Chapter XVIII

Towards dawn, following the bomb-fight on the Jaffa Road, those masses of sulphurous cumulo-nimbus, piled over the Hills of Gilead, move without the push of a wind behind towards the damp rain-clouds rolling inland from the Mediterranean, and there is a great thunderstorm over Shechem. Forked lightning strikes and splits the rocks, the echoes of Nebo and Gerizim bellow in answer to the rattling volleys of cloud-artillery. Wadis and passes became foaming cataracts, field-bivouacs are flooded--men and guns are bogged in the foot-deep mud of the hill-roads--and supply-columns of British A.S.C. hopelessly held up in the vast cotton-soil morass that was yesterday the Maritime Plain.

By noon of the next day the sun regains sway, and the smells of Shechem their wonted potency. Save for one Turkish sentry at the gate, the guard has been removed from the Wired Enclosure. In its littered desolation an offence to the eye--in its neglected filth an outrage to the adjacent organ, it lies and steams and festers under the baking rays; and all the winged legions of Baal Zebub seem there to be holding revel--especially in the neighbourhood of the wooden hut.

A couple of hours after noon the Enclosure is visited by the Bey. The _posta_ at the gate stiffens to the salute as Hamid passes in with the gauze-spectacled Medical Officer and his bilious-looking secretary, his nondescript Greek interpreter, and his usual following of big-bearded, red-fezzed _zabtiehs_, armed with German Service revolvers, and repeating Winchesters.

The fog of flies about the wooden hut thins a little as the visitors approach its entrance. The heavy door--broken now--stands as wide as though no prisoner were within worth keeping. The odour of corruption fills the place. The Bey spits, the Turkish Medical Officer in the black gauze spectacles furtively sucks a formamint lozenge, and conveys one to the interpreter--the Secretary holds his nose....

The wooden bed has been dragged aside from the patch of ground it covered, where shows the mouth of the tunnel, which has been hastily filled up with brickbats, sand, and gravel. Flies rise in a roaring cloud from the bedstead as the visitors enter, and the Bey, with a pale twinkle in his oblique sandy eyes--the inevitable cigarette poised between his thick gloved fingers--perpetrates one of his inimitable jests:

"Come, see a greedy dog we have in here--a Yahudi of the Yahud, who has eaten stick till his belly burst, and now can eat no more! ..."

At which display of wit the fat, goggled surgeon squirms with laughter, the secretary and the interpreter, faint with mirth, retire to the threshold, and even the flies buzz as though they too appreciated the jest....

The Thing that lies upon the bed looks as though it, too, joined in the merriment, for its teeth are set, and the swollen lips drawn back--the Medical Officer learnedly explains--in the rigor of the early stages of tetanus, so that it grins from ear to ear. A mountainous bulk of bloody flesh, clothed in a garment of feasting flies, and bound about with an iron chain that is padlocked under the _anghareb_--he is no more than the caricature of what was once a man.

A man who has suffered the extremest punishment of the _falagy_. Who has been beaten by the lithe green rods on the feet and legs, on the belly and breast, on the loins and thighs and face.... Beaten to kill by relays of men, skilled in the use of the _asayisi_, and yet, for a wonder, is not dead....

Labouring breaths issue from the bloated lips, and puff from the split nostrils. In the glazed eyes staring from their bleeding orbits, black fire smoulders still.... He is even capable of a croaking sound, which he reiterates at intervals, with his bleeding eyes begging at the faces of those beside his bed....

"_So' ûk sû! ... So' ûk sû! ..._"

All the Turkish the sufferer knows: "Cold Water!--cold water! ..."

"O Jew! you will get no cold water between here and Hell. But stick--plenty more stick, if you are noisy." Thus the Bey, illustrating the humour of the words with eloquent pantomime.

"Do not beat me any more!" the wretched being on the bed stutters in broken Arabic: "Do not call the soldiers--beg the Bey to be merciful!" Bright red blood jets between the clenched teeth--his cracked tongue being moistened with this, his utterance becomes clearer: "Tell Hamid Bey if he will let me go, I can pay--I can pay him well! ..."

"Thou canst pay? That is speaking Osmanli sense." A flat pasty face with oblique, pale, lashless eyes, and sandy eyebrows, replaces the spectacled surgeon's. "How canst thou pay?"

"By--telling--but I will tell no one but the Bey--where the money has been hidden away! ..."

"Hidden money--and where!" Sharp greed wakens in the pale eyes. They dig in the smouldering black ones as if treasure lay behind them: "I who speak am Hamid Bey. Now, Jew--out with it!--where is the money?"

"I will tell--I will tell, but only to the Bey," moans the voice between the clenched teeth. "Send away thy people.... Fasten the door lest they creep back and overhear. There was a whole bag of English gold! I brought it to buy the freedom of the Nazrâni priest--and coveting the money, buried it--where I will tell thee...."

"_Peki_! Very good,--all right!" The Bey turns upon his men, and dismisses them with an injunction to keep well out of earshot, then kicks-to the broken door and returns to the side of the _anghareb_.

The fear of desire thwarted grips him now, for the face is contorted in a ghastly grin, and the black eyes are rolling in their bloody sockets. He stoops over and shouts in the bloated ear, "Wake, dog! Tell now--or I call back the soldiers. Tell of the hidden gold! ..."

"I will tell! ..." The mountainous body heaves, the flayed muscles stand out on the huge arms like thick blue cordage.... "Stoop lower! Bend thine ear close! I buried--I buried it--"

"Where? ..." The thick yellow-pale ear approaches the grinning teeth. "Where didst thou bury it? _Ai--y!_ ..."

The beginning of a shriek of pain is choked in the Turk's fat throat, even as the big, white teeth sink into a bulging fold of it--between the ear and the collar. Their owner growls as a savage dog might do--and with an effort that rends the tattered flesh, drags an arm from under the chain that binds him down--and with a second wrench, releases the other....

Now both big hands are gripped round the Bey's throat, and his pale eyes bulge, and his pasty face is blackening. No sound escapes his gaping mouth, from which the saliva streams. And the blood from the great artery, bitten through; like a torrent of warm and sticky rain deluges the face and breast of his enemy.

"I buried the gold," the voice croaks in the now discoloured ear, "in Esther's tomb. Dost thou hear me well, O Hamid? But I have brought thee a gift instead--the gift that many have had of thee. Even Death at these hands of mine--murderer, fornicator, lecher! Another twist yet for thy fat neck. For Jacob! ... This for Esther!--this for Julian Forbis! ... And this last of all for John Hazaël--who takes the head of the dog! ..."

The strength is ebbing from the great hands.... The fingers relax their hold upon the throat of the dead body.... Now with the head bent under it at a suggestive, ugly angle, it drops with a dull, heavy thud, upon the blood-slimed floor.