Chapter V

The weather changes before dawn. Soggy clouds roll inland from the sea, hide the sky of Eastern azure, blot out the shining faces of the stars and invest the pale beauty of the Queen Planet of Night with the flowing sable veil of a recent War Widow. It has come on to rain--a slashing downpour of Palestinian intensity, under which the wadis speedily become shallow cataracts of khaki water--the trenches slashed in the terraced Judæan Hills, and manned by Turks, Germans, or British Crusaders--mere troughs of sandy or chalky mud.

Sangars ramparted with boulders may offer some practical assurance against shell-splinters or bullets, but against rain like this they offer no security. Bivouacs built of stones, and roofed with ground-sheets may in some degree keep out the rain, but they freely admit the cold. A Scotch mist, clammy, freezing and blinding in its damp opaqueness blankets the Hills of Ephraim, and broods over the Maritime Plain, as on the edge of one of the limestone terraces that fringe the robe of Mount Ebal,--a big, brawny Arab sits--nursing a badly-ricked ankle, and swearing in the fruitiest vernacular of his adopted land.

It is lucky for the Arab in the brown camel-hair shirt, striped _abâyi_ and roped white linen head-cloth, that he has no audience but the scorpions and lizards sheltering from the slashing downpour under the grey-white boulders--as he rocks himself and nurses his ricked ankle--and curses his luck. Presently, as the Scotch mist lifts, and the plain is irradiated by the watery moonlight, he sets his teeth for an effort and crawls to where a bundle tied in native cloth, and a long, metal-tipped Arab walking-staff lie on the chalky, puddled plain where they fell when he dropped them from the machine at the beginning of the volplane, and screwed himself as the plain rushed up, to wait the throttling down of the engine--the long, smooth final glide--the flattening out following the pilot's raising of the lever--and the slight jarring impact of the thick-tyred wheels with the ground....

"_Now_ jump!" the sharp, strident voice of the Egyptian called when the expected shock seemed imminent, and John Hazel set his teeth and jumped promptly. Aware even before he crashed to ground that the word had been given too soon. Even as he sprawled on the chalky plain, with all the wind knocked out of his body--the machine just missed landing on top of him. How he rolled out of the way of the thick squat wheels, and the steel framework of the under-carriage of the biplane, a powerful and heavy machine of D.H.6 type--he does not know now....

Sick, faint and shaken, he picked himself up, but not before Essenian, lithe as an acrobat, freed himself from the safety-belt, jumped out, adjusted the controls, and swung the big propeller. As the engine started he leaped back to his seat, looked round at Hazel, shouted "Good-bye!" and opening the throttle, raced over the plain, and rushed up into the air as though pursued by a fusillade of machine-gun bullets.

"Damn and blast the Egyptian beast!" John snarls, and, as the ricked joint rapidly swells to cricket-ball size, swears again, and thinks as he rubs it, "Might have guessed he was out for some treachery or other. Though how could I?--until he signalled to the enemy over Shechem by firing the Verey light, and gave away the whole show by dropping a message-bag! Making me swear before the start by all we Hazels hold most holy, never by word or sign to let out anything I might see him do. Consequently I'm his confederate--tarred with the same brush. And now I know he murdered Captain Usborn! It was his own revolver-bullet I showed him at the Club. If ever I get out of here I stand some chance of getting shot myself for being back at the Front on the quiet when I'm supposed to be on leave in Alex. But anyhow I hope I'll see Essenian Pasha get his dose of British lead before I do. Unless I get a chance to settle him myself. Wouldn't I let the beggar have it! Right in the neck--where Winnie wore the beads. But what a flier! Holy Smoke! what an A1. flier! Unless he's a devil, which I trend to believe!--there's not a man his match."

The rain that began at two a.m. by his wrist-watch (hidden under a broad band of untanned sheep-leather, laced on John's big wrist by a slender thong) shows no sign of abating. Fitfully and at intervals through the night, those guns in the west and south have held debate. Now they begin again with redoubled energy. John has seen as the D.H.6 travelled through the clear azure Palestine night, how the enemy's line has been thrust back from Gaza towards Jaffa. Now with a great blowing-up of Turco German ammunition-dumps, Junction Station,--key of the northern railway system--announces to the echoing hills the success of British arms.

"Good for us!" John chuckles, rather drearily--as the sullen sky in the south is illuminated by Aurora Borealis-like effects of orange, green and crimson--and Brock-like sheaves of flame spurt from the horizon to descend in gold and silver showers. "Djemal Pasha's Fourth Army Corps seems to be getting it rather badly. We're putting the breeze up Von Kressenstein, unless I much mistake...."

Even as John Hazel hugs the thought, the train containing Djemal Pasha's German Corps Commander is rushing towards Jerusalem. The Turco-German Army, broken in two, is retiring eastwards upon the Holy City and north-west through Ramleh towards Tul Keram. The brigades that rolled into Shechem overnight--rested and fed, are rolling out again. Fresh batteries from the Caucasus, diverted from Mesopotamia, new battalions of infantry of the Redif and Mustafiz, and brigades of irregular Cavalry from Kurdistan and Northern Albania, are swarming down to reinforce the Nizam and its Ikhtiât.

Dawn comes with cessation of the freezing, pelting rain and the sun glows fiery red through the curtain of leaden-coloured mists that yet hang over the Mediterranean. Wounded and stragglers on foot, German Army motor-lorries laden with escaping Teuton officers, begin to arrive at the Holy City. It is whispered in Jerusalem the Weary that the days of Ottoman rule in Palestine are numbered, that the German, Turkish and Austrian officials and residents are even now preparing to quit the town. And indeed German depots are hurriedly emptied; sugar sold as cheap as the dirt that is in it--long held-up flour and cereals disposed of in haste. From the high towers of the City and from the Mount of Olives one can see the roads that are muddy now--and will be dusty presently, crowded with lorries, carts and pack-animals carrying fugitives with their baggage, munitions and essential stores, north to Shechem or east to Jericho....

John, unaware of this, yet senses great happenings, as he stands propped on his Arab staff, cursing the temporary uselessness of a man with a sprained ankle-joint. He must lie up somewhere until the anguish abates and the cricket-ball reduces. A hut--there are clusters of drab-white specks, indicating a village on the northern fringes of the stretch of plain--boulder-strewn, bush-dotted, thinly grassed, thick with tufts of mandrake and tall blue Campanulas, and knee-deep in growth of late-blooming, white and yellow asphodel--on which Essenian elected to come down.... Westwards towards the sea there are other, larger villages. South there is a broad defile, curving east between humpy limestone hills, leading, John knows, to the town of Shechem. Over him rises the huge and bulky Shape of Ebal, three thousand six hundred and ninety feet above sea-level. From terrace to terrace, a path winds up to her towering rounded crest between hedges of tamarisk, broad-leaved grey-green cactus, and prickly pear plentifully laden with knobby red fruit. On her summit the map has shown John the ruins of an ancient fortress. Near the top, on this, the west side--stands a little whitewashed cupola surmounting a wall of mud and stone encircling a Moslem well.

Water is there; and hidden away with his revolver and cartridges on John's big person, is a case of First Aid necessaries, a small flask of brandy and some meat-lozenges in case of need like this. He determines to crawl up to the place of the well, hide, and doctor himself for a day, or even two days until the sprain is reduced, and he can get about.

"Hard luck," he mutters to himself, "but there's no good in grousing.... Now buck up and help me--O all you Big Old Men!"

But the Big Old Men give no sign, and their descendant, shouldering his bundle (to bear out his role of Arab there ought to be a donkey or a woman to carry it), limps, leaning on his staff and sweating with pain, up the narrow pathway leading between the hedges of cactus and prickly pear.

Blood-red, the Sun rises over the distant horizon, the glittering drops upon the leaves, the drying puddles under John's naked, slippered feet are reddened by the reflection. From the broad, prickly leaves the wet begins to steam; the tufts of snapdragon, pink and crimson, white and yellow and orange; and the blue campanulas, growing in the tissues of the rock, stand gallantly upright, refreshed by the dampness; the lily-like asphodel exhales its delicate, characteristic smell.

There are goats on the Mount, John notices, presently. Their droppings are thick upon the path he climbs. He hears them bleating, and sees them, feeding under the ruins of the Fortress. Indeed, the next wind of the path brings him out upon a ledge where a heavy-uddered female is cropping the thyme that grows there, with a jet-black kid nuzzling at her side. If one could catch the mother, thinks John, the question of subsisting here for days would be easily settled. Prickly pears are eatable.... Goat's milk is good.... There were lots of milch-goats in the caves of Sheria, and modern Crusaders, dry with the drouth of battle, and as yet uncertain whether the enemy had not poisoned the wells--milked the goats into their tin hats and other receptacles, and drank and were mightily refreshed. If only--even as John licks his lips, the too-nimble dairy, skipping from ledge to ledge, recedes from view. Bleating, the little black kid scrambles after her--and the Moslem well near the summit of Ebal seems farther off than it did before.

John sees now a path, branching off to his right hand, which may lead to the hut or cave of the goatherd. He strikes out upon it, and makes some progress, until the curve of it, trending southwards, suddenly shows him a narrow road, deeply rutted with broad-tyred wheels, and pitted with hoof-prints, leading up the Mount from its base on the south-eastern side. The erect brown figure of a sentry--reduced by distance to the size of a doll--stands out against the background. A Turkish Artillery waggon is jolting up the steep roadway.... John hears the panting of the toiling horses, the creak of the straining rope traces, the jingle of chains and the cracking of the drivers' thick-lashed whips....

From behind a bush he now looks down into a sangar built of boulders, sheltered at one end with green tarpaulin and full of Turkish machine-guns. The tarpaulin quivers with the snores of sleeping gunners, whose legs project beyond it, and from a nest of camouflage lower down the mountain, the blunt nose of a howitzer snuffs at the sky.

Still farther south a Field battery of Krupps has been posted on the flank of Ebal; the whinnying of horses eager for their morning barley and forage comes from a hollow where the Turks have stabled their teams, the smell of some aromatic burning wood spices the air with sweetness. Blue smoke columns up from fires of hidden bivouacs. There are picquets along the foothills, and on the plain are outposts. The Mount--except on the west and north whence danger is not apprehended--has been converted into a veritable wasps' nest.

Holding his breath, John Hazel turns, and noiselessly retraces his footsteps between the cactus hedges and along the path to where it first branched off. As he sets his lame foot gingerly upon it, he encounters a veiled native woman, toiling upwards, who carries--not an excessive burden in this land of laden women--a bundle of canes, and an empty gourd, and has a coarse jar of red earthenware balanced on her head.

Perhaps the earthen Jar contains water, or milk, or _laban_, that mixture of excessively sour milk with finely-chopped mint, peculiar to Syria. The bare idea intensifies John's thirst.

"O my mother!" he begins in quite passable Arabic: "In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate--"

"_Ai--e!_" The woman has started and dropped the gourd, and stands before him trembling, "What--what wouldst thou?"

"Somewhat to wet my throat. Thou lookest on a thirsty man. Hast thou, by any lucky chance, drink in the vessel?"

"The vessel is empty. See you, I have spoken truth!" She takes the jar from her veiled head and turns it upside down, and John's heart sinks to the bottom of his famished stomach. "May God relieve your need! ..."

"Allah favour thee! Black is my fortune. Thou seest," he thrusts out the swollen foot with the bulge at the side of the ankle-joint, "what evil has befallen me through a slip upon the Mountain side."

"It hurts thee? ..." He cannot see the hidden face, but in the faint voice there is a note of pity....

"_Wallah_! It hurts like very hell! Worse than the hurt is the lameness. Now hear! By the life of my head I say: If thou, being a woman, couldst help it somewhat! ... If thou knewest a place of shelter where I could lie and tend the hurt, and--and--have somewhat to eat and drink while it was mending, for this I would pay thee. By Allah! I am no beggar, I!"

The Fellaha thinks, while a little dusky hand holds the edges of her veil together. Then she says faintly:

"_Ala râsi_. I have--I know of a place of shelter. It is not very far from here. There thou couldst lie, it is a cave between two boulders and I would bring thee food and drink."

"Allah requite thee, O my sister! ..."

"Come, then, Sidi!" She returns her empty vessel to its place upon her head, with the deft, accustomed swing of the Eastern woman, and moves on before him, striking into another lateral path, a mere goat-track to the unpractised eye, that scores the mountain-side, running north. For perhaps a quarter of a mile her little bending figure hurries along and the tall Arab, leaning on his staff, hobbles painfully after. Where the cave between two boulders is--and less a cave than a hollow under a projecting ledge of nummulite limestone--he finds her waiting him....

"In here, Sidi!"

"Call me not Sidi! I am no person of degree." John thinks it well to try on the woman the story he has invented. "No person of degree am I. Only Ali Zaybak the Bedawi, a man who once had three camels, and ten sheep, and five goats, and a father and two brothers, and a wife also; and now has none; my brothers, my wife and two camels being killed and all the rest lost...."

"May the Dispenser of Mercies atone to thee, O Ali Zaybak!" says the thin faded voice from under the woman's veil. "How came about thy loss? From whom dost thou claim the blood-wreaks?"

"From the Inglizi, (English) the thrice-accursed ones! who came flying over our village--we dwelling in the Shadow of Allah in the caves of the Wadi Sheria--I and my brothers having bought exemption from service with the Army of the Osmanli (Turks) with the savings of all our lives."

"Ay, ay," the thin voice assents, bitterly. "Few and small were the gold and silver coins remaining on thy wife's head-tire, when the Dispensers of Exemption had signed thy card."

"Verily, Allah be my witness! and it is a black shame to take the money that was the woman's marriage-gift. We were then very poor--but we had the three camels and the sheep and the goats also--though the beasts were little and thin. Then came the War, rolling all about us--with marchings and counter-marchings of hosts of men--and we sent my brothers south so that they might sell to the Inglizi soldiers before Gaza, all the olives stored in old oil-tins, and all the oranges, and tobacco, and grape-treacle, and figs of last year, that the Almani and Osmanli had not taken away...." John cannot for the life of him restrain this vitriolic touch. "And they went, and made much money--the Inglizi being fools and wealthy, moreover--as all these sons of Sheitan are. This was in the month Shbât; and coming home my two brothers encountered Fate, in the person of a Commander of the Almani (Germans), who seized upon the young men--they being far from their native village and not having their _warakas_ of Exemption on them--and sent them to dig trenches at the Bir-es Saba Works."

"A bitter tyranny the Most High beheld, and will avenge upon the doer!"

"Then there was fighting at the Wady Sheria--because having taken the strong place of Bir-es Saba, ay! and the ridges down to the sea, the British desired the Place of Good Wells." John is beginning to believe in Ali Zaybak, the Bedawi farmer, to the point of getting hot over that individual's fictitious woes.... "Came they--they came, and were as hornets about us, their _killis_ bursting with stench, and smoke, and ruin--and their Devil-Birds fighting the Devil-Birds of the Almani, and driving them down out of the air. One dropped an egg of Eblis that killed two of our camels, and broke the leg of the third. My father cried out on Allah and fell face downwards.... So my wife cried out and fell, and when I went to lift them, lo!--they were dead.... Yet was there no wound on either.... _Wallah_! Upon neither was there a wound! ..."

"Well do I believe thee. I have seen Death come after that fashion many times since the beginning of this War. What more, O Ali Zaybak? ..."

"This,--that my goats and sheep being gone from me--for the _Osmanli_ took them when they retired before the Inglizi--I have come to Shechem to seek my brothers, if haply they be alive and there! ..."

"Ay, but why seek them on the Mount of Cursing, and not within the town? ..."

Woman-like, she has put her little wasted, dusky finger on the weak spot in John's trumped-up story. Having done it, she goes on, as he racks his brain for a sufficiently-convincing figment:

"Thou wilt do this to-morrow, O Ali Zaybak the Bedawi, when the swelling of thy joint hath abated and thou art rested and fed. So creep in here between the stones--there is a sheepskin thou canst lie on--and in somewhat less than an hour I will come back to thee with food and drink."

"May Allah prolong thy years, O woman!" says John with the extravagant hyperbole and the sing-song inflection proper to Oriental gratitude. "May thy fortune be doubled upon thee, and, fair as thou art already, may the radiance of thy beauty out-dazzle the full moon!"

She gives a queer little rustling laugh behind the folds of her coarse, yellowish head-cloth.

"Sweet words, sweet words from a widower bereaved in Shbât! Belike," she cackles again, "thou hast come to the Mount of Cursing in search of another bride? Dost thou lust for the Unrevealed? See, then, O Ali Zaybak! what beauty hides behind this screen! ..."

And accompanying the words with a swift revealing movement, she whisks back the heavy veil from that mutilated left side....

"My God!" John very nearly exclaims, bleaching under his natural mahogany-colour, for a man old in War and hardened to the sight of wounded men may yet sicken at the sight of a woman mutilated like this. But he swallows the exclamation, and substitutes:

"I--am sorry! May Allah pity thee, poor soul! ..."

"And increase the wisdom of the Sidi! ..."

The Fellaha is re-veiled and between the pendent linen folds comes her little rustling whisper; chilling the blood of the pretended Ali Zaybak, under the now nearly vertical rays of the blazing Syrian sun....

"_Who, desiring Secret Intelligence for his War-Chiefs of the British Army, ventures into the midst of the enemy, disguised as an Arab and alone! ..._"

The words drop, coldly as lumps of hail, on the adventurous heart of the man. Discovered, and in the first hour by a Syrian peasant woman.... He forgets his pain, and drawn to his full height, fixes his black eyes threateningly upon her hidden face.

"What sayest thou? Hast thou no fear?"

"None--of a British officer, nor of a British soldier!"

The words, spoken in English with a Syrian-French accent, are such an unexpected shock, that John jolts temporarily back into his own adopted tongue:

"How the hell--ahem! How did you know--I'm--what you say I am?"

"Because" the voice is soft and refined, though it is thin and toneless: "Because--sir!--when I showed you my face--you did not--spit like a Mohammedan, or laugh like a German! And who"--the voice suggests the shadow of a mocking smile--"who but an Englishman would venture here--so ill-disguised and speaking such bad Arabic, and carry himself so confidently as almost to deceive me--in spite of the testimony of my two good ears--and my one very good eye."

The poor face she has shown to John is blind on that shattered left side. He knows a thrill of pity even as he asks:

"You won't give me away? ..."

"If 'give away' means to betray--no, I will not betray you!"

"Thanks. You're out Scouting on your own," says John, "unless I'm very much mistaken?" He adds still in English, as she lets this broad hint pass.... "Since we're to be pals of sorts, do you mind telling me your name? ..."

She gives her faint little whispering laugh.

"Ay, surely. It is Ummshni.... 'Mother Ugly' in your English tongue. In Arabic, 'Mother of Ugliness.' ...!"

"But--but I can't call you that! ..."

"You must. It is my name here. For you I have no other."

"Then shake hands, little Ummshni," John says promptly, and thrusts out his own huge, brown right hand.

"Need we?" She hesitates....

He says, encouragingly:

"Just once. To seal the bargain and show we're pals!"

"Once then...."

She hesitates an instant more. Now from enveloping folds, a small, shrunken, dusky hand steals out, and is engulfed in John's. And then a breathless cry, not loud, nor shrill, but terrible in its dire, agonised intensity bursts from the mouth of the distorted face that is mercifully hidden by the veil....

"God of my fathers! Who art thou?" The gasped-out words are once more Arabic. "From whence didst thou get the Ring of the House of Hazaël? ... Thy face, too.... It is the face of Eli! Thy voice.... Do not deny it! ... Thou art of the Blood! ..."

"Since you know it already I'll tip you the garden truth. I'm John Benn Hazel, old Eli's grandson from London. But who in the name of--wonder--are you? ..."

"Thy--thy unhappy Cousin Esther!" The words come stumblingly, between terrible, dry sobs.... "Oh, do not check me. Let me weep! I have not for so long! ..."

"Now by--the whole blooming, blessed row of Big Old Men, back to the Very Biggest!" John says between his teeth, as leaning on his heavy staff he stands staring blankly down at a little heaving bundle of coarse and common feminine drapery that crouches at his big sandalled feet amidst the short thyme-scented grass, "This is--this is the cherry in the cocktail! Just when I'd begun to think I wouldn't carry through--comes along the very sort of little woman to help me! This isn't Coincidence or anything like it. This is--just--Fate! ..."

"Help thee?" Her sobs have abated, she lifts up her bowed, head. "In what manner can I help thee? I can feed thee, tend thy hurt and hide thee. But there is something more than these.... Tell me what thou wouldst do? ..."

"Save a man!" No one is near, but he whispers it, stooping over the little figure. "A War Prisoner they've got here. Get him out--and get him away! ..."

"Yes--yes! Willingly will I help thee. Hath an Hazaël ever failed to answer to the Call of the Blood?" The little dusky hand clutches at his brawny wrist. She rises, and her eager breath mingles with his, and an eye diamond-bright, black as his own, flashes between her veils.... "What strength I have--what cunning and courage--are thine, to the threshold of Death and beyond it. But--but, John, my cousin! If I help thee to free thy man--thou must needs deliver mine."

"I'm not sweet on conditions--they're things that handicap. Who's your man?" The tone is decidedly gruff.

"He is an English officer.... There is no other in Shechem since the big German petrol lorries rolled out this morning. For the Turks have sent them all away ... I heard, to Aleppo."

"The hell you say! Forgive me, little Esther, but this is--pretty rough! For I'm here--bad Arabic and all--on the track of a British War Prisoner."

"Tell me his name," says the thin rustling voice, shaken still with emotion....

"Julian Forbis.... Father Julian Forbis," John answers, and she falters:

"O my cousin! in thine hour of need and mine the Most High, Blessed be He! hath verily sent thee. For--for--thy man and my man--are one! Come now to the secret place where I dwell alone with my sorrow. There we can talk freely--it is safer than here. Thy hand on my shoulder--what a big hand, like that of our grandfather Eli! ... Lean on thy staff, but on me too. I am stronger than thou wouldst dream...."