A moment later the hyena snarled and scampered off, looking as big as a lion when his outline showed against the sky. Then they heard whimpering and hard breathing. Something or somebody stumbled, sobbed, and hurried on again toward them. Then Suliman burst into their midst and threw himself face foremost on the earth, heaving for lack of breath. He had something heavy in his hand. Jim picked it up.
“The kukri again! You young luss (robber)! How did you get it?”
“That jemadar gave it to a sentry to hold, and the sentry laid it beside him on the ground where he could feel it with his foot. So I pulled the skirt of his overcoat and took the kukri when he turned. Then I ran.”
“And he didn’t shoot?”
“No, for I took care that he saw me. Sikhs don’t shoot at men of my size, for I have tried before.”
“Now,” said Jim, do you still think I was wrong to bring the kid? Lead on, Catesby.”
* * * * *
They took to the top of a sandy ridge that lead gradually upward to a low hill covered with cactus, from which by daylight there would be a fair view of half the camp, although now they could see little more than scattered lights that made the darkness more confusing. There was a short bare ridge on the hilltop, sandy like the rest but free from cactus.
“Suppose we lie here till moonrise,” Catesby proposed. “Last time I saw the iblis was from just this place. I was waiting for a chance at a leopard and friend leper came instead, scaring everything away for miles around. He pretty nearly scared me stiff. Most awful looking brute you ever saw.
“You see that hill opposite? You can just make out the outline of it against the sky. He danced on that and made me feel so creepy I vowed I’d never dance again. Later he passed along this ridge so close that I thought he’d trip over me. Ugh! I was glad he didn’t. He’s leprous from head to foot. It beats me how he holds together when he dances.”
They lay down on a shoulder of sand that overhung the shallow valley; and now the Arab costume they were wearing proved its virtue, for they could cover faces, hands and ankles from the mosquitoes that attacked in mass formation. Hooded like that under loose robes they looked like dead men. A badger came and sniffed them, then a hyena, then several jackals, remembering perhaps the fat times when men were fighting and the carrion lay thick.
They lay an hour until the moon rose, like a huge blotched lamp beyond the other hill, and by that time Suliman was fast asleep and snoring. Narayan Singh shook him awake—lest he frighten the iblis away, as the Sikh was careful to explain. The notion that the iblis might be afraid of himself was new to Suliman, and he sat up to consider it, fingering the edge of the heavy, curved Gurkha blade.
“The game is to catch this beauty alive if we can,” said Jim, “but above all we mustn’t scare him and let him get away from us. Better watch him for a week than rush in and fail. The next most important thing is not to kill him—bear that in mind, Narayan Singh; even you can’t make a dead man talk, you know!”
“I will plunge this kukri in his belly and discover whether an iblis has entrails if he comes near me!” vowed Suliman.
But a moment later he returned the great knife to its sheath and crept up close to Jim, with the hair raising so that his turban actually lifted.
“Look, Jimgrim! Look! The iblis!”
Naked in the reddish moonlight—framed, in fact, exactly in the middle of the orb that rose behind him, about two hundred yards distant from where they lay across the wady—glistening here and there as if his carcass had been smeared with whitish slime, a tall, lean, muscular man stood motionless, gazing toward the lights that indicated Ludd encampment.
The turban on his head but emphasized the nakedness of all the rest of him. Nowhere in the East is the mere absence of clothes remarkable as a rule, although the Arab likes to drape himself in amble, loose array for the sake of dignity and comfort. But the man’s nakedness was ghastly—impudent—a calculated, sheer affront—deliberate indecency so flaunted that the moonlight and the loneliness could not absorb it, and it shocked grown men.
He was well shaped. No crippled limbs or unnatural abortion helped to horrify. It was an arrogance of nakedness, made monstrous by the will to assert itself. If he had stood among a hundred naked men, he alone would have seemed unclothed, and if you had clothed him he might likely have seemed naked still because of the outrageous insolence that owned him.
For minute after minute he stood gazing at the camp, with his stomach thrust out in an attitude of self-complacency and his arms folded across his chest. Then, as if the turban on his head were too much concession to the prejudice of other folk, he began to unwind the thing, coiling the yards of cloth around his arm.
“What did I tell you?” whispered Catesby. “Isn’t he a horror? Isn’t he a gruesome swine?”
“In my land there are millions with no more than a yard or two of rag apiece; but that thing there is an insult to the gods, and he should die!” declared Narayan Singh.
“Nevertheless, remember what I said. Don’t kill him,” Jim answered. “He thinks he knows something or he wouldn’t like himself so much. Let’s find out.”
The man began to posture on the hilltop, taking attitudes suggestive of the figures on Egyptian temple walls. He seemed conscious of the fact that the rising moon served to spotlight as well as background, for his movements were deliberately calculated to show up in silhouette. They were slow and strong and snakelike, but little by little the snake idea gained ascendancy until his whole body writhed in serpentine contortions.
Then he began to dance. You could not watch the man and tear yourself away or make a move against him. He had the faculty of stirring curiosity and holding it, so that each move was a fascinating prelude to the next and you had to wait to see.
The dance began with a rapid repetition of the Egyptian poses, so skillfully done that the infinitely tiny pause between each movement served to fix each posture in the watchers’ vision, and the whole became a motion picture in staccato time.
All that while he kept the turban draped about his arm and it looked like an excrescence—something or other horrible—sometimes as if he had three arms on his right side, two growing out of one. But all at once he began to whirl the thing about him like a lariat until it formed a Saturn ring, in the midst of which he spun like a top on tiptoe, dervish fashion.
Whoever on the countryside saw that would understand the meaning of it. The whirling turban was only an added stroke of genius to emphasize his eminence among his kind.
The dancing dervish claims that by spinning for a length of time on tiptoe he can rid himself of human limitations and see clearly into the infinite. The ordinary dervish apes an arrogant humility before he starts; this fellow was assuming to confer with spiritual essences with banner whirling in the breeze—that was the only difference. There might be Moslems after that who would question his claim to miraculous vision and sanctity, but not many of them, and they would be kept in order by the rest.
Suliman, with the creed of his ancestors half-learned and wholly in his veins, was quite convinced.
“That is truly an iblis,” he whispered with chattering teeth. “There is nothing for us to do but leave him, Jimgrim.”
But Jim was thinking then too busily to quiet the superstitious qualms of a small boy.
“Narayan Singh!”
The Sikh crept closer.
“Do you know the lie of the land here?”
“No, sahib. But I could crawl up close and rush the brute. If I may not slay, I could hold him until you come and bind him with the turban.”
“Catesby!”
The three laid their heads together.
“Is there any way of coming up behind him?”