Chapter IX

At the spring of the oasis at the summit of the pass leading to the Outer Mountain, bronze-coloured doves, several oryx, and a herd of wild asses were drinking, greyish-red creatures these, white bellied, and marked by a broad black stripe down the back. The birds took wing, the beasts scattered over the plain at the approach of the camel and its two riders, who halted to water the animal and fill the goatskins, and take food and rest.

Bands of painted, naked Blemmyes, the fierce Ethiopian nomads of the south and eastern desert had shown themselves occasionally, but made no attempt to attack the travellers, whom they perhaps judged to be too poor to plunder, or too strong, fierce and well-armed to be despoiled without exacting tribute of life in return.

Before sunrise Hazaël and the Saracen camel-driver, who had agreed to guide him,--struck northwards through a rocky and difficult defile. This was the opening of the road that led to the inner fastnesses of Attaka, that stupendous mountain of pale red granite, streaked with limestone, and sometimes veined with porphyry, from whose summit, it was said, one could view the distant Mediterranean upon one hand; and upon the other look over to the Sinai ranges, across the Gulf of Heroöpolis, that widens into the Red Sea.

The region in which Hazaël now found himself was savage, bare and solitary. At the top of the defile the camel halted and knelt. The Jew dismounted and looked back. A crimson glow spread over the shining waters of the Gulf of Heroöpolis, and every object possessed two shadows; one cast by the sunrise and the other by the moon. The yellow plain of the desert, looking west, exhibited an illusory vista of cool blue waters, out of which rose little islands plumed with palm groves, reflected in the depths.

"Return," the Jew said to the guide, "and wait for me with the camel at the spring of the oasis. Yet first describe to me again, in number and device as I shall find them, the various signs by which pilgrims to the hermitage that is on Derhor, may find their way."

He listened as the guide spoke, storing these things in his strong memory. Here a column of porphyry set up; there a pile of oddly-shaped granite boulders; at the mouth of the defile an arrow scratched on a limestone rock with a lump of crystal; at the parting of ways a rude Cross fashioned of the pieces of a broken staff, and jammed between two great stones.

"Swear to me by your gods," said the Jew when the idolater had ended his recital, "that you have named these marks in the order in which they come!"

"By the Face of Truth!" swore the camel-driver, who was a wild and savage-looking object, with tangled hair smeared with rancid butter; grotesquely painted of face and body; hung about with charms and wearing a waist-cloth of gaudy colours under his mantle of camel-hair. "I have not lied! Follow these directions and you will return to find me waiting for you with the _heggin_. Yet pay me now the sum agreed, in case you lose your purse upon your way!"

Hazaël reluctantly paid down half, and set out upon his solitary journey.

The steep defile being ascended, the first sign was recognised in the shape of a rude pillar of porphyritic rock. This passed, the surface of the ground began to be more gently inclined. Heat radiated from the huge pinkish-granite boulders that almost scorched the flesh. The ground was covered with blocks of this stone, between which showed the arid yellow soil of the desert. A scrubby bush with black stems set with long white thorns, also tufts of seeding wild garlic and a spiny red-fleshed wild cucumber, bitter exceedingly, with wild fig-trees, grew between the granite rocks. Wild goats with great horns walked upon the verge of towering precipices and bounded from ledge to ledge. White eagles and huge ravens screamed or croaked from inaccessible eyries. The defile being passed, the rocks sank down. Barely a dry weed relieved the barren aridity. The yellow gravelly ground began to billow upwards, and into the troughs of these billows the sun poured down like molten brass.

Climbing over one of these extraordinary ridges, the Jew made an astonishing discovery. It was a dish or charger, circular as a Gaulish buckler, wrought with the victories of forgotten kings, and of the purest gold. The love of the Semite for this precious metal,--of which were carved the lions that adorned the throne of Solomon,--plates of which covered the Temple built by Herod,--and of which the Vine above its chief entrance was gloriously made,--caused Hazaël's sight to dim and his powerful frame to tremble. Such a mass of gold, all his by the right of discovery! ... He threw himself upon the treasure with such eagerness that his foot slipped upon a rolling pebble. He fell--and the gourd water-bottle he carried at his girdle was smashed into bits.

Moments passed before he grasped the full extent of his misfortune. With all his strength he could barely lift the massy charger, which might have contained a wild-deer or a calf roasted whole. Sweat streamed from him, and a raging thirst was aggravated by his efforts. He moistened his throat with a few drops of water left in a fragment of the bottle, covered the golden dish with sand, and marked the place with three stones. Then he rose up and strode onwards. Another defile presented itself before him,--not leading upwards but bending to the north.

To the south another opened, floored with huge granite slabs, frowned on by precipices. At its mouth on the left side was a conical mound of rounded black stones. Night rushed down before Hazaël had decided which of these forbidding roads it would be best to follow. That indicated by the mound looked the worst.... He was beginning to doubt the honesty of the camel-driver. If the hermitage beneath the summit of Derhor was to be reached, he must trust to his own good wits.

He chose the northern defile, and presently--with the rising moon--came into a wide valley walled in by sheer cliff-faces of limestone. At its eastern side rose a precipice of coal-black stone, down which appeared to flow a foaming waterfall. This appearance was caused by snow-white quartz, issuing like a solid torrent from a point high above, and flowing down into the rocky valley. There was no way out of this trap but the way by which Hazaël had come in. With his agony of thirst increased tenfold by the unreal show of water, he lifted his arms above his head and savagely cursed the deceptive flow. And as the echoes of his deep voice resounded from the precipitous walls of the valley, he turned about sharply--for a high whinnying laugh had answered from behind him--and the clatter of hoofs, light and small as an ass's or goat's, followed--galloping over the pavement of broken stone....

"Who laughed there?" the Jew cried, but no human voice answered, and the moon was veiled behind a light cloud that afforded no hope of rain. When the planet looked forth, no sign appeared of the supposed ass and his laughing rider; and Hazaël, suppressing the desire to bestow another curse upon the cheating torrent, made the two benedictions, and repeated the Shema for the first night-watch,--fortifying himself against the attacks of evil spirits within an iron wall of prayer. Then he painfully retraced his steps through the defile previously traversed,--munching the dates he carried in his wallet,--as the dried bread without saliva to moisten it could not be swallowed without pain. And as he went, he slept by snatches,--often wakened from one of these dozes by tripping amongst boulders, or jagged sharp-edged stones.

Walking still with indomitable determination, he had just repeated the prayer for the third night-watch, when he stepped into daylight across the edge of dawn. A dazzling play of colour was smitten by the sunrise from the wilderness of stone beneath and about him. Broad veins of purple and greenish-white porphyry, with red granite, and yellow and black limestone, with outcroppings of snowy quartz, streaked the towering sides of the defile: the stones and gravel beneath his great travelling boots of hippo-hide,--whose heels of elephant-nail kept him from slipping,--was composed of fragments of these. Looking about he came to the conclusion that in sleep, or during an interval of darkness, he had turned aside into another path. This led steeply up, and up,--the vari-coloured rocks closing in until a mere streak of fierce blue sky between the walls at the tops of the defile showed where egress might be obtained. To delay here was to die. Therefore Hazaël determined to go on.

Now, as he toiled upwards under the increasing torture of the sunrays, delusions born of thirst and weariness began to haunt his path. The faces of his wife Miriam, of Levi his first-born son and of his little daughter Leah,--rose up before him in the vivid hues of life. His dead master; the child Florens, or Mark as he must now be called; the monk Paule and the Abbot of Tabenna, moved with him among the scorching stones, on which the lizard rarely basked; and between which a few dry bushes lived without visible nourishment. Through a strange roaring in his ears he distinguished the voices of these phantoms. Sometimes he answered them without ceasing to walk.

He retained by this time barely the semblance of humanity. His eyes beneath the beetling brows were red as those of the captive eagle of Tabenna: and his long hair, and curling beard, uncombed; tangled with burrs; soaked with sweat, and clotted with the dust with which his ragged garments were covered, had the appearance of a wig carved in stone. Blood flowed from cuts upon his gaunt sun-blackened limbs--sustained when he had fallen. He realised that without water he could not now live long. Should there be dew that night, he might find sufficient relief by licking the stones, to endure forty-eight hours longer. Did no dew fall, he might possibly survive yet another day. What grieved him most was, that as the news of his death could not reach Alexandria for a long time after the return of Ephraim by way of the Libyan Desert with Mafa Oabu and the Saracens; his son Levi--who had already begun to study the Mishnah--would not say Kaddish for his father for many moons to come. And the thought of the anguish of his widowed Miriam would have moistened his parched eyelids, had in their dry and gritty channels one single tear remained....

Stumbling amidst boulders, striding from stone to stone, falling, dragging himself to his feet, and staggering on again, the recurrent image of Miriam tormented him more sorely. The fancy that at the top of the pass--where the rocks approached each other so nearly--her well-loved figure would appear with that square of blue sky behind it, became conviction. He bounded on, obsessed by the idea....

"Miriam! My loved one! ..."

He breathed like a beast roaring. His parched gullet and dried-up lungs would barely admit the air. He was bruised from head to foot and wounded in many places; but beyond that square of burning blue he would find--he knew it--home.... Home,--where he was welcomed as a King on each return from a journey,--the rooms festively adorned even as on the Sabbath! the table spread with fair linen, rich porcelain and costly plate,--the dishes such as he loved best; the thin sweet Mareotic wine cooled exquisitely in snow....

"Miriam.... My wife! I come!"

He heard a sweet voice singing.... He was nearing the square of burning blue framed in the porphyritic rock when a waft of perfume came to him, and a figure filled the frame.