The place was of typical Arab “culture”—jumbled, tumbled, cluttered, evil-smelling, verminous; war had only multiplied the normal chaos. That minaret had been the only decent building, and it remained the only thing worth anybody’s trouble.
There was one little slit of a window visible almost directly facing the moon. It looked faintly luminous.
“D’you suppose there’s glass in it?” asked Catesby. “Does that look like reflected light to you?”
Narayan Singh scouted closed to investigate. The window was much too high to reach, but he climbed on a broken wall to reach its level and returned at the end of ten minutes, stopping on his way to examine the ground close to the door. A slash of while across the blackness of his beard betrayed that he was pleased with the result.
“I heard no sound, sahib; but there is no glass, and there is a light within. Moreover, I found this.”
He put a scarab ring into Catesby’s hand.
“Jimgrim sahib’s!” cried the Sikh.
“How d’you know? They’re common enough. It might be anyone’s.”
“Ask the butcha.”
Suliman examined it and grew exited at once.
“Taib! That is Jimgrim’s. I have cleaned it for him fifty times.”
“I suppose they’ve killed him.”
Catesby had been too much of late under the brigadier’s harrow to be an optimist.
“Nay, sahib. More likely he dropped it there for me to find. If they had killed him we should have found his naked body in the cave or thereabouts. If they had looted the ring and dropped it when they reached this place, they would have missed it and have looked. It lay in full moonlight on the flat side of a broken stone against the wall.”
“Then I go,” said Suliman, “to break that door down with this kukri.”
“Ahsti, ahsti!” said the Sikh. “What is your judgment, sahib?”
* * * * *
Catesby was in high spirits again.
It took a Jenkins to depress him, and not much more than a symptom of encouragement to set him up.
“No sense in rushing things. If he’s dead, he’s dead. If he’s alive in there we’ll get him. Is there another door?”
“None, sahib. I saw all around the place.”
“Then we’ll watch this one until morning, and creep up close enough to hear if anything happens. Look about for a beam to have handy in case we should want to burst the door in.”
Together they pulled a roof-beam out from a mess of fallen thatch, and laid it where they could find it in the dark that would shut down when the moonlight waned. Then Narayan Singh crept close to the door and listened. He was grinning again when he returned.
“He is in there, and alive. I heard his voice. I could not hear the words. He seemed to be close to the door and to be carrying on a conversation. Shall I go back and rap on the door softly as a signal?”
“No. It might be the signal for his death. How many voices did you hear?”
“One other.”
“He’d be sure to yell if they tried to murder him. In that case, down with the door. But if we go to his rescue before he needs us we might spoil his game.”
“Atcha, sahib,” said the Sikh; but he examined both pistols again and plainly did not like the inactivity.
It relieved his anxiety a little, however, when Catesby chose a black hole to hide in among the tumbled ruins of the mosque within twenty paces of the minaret door.
* * * * *
Nobody who has not tried it, out hunting or in war, can guess how hard it is to listen attentively and scratch himself at the same time. Suliman, who not so many months ago had been clothed in little else than paupers’ lice and had hardly had time to forget the indifference that goes with it, suffered least. Perhaps, too, his carcass was less appetizing.
But the Sikh is a clean race, prone to look down on even the tubbed and scrubbed British officer as none too particular. And that heap of ruins was alive with myriads of body-insects, “whose seed is in themselves” and that exist apparently eternally on nothing until warm-blooded provender arrives.
Yet they did not dare move away. The moon was too low in the sky, and whoever had brought Jim to that place would likely to make a move of some kind before morning, or at least soon after sunrise. If this were a rendezvous of thieves, whoever approached it would likely do some careful scouting in advance. There was nothing for it by to lie still and scratch—and swear—and scratch.
The Sikh’s ears were sharpest, and once he swore he heard the voice of a man begging for mercy.
“Maybe Jimgrim has a man down?” ventured Suliman.
But the other two grew nervous, and this time it was Catesby who crawled to the door to listen while Narayan Singh watched the coast. Catesby, too, distinguished the voices of two men, or thought he did; but the door was too thick for him to hear one word or establish Jim’s identity. He crept back again into hiding in that divided frame of mind from which small comfort ever comes, wondering what he would think of himself should it turn out afterward that Jim had been all along in peril of his life—already dead perhaps; yet recalling Jim’s words earlier that night, that it would be better to wait for a week than spoil things by a false move.
When dawn came, what with insects and indecision they were thoroughly miserable, stiff, sore, hungry and depressed by the zero-hour self- consciousness that sheds the drear light of cold unreason on every circumstance. Suliman, who had been blubbering, fell asleep again.
Catesby’s thoughts were back on Jenkins and the hopelessness of clearing himself of a false charge in view of the brigadier’s notorious ability to lie plausibly. Narayan Singh was squatting with eyes half-closed, dreaming in another language and another dimension, for that matter; not even the Sikhs can tell each other what thoughts reach them when the far-away look settles on their faces.
None of them saw the morning visitors arrive until the twelfth and last of them came abreast and the first one struck the door with cautious knuckles. They were ordinary-looking fellaheen—villagers, that is—and each man carried some ordinary-looking load or other—baskets, mats, bags, a patchwork quilt.
The last man led a donkey—one of those bruised and tortured little insects that make less noise than a ghost and eat endless Arab blows and insult in return for overwork. None of the men had a weapon as far as it was possible to see; for lack of the customary thick club the last man used his fist on the donkey’s nose as a hint that it was time to stand still.
The leading man knocked half a dozen times; then the door opened and they all filed in, but from where the watchers lay it was not possible to see who opened it. The donkey went in too, and the lock squealed again behind her.
There followed further agonies of indecision and impatience; for, weapons or no weapons, there is no limit at all to the senseless cruelty of which the fellaheen are capable. Like their prototypes of Egypt the Palestinians have such a heritage of oppression to look back on that their actions are simply a matter of mood.
They smolder, as it were, in childlike harmlessness for periods whose probably duration no psychologist can guess; and burst out into senseless, superstitious fury without any apparent cause. Fear they understand always; fair treatment never, having no education in it. Jim would be about as safe in their hands as among sheep or wolves, whichever mood