, presently drew the rein, and looked back at Ephraim, saying:

"The idolaters are true to their word. See, there are their tents and camels!"

And he pointed to where low black tents were pitched upon a stretch of scrubby ground lying between the crop-land and the reddish-coloured desert, upon which camels eagerly grazed upon withered vetch and wiry grasses; while a small band of Saracens crouched round a small fire, wrapped in capacious mantles woven of white wool and black camel's hair, their loaded staves beside them, and sharp broad-bladed spears planted haft downwards in the ground near by.

The Saracens rose, seeing men on beasts coming, seized their staves and plucked forth their spears. Then, comprehending who it was that approached, their demeanour altered, and they received the Jew with respect.

"I am Mafa Oabu," said the eldest of the company. "If evil come to thee, or those who are thy companions, I pay to him whom thou knowest, with my life and the lives of my sons!"

He touched himself with the right hand upon the breast and brow, and laid his hands in the hands of Hazaël, as also did the men of his following. Three young camels were chosen for the travellers to ride. Two others were loaded with the water-skins, provisions, fodder, and baggage. Mafa Oabu mounted one of the pack-animals. Two strong young men, marching with the caravan, would ride by turns upon the other, the old Saracen said, when either of them required rest. As for the mules, they remained in the keeping of the Saracens, to be reclaimed upon the return of the travellers. The price of the journey, not to be paid until then, was to be one hundred silver _sestertii_ a day for each of the five camels; fifty _sestertii_ for Mafa Oabu, and a gift for each of the young men.

The departure was accompanied by shrill ululating cries made by the women of the Saracens, who kept veiled their faces, painted like their naked bodies with green and scarlet fishes, serpents and the signs of the Zodiac, and smeared their hair with butter. Then the caravan struck southwards into the Nitrian Desert. That night they encamped under a grove of palm-trees, near a Roman well hollowed in the living rock, amidst the bellowings of the camels, which purposely had not been watered before the start.

Water-skins brought by the Jews being filled by Ephraim, that the pure element might not be contaminated by the touch of idolaters, the Saracens filled their own, and drew water for the camels, which was given the thirsty beasts in a pitch-smeared skin trough. Mafa Oabu took no share in these labours, but prostrating himself upon the sand with his forehead towards the setting sun, remained absorbed in silent adoration. The Jews washed, gave thanks and ate; sharing with the child the bread, eggs, figs and dried fish they had brought with them; drinking a little wine diluted with water, and keeping their own side of the fire. The Saracens washed down their sparing diet of dried bread, dates and sheeps'-milk cheese with a drink of charred corn, crushed, and boiled in water mingled with honey, which they sipped from the shells of young tortoises, showing their white teeth in smiles at the hearty appetite displayed by the child. Yet while the novelty of all about him pleased and excited Florens, he would pause in the midst of a mouthful to ask Hazaël:

"When we reach where we are going, shall we find my father there?"

"If the Almighty so wills!" was the Jew's invariable answer. The young Saracens, whose names were Marduk and Belias, pitched a black tent to shelter the travellers, when sleeping, from the rays of the new moon. Small, marvellously bright and silvery, it hung high in the south, rivalling the blue radiance of Jupiter, the evening star.... In the north-west the Pharos of Alexandria blazed on the horizon at intervals of an instant. Hazaël looked at the distant splendour of the city, and muttered, as he thought of his benefactor murdered there:

"But for the Chosen, and my Miriam and my children, who dwell in the shadow of thy painted temples like to doves among the rocks, I could wish that fire and brimstone might descend from Heaven and consume thee utterly, thou thrice accursed Harlot of the Sea!"

For in the bosom of the Jew, who had witnessed massacres of Christians without a sentiment of pity or horror, the commission of that single crime had caused a strange revulsion. Before he lay down, he looked at the boy, who wearied, was soundly sleeping; and a heavy tear dropped from his stern eyes upon the woollen covering he held back. Then he replaced it over the tossed curls and the flushed face of the sleeper, commended himself to the Almighty care, and stretched himself upon the ground beside Florens.

Rising to repeat the Shema for the first night-watch, he stepped outside the tent to leave to Ephraim, who had also wakened, the freedom of solitude which intensifies prayer. The young Saracens slept beside the pink embers of the fire, enveloped in their mantles of camel's hair. Mafa Oabu did not sleep, but sat apart, alert and wakeful; spear at hand and staff in readiness; his sling lying beside him, with a supply of rounded stones.

Placing ten small pebbles in front of him, he reckoned that ten days must pass before the arrival of the caravan at Memphis. Adding ten more for the return-journey, he surrounded each of the twenty pebbles with five hundred grains of maize, reckoning up his gains by the light of the moon and of the fire--which he often fed with dead wood and dried camel's-dung--regularly discovering to his chagrin that he had not added the sum due for his own labours, and must begin once more. When the stars began to pale towards the dawn, he ceased, and prostrated himself, rising to find Hazaël standing near.

"What do you worship?" the Jew asked him.

"We pray," said Mafa Oabu, "to the Great and Lesser Lights, to the starry Hosts of Heaven and to the Djinns and Afrits both good and evil, that eavesdrop at the celestial gates and thereby learn much of the divine plans of Allah, the Eternal, the Creator of All. The brilliant lights that sometimes shoot across the sky are in fact these beings, driven by the Angels from the celestial threshold, whence their master Iblis, the Peacock of the Angels, was banished when he rebelled against Allah. We also reverence as the holiest thing from Kaf to Kaf, the pure white stone that fell with our father Adam from the Garden of Paradise. It is now no longer white, having wept so much for the sins of the world, and silver bands prevent it from bursting. It is imbedded in the wall of the Kaaba, the Holy House containing more than three hundred and fifty images, built and carved by Seth, son of Adam, and washed away by the Deluge. Later, Ishmael, guided by the Archangel Gabriel, discovered the marvellous stone, buried in the mud left by the retreating waters, and made new images in place of those lost. We call the period at which these events occurred, The Time of Ignorance. You, my lord, being of the People of the Book, the Sons of Isaac, look back with ourselves--the People of the Desert who are the Children of Ishmael--to Abraham, our common ancestor."

"So it is said," observed Hazaël, unwilling to offend the master of the caravan, while he turned aside to spit upon the sand, making a mental act abjuring kinship with idolaters, condemned by the Almighty to burn forever in hell.