Chapter XII: Kismet

Allan was aware that the sheikh had seen the jewels, though for a moment only, that were in Holcroft's possession. He knew that greed and the _Lex Talionis_, or law of retaliation, are distinctive marks of the Bedouin character; but he also knew that their regard for hospitality is not a less remarkable characteristic, and that even an enemy is secure if he can obtain refuge in a tent.

Ali Bey (otherwise known as Don Pedro de la Badia) relates that when a Bedouin heard that his wife had given food to his mortal foe, who had sought charity at his tent, not knowing who or what he was, observed, 'I should probably have slain my enemy had I found him here; but I should not have spared my wife had she neglected the sacred laws of hospitality.'

But Allan felt doubtful how the sheikh might be disposed to respect these laws in the case of one like Holcroft, who had not fled to his tents for succour, but been brought there a captive, and had comported himself in a dogged and defiant way.

'And you had actually sunk to being a billiard-marker?' said Allan.

'For a time--yes; nothing comes amiss, so money comes withal. When taking stock of my affairs I found them shady--very; my assets falling far short of my liabilities. Thus I was forced to play out the only card left me, and put the screw upon your wealthy cousin, Miss Raymond. Sorry I can't give you a copy of that remarkable photo of Olive and myself, of which, no doubt, you all know now.'

'All,' replied Allan, amazed that the man could exult in his utter and degrading villainy. To him it seemed almost incredible that one who was by birth a gentleman, the son of a gallant old officer, and bad been the associate of gentlemen, could fall so low as Holcroft had done, and be so callous and shameless.

'Oh, for a glass of bitter or Burton and a good cigar!' said Holcroft; 'and, by the way, as you seem to speak his lingo, will you ask this old nigger in the striped counterpane why he keeps me here, and what he means to do with me.'

Allan inquired this of Zeid in Arabic; but to him it seemed that Hawke Holcroft totally failed to comprehend or to take it in that he was in any peril at all. As an Englishman he thought that no 'dashed foreigner' dared meddle with or molest him, yet these Bedouins had him at their mercy sure enough; and to judge of matters or chances by the standard of Regent Street and Piccadilly, would hardly do under the summits of the Jebel Dimeshk.

Remarking the tarboosh worn by Holcroft, and using Allan as an interpreter, the sheikh asked,

'Are you a Mussulman?'

'No,' replied Holcroft, with a laugh.

'A Christian, then?'

'No,' was the strange response.

'You must believe either in the Prophet or Christ?'

'I believe in neither.'

'Unhappy wretch!' exclaimed the sheikh, with astonishment in his tone.

'Men may believe in both, yet follow neither.'

'So do the devils believe--and like devils tremble' said the Bedouin.

'Well, I do not.'

'Do you feel no trust in God?'

'None!' was the blunt and defiant reply.

'Why?'

'He has always left me to myself.'

Allan sighed at this hopeless response, while the blasphemy of it filled the Bedouin--who, whatever his shortcomings in the way of _meum_ and _tuum_ were, was pious in his way--with horror and indignation. After a pause, he said,

'Look at his eyes--they are grey; and does not the Koran say that on the last day "we shall gather the wicked together having grey eyes."

The twentieth chapter certainly has that curious remark, for with the Arabs--a black-eyed race--to have grey eyes is the mark of an enemy or a person to be avoided.

'You knew this man in Frangistan!' said Zeid.

'Too well,' replied Allan.

'Then he has wronged thee?' was the sharp question and suspicion of the Bedouin.

'Deeply; he tried to kill me, indeed.'

'Yet he lives?'

'Yes.'

'Why is this?'

'I thought he was dead--drowned,' replied Allan, evasively.

'Take this sword and smite off his head. The blade is sharp enough.'

Allan shook his head and drew back.

'You Franks are fools!' said Zeid, while the miserable Holcroft, though he knew not a word of what passed, guessed the terrible import of it, and glanced imploringly at Allan.

'Do you think,' said Zeid, after a pause, 'that his neck is turned to ivory, as the Koran tells us that of Moses was, when he was about to be beheaded for slaying an Egyptian?'

'The Koran--always that weary Koran!' thought Allan, impatiently.

'Will you tell him,' said Holcroft, 'that, if he expects a ransom from me, I have neither a friend nor a farthing in the world.'

Allan did so.

'Liar! may God burn thee!' exclaimed Zeid, as he thought of the diamonds, and, acting in obedience to a sign from him, Abdallah, unknown to Holcroft, was stealing behind him, armed with a heavy and deeply curved Damascus sabre of the keenest edge.

There was a flash in the sunshine as the blade was swept round by a swift back-handed stroke, and the head of the miserable Hawke Holcroft rolled along the ground, as his body fell prostrate on it in a heap, with the red blood welling out from every vein and artery of the neck.

'He has met his _kismet_,' said Zeid, complacently.

At this sudden catastrophe, Allan turned away horrified--utterly appalled. He had seen men wounded in every way, and mutilated too by shot and shell, but had never seen aught like this--and in cold blood, too!

'He believed neither in the Prophet nor in Christ,' said Zeid, complacently; 'now that he is in hell, that cemetery for lost souls, he may learn the truth.'

And, torn from the pocket of the wretched creature's tattered surtout, the fatal diamonds were placed in the hands of Zeid-el-Ourdeh.

Allan, as he saw them sparkling in the sunshine, thought of all he heard his father say of them, and marvelled to whom they would bring evil next. If to the sheikh, he was fated never to know.

It was some time before he recovered the shock this scene gave him, but it rendered his desire to be gone--to be free--irrepressible; yet he dreaded just then to approach the subject with Zeid. Whether it was the excitement of a blood-shedding or acquisition of the diamonds, or both together, Zeid was in high good humour, and about noon gave Allan a dinner unusually sumptuous in his own tent.

Upon a tray of tinned copper were placed saucers of pickles, salad, and salt, with thin cakes of bread, and in the centre a dish of rice, highly seasoned with spice and saffron. Neither forks nor spoons were there, and he had to use his fingers. Thus it made him shiver to see the sheikh plunge his copper-coloured digits into the dish one moment and thrust them half-way down his open throat the next.

He always clapped his hands when he wanted any attendance.

A cotton towel surrounded the tray on the ground, on which they occasionally wiped their hands; then pipes of tobacco followed, and the sheikh became sociable, as he reclined back against a saddle over which some shawls and a barracan were spread, and Allan began to cast about in his own mind how to approach the subject of his departure.

He gathered courage from the knowledge that, after eating bread and salt together, or even salt alone, in the East, produces mutual obligations of friendship.

The sheikh was a man of great piety, after his own fashion. He said his prayers five times daily, the first time being between daybreak and sunrise, turning towards Mecca, and five times daily he washed his hands. He was a firm believer in magic, and that there existed somewhere in Upper Egypt, Ishmonie, or the Petrified City--so called on account of the great number of statues, representing men, women, children, and animals, with which its silent streets abound--all of which he believed to have been once animated creatures, miraculously changed into stone by a whisper of the prophet, in all the various attitudes of standing, sitting, or falling, but none of which are ever visible save to true believers.

He also firmly believed in the miraculous egg laid by a hen after Tel-el-Kebir, on which was inscribed the words--'Arabi has lost the battle because he mutilated the corpses of the enemy. Allah has punished him, but He will give victory to him in the end, if he will keep the commands in the future.'

'Hah!' said he, after a long pull at his chibouque, 'at Tel-el-Kebir your bare-legged men came on as hell will come at the last day.'

'How is that?'

'As the Koran tells us, with seventy thousand halters, each dragged by seventy thousand angels--a power nothing can withstand.'

'Accursed as you unbelievers are,' said he, after a pause, 'God seems to give you a wondrous power, even as he gave Solomon the gift of miracles in a degree greater than anyone before him; the animals and the vegetables obeyed him, and he was carried by the winds of heaven above the stars therein, and his power over the genii was by a seal ring, of which one part was brass and the other iron, and upon it was graven the great name of God. Yes, though unbelievers, you are swift in action as the pigeons of Aleppo; not like the Osmanli, who would catch hares in waggons,' he added, with reference to the proverbial slowness of the Turks.

'Sheikh,' said Allan, in his most persuasive manner, 'you know that I befriended you when in sore peril.'

'Yes, as my brother would have done,' said Zeid, his expressive face lighting up and his black eyes sparkling under the hood of his burnous, as he pointed with his left hand to his right shoulder, which had been slashed by the long sword of one of our Life-Guardsmen.

'Well, in memory of that you will allow me to depart home freely to my people?'

'Why? Are you not comfortable enough here? Is not one place that God has made as good as another? And who and what are your people? With all their skill and power, they are but wretched unbelievers, who go to battle with their legs bare, accompanied by bags of devils, that squall and groan, like those who strove to defame Solomon.'

'Do be just, sheikh!' urged Allan.

'I shall--is not justice the sister of piety?'

'You will allow me to go, then?'

'I have not said so. Why leave the desert and go back to cities, where men become intoxicated with the pleasures of this life, and forget that which is to come?'

Allan sighed. By this time he was weary of the sheikh and his stilted conversation.

Beginning with the inevitable aphorism, 'There is only one God and Mohammed is his Prophet,' the sheikh, after a pause, continued thus between long whiffs of his cherry-stick pipe: 'Stay with us and pray with us five times a day, each time turning to the Kebbah; eat not in the daytime during the whole feast of Ramadan, make the pilgrimage to Mecca, give alms to the widow and the orphan. These are the sources from which all goodness springs. Stay with us and do all these things. Become my brother indeed--a son of the desert. Why go back among the accursed Franks? You know how to use the sword, the spear, and the rifle. Stay with us; we shall give you a rich pelisse, a good blood mare, and a Bedouin girl, beautiful, good, and virtuous.'

This programme scarcely suited the views of the Master of Aberfeldie, but the situation was such a grave one that he dared not laugh at it.

'But you need not go to Mecca,' said the sheikh, as an after-thought.

'Why?'

'God is everywhere--why seek Him at Mecca, when we have Him here in the desert?'

Allan pled hard, and spoke of bribes and ransom, but apparently in vain, and he began to get sorely perplexed by the prospect before him, especially if the tribe took their departure--of which there was every prospect--in search of 'pastures new' further from Grand Cairo, and towards the plain of Muggreh.

He was obliged to dissemble his disgust and mortification, and could only hope of finding an opportunity of 'making,' as he thought, 'a clean bolt of it.'

A few uneventful days passed, and during these he could not help being struck with the simplicity of the domestic life and manners of the Sheikh Zeid-el-Ourdeh and his family.

Though the commander of more than six hundred horse, he did not disdain to saddle and bridle his own steed or to give him his barley and chopped straw.

In his humble tent his wife made the coffee, kneaded the dough, and cooked all the victuals, though a kind of princess in the desert and among her people. His daughters and kinswomen attended to the linen, and, closely veiled, went to the wells or springs for water, with classic-looking pitchers of brown ware balanced on their gracefully-carried heads--in ways, manners, and ideas all unchanged from those described by Homer, or as we find them in the history of Abraham and in Genesis.

It was while a prisoner thus with Zeid, that Allan heard the strange story promulgated by Arabi, that all Egyptians who fell fighting for the faith would come back to earth as spirits mounted on snow-white horses and armed with miraculous swords to completely exterminate the British--an idea evidently borrowed from the Koran, which ascribes Mohamed's victory at Bedr to his having as allies three thousand spirits led by the angel Gabriel mounted on his horse Haizum.

On this subject the Paris _Temps_ recorded that an Arab servant belonging to their correspondent asked the latter whether he had seen any of the returned spirits from Kassassin in recent encounters, and, on being answered in the negative, declared that the correspondent could not see them because he was _not_ an Englishman.