“That, or vulture-food?” he asked her; and laughed, and lit a cigarette.
CHAPTER IV
“A cent for your sympathy!”
Well, our ruffians turned up at last, and brought back news with them. Ali Higg, they said, was on the rampage. He had left his eerie of a cave, and was superintending the saddling of a score of camels in front of “Pharaoh’s Treasury.”
“But not good camels, Jimgrim. Mangy, miserable beasts. His men are using all the best ones, and those six splendid ones that we borrowed just now are all that were left of his private string. If he means to follow he will have hard work. He has collected a handful of men, but they are hardly better than the camels—fit food for kites—sick men, wounded men, men afraid of their own shadows—scarcely able to lift a camel-pack between them. We walked up to the Treasury and flung the plunder down, saying that our Sheikh Jimgrim declined to burden camels with such miserable stuff. He ordered his party of crows’ meat to open fire on us; but one of them swore that our return with that loot must be a trick to start trouble. He said that you and the rest of our party were doubtless waiting close at hand to make reprisals, and the sound of the first shot would certainly bring you hurrying. The others, being all afraid, agreed with the first man. So we behaved like men who have been found out in a trick, carrying on scornfully and saying it was a pity nobody in Petra was brave enough to fight, since our Sheikh Jimgrim took no pleasure in defeating cowards. And what with one hot word and another we made our escape safely.”
But that talk might have been a trick to cover up another one and Grim made sure.
“Men who speak truth,” he laughed, “are never afraid to prove it. Let’s see how much loot you’ve still got hidden in your clothes.”
They submitted to be searched with entire good humor, and Grim displayed an intricate knowledge of their ways of hiding things that made them laugh. But he had had his way; there wasn’t as much as a woman’s ear-ring or a brooch among them, and they were all the better-tempered for having proved it, considering now that the joke was as much on him as on themselves.
That is a great point, by the way, which some men fail to understand. When disobedience doesn’t really matter much you can now and then afford to overlook it—especially if it would be easy to enforce discipline; because discipline that is easy to enforce doesn’t make a lasting impression on naturally lawless men. But in a tight place, when men disobey because they think they have you at a disadvantage, and to force the issue looks like sure disaster, then you can’t afford to yield one jot or tittle of authority. Better die there with your boots on than give way; because if you fail then, you’ll never regain their respect.
And having won your point, by hook or crook, brute force, profanity or argument, be sure you have the whole of it. To use Narayan Singh’s expression: “Milk the udders of obedience dry.” Thereafter, whenever you concede a point or two you’ll find it safe enough, because they will realize it is concession, and not anarchy.
We were all in a rare good temper now, Jael Higg not least of us. I suppose the news that Ali Higg was on the move was what raised her spirits. Grim asked her what she supposed the Lion intended, but she shook her head and laughed.
“You’re worse than a divorce court! You separate a man and wife, and ask the wife to account for her husband’s doings?”
“I know nothing of lions,” Narayan Singh commented. “Mine is a land of tigers. When a tiger keeps quiet he is difficult and dangerous to trap. When he prowls he is easy.”
At that Mahommed piped up, Ali Baba’s youngest son, poet to the gang, and bard, and arch-inventor of impracticable plans.
“I say let us lie in ambush in this hot jahannum of a valley, and catch the Lion as he ventures out. Let us take him back with us to El-Kalil and lodge him in the gaol for folk to make songs about.”
The notion was not impossible on the face of it. There were plenty of suitable places for ambush, as Alexander of Macedon found out, for instance, when he tried to force that gorge. But it would only have entailed the breaking of Grim’s promise and the absolute reversal of his stubborn principle, that he had no right to, and therefore would not move a finger toward imposing alien rule on Arabia, even in the interest of peace, and indirectly. It was Grim’s notion of duty and enjoyment—and a good one, too, in my opinion—to prevent that very thing by drawing the teeth of contention and giving the Arabs a chance to work out their own destiny.
“Let’s go,” he said; and the only members of the party to grumble at that suggestion were the camels, who object to everything.
When you bear in mind that none of us—not even the women —had slept a wink the previous night, and that we had to face the hot south wind that withers the Arabian desert and, impinging on the northern wall of that gruesome Valley of Moses, blows like a furnace blast down the ever-narrowing funnel, our high spirits were a thing to wonder at.
None of us had more than a vague idea of the danger into which Grim was leading us. My only objection to him is that exasperating way he has of never discussing difficulties until after he has thought out their solution. In my own way I’m rather a cautious man. I like adventure, but I also like to puzzle out the chances in advance, both of risk and profit, and so be prepared for them. Having anticipated ten percent or so of the possibilities, I can then devote more attention to the unexpected when it happens.
But the very method that annoyed me was like meat and drink to our rogues of followers. What they did not know didn’t trouble them over much. Weaned on knavery, and used to haphazard devilment of any kind at all, all they asked of life was meat and drink, a chance to get away with other men’s belongings, and something new as often as might be to make up songs about.
To them Grim’s very reticence was all in his favour, since it suggested mystery. And remember, that is the land where the tales now known in the West as the Arabian Nights first stirred men’s imagination. They wouldn’t have enjoyed things half as much if they had known exactly what was going to happen next.
Nor were they the only ones, who enjoyed Grim’s method. There was Narayan Singh. He rode his camel beside mine, and occasionally leaned across to boom remarks through the cloth that covered nose and mouth with the unaccomplishable purpose of defeating the hot wind.
“Hah! sahib, this suits me! This is the true way of a soldier! Here today and gone tomorrow—today a bellyful, tomorrow a fight, and the day after God knows what! I have no quarrel with the law of destiny!”
I may have felt like a man on a wild-goose chase. In fact, I know I did. But you couldn’t for the life of you escape the spirit of the game; and even with bones and muscles sore from Mujrim’s racking, and a cut in the calf of my leg that was beginning to smart unmercifully as it grew stiff and the hot wind dried the bandage, I felt about as merry as the rest did.
That Valley of Moses is as savage and as endless as the Khyber; but we emerged from it at last into a waste of hot rock, deep wady,* and oleander scrub, with rounded, rolling foothills all about us, and in places great heaps of human bones all cracked up by the jackals—bones, I dare say, of the Turkish soldiers who had tried to turn Lawrence out of Petra during the Great War, the skulls persisting, as usual, long after the other bones had lost their shape. (I wonder why a man’s rib-bones disappear first. Has it anything to do with Eve?)
(* Ravine or valley)
Grim called never another halt until near evening, when we found a thing they call a fiumara, which is a dried-up watercourse that winds between hills and widens until it reaches the sea. There isn’t any one word in the English language that translates it nor for