American Captain

CHAPTER 8 The Crucible

We three survivors of the Vindictive's company had lost too much too suddenly to feel any great concern over what remained. We looked at the approaching boat with vague fear and dulled interest. The savage shouts of its rowers rang hollow in our ears and we stared blankly at dark bearded faces and fantastic raiment and belts stuffed with pistols and knives. The officer standing in the bow, of more gorgeous dress than the others, brandished a scimitar as though intending to hack us to death in the water, but my heart kept its slow, cold beat.

Yet by coming aware of the lethargy, I could try to emerge from it. It was necessary that I make a hard try—instinct told me that—because our stunned condition greatly increased our danger. I heard myself giving an order in low tones.

"Obey their commands. Don't either of you show any defiance. If they tell you to kiss their dirty feet, do it. It won't hurt us, and remember, it's for our mates."

Enoch gave a little nod. Jim turned wide eyes into mine. "Our mates is all gone," he said. "What do you mean, please, suh?"

I racked my brain to answer. "Their murderers must get their just deserts."

It sounded flat and queer, but Jim's stroke changed a little, as though from a different set of his brawny shoulders.

As the boat came nigh, the crew's shouting died down and the officer's gestures became less ferocious. Apparently they were overcome with curiosity. After being searched for weapons, we were allowed to sit on a center thwart.

A few minutes later we were climbing a Jacob's-ladder to the pirate's upper deck. Some of the Tripolitans drew knives as the officer led us through the swarm; others scowled and made faces; most of them watched quietly. When we came to the break of the quarterdeck, one of the crew thrust us roughly into line. A richly dressed man, whose scimitar hilt sparkled with jewels, was standing by the lee rail watching the boat being hoisted aboard; when the job was done, he turned to look at us. By now my heavy eyes had come wide awake, and I saw him sharply.

He was a renegade from the West, several of whom had become reis under the Barbary kings. I guessed at once that the English threats shouted down to us during the battle had come from his bearded lips, spoken in his native tongue. He was about forty, tall, well-formed, of feature indicative of aristocratic lineage; and although he might be an Englishman, from the cut of his jib I judged him an American. If so, he was no better than Simon Gurty. If he did not prance and howl about the stakes where his countrymen burned, the sneer on his sharky mouth and the snaky brilliance of his eyes denied human mercy and betokened wickedness as great as Simon Gurty's and evil perhaps more deep.

"Stand at attention," he ordered.

Sparrow and I were already at it, but knife points jabbing our backs brought them straighter still. Jim clapped his long arms to his sides and stood with feet apart.

"Are any of you officers? Address me as Murad Reis."

"I am, Murad Reis," I said.

"What is your name and rank?"

"Captain Whitman, in command of the Vindictive when we abandoned ship."

"Do you dare lie to me, you Yankee swine? I saw the cap'n through my glass. He was a black-bearded man."

"Sir, Captain Phillips appointed me captain of the vessel just before he died."

"You're quick to assume the honors—in that like the rest. But I take it you're telling the truth, so you may follow me to my cabin." He called an order in the Arabic tongue to our guards, and at once vanished down the companionway.

I was brought to gaudily furnished quarters and given a seat on a chest. With some histrionics, Murad Reis half reclined on an ottoman, smoking a water pipe lighted by a Negro servant.

"Have you been long enough in these seas to have heard of me?" he asked lazily.

"I heard English sailors speak of you when at the hospital in Valletta," I answered. At least I had heard his name mentioned not long ago.

"And of my brother, Hamed Reis?"

"Nay, sir."

"Did they speak of my nationality before I embraced Islam?"

"They thought you were English born, but I think you were born and raised in America."

" 'Tis a fact I curse to hell. However, I praise Allah for letting me see the light in time. The long and short of it is that my brother and I, both from Baltimore and not subscribing to the proposition of equality with peasants, were Loyalists in the late war. For this our manor house was robbed and burned, our plantation laid waste, and we forced to flee from the mob. We managed to get through to the English lines and finally on an English ship where we gave 'em some of their own medicine. After the war we wanted nothing more of an English king who'd make peace with traitors, or nothing more of the traitors themselves except to harry 'em whenever we came upon 'em. My brother found his heart's desire serving the Sultan of Morocco. I found mine under Pasha Yussuf. La illaha ill' Allah!"

There was a small Turkish quarter in Valletta and the latter cry was not uncommonly raised along the waterfront. It was the watchword of Mohammedans everywhere, and seemed to mean, "There is no God but God."

"I told you this much so you won't think it a piece of good luck that the reis into whose hands you've fallen was American born," Murad Reis went on.

"I won't think so, sir."

"In fact, any good luck you've ever had has run out."

"I'm resigned to being a prisoner of the Pasha of Tripoli."

Murad Reis removed the stem of the pipe from his mouth, threw back his head, and bayed with laughter. I had never heard such a laugh out of an American throat. Plainly he had learned it since he had turned pirate.

"You are, are you!" he cried when he had wiped his eyes. "You a New England Yankee and as dull-witted as that?"

"I don't understand you, sir."

"It's true that my Pasha has declared war on your Yankee Doodle. Many a Yankee captain will be ransomed or sold into slavery when your president prostrates himself before my Pasha's throne. But you and your two hearties won't be among the number."

His eyes glistened with mirth as he waited my answer.

"What is our status then, if you'll kindly tell me?"

"Gladly. You are three dead men."

"We didn't know it."

"You may take a long time to find it out, but in the end—if you breathe that long—you'll see what I mean. In resisting capture by my Pasha's frigate Ayesha, the Vindictive sank with all hands. No doubt the Vindictive caught fire, which reached her magazines and caused her blowing to hell. It's not the first time that a Yankee vessel, presuming to do battle with her betters, went down with no soul saved. In fact, I was present at a similar event in the late war."

Murad Reis, was the ship you mean the new Saratoga, commanded by Captain Fairbank and sunk by Our Eliza under Captain Godwine Tarlton? The latter s crew were mainly lascars, Captain Phillips said. Were two of his officers young Loyalists fighting their own countrymen and now reis of pirate kings? My blood runs cold.

But I did not speak, and under Murad's searching glance, my face stayed still.

"Your blowing up the Vindictive to keep her out of my hands will never be known to living man except myself," he went on, the evil mirth gone from his face and his tone low and earnest. "You'd naturally ask how I could pull the wool over the eyes of my crew, and what would be the good. Let me tell you. I have the only glass on board. There's method in my madness—I have my own ways of doing things —and before long I'll be the Reis Effendi, which means the admiral of my Pasha's fleet. When I saw four men come overside from that bloody, empty deck, I suspected you'd set fuse to powder. It was just what Yankee dogs would do, God damn their souls to hell!"

At the last his voice did not change in the least, but the pupils of his eyes spread and almost filled the pale-gray iris.

"As you swam out, I called to my crew that the ship had caught fire—you were quitting her like rats—I could see it with my glass close to the deck, under the fallen foremast—it must be a pot of Greek fire turned over, for it burned without smoke. Couldn't the lubbers see it in the scupper vents? So when she blew, not one of 'em guessed the truth."

What was the truth of the Saratoga's sinking, Murad Reis? It was not what was given out, if I believe the intimations of my soul. Did Our Eliza's captain have the only glass—or the only witnesses of standing—in his white hands? What great cause was served?

"What had I to gain?" Murad Reis asked, languidly blowing smoke. "Since you're a dead man, I'll tell you. My rascals fight for loot—each man his appointed share. He'll risk his life for it, but if there's no booty to be got, he'd rather lie in the sun. We'll have many fights with Yankees in the next year, and we don't want the word to go out that they'll sink their own ships rather than strike their colors, for that's madness worse than a dervish's, and Mohammedans hold madmen in holy terror. The Vindictive fought us to hell as it was, if 'twill comfort your soul. What have we got to show for it but a leaking ship—we'll have to turn back to Tripoli with our cruise barely begun—forty-two men lost in trade for your thirteen, and a prize of three breathing corpses!"

"That's the exact number, sir. You kept a good count."

" 'Twasn't easy, with so much running back and forth, but I thought it about right. You other three are no longer Whitman, Jones, Smith, however you've signed on. What's your given name?"

"Homer, sir."

He looked a little startled. "Slur it a little, and that's Omar in Arabic. But don't think it will be any use to you. We'll call the black by the number fourteen, fifteen for the little cockerel, sixteen for you. You'll be put ashore, and before we sail again, I'll tell my crew you were set upon by street gangs—Yanks are hated in Tripoli almost as bad as in London—and stoned to death. But that won't happen. You're going out on the desert to disappear. Now what's that in your pocket, fastened to your belt by a black thong?"

"It's my silver watch, wrapped in oilskin." "Does it keep good time?" "It loses only a minute in twenty-four hours."

"Hand it over, for you'll not need to count minutes where you're going—you'll not even need a calendar to count years, perhaps thirty of 'em, before your bones are dry instead of wet.' He paused, relishing some secret meaning that was meant to make me quail, but my face was turning into stone, and he talked on. "I'll keep the turnip as a souvenir."

"May I keep the thong?" I asked. "It's only horsehair with brass ends, and I've a sentimental attachment to it."

"Certainly, and I trust 'twill be a comfort to you, for I'm a man of sentiment myself."

It would not be my only comfort. Another was my youth, whereby I need not count years as a spendthrift counts a last handful of coins in his purse. And as I careened into darkness, I found strange solace in the limitless range and sweep of human fate. Fate that had brought me to this pass could bring me to any other within the bourn of man.

The effort made to conceal the arrival of three American prisoners at Tripoli boded us no good. Irons were welded on us before we left the ship—mine the heaviest in the armory; but I did not complain at that, because thus the chains running from wrists to ankles were extra long, giving me full leg and arm room. Turkish rags of dress concealed our white skins. Then we were brought on one of the Ayesha's boats to a deserted wharf far from the busy docks we had seen from the ship, and bundled into a kind of goblin dress, with eye and nose holes, used by women in extreme purdah when forced to go abroad. Hustled into a donkey cart, we jolted over cobblestones, then along a shingled beach. Half-suffocated, we were hauled out at last and put on baggage camels. When dawn broke, we were on a desert of pale brown sand, limitless in every direction except north. That way we could see the distant sheen of the Mediterranean coast, the green of the oasis, and a cluster of white specks marking the town.

Thus began a two-day journey toward some high rugged hills that our Tripolitan camel tenders called the Jebel. Long before we arrived, we knew the first agonies of thirst—our ration of water was hardly half our guards', and our bodies were not yet inured to the burning sands and sky—and the sharp pain and soul shock of the lash laid across our backs. We came at last to a small but green oasis at the foot of a bleak wadi. There were several wells, a large grove of date palms native to the desert, and sick coconut palms imported from the steamy coasts; and in the shade stood one imposing house with a tiled roof and several huts of baked mud roofed with split palm trunks under packed earth. Here, we were to learn, dwelt the quarry master, Sidi el Akir, and the foremen and guards. Up the hill in the glaring sunlight rose a palisade of tree trunks, each topped by a wooden spike hardened in fire. This structure, about a hundred feet square, was the life-long home of about a hundred quarry slaves, their number now increased by three.

These were work hours, so the gate was open and the pen seemed deserted. An off-duty guard who had seen the approach of our little caravan spoke to our captain, made entries in a leather-bound book, and led Sparrow, Jim, and me around one end of the stockade, where an iron hook, about six feet long, jutted out from the wall. He pointed to it, and snarling like a dog, told us something in Arabic. When we were brought inside, I saw a gaunt form of a man lying on a black cloth. It was naked except for a few rags; the pale color and scant beard of the face turned toward the burning-glass sky suggested that he was an Arab. The enclosure contained nothing else but a hole dug in the sand for a latrine, a water trough made from a hollowed tree trunk, a much larger wash trough that could be emptied into a sluice under the wall, and about a hundred rolls of cloth scattered a few feet apart, no doubt similar to the woolen robe, called aba, that comprised the Arab's bed.

Such robes were tossed to us three newcomers. Also, since we had not tasted food since the night before, we were given a handful of dates and allowed to drink from the trough. The guard now walked to the still form by the wall, gazed at it fixedly, and then bent to touch its eyelid. At once he turned, snapping his fingers, and beckoned to Jim and me. We came, our chains rattling.

"Muerto," he said—quite companionably for one so exalted—pointing at the form. Then he told us in sign language what we could do.

It was only to drag the corpse about a cable's length up the hill and leave him there. I thought to pretend to misunderstand and heave it on my shoulder—in respect to the human being it once lodged—but the danger of plague and some half-glimpsed necessity of living long caused me to do precisely what my lord commanded—to take hold of one bare foot while Jim gripped the other and drag the body to the appointed place. As we came near, a flock of hideous vultures hopped along the ground and took to heavy flight. They had feasted richly only a few days before, we thought from the signs. Now their table was spread again.

"Ye reckon we did wrong not to play Ezra Owens's game 'at day we went overside?" Jim asked me, his eyes wheeling slowly to mine.

"We did more right than we knew," I answered.

By now the sun of molten brass had pitched and set; with the failing light the arid air turned chill, and the gathering dusk gave out metallic sounds in cadence. As they loudened slowly, I recognized them as the heavy rattle of many chains of men walking in step. Peering through a crack in the palisade, I saw bobbing torches. The rhythmic noise frightened me more than any experience of my slavery so far—I did not know why—and vibrated the bones of my head before the gate opened and the long file of dust-encrusted human forms trudged through.

All were naked except for loincloths, proof that none were Mohammedans. As they washed in squads of eight, the torchlight glistened on a rapidly increasing number of ebony black or dark brown skins. These were not all Africans: a few with long hair and bearded faces I took to be Indians, quite possibly lascars captured at sea. Several more were pale brown or brunette Levantines of various sorts, Armenians, Cilicians, and Maltese; and at least six were either Circassians or Western Europeans. But only one of the latter—a powerfully built man with reddish hair, big features, and a devil-may-care expression, quite possibly a black-sheep member of a respectable Irish family—gave me a second glance.

After the washing, two Negroes gave each man a palm leaf on which was scooped black beans and several flaps of unleavened bread. The men ate rapidly, licked the palm leaves, and threw them into the latrine. Then all but a few immediately spread their woolen abas and lay down.

The man who had noticed me sauntered to my place and crouched on the sand beside me.

"I'm an Irish gentleman known here as Kerry," he told me in the warm and winning voice of his kind. "Who are you?"

"I'm known here as Sittash."

"That means sixteen, and evidently you've learned a lesson or two already, and mean to get along the best you can."

"Yes, sir, I do."

"I'm glad of that, and I'll tell you why. My teammate, a Salib— they're Christian Semites—began to break up a few days ago; this morning they couldn't whip him to his feet, and since he's not in sight, I assume he's been dragged to the Hill of Mercy to feed the birdies. Well, it stands to reason you'll be put in his place. The little larrikin who came with you hasn't long enough reach to cleave stone with me, and the black will probably get a shade lighter duty, for our job foreman is a black Mohammedan from the Sudan who favors his own color. A teammate who can't face the facts could make me a great deal of trouble—slow down my output, get me a lot of whippings along with his own, I'd arrange for a bad accident to happen to a man like that."

"It's a fair warning, and I'll return everything you said."

"Good for you. Now let me guess how you came to fall into the Pasha's tender hands. You're a Yank, and the hostilities that we heard were threatened have begun."

"That's a good guess."

"But it doesn't explain you and the other Yank and a Negro without rings in his ears or nose being sent to this extremely exclusive club."

"I didn't know why it was."

"I think that's a lie, but you've your own reasons for telling it, and I'll not gainsay you. Now I'll give you a free English translation of this club's Arabic name—the Sepulcher of Wet Bones. Pretty ugly, isn't it? But wet means only not yet dry. Very imaginative people, the Arabs. Your being sent here means you're never to be offered for ransom or for sale or associate with any prisoner who will live to tell the tale."

"What tale?"

"The one you might tell him—the one you may tell me."

"Is there always one?"

"In every case where the prisoner is something more than the dullest workhorse. This quarry belongs to the Pasha. It is well run and reasonably profitable, but your services here could be done by a Nubian Negro worth, in the great slave markets of Constantinople, about a hundred dinars. You would bring five hundred to become an attendant on some Central Asian sultan or artisan, or clerk for a merchant or manufacturer. Did you invade the harem of some noble Tripolitan? Did you cause a reis to lose face?"

"Our ship's company did. I'll tell you later. You say this quarry is well run. I don't see how that could be true if the slaves are worked or whipped or starved to death in a few years."

"We're not. We labor from sunrise to sunset—that's the Mohammedan law—which means from ten to fourteen hours, depending on the season. Going back and forth takes two hours more out of the day. We're given enough to eat to keep us lean but strong. We're whipped for any idleness or the slightest offense, but rarely more than twenty strokes, after which shock sets in and the man is not up to mark the following day. By the way, you get twenty every month whether you earn 'em or not. That's a matter of principle with our quarry master, Sidi el Aku". He thinks it keeps us out of temptation— maybe it does. He, too, is a Tripolitan—use the generic term Moor—as opposed to an Arab. I suppose you know they all speak Arabic."

"Yes."

"A sound man can last twenty years or more. The climate is quite healthful when you've become adapted to it. By turning into animals —not nearly as difficult as you think—men have lived and labored here for thirty, even forty years. Those who don't, go mad and are very soon destroyed."

"You said, too, the quarry was profitable. How could it be, if they have to transport marble on camelback for seventy miles—"

"You're a cool 'n. I wonder what the story is. The marble here is known as Carthage onyx, highly translucent, of very rich browns and yellows. It's in high demand all over the Orient for temples and palaces and is costly as alabaster, but the bed is not large and devilishly hard to work. We get it out in thin slabs with drills and wedges, and it's sent in five-hundred-pound loads by baggage camels. The men who want to live long—not necessarily the more intelligent-wear a cloth over their mouths and noses. It's hot and uncomfortable, but it stops most of the fine dust. Those who don't use it wear out fast. I can foretell you'll wear it."

"Yes."

"Now I've got a question to ask you. I'll explain its importance later. Are you a boozer?"

"I like a drink—"

"That isn't what I meant. Does booze count more with you than self-respect—life, women, everything?"

His voice changed, and his hands shook.

"Not one of those things, let alone all."

"It does with me. Indirectly, that's why I'm here. After a terrific bout in Lisbon, I found myself on a Dago ship without a passport. I jumped her in Tripoli, got some fig wine, and knocked down the Chiah in the palace kiffer—he's the direct representative of the Pasha and next to the Reis Effendi in rank. It's a wonder I wasn't hung alive on an iron hook. To avoid trouble for everybody, I was quietly shipped out here."

I nodded, waiting for the business.

"Every Friday—that's tomorrow—the Mohammedan Sabbath, we're issued a pint of palm toddy made from those wretched coconut trees. The quarry master believes that it 'thins our blood' and winks his eye at the fifteen or so per cent of alcohol. One pint gives about twenty minutes' glow. But I've a little jug hidden away, and if two people will give me their ration—and there is one left who does—I've enough for one night's drunk. It doesn't faze me the next day—not an old guzzler like me—and it gives me something to live for."

"The man who died today gave you his portion?"

"Sold it to me, rather."

"What will you give me for mine?"

"Good advice. Oriental sayings—in perfect Arabic—to please the foreman. I was once considered a rising Orientalist at Dublin University. I can be useful to you, Sittash, if you're my friend."

"I agree for the time being."

"Thank you. I can't thank you enough. If I could go to bed drunk every night—not soaked, not crazy, just gentlemanly drunk—I'd be happy as a king."

"Do you mean it?"

A deeply moving dignity came into his face.

"Why not? I'm a good workman—I get almost no disciplinary whippings—that one good dusting every month makes me remember public school and cleanses my soul. I've no fault to find with the hard labor and the simple food, for what would I be doing if I weren't here? One prolonged bout after another, ending in red spiders and white mice—jail sometimes, always disgrace, shaming every one who loves me. Now they believe me dead. I am dead in a sense more true than you know, most of us are—this is the Sepulcher of Wet Bones; I have all the advantages of being dead, yet I labor and eat and sleep —the last two the reward of the first—and when I can lay hand on the wherewithal, I can still get drunk."

"I see." But my eyes darkened, as though in prelude of death.

"What have you got to live for, Sittash?"

"A commemoration."

"That means an observance—or an action—in someone's memory."

"I'll let it go at that."

"Good night, Sittash."

"Good night, Kerry."

I lay down on my aba and went to sleep and began to dream. Before the stars began to pale, I was wakened by the beat of a kettledrum. The day had begun. The first day of how many? It would be unmanly to count in tens. , . . My common sense denied I could count in hundreds. . . . What remained but thousands?

The first thousand days had gone by.

As Murad Reis had told me, I needed no watch to tell the hours, no calendar to count the days. The procedures of the prison served as my sun dial, and in my dreams I heard shipbells thin and far away. My first thought in the morning was the sum of my days as a slave, yesterday's figure plus one more; and there was no use of cutting notches in a log or adding a pebble to a pile, since I never came even close to confusing the number.

The most marked change in me was a reshaping of my body that at first alarmed me. Although my one hundred and sixty pounds had been all brawn and bone, I gradually lost weight until Kerry guessed me at no more than one hundred and thirty-five. My flat muscles became longer and thinner, my legs and arms lost their look of power, and my torso was so gaunt that my shoulders appeared ungainly broad. But I came to believe at last that the transformation was the almost miraculous fulfillment of my needs. Kerry and I were invariably given the heaviest and hardest labor of the gang—I could credit no reason other than the quarry master's spite against imperious England and hence all English-speaking people—and since my teammate was not quite equal to it, I must be more than equal to save us both from nightly beatings by the guards.

Little Enoch Sutler, whom his shipmates knew best as Sparrow, and whose name in the prison was Kamstash, remained as dauntless of spirit and as true a man as ever walked the deck of the Vindictive. But if his fortunes seemed better than mine in the eyes of our fellow slaves, I greatly feared they were worse. Because of his small size, he had been put in the finishing gang, whose task was to smooth and then polish with pulverized lava the thin blocks of granite hewn from the bed. In spite of constant wetting of the abrasive, some of it was breathed in along with other dust too fine to be caught by a face cloth. According to prison lore, the finishers lived better and died sooner than any other gang. Like all the rest. Sparrow developed a cough and bloodshot eyes.

In the depths of Sparrow's mind I was still Mate Whitman—even Cap'n Whitman, now that Cap'n Phillips had been gone so long. If I had bade him do so, he would have asked for harder but healthier labor; but I could not do so against his own will. He greatly feared that the foreman, irked by what he might deem ingratitude for mercy given, would put him at some task beyond his strength and lay him open to the torment of the kurbash. It was quite possible; and since Captain Phillips had appointed the duty, to me alone, I had no right to ask him to live longer than he desired.

Of us three survivors, the lot of 'Giny Jim was the happiest. Long before they could communicate with words, he had made friends with a tar-black Nubian named Zimil, a former slave who had been permitted to embrace Islam and had since become second-in-charge of the palm groves. Zimil had managed to have Jim put to work there, with plenty of dates and coconuts to eat and the delicious milk to drink. Since he could not climb trees in our heavy irons, he got shed of all except light ankle rings. Although he still slept in the stockade, the two were inseparable in daylight hours, and could soon talk an astonishing mixture of Arabic and English.

Sparrow and I profited indirectly from the friendship, since Jim never missed an opportunity to give us dates and coconut meat. Of equal importance to me, almost every night he was able to bring into the stockade a wooden flask containing a quart of palm toddy, one of the strongest fermented drinks, nearly the match of the fortified wines of Spain. This he slipped into my hands; I in turn sold it to Kerry, but at a higher price than a little advice and a few Arabian sayings. Thereby I slowly obtained possession and use of a wonderful tool.

It was no less than the Arabic language in its pure and classic form. If Kerry's teaching while we labored was assiduous, that night he got pleasantly drunk; but if he slacked the task, he remained unpleasantly sober. It demanded strong application of mind on his part as well as on mine, patience, and much use of dusty throats, but when he found that I stood firm—and drunkards can hardly believe that of anyone—he usually earned his tipple.

All this while we three had listened in hidden and desperate hope for news from Tripoli. None was good until December, 1803, when Kerry heard a vague rumor of a large American frigate and a heavy-gunned schooner blockading the pirate stronghold.

On Christmas Eve, a brutal guard named Caidu summoned Kerry and me for what I feared was a whipping. Instead of leading us to the post, he let us squat by the watch fire while he seated himself grandly on a bench. At once he began to speak rapidly in Arabic, which I had barely started to learn.

When he paused, Kerry turned to me.

"The gentleman begins by reminding us that since tonight begins a great Christian feast, he is going to give you some news of great interest to all Yankees. And you'd better brace yourself against something pretty rocky."

Caidu spoke again to considerable length. I did not glance into his malicious face, but I could not keep from watching Kerry's.

"Sittash, have you Americans a fine frigate named—as near as I can catch it—the Fee-deff ?"

"Yes, the Philadelphia."

"Well, the bastards have captured it."

"I don't believe it."

"He seems pretty damned cocksure. Thirty-two guns—"

"That's right."

"About three hundred officers and men—"

"They could guess that—"

"Don't fool yourself, Sittash. They've got her, I'll bet five quid. America's a little nation and far from here. Well, how about us splitting what your friend brought tonight? It's Christmas Eve, and we'll toast to the old brig yet."

"Thanks, but he brought the same to me and to the little fellow. We'll celebrate Christmas as merrily as we can."

I would hear more of the Philadelphia, I thought—Caidu would not miss letting me know how she had been given a Moslem name, the flag of Tripoli flown from her mainmast, and sent forth with a swarthy crew to capture Yankee traders. But he remained queerly silent, and it was in February, that 'Giny Jim—entered in the book as Oribatash—finished her story.

"It come out better dan we 'spected," he said, "but don't you tell nobody but Sparrow, 'cause Zimil, he got it from de quarry mas', and if it gets out, he'll s'picion Zimil tol' me, and he'll would be to pay."

"I won't even tell Kerry."

"The Philadelphia was lyin' in Tripoli harbor, guarded by de guns of de forts. But some o' our boys sneak in at night in a ketch and set her afire, so de pirates couldn't use her 'gainst us, and she burn to de waterline, praise God!"

He fell silent then, and in his eyes was a vision. I saw it too—a smaller but no less gallant ship for a second bathed in flame. . . .

The American war with Tripoli—which I was once too proud to call a war—was waged fitfully for a year and a half more. Although there were no decisive battles, the Pasha had lost at least one frigate and several gunboats and had reduced his blood-price for his American prisoners by more than two-thirds. When he surrendered at last, how many would be returned? Would the Yankee admirals be content with the Philadelphia men, or would they scour the remote slave pens for countrymen captured in unrecorded piracies and spirited away?

Sometimes I visioned marchers across the desert, flying a bright flag, playing "Yankee Doodle," coming to burn our stockade to the ground and hanging any whipper who had ever laid lash to a Yankee back or kurbash to the sole of a Yankee foot. It was at least a fair hope. And until it had been fulfilled or failed, I could not run desperate risks with Sparrow's, Jim's and my own life in an attempt to escape.

In the blaze of summer, four years and four days after I had met a dark-haired girl roaming the beach of Malta, the hope failed. Sparrow was the first to bring me word. He had had it from an English-speaking marble buyer who had paused in his survey to watch him polish the beautifully marked onyxlike stone.

"We assembled a great big naval force in front of the town," Sparrow told me. "The muley tol' me—and he was right polite and nice—we had six frigates, four or five brigs and schooners, a dozen or more gunboats, and a sloop of war. The Pasha seen he couldn't do nothing against a force like that, and besides another American, a General named Eaton, led a army of Moors and Arabs and some Greeks and a few of our boys from about Alexander clean to Derna— six hundred miles it was—and captured Derna. He was going to put Hamet Pasha on Yussuf's throne to make peace with us. So Yussuf seen he'd better not fight us no more, so he let the Philadelphy men go for sixty thousand dollars and signed a peace treaty to leave our ships be."

Sparrow paused, a strange expression on his small, peaked face.

"Is that all?" I asked.

"Aye, sir—'cept our ships went home."

"They wouldn't if they'd known we were here."

"You can lay to that, Cap'n."

"Our boys who were with General Eaton—I reckon they went home, too."

"Yes, and I wonder if we can call 'em our boys any more, us so lost and forgotten for so long."

He coughed hard, and tears rolled out of his bloodshot eyes. He wiped them furiously away with the back of his hand.

"They are our boys as long as we live," I said. "They've lost us, but we haven't lost them. Hang on with your teeth and fingernails and everything you can, as though you were in the tops of the Old Bitch in a full-reef gale. As soon as the time's ripe—and it may not be very long—we'll leg it. It's a better hope than I've ever told you."

"Then don't tell me now. If they got wind I knew anything, they could make me cough it up. I couldn't stand no real long whippings any more."

"You can stand anything you have to, Enoch Sutler. You're one of Vindictive's men. But we've talked too long, and I'll bring you the good word later."

He nodded and quickly turned away. I waited to speak to 'Giny Jim. To carry messages or tokens from any prisoner or slave was an offense against the Pasha punishable by a hundred blows of the kurbash, while the sender thereof must die on the iron hook, yet Jim might know some camel driver or baggage wallah whom he would dare ask to run the dreadful risk for such reward as we might sometime, somehow, pay. If he consented, it would be more likely for friendship's sake alone. Sahabti—the Arabic address of friend-has great meaning throughout Islam. Poor people everywhere set more store on friendship than do the rich.

There came upon me a sense of urgency, akin to panic, that dizzied my brain. That way lay death.

CHAPTER 9 Token of Hope

'Giny Jim recalled a Negro camel wallah named Giafar who passed this way three or four times a year and with whom he had drunk many horns of palm toddy. When Giafar had admired an ostrich skin Jim owned, its beautiful plumes stained with blood, that Jim had got when a mortally wounded cock strayed close to the oasis, Jim gave it to him to take to his wives and children somewhere on the hot side of Ghaira. Now that Jim could talk a bastard Arabic taught him by Zimil, they had greatly enjoyed each other's company at their far-apart meetings.

"Is Giafar slave or free?" I asked.

"He free."

"Does that mean he can go with any caravan captain who employs him?"

"He does 'at already. He like what we call a tramp in 'Giny. And he so good wif camels he no trouble gettin a job."

"If you asked him to, would he carry a message for me clear to the Baeed Oasis?"

Jim's brow became furrowed with deep thought, then he made his answer in the argot that the Vindictive men had known and loved well.

"I reckon when he got around to it, he mo' o' less will." But nine months fled-and fleeing from me was what they seemed to do, vanishing like the duration of a dream in the deep of night, dropping out of my life with only a hole left where they had been-before Giafar's kismet bore him this way again. Day in and day out during this while, I had noticed no change in Sparrow. But on the day Jim told me that this watch was over at last-at best only a fragment of the time required for one chance to succeed or fail-I recalled how Sparrow had looked on the day that it began, my gaze probing back nine months to behold his face, and compared it with the way he looked now. Then I knew he had changed for the worse, and unless the slow deterioration was arrested before long, he would not be with me at journey's end.

"Did you tell Giafar what I want of him?" "Nay, suh, but I tol' him you wanted to speak to him." "Would the chance be better if you told him, or I did?" "I don't know, Cap'n, but you's the right one." I did not gainsay that. I should have known it beforehand. "I'll take him to de quarry high sun tomorrow to watch de marble bein' cut. You make out like you gotta pump ship, and since de boss man neva let you do it on de bed, you walk to de little gully. We'll be on de knoll and start down. I'll stop lak I speak to you, and you look at me when you talk, but he'll know it's for him. Nobody can hear you if you talk quiet. Whatever you got for him, you lay on dat big white boulder. He'll pick it up after you start back to do wo'k."

During the long wait Jim and I had discussed a dozen different ways of effecting a brief meeting between Giafar and me, but since most of them had depended on careful timing, this was the simplest and the soundest yet proposed.

"Tomorrow morning, while you're taking him to the quarry-not tonight, because his tongue might become loosened by palm toddy -ask him if he has ever heard of Sheik el Beni Kabir, a horse breeder of the Baeed Oasis in the Libyan desert."

"I sho will."

The night passed, not quite like other nights, the sun rose with a somewhat different aspect, I ate and trudged to work aware of more color and changing lights than on other mornings. When the sun rose high, the two black men came to the quarry. Jim was often seen there, to bring a message between bosses or to borrow tools; and visitors from the caravans were not an unusual sight, so the guards did not glance at them twice. When they were on the knoll, I signaled to the foreman in our custom; as usual when he was in a good humor, he nodded and did not appear to watch me as I made for the little gully. At that moment the two visitors started down the knoll. As they came nigh me, Jim stopped and spoke to me.

"Giafar knows him. He's helped drive his horses to de Big River. Speak quick."

"In Allah's name, will you strive to take to Suliman, Sheik el Beni Kabir, a little horsehair band I'll leave on the rock, and tell him it is from his son in the Sepulcher of Wet Bones?" I asked in the Arabic tongue, facing Jim but my eyes turned to meet Giafar's.

"By Allah,I will."

I leaned a moment against the rock as though to wipe off sweat, then started back to my post. The guards did not look at me, nor did I see any sharpening of their idle gaze fixed on the two Negroes. Presently they walked on. All that day I watched fellow prisoners go to the gully on the common errand, but none stopped and stared at the rock, and I could believe that the hank of horsehair with brass ends was on its way.

How long a way? My heart that had beat staunchly with no support but hope and resolution, sank like a stoved boat.

Hours, days, phases of the moon, whole moons, and seasons fled by and away almost, it seemed, as if compressed into one drab, dimly remembered yesterday. In my waking life I strove to protect Sparrow and Jim. That striving required no magnanimity, no self-sacrifice; they were all who were left of my shipmates, and it seemed I needed them more than they needed me—that the ship that I must bring into port could not sail without them. In my dreams I felt no great concern for Jim—he moved silently and gracefully through them, climbing trees but never falling, surmounting every difficulty, evading every peril—but I fought endlessly and terribly tor Sparrow, Now in that gray world of dreams I had another charge. It was the token-bearer Giafar, journeying through illimitable deserts toward a great dun pasture somewhere beyond the last oasis, where ran the mares and stallions of Suliman, Sheik el Beni Kabir.

There came the day that Giafar had been gone a year. Just short of six years ago, I had become a slave. My most vivid life was in dreams—therein I knew conflict, victory and defeat, ships, seas, and storms, and sometimes the ecstasy of love realized in the flesh but with some paramour whose face I saw mistily and never recognized. If I had dared reveal my mastery of Arabic—it remained a last shot in my locker for what sudden and secret use I could not foresee—I could have established a stronger human bond and even a kind of companionship with my fellow slaves; as it was, I listened without speaking, always on the outskirts of some dreary cluster of half-entities, and my only confidants were Jim, Sparrow, and Kerry.

Of the rich stock of Kerry's mind, I still made use. If, during our day's labor, he had the energy and patience to give me my fill of instruction, his fee was enough palm toddy to get mildly drunk. If he sulked or gibed or ranted, he must confront the night cold and ghastly sober. Often he complained that he had taught me all he knew, but by delving a little deeper I uncovered another layer of learning, or broke into a storehouse he had forgotten, or found a hidden vein.

So I myself could wait a great deal longer without taking harm. If after two years, or three, or five, I must at last abandon hope of an answer to my message, there were other chances, however hopeless they seemed now, that a desperate and cunning man might take. But on the first dark of July i, 1807, as our dust-smeared file neared the open door of the stockade, I went dizzy and must brace my knees against falling when the guard Ibrim stopped us, spoke to the attendant guard, and then approached Kerry and me.

"You two Christian dogs step out of file," he told Kerry in Arabic.

"We are your protected, effendi," Kerry replied.

"Ker-ree, foul Giour though you are, you know our tongue," Ibrim declared when the file had trudged on.

"Aye, O Caputan."

"Then speak what I bid you unto the Yanki called Sittash, in the tongue you two employ, adding nothing and leaving nothing out."

"Allah bear witness!"

"When Suliman ibn Ali, Sheik el Beni Kabir, was on Malta many years ago, he had business with a Yanki with dun hair and blue eyes, whose given name sounded not unlike that of Omar ibn Al-Khattab, faithful servant of the Prophet whom may Allah bless."

"Bless him, O Allah!"

"The business being uncompleted, the great Sheik spoke of him to the Yankis treating with our Pasha, who told him tliis man had been lost at sea. But it came to Suliman in a dream that it was not so, and it became his kismet to search for him more diligently, whereby he heard from the Reis Effendi of a Yanki of his description becoming our Pasha's slave and sent hither. Therefore in his journey from the capital to Kufurustan, he has come seven marches out of his way to see if he is the one. Ask this Yanki his given name."

Keny turned to me. "It may be death and it may be luck. You'll have to decide for yourself."

"Homer," I answered, slurring it so that it sounded almost exactly like the Arabic pronunciation of Omar.

"There is no majesty or might save in Allah!" Ibrim proclaimed. "Ker-ree, tell the Yanki Omar to come with me to the Well of Fatima's Tears by which the great Sheik has pitched his tent, and there he may speak to him in a tongue that they both know."

My chains jangled in the dark. The dull red of a distant fire swiftly turned bright gold. We came to a large and luxurious pavilion. Ibrim spoke to a wild-looking Arab sentinel who vanished within. At once the door curtain was again drawn back and Suliman emerged, followed by an unbridled, unsaddled horse. The sentinel held high a thornwood torch that threw a garish light.

I recognized him instantly. I could hardly believe he had changed so little in this long time. He was more richly dressed, his beard slightly more gray, a linen turban had replaced the high wool cap, but his slight form and bony face were the perfect reality of a long-dimmed image. But there was more than this to read in his countenance and unconscious actions. In them I somehow saw myself, as though I were looking in a mirror.

He gazed at me first in disbelief, then in sore trouble. As the beautiful sable-brown mare nudged him for pettings, he spoke in an undertone to Ibrim.

"Is this Omar known as Sittash?"

"Yea, O Sheik. Isn't he the one?"

"It comes to me that he's the one, but he's greatly changed."

"Men change greatly in the Sepulcher of Wet Bones, or they die."

"Allah have mercy!" He turned and addressed me in a gentle voice.

"Do you speak Arabic?" he asked in that tongue.

"In secret only," I answered in English.

"I will try—I forget—most all. Speak truth, by the bread and salt. I make speak to Reis Effendi. He put you with trust to me. If I take you to my oasis, work on stud farm—must you—you must swear before your God not to escape. So?"

There it was, this soon, as solid and tall as a mountain. But there might be a pass...

"In my great need I must speak."

"Speak, my son."

"Will you take two more?"

"Nay, I cannot."

"One more?"

"Nay, nay. Not once in Yussuf's reign did man come forth from Sepulcher of Wet Bones. It be Yussuf's pride. If Reis Effendi need not my tribe against Egyptians, he would not let one go. And when I die, you must go back."

"You can't take me unless I swear?"

"No, my son."

"Tell the guard I must speak to the other Yankees about the business you had with me—say I've forgotten some point of it. Say you want me to return in an hour."

Suliman did so. Ibrim marched me back to the stockade, but long before I arrived, it had come to me to speak only to 'Giny Jim, and there was not much need of that. I did not want Sparrow to see my face by torchlight.

Jim was still at the date racks with his friend Zimil. We stood together in the warm dark, Ibrim in easy sound of our voices. I told him quickly how it was.

"You know I can git along all right," he said when I was through.

"Yes, I know that."

"Dis here is what you've got to figga. Whiles you can't break no oath to him who stood by you, maybe you can make friends among 'em sheiks, and send letters by the drivers, and such as that. Maybe you can git 'em to help git Sparrow and me out. You might even git a letter to the President of U. S. A. Wouldn't 'at help Sparrow more'n stayin' here wif him?"

"Where would Sparrow be, by the time help came—if it ever comes?"

"If you order me to, Cap'n, I'll answer 'at true."

"It's my order."

"His bones would be dry up yonder on de hill."

"You can lay to that."

"Worse 'n 'at, when his time come to die, you wouldn't be wif him. I'd be wif him, if I could, but I can't put courage in his heart like you kin, so when Old Man come for him, he could look Him in de face. Wifout you, he'd die 'fraid and shamed, not brave and proud."

"So you see what that means, James Porter." I called him by his real name without thinking.

"Aye, suh, I see plain."

I turned away, and still in Ibrim's care, trudged back to Suliman's pavilion. The sable-brown mare, excluded now from her master's tent and lying like a dog outside its door, heard the distant rattle of my chains and sprang up. "Is it he, Kobah?" Suliman called in Arabic to his pet. "Ah, my ears bring the sorrow-laden sound."

He came forth, and in tlie torchlight his face looked drawn.

"You—not—stay—the hour," he said in careful English.

"Nay, sir, I didn't."

"I fear your answer, but give it me."

"I can't go with you now, O Sheik."

"How soon can you go, if ever?"

"When I've lost one of my last two shipmates."

"How you give me word? My caravans can pass, only short out of way between Tripoli and Gjaria, summer and winter."

"Did you notice the rook's nest in the big acacia tree above the wadi as you came down to the oasis?"

He turned and spoke quickly in some dialect of the desert to the wild-looking Bedouin torch-bearer. The man nodded and salaamed.

"Hamyd marked it."

"It's been here as long as we have. If it's missing, I can go with you."

"Then, Omar, I bid you farewell."

He touched his hand to his forehead and his heart, tears flowing down his brown cheeks. In spite of my rattling chains, I made the same noble gesture, but my eyes stayed dry and burning from having lost the power to weep.

It seemed to me that in the few weeks following Suliman's departure, Sparrow's slow decline was arrested, if not changed to barely perceptible improvement. The thought of losing him was intolerable, and, hating the prospect of ever profiting by his death, I felt a renewed surge of energy and hope. These quarries had been worked by slaves for more than fifty years. In all that time, not one had made good his escape; some had been killed in the attempt and others who had fled into the desert had been brought back to be hung on the iron hook on the stockade wall. This did not mean that escape was impossible. Indeed, the complete conviction that it was, held by the guards and almost all the prisoners, was itself a loop in its walls.

Irons could be chiseled off. Food and water could be stored in limited amounts by favored slaves like Jim; camels might be stolen. The great chain I knew not how to break was the immense stretches of desert between us and any refuge. Flight through Tripoli to the sea was unthinkable without the prearranged help of friends or a bag of gold. The other coastal towns in conceivable reach were too small and far-scattered to be of use to us unless we could disguise successfully as natives, an almost impossible feat to aliens unsteeped in the country's language, lore, and ways. Westward lay the interminable sands of the Algerian Sahara. Southward stretched the empty wastes of the Fezzan and the Tibbu, a thousand miles of thirst before we might find shelter among the savage Negro tribes of the equatorial wilderness. Eastward the Libyan Desert, breached here and there by oasis, was a camel journey of forty days to the greenery of the Nile.

Our best, if not our only, hope lay in some fellow prisoner with friends in the country. Jim constantly searched for such a person— his guileless ways, easy address, black skin, and even corrupt Arabic were touchstones in gaining the confidences of the terror-stricken captives out of the Bush. Thus far he had found none to begin to fill our needs; but I pinned some little hope on a newcomer to the pen, a bold-looking, hard-bitten Englishman of my own age who did not admit to speaking Arabic, but whose manner breathed a long stay in North Africa. He might have many resources fitting him for an ally.

"You're a rum-looking cove," he told me at first sight.

He had a light, tough build, sandy-red hair, blue-green eyes, bold features, and a sardonic expression. I had no trouble finding out his odd name—Holgar Blackburn—or that he had run away from a workhouse in Devon at the age of fourteen. His family had been wiped out, not by the sea, but by a smallpox epidemic. Having only distant kinfolk whom he loved no more than they loved him, he had never again set foot on English soil.

"If you'd go back, you might find you are heir to a fortune," I said— a strangely ritualized joke around the prison.

"All they had for me there, they've given me already, and I've got it with me." He showed me an X mark burned deep on the back of his hand.

I had not noticed the mark. I think he had kept his hand turned palm up. It would be a serious handicap to a runaway.

"What caused it?" I asked politely.

"A barrel-stamping iron in the hands of the master. I had raided his larder and made off with a meat pie. He heated the iron and did the job to his satisfaction. I got off easy—I could have been hanged for breaking and entering—and that's quite a satisfaction."

At our next meeting he told me that he had sailed on a French ship that was captured by Moroccan pirates. Sold into slavery in Tripoli, he had taken the eye of an effendi and elevated to the Pasha's corps of Mamelukes, mainly blond Greeks and Thracians. But after winning a rare prize—permission to embrace Islam—he had suddenly made a break for freedom with ten thousand pesos of the corps' funds.

"If I had gone through the ceremony beforehand—circumcision and declaration of faith—I would have been counted a recanter and hung on the iron hook," he told me, grinning strangely. "As it was, I was sent to pass my declining years in the Sepulcher of Wet Bones."

"You've got a lot of years to decline."

"I'm of yeoman stock and country bred—from a little rented farm near Tavdstock by the Cornish border. . . ." His voice died away and he peered sharply into my face. "That hit home, didn't it?"

"It hadn't ought to've. I've only been in Cornwall once, to my remembrance. I went with some friends into the country. I remember a big house called Celtburrow. We saw the moor "

"Celtburrow was the seat of the Linden family, 'most as old as Adam. They've about gone to seed, but there was a beautiful woman whom I saw when I was a little boy. A little girl, her granddaughter, lived with her. The child's father was a naval officer and a great blood. I was caught stealing flowers—but all that makes a lot of difference to a bloody abandoned bastard in the Sepulcher of Wet Bones."

"That's right," I said with a small inward smile. "How did you come by the name of Holgar?"

"It's a variation of Orgar, Earl of Devon in the tenth century, who founded our great Abbey of St. Mary and St. Rumon. When you go to Tavistock, don't fail to see it."

"I won't. What were you saying about being country bred—"

"I was answering you about my living a long time. I'm tough enough of meat and bone, but I've got a fatal weakness. I'm unable to resist impulses if they're very strong. Some are criminal, and although you won't believe it, some are quite decent, and the latter can be as dangerous as the former. It's brought me this near to death at age twenty-eight, and will finish the business soon."

I could not help but believe him.

The same month that brought my hope of Holgar's help to a quick death, saw a dark shadow fall on a great hope. Sparrow wakened in the night with an attack of coughing that brought forth blood.

I heard the spasm, so prolonged and violent that I rose and went to him, although fearful of shaming him in the men's sight. He grinned at me in the torchlight and tried to hide the telltale flow. I pretended not to see it and slipped him a little bhang, another of Jim's provisions, to put him back to sleep.

"Thanks, Cap'n," he told me. "I'll dream I'm back on the Old Bitch." But I dreamed I stood on a lonely beach, watching the Eagle of Maine lurch broadside to the seas before she struck the rock.

Thereafter Sparrow broke up like a gale-racked ship on reefs. Both were a continuous, remorseless action, and although one took weeks and months and the other only hours, time meant little here, and they had something of the same shocking effect upon the mind. I had never known a better man than he—in the sense that sailors would use the expression, a most true and real sense. His small body and brain, reflecting his bright spirit, had been compact of all the male virtues—strength limited but fully apphable, quickness, economy of motion, wonderful resilience, coolness in times of stress, courage without rashness, loyalty to his own. The last three of these, qualities of the spirit more than flesh, would stay by him to his last breath, but the others melted away.

Late one summer afternoon a sudden gush of blood flooded the slab of marble under his hands. Thrice the long lash of Caidu's ox whip curled about his wasted form before a savage roar from the quarries made him leave his helpless prey to scourge the bare backs of the shouting, howling madmen in the pit. I was struck only once, partly because I stood still and silent and perhaps because Caidu was afraid; and the reason I did not join in the tumult was the clearly perceived reality that however I might share my fellow slaves' yearning for death, I must concede it nothing.

That night I laid Sparrow's aba in a corner of the stockade far from the watch lanterns. When I brought him some bhang to chew, he gave my arm a little tug, to let me know he had something to tell me. The drug must have eased his rasped throat, because his words came forth in a feeble voice without pain or strain or attacks of coughing. I could not make out his face in the heavy dusk, but I thought his eyes were burning.

"Cap'n, I've only a few days more," he said.

I thought to answer with false cheer that he had lots of life in him yet, and that men worse off than him had gotten well; but I remembered we were shipmates and I was his captain now, and I would not treat him so.

"I know it."

"I'll hate to leave you and Jim, me so lucky, lying and sleeping and never having to wake up in this world no more, the work done and the whipping done, while you and him must stand the misery and then the duty."

"Why do you put it that way?"

" 'Cause that's what it is. I've known it from the first. When Ezra Owens and me was bending the fuse on the powder cask like you'd told us, he whispered to me the orders Cap'n Phillips gave you. To find out if that English lord betrayed us to the pirates and bring judgment on him."

"He said to bring him to lawful punishment."

"Thank God he didn't lay it on me. I could run him down and shoot him, but what good would that do, for he'd only be dead as I'll be dead 'fore the moon's full again? I don't want to think about it no more. It lays a dreadful burden on my mind. Now, Cap'n, I got three favors to ask of ye, two of 'em to do if ye can see your way, and one ye must do, for my soul's sake."

"Speak out, Enoch Sutler."

"One of 'em is for you yourself, if they'll let ye, and nobody helping you but Jim, to carry me up to the hill where them ugly birds is waiting."

"I'll do it if I can."

"If you live long enough, and have the means, I want you to go to Newburyport, where I was born, and inquire for Bessie Sutler, who's my baby sister, and for Calesta Peck, who is my aunt. You needn't bother about my parents, for my ma's dead and my pa went oflF and left us. But if you find Bessie and my Aunt Calesta, tell 'em I didn't do no great wrong, such as murder and treason and suchlike, and that I loved 'em to the last."

"I'll tend to that if I live long enough. Those two are easy, but I'm afraid the third one will be hard."

" 'Twill be hard, but you can do it if you're the man I've took you for since first I knowed you. These next few days is going to be bad. They'll put that old whip on me plenty before they find out it ain't no use, and 'twill be hard for you to watch. So tell Jim to stay clear away, and you give me your promise, before God in heaven, and for the sake o' all the boys who're gone, you won't raise your hand."

"That's a heavy haul," I answered, hardly knowing what I was saying.

"Aye, but ye got to make it, for you're the cap'n, and everything pends on you. Let me hear you say it, or you'll do me mighty bad wrong."

"Enoch Sutler, I swear before God, and for the sake of our lost shipmates, that no matter what they do to you, I won't raise my hand against them."

Sparrow heaved a long sigh.

"You don't know how that comforts me, Cap'n Whitman. It's my part in the big duty—the part assigned to me by Almighty God—to protect you in this danger so you can live and carry out the rest. No matter how much you hear me holler—or maybe even beg 'em to let me be—you'll know it's just the flesh that's weak, and I'm standin' by the ship like Cap'n Phillips ordered us, and I'll die proud."

CHAPTER 10 Stout Dogs

Sparrow proved a true prophet. The next few days were bad.

On the morning following my pledge-giving, he had difficulty getting to his feet, then, staggered and fell. Only after three cuts by Caidu's whip did he rise, his face and his naked back both stained with blood, and join the file. Because Caidu had had the night watch, Ibrim and another guarded the quarry gangs; and by the mercy of Allah, they pretended not to see Sparrow's faltering hands and nodding head over the blocks.

On the second and third mornings, Sparrow rose and ate and took his place with the rest, but on the fourth, the cruel lash cracked six times against his shuddering form before he could lurch up; and meanwhile the men stood mute with dull, bestial faces, their chains hanging loose and silent. The fifth morning was one that every prisoner would remember as long as his mind lived, no matter how inured he was to violence and horror.

The ordeal began when Sparrow did not waken at the drum. Caidu kicked him once in the side, then gave him three brutal lashes with all his strength. Sparrow's body jerked at each one and short grunts came forth from his bloodstained lips, but he did not appear to waken. As Caidu turned away, I did not even dare hope he had left him to die in peace. As we ate and then formed our ranks, I was not the only man gray and glassy-eyed with ineffable dread. Now the gate was thrown open and Ibrim and his fellow guard took their places at the head and the foot of the file. Ibrim already carried an ox whip, and Caidu passed the bloodied one into the rear guard's hands. We knew what would happen now; we had seen the signs. He was not satisfied, monster that he was—the uproar the men had raised a few days before still stung him—and he took down the kurbash from its nail in the stockade wall.

It was a pliant cane made of rhinoceros hide, amber-colored and somewhat translucent and rather pretty in the eyes of those who did not know its use. It had a cutting edge for inflicting ineffaceable stripes and a blunt side for dealing extreme pain. Caidu turned it in his hand so that the blunt side was outermost. As he walked slowly toward Sparrow, a man behind me vomited on the ground.

Caidu sat down beside Sparrow and, clutching his ankle, raised his foot backward and up to expose the sole and instep. At the first blow another man retched, and as one after another fell in measured pace, hard as a carpenter's hammer driving a nail, the sickness ran up and down the file as might some instantaneous contagion. At first there was no sound other than the sobbing and retching of the vomiters and the dull thuds of the kurbash; but in a little while I heard a more terrible sound. Sparrow had roused up from his merciful trance and was uttering a shapeless yell at every blow.

Kerry's hand closed about my wrist, shaking but strong. I did not need its restraint; something stronger than either muscle or iron had me in its grip, and I watched steadfastly without sound or movement. Not so a man nearer to Sparrow, Kerry, and me than any other in the double file. He stood three ranks ahead of me and nearest to the torture. His name was Holgar Blackburn, and sometimes he had impulses that he could not disobey.

Like us all, Holgar wore chains between the shackles on his wrists and ankles. Yet I had never seen a man move so fast as Holgar moved in the three strides he took. His feet rose high and his arms rose and fell with them as in some grotesque, long-practiced dance, and thereby his chains remained taut enough not to rattle, but not too taut to impede his movements. The cry of warning from the watching guards broke forth too late. Caidu's back was to us, and his attempt to spring to his feet was far too late. After his third stride, Holgar kicked high with his right leg, at the same time taking a doubled length of the slackened chain in his savage grasp. The weapon was less than a foot long, but we knew well its weight, and Caidu had time to turn his head and anticipate the might of the blow in the instant ere it f ell.

It was the last instant of Caidu's life. With that furious gigantic blow the chain broke through his skull to the eyeline. We saw him topple back under a crimson geyser; and now there was no sound-the slaves watching with the stares of madmen-for Holgar was not quite done. . ,

Alternately kicking high and bending low to keep his grip on the chain, he moved quickly to Sparrow's fore.

"Forgive me, little Yank, but it's for the best," he said.

"Hit hard, and Jesus bless you."

Again the chain fell, a tempered blow, but hard enough. Sparrows taut body grew limp as a child's in slumber.

There followed a little pause. It was caused by the sudden arrest of the violent movements of Holgar's body; it was deliberate and in some way ceremonial. It put a period to the preceding action; it ushered Sparrow out. We waited in silence and immobility for what would follow.

Holgar wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and turned glittering eyes and a half-grin on Kerry.

"I say, Tipperary?"

"Kerry, not Tipperary," my workmate answered.

"I can speak Arabic as well as you can, but I want to talk to the big Yank before I go up the spout, so tell 'em you need him to help interpret something of great importance to Yussuf Pasha."

"Right."

"Now tell Ibrim that I'll submit to arrest. I could break some bones and maybe kill one or two, but I haven't the inclination."

"Ibrim Effendi!" Kerry intoned in Arabic.

"Ah!"

"I cannot understand the mutineer very well, for his accents difter from mine, even as the accents of Somaliland differ from those of Oman. Although I believe he said that he would surrender, I entreat that I may ask Omar known as Sittash, who knows that dialect, if I heard aright."

It was flawless, classical Arabic punctuated by Kerry's right forefinger in the palm of his left hand. His quick-thinking amazed me no more than his histrionics in the wake of horror and in presence of the blood-drenched dead. Nothing could be more Irish and at the same time better calculated to impress the Arab guards and gain our point.

"You have my leave to speak to Omar known as Sittash."

"If you've got anything to tell Holgar, you'd better blab it now," he said to me. "I'm doubtful if you'll have another chance."

"Holgar, I'll get you the pure resin of the hemp if I possibly can," I answered, looking at Kerry. "If I live and am able, I'll pay your debts and honor your memory and pray for your soul. Kerry, bring in about his important message for the Pasha."

Kerry responded instantly in Arabic.

"Ibrim Effendi, my workmate understood the Englishman well. He will surrender to you and he has secret tidings to tell you of great moment to Yussuf Pasha."

"They will have to be short," Ibrim answered grimly.

At that moment a panting guard appeared in the open door, followed in the next few seconds by our foreman and Jim's friend Zimil and several husbandmen of the plantation. There was a curious lack of excitement; they only stopped and stared. Last to come was the quarry master, Sidi el Akir, in the company of his gray-bearded scribe. Tremblingly, Ibrim told him what had happened.

The master acted quickly. Kerry, Holgar under guard, and I were led out the gate, followed by the free men. The gate was shut and its log dropped behind us, penning in the file of slaves; and we heard them howl as we tramped around to the western side of the building. Well they knew the business to be done there. An iron hook six feet long jutted out from the wall, eight feet above the ground. The guards had shown it to me when I first came to the Sepulcher seven years before; because our march to the quarry and back was by way of the eastern side of the stockade, I had not laid eyes on it since.

We stopped, and the master spoke.

"Which of you is Omar known as Sittash?" he asked.

Fearful that I would speak, Kerry pointed to me.

"Bid Omar speak to the slayer of Caidu and discover what are his tidings of concern to my Pasha, if indeed they are not a dog's trick to delay his doom. These Omar may recite to you to convey to me in Arabic."

Kerry looked at me, but spoke to Holgar.

"This must sound good, or they'll take it out on us. How about a big meteorite you could have found when skipping from Misda to Nulat with the paymaster's chest? Meteorites are greatly venerated by these Moslems. The Black Stone of the K'uba is one."

"Holgar, would there be any use to ask Sidi to reprieve you, while you lead a party to the meteorite?" I asked in English. "At least you'd have a chance to cut your throat—"

"For the love of God, don't do it. That's what they're expecting me to ask, then my eyes and ears and tongue would go before they hang me."

I would have known that, too, if my mind had not failed me.

"The prisoner will now give important tidings to Omar known as Sittash," Kerry told the Sidi in Arabic.

"I wanted to put you on to something, Yank," Holgar went on. "At first I decided against it—why torment you with it when old brother vulture would soon be on your bones? But you've survived and I think you alone, of all the gangs, may live to go free—"

"Make a few gestures as though describing a scene—"

"I heard all kinds of rumors when I was with the Mamelukes. The renegade pirate skipper who attacked your ship and his brother, called Hamed in Morocco, were American Tories who served as officers under Captain Tarlton in the American War. Tarlton was in Malta when your ship put out from there. He's my countryman and I hope to hell there was no connection—"

I could not bear for him to stand there, facing death by torture, using his last breath to tell me what I already knew or could find out.

"I'll attend to it, Holgar, without fail."

"Righto."

"The master's getting impatient. You've got one more turn to speak, so be ready to tell me what I can do to pay part of my debt."

Then I described to Kerry an imaginary scene near the foot of a wadi, the biggest Holgar had crossed on his third day's run from Misda. The hills looked so-and-so. The tamarisk thickets grew here and yon. The stone lay in a little crypt fashioned by afrites. . . Touching hands to forehead with a rattle of chains, Kerry repeated all this, with various embellishments, to Sidi el Akir. The Sidi could not conceal his excitement; but at the end of the recital, he smiled haughtily into his grizzled beard.

"Have Omar known as Sittash ask the mutineer what reward he expects for this guidance to a lost stone from heaven?" he commanded.

"This is the last round, I think," Kerry told me.

"Holgar, you said there was something I could do for you if I live and go free. What is it?"

"You've got to take another name to go after what you want," Holgar answered. "Why not take mine? I'd be proud to have you wear it. Make a good showing for me in Tavistock."

"I'll take it and keep it and live up to it until I can go home."

I turned to Kerry, tried to speak, and could only shake my head. There was something upon me that had come from afar, and the fresh dawn air was sharp in my nostrils, and it seemed I went a little distance into death. Kerry turned white, then spoke with great resource.

"I understand what Holgar said then, O Sidi el Akir. He will ask no reward or no mercy, for he is a Frank of a great clan, brave as a dervish of Jahad. Why he has told us of the stone I know not, for it comes to me it will never be found, but it may be the spirit of the very Omar, whose name is akin to his, spoke through his lips."

"If he had asked for mercy, he would have received none," the Sidi answered. "He would be flayed, blinded, his tongue cut off, his eardrums broken, then thrown so that the hook would pierce his belly, and all day tomorrow he would dangle there, the cup of death brought close to his lips, but ever snatched away. But since he did not ask, this mercy shall I grant him. He will be thrown for the hook to pierce his chest, whereby the cup of death shall be brought speedily to his lips, and he shall empty it without respite. More, his body will not hang there until it falls, a shame and torment to the men within the walls, but it shall be taken down and dragged to the hill where the birds of death will quickly strip its bones."

"That will be a great mercy, O Sidi, if your men can throw straight."

"That's the hell of it," Holgar said under his breath.

"If they do not throw straight, and he is caught by the belly, it be the will of Allah. Now speak what I have spoken to Omar known as Sittash, who, it comes to me, may be of the same clan as Holgar, for truly their names have something the same sound, and he may tell the condemned one, for the comfort of his soul."

When it was repeated to me, Kerry blue-lipped and gasping, I still could not speak. Then Holgar spoke.

"Ask if they'll let you do it. Big Yank."

"What?"

"The stroke of grace. I gave it to Little Yank. Those bully boys of Sidi's are edgy and will bitch it sure. They'd take my legs and arms and heave, but you can do it with a good grip on my ankles. You're strong as a Hon—and you ought to see one jump over a six-foot boma with a man in his jaws. Your chains are longer than mine and will give you room enough. Great God, if you only could "

Sidi spoke imperiously. "Bid the mutineer He flat on his back."

"Both of you heard that," Kerry said. "You know what it means."

Holgar started to lie down. I had started to say to him, "If they'll let me, I will." Then, in one instant of recognition of my bond with him, I turned and touched my forehead and spoke to the Sidi the Arabic sentence that every prisoner knew.

"Your slave obeys your command."

As Holgar lay belly down, his head raised up and his gaze met mine, and I had never seen such human need in a brave man's eyes, or in any face such prayer that a cup might pass. I seized him by the shackles on his ankles, and as he stiffened to help me, heaved him off the ground. Whirling, I raised him higher and swoing him faster, and now the Sidi was shouting orders that I need not hear because there was thunder in my ears to drown them out, and now lightning flashed before my eyes. Some of his followers sprang forward, but stopped outside the orbit of the human wheel, lest it strike them and break their bones, or a flying chain smash their skulls.

All these and the master, too, fell silent. Faster it sped until, at its fourth revolving, my arms and Holgar's body made one rigid projection level with the ground. By now I saw how high his chest must rise above my head in order to strike true; and with a great wrenching sweep, I swung him upward and backward.

My chains were long enough. The strength of my shoulders and loins stood the inhuman strain of stopping him in mid-air. My back bent, my arms lowered with great power, and hammerlike over my right shoulder, Holgar swept forward and down. Suddenly there was no more weight in my hands, and there was still no sound.

I raised my eyes. The point of the hook had passed cleanly through Holgar's deep chest, and he dangled limply as a sparrow impaled on a thorn by a murderous shrike. His head bowed like a sleeper's, but his wide-open eyes were dark.

Sidi gazed and stroked his beard and was the first to speak.

"Behold a wonder!" he cried to his followers. "This dog of a Christian died with only a pinprick's flow of blood and without one wail."

"He was a stout dog, O Sidi, fit to unleash on the Day of Jahad, had it been his kismet," Ibrim replied. "So it comes to me that Allah showed him mercy."

"What of this Yanki wolfhound? He, too, is no lamb in strength. It is my belief he played a fox's trick, knowing well I would not order him to hang the meat alone."

"But truly he hung it well!"

"It comes to me that the two dogs were in close bond, out of the same pack if not the same litter, and if so, he has been punished more than by fifty blows of the kurbash. The rest I will leave to Allah, who alone gives meat and what is meet to men and dogs."

Between dusk and dark, when he would not be seen or himself missed from any head count, 'Giny Jim climbed the acacia tree above the oasis and tore down the abandoned rook's nest, a landmark old when our earliest comer went down to the Sepulcher.

As our files tramped at daybreak past the place, the scantily leafed tree stood naked and empty against the paling eastern sky. No man raised his shackled hand or his voice above a mutter, but in a few seconds the void was known to all. Many breathed hard. They believed they had seen a sign of ominous import. The guards cracked their whips.

"How could it fall?" my leader murmured in Arabic. "No gale blew last night."

"It rotted out at last, as we will," Kerry replied.

Kerry said nothing more until we were on the bed, then spoke in an evasive manner I was awake to long ago.

"Bloody queer, after all, that rook's nest falling down."

"So?"

"They're made of sticks and earth. If used long enough, the earth turns into a kind of plaster from the droppings, and you've got to break 'em up and pull 'em down. Well, I think that one was pulled down."

"What for?"

"A signal. There couldn't be any other reason. But if a great horse-breeding sheik could get you out—not free, of course—abandon hope ye who enter here—and at last you were free to go." Kerry stopped, his face gray.

"Go on, Kerry," I said.

"If you couldn't take Sparrow, you certainly can't take Jim—or me."

I knew I must not let him build in vain.

"No, I can't, but if such a thing would happen, it would be a long time off."

"Time as it passes in the Sepulcher—one day as long as a year—a year like one day."

We did not mention the matter again for about four months. I did not invite it into my mind, for the uncertainty was more harrowing than the hope was comforting; indeed, I tried to keep it out, since it caused my thoughts to move in the same futile orbit they had completed a hundred times. I had been warned that any circular path worn deeply in the mind led to madness. Almost all of us had to fight madness or drift into it; those that went too mad to work were beaten with the kurbash until they recovered their sanity or died. I had counted the chances in my favor-confronted those opposed—and could only wait.

At the end of four months, one of Suliman's caravans came out of the north, the second since his visit here, rested a day in the oasis, and departed into the blue. I had seen a robed figure beside the road close to the acacia tree as we trudged to the quarry at daybreak, but he did not give me a sign or, as far as I knew, a glance. Kerry mentioned the caravan, his eyes sunk in his head, then the subject was dropped for half a year more.

Then, on May 19, 1809—with eight years of slavery almost through —a wheel of fortune set turning in a sea-bound cave in Malta came full circle.

As we marched in iron the quarry, thornwood fires glimmered on the camp ground, and we heard the ugly bubbling cries of many camels and the shouts of their drivers. We had hardly gained the stockade when Ibrim summoned me from the rank, and Kerry rattled his chain—the slaves' way of wishing good luck—as I was led away. With hardly a word he took me to the house of the quarry master set among date palms which none of the quarry gangs had ever come nigh. Its walls were marble, of quality not quite fine enough to be worth exporting, yet beautiful, and so were the pillars and floor of its portico. It was not meet that I should enter the master's gulphor or that any guest of his should descend to the courtyard to talk to me. So Ibrim brought me into the kiffer, an entrance hall.

In only a moment Suliman came through a screened archway. I saw no change in his countenance, unless its pale brown skin was slightly more taut over its fine bone; but he had dressed more richly than before, in robes of Kashmir and a large turban with a brocaded sash and a diamond plume. In his broad belt the hilts of three daggers sparkled with red and green jewels. Behind him stood the master, his Moorish dress as gaudy as that Murad Reis had worn on the day I first wore chains.

Suliman touched hand to heart and forehead. I did the same, my chains jangling harshly. Suliman's eyes filled with tears, but there was no danger of my weeping. I had lost the power to do so—for tears are often a sign of manly power—just as I had forgotten how to laugh.

"You—can—go?" Suliman asked.

"Yes, O Sheik."

"You must make vow to me and Sidi el Akir, Allah and Christian God to witness. For long as you stay by me—all while you in my charge—you escape not. You not try escape. You be true to me and to vow. When I die, must you return to prison. No, you will not run off, but come here back without try escape. So say the Reis Effendi in name of Yussuf Pasha. Not till you back here come, and irons put on you, is bond between us broke. You understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Reis Effendi say, 'What is vow to Christian dog but barking at the moon?' I say you, I, break bread, eat salt, and I, Sheik el Beni Kabir, give bond for your bond to me. Do you swear before Allah, before God, without two face, to keep promise, keep faith?"

"I do."

Suliman spoke gravely to his host.

"Sidi el Akir, the Giour Omar known as Sittash has made the required vow, and I, Suliman, Sheik el Beni Kabir, warrant his keeping of his given word even as one of the Faithful."

"So be it. One day more shall he labor at the quarry with his fellows, and when he returns in the darkness, Ali the smith will cut away his chains, leaving only the bands on his ankles; and he may pass that night among your camel drivers, and when you start forth in the dawn, he may go with you, not to return until you have drunk the cup of death."

A moment later I was under the young stars, sniffing the dry, cool, aromatic desert air. When the gate had been opened for me, Kerry gave me a quick glance in the glimmer of the watch light, then looked away.

"You needn't tell me," he said. "I can see it in your face. When I went to my accustomed place, Kerry and Jim crouched beside me, and for a while-without knowing why-we did not mention tomorrow's business, and spoke of happenings of long ago. "Will you leave at daybreak?" Kerry asked me abruptly. "Not till the next day. I'm to work tomorrow as usual." "It won't be as usual. Still-if you don't mind-I'm glad we'll be teammates one more day. What does one day count? Well, children know it can count a great deal-I remember that-and I dare say the very old know it, too."

"I'm glad of it, too, Kerry. After that, you and Jim keep m close touch. Jim, you're to bring him the toddy that you brought me. Don t fail him any more than you failed me. He needs it to keep going and to keep strong for the day we'll break out and go free." For somewhere along the hne I had learned to speak clearly and well. "Aye, aye, Cap'n," Jim answered.

"Do you think you'll come back someday?" Kerry asked incredulously.

"When Suliman dies, I'll be sent back." I told them about my bargain.

"He may live for twenty years-lucky dog that you are! Forgive me, man."

"That's all right. Each of us has got to think of himself in proper measure. For the next few years, my chief business is living. I'm going to make up for the lost years as far as I can. But all the time I m going to be battening down against the day that Suliman dies. Remember, there's no chance for any of us to go free without outside help or a pile of money to bribe with. I'll try to get one or the other-lay plans-make preparations. And if the hope becomes bright enough while Suliman's still alive, I'll ask him to send me back here.

"It would have to be pretty damned bright," Kerry said. "To come back to this tomb from out in the open air—"

"I wouldn't have the nerve to do it unless it's almost a sure thing. At least not until I've stowed away a lot of living. I reckon it gets down to this. Your chances of escape are no worse for my being gone, and in the long run, somewhat better."

"That's all we can ask and more." Kerry turned quickly away.

My next day's labor would have been like all the others except for Kerry's attempt to make it memorable. I had learned to labor rapidly with great exactitude while listening to him, largely oblivious of heavy exertion, long hours, baking heat, or piercing cold. My body had stayed equal to it, and I had not let it torment my mind. Today we had a delicate layer of marble to cleave and lift out while Kerry recited to me tales and ballads of ancient Ireland—of great heroes who fought in chariots with packs of war dogs running before, maidens beautiful past dreaming, cattle-stealing, great loyalty and terrible revenge, fairies, witch children, and banshees—lore that he loved above all other. His low voice became vibrant with emotion, and I was afraid his brilliant eyes would attract the guard's attention.

Late in the afternoon the team just below us in the bed filled two oversize wheelbarrows with shards preparatory to dumping them into a ravine about two hundred paces above the quarry. The path was rough and largely uphill, so the chore was one of the most dreaded of the day, coming at its close when the men were near exhaustion. The teams took it in order, and today it had fallen to one of the weakest in the gang—a frail-looking Jew on his way to the Hill with bloody urine, and a broken-spirited West African Negro.

"I can't watch any whipping today," Kerry said. "Let's offer to take their turn."

"Good."

When Kerry caught Ibrim's eye, he touched his hands to his forehead in entreaty.

"You have my leave to speak," Ibrim said in Arabic.

"Effendi, Omar known as Sittash is grateful unto Allah—although he calls Him by another name—for the friendship of the great Sheik Suliman, and hence he wishes to do a deed of friendship toward a sickly fellow, which is to take Ishmael's appointed task of dumping the shards. If you wall give him your consent, I ask to relieve Na'od of the same duty."

"There's no harm in that." This was a frequently used form of assent to a petition.

Kerry chose the heavier barrow and led the way. When he came to the steep part of the hill, he took it in one rush, and he never broke the thread of a tale he was telling me—of a great warrior Chuchullin and his phantom chariot. As we came to the ravine, he pushed on further than our usual dumping place, to the top of its steepest wall. Then, setting the barrow down, he walked quickly to the brink.

He turned to me, his face still, and spoke.

"Please stay where you are a moment."

I nodded and stopped.

"That's the end of the story of Chuchullin. You see, he was a ghost even then. The witches raised him out of the grave for that his ride. And it's the end of my story, too."

"I hope you'll reconsider."

"Why should I? I made up my mind last night, and all day I've been happy over it. Today I've told you the stories I hold most dear —the only way I could honor our farewell. Jim would bring me the drinks as you told him, but I know a deeper draft than that, and sweeter to a man in my boots."

"I wouldn't want to feel that my going away caused you to do it."

"Your coming here prevented me from doing it. I was about ready when you came—I lasted eight years more. Will you tell me good-by—and wish me good luck?"

"Yes, and I wish you'd shake hands with me."

"I trust you not to jerk me back."

"I'll keep it."

He gave me his hand. I shook it, and then could do nothing but step back.

"You see it's a clean pitch," Kerry went on. "I'll hardly know what hit me. And back home in Kerry County—beside a peat fire in a smoky old house—a woman old before her time will hear a banshee scream."

"I have to tell you something."

"All right."

"Ibrim's coming on the run."

"Thanks. Good God, I thank you. Make good use of all that lore. You're my prize pupil—my friend—my only heir. Here I go!"

"Good-by, Kerry."

He smiled again, and forgotten tears flowed down his cheeks once more. Then he sprang out far, his chains rattling fiercely, and hurtled down.

CHAPTER 11 The Horseman

I BEGAN to live again the moment that Suliman's caravan passed out of sight of the Sepulcher, with no one running after us to summon me back. Asleep or awake, in the tents or far afield, feasting or famishing, lolling in the pools of the oasis or licking damp zeirs on the desert, at work or play, under chill stars or the molten sun, I lived without respite for so many days of joy that I hardly dared ask for more, yet day after day—a genie's treasure dropped jewel by jewel into my horn—I still lived on.

No labor appointed me was too heavy for my liking. No hardship, even the dreadful khamsin—the blast off hell's furnace with its pall of dust and sand—could harden my heart against the gift of life. My companions, the Beni Kabir, of smaller build than me, had been strengthened and toughened by their deserts to a degree almost unimaginable by civilized people—their only equals being other nomads roaming wastelands as harsh as theirs and the desert wolves—but I, too, had been hard-schooled. To their amazement, they need not favor me even on our first journey together if the trial was of physical endurance only. They must teach me the lore of survival in a deadly land—I was a child when it came to riding and shooting and other prowess that they prized—and at first sight of my lank body, ungainly-looking with its wide shoulders, immense, almost fleshless chest, and long, gaunt limbs, ill-hidden mirth ran up and down the line, and many jests of an indirect sharp-pointed sort made the Bedouins bark with laughter. But before the end of that month-long journey, they sang a different tune.

To the unredeemed, it would have been a dreadful trek. We crossed ever-shifting sands, climbing interminable dunes or else sand hills flat-topped by the wind. Whole deserts were hard-baked clay so thick with stones that the camels suffered, and the worst was sunbaked mud, almost snow white, that shot arrows of fiery pain into our brains. Our way wound far to touch at every oasis within fair reach. Sometimes we rested at desert wells, drinking foul or bitter water, and when they failed, the camels screamed and gnashed their teeth in vain. In stretches of total desert, we must carry water for several days, and if used too soon, to do without or die. When the moon gave us enough light, we set forth at sundown and traveled until morning; then lay in such shadow as we could find or make through the pitiless white-hot days. But I had left my chains at the Sepulcher of Wet Bones, and no long-haired, wild-eyed son of the Thirst, with gazelle's feet and camel's belly and lion's heart, need ever pass me his water jug or lend me his hand.

Only Suliman, no longer young and weakened by capture and torture by robber Bedouins ten years before, and the caravan captain, Mirsuk Effendi, did not share the labor of the camps. I became a baggage wallah, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water and a toter thereof, an uprooter of asla bushes for fuel where no thorn trees grew—it took a strong grip and a sudden jerk, at which feat I promptly had no peer—a tent raiser and a subduer of refractory camels. Before long I meant to be a rider, a hunter, and if the need came, a warrior second to none.

The Beni Kabir were essentially Bedouins—a nomadic race of Semites whose history was lost in myth—but a good half of the tribe grew dates, groundnuts, grain, lentils, and indigo in well-watered gardens of the Baeed Oasis. In the village stood Suliman's palace, an ancient, many-arched edifice of cool stone and sun-baked brick, bare of all furniture except divans and weapons hung on the walls. But his wild-eyed men and their leopard-fithe women followed their flocks and herds on the far-flung steppes, where many a sun-baked hillside furnished camel fodder and the wadis grew herbage fit for fat-tailed sheep. Much of this domain was a series of depressions, too arid to be called oases, but sending forth scanty but strong grass in the wake of far-scattered showers. Here Suliman and his nephew Zaal, with their retainers and slaves, raised horses of the ancient Arabian breed.

I became a helper to Timor, pale-skinned, hawk-eyed, and eagle-beaked, who corralled and broke to bit and saddle stallions, beautiful geldings, and a few half-wild mares. It was Timor who taught me to ride. Although I was a slave, Timor knew I had broken bread and eaten salt with Suliman, hence the teaching was of no makeshift sort, for I must not shame him in attendance on him before his fellow sheiks. Daily for six months I must ride bareback, with no bridle and only one halter rope to guide and control my mount. This taught me balance and harmony with the mare's gaits and, most important of all, a kind of fellowship with her more than a master-servant relationship—as though she lent me her back for the pleasure of my company and our runs together on this great dun pasture of my dreams made only sport.

Many mares were hand-raised. Those that showed great promise drank camel's milk and were coddled with bread flaps. Almost all became gentle as shepherd bitches, partly because of the care and caresses lavished on them from the day they were foaled, partly a matter of breeding. The Arab had no use for a vicious horse, whether stallion or mare, and when one showed the signs—the rolling eye, the back-drawn lips, the head swung in a scythe-like motion—his life was short and unproductive. The stallions that got many fillies and few colts came to honor, but the Bedouins barred them from their tents and largely from their hearts, and composed no verses in their praise such as every sheik and water boy sang to the melting-eyed mares. They almost never rode them in sport or war.

A well-bred, well-trained mare became incredibly loyal to her master. The Bedouin had ceased to marvel at her refusing to leave him wounded on the desert, waterless or in the dread khamsin. And it was no myth that she would fight for him to the death against desert wolves, whether four-legged or two.

Timor praised my progress in riding—for a farengi (foreigner) I did quite well. Actually, I was doing better than well, as he well knew; and it would have surprised me if I weren't. I was a hard-taught rider of the horse-of-tree. I had learned to grip with my knees and my thighs, to resist sudden jerks, and to keep my balance under difficulties. My weight was light, yet I had powerful hands and forearms. A man who had come up out of the Sepulcher of Wet Bones need not be afraid of horses or of painful falls. Now that my chains had fallen, I loved to fly—and tliere is no such soaring motion in reach of man as the full run, neck and tail arched, of an Arabian horse.

I wished to please Suliman and to gain izzat in his tribe. Both would make for fuller living and for higher hope of the future. I did not intend to stop with being a good horseman. I proposed to be among the very best of the Bedouins, who are among the best equestrians in the world. If I stayed whole and long enough among them, I would succeed.

That was a far cry. Meanwhile, there were days crammed with living and nights—such nights as we need not be abroad—of light, dimly blissful, refreshing sleep. The lot of slaves is almost never hard among the Bedouins. Suliman did not favor me above other of the slaves who had striven and starved beside him, except in one particular. Once with every change of the moon he summoned me to his great pavilion, usually at midnight, to receive me as a kinsman and give me sirupy green tea and a well-bubbling water pipe. We talked in English on such large and eternal topics as the excellence of women and of horses; the splendor of heroes and the glory of war and the joys of hunting; of black-maned lions that killed in one terrible, silent rush; of leopards that slew colts and sometimes mares in the ambushes of the night; of hawks and hounds; and of those two obsessions of all undegenerate Arabs, the beauty of poetry and of the stars.

But he never spoke to me of Allah or his prophet Mohammed. Even if we had both desired that I embrace Islam, I could not do so because slavery was my kismet as long as I stayed in Suliman's charge, and no Mohammedan may keep a slave of his own faith.

Suliman occupied his palace in Baeed Oasis for about one week in each of tlie four seasons. Most of the year he "followed the grass" with us, the hfe that he most loved. His pavilion was about sixty by thirty feet, with removable curtains of black felt. About half of this space comprised the mukaad—a rug-strewn hall where he ate, smoked, conferred with his captains, and entertained male guests. The rest was given over to cooking and what httle other housekeeping nomads considered necessary, and to the haremlik, the curtained-off quarters of the women of his household.

At present Suliman had no wives. His last, the daughter of a minor emir of Hejaz whom he had married late, had died at the birth of his only son four years before my coming. Two crones, relations of the lad's mother, cared for him; and the other occupant was a young Nubian slave girl, a Coptic Christian, sable-brown, with clean-cut features and form. Her children by him would be born free—so far there had been no loosening of her robe to rejoice the tribe—but even if she bore Suliman a son, he would not take her to wife, and for a peculiar reason. In case of his death before his son Selim reached sixteen, his ranking widow would become the boy's guardian and have far more power over the tribe than would be easily credible in more settled and civilized Islamic lands—especially since Suhman's nephew Zaal loved the fleshpots of the cities and would not live the life of a Bedouin. For this office and influence Zara was fitted neither by hereditary place, education, nor intelligence. Thus the elders would be left free to direct the boy until he came of age.

A few other maliks—close kinsmen of the sheik—pitched tents in our longer stays; the rest slept under canopies only in the blast of the midday sun. These were hastily raised, often no more than a felt curtain hung on a thornbush. The wives and daughters of my companions did the same, unveiled, often bare-bosomed, with little thought of purdah; sometimes at night we must erect shields against wind-blown sand, but we almost never shut out the lovely starlight or the enchanting glimmer of the moon. Our other living customs seemed sybaritic compared with those of the prison, yet settlers on the American frontier, who can cany their goods in one wagon, would have considered us savages.

Our staple food was camel cheese well-crusted and rank, dried dates, and beans and bread flaps cooked over a fire of camel dung, thornwood, or thornbush. Our favorite drink was fermented camel milk, instead of the mare's milk beloved by the Tartar—all the milk in our mares' bags must go to their frail-legged babes. The Bedouin was no stickler for strict Mohammedan dietary laws—our greyhounds often caught rabbits, or we rode them down and clubbed them; any kind of bird's egg in any stage of development was a welcome dish; and if gophers, owls, and even jerboas found a way into the pot, what I did not know did not hurt me. Often we shot gazelles, and we never hankered very long for boiled mutton.

When Suliman feasted guests, we slaves were given our turn at the leavings. These would be on a six-foot metal platter, carried on camelback, still laden with a hollow ring of rice filled with fat meat and liver wallowing in gravy. Like any sheik, we dipped in our right hands, rolled rice-and-meat balls deftly in our fingers, let drain the surplus juices, and conveyed them to our mouths. Occasionally the dish was a whole camel colt boiled in milk. When no other meat was in reach, we slaughtered aged or unpopular baggage camels. But we would not dream of eating the beautiful white riding camels with sweet breaths, and it would have been a kind of cannibalism to devour a worn-out horse. Our single greatest treat was wild honey of spicy flavor, the same with which Canaan flowed.

Occasionally in the dead of night—for I must never go naked before a Mussulman—I swam in the pools or canals of the oasis. Out on the desert I never dreamed of using precious water to wash with, depending on sweat to keep my pores clean and open and rubbing off surplus dirt with sand. Although unwashed, these Bedouins could not be called an unclean people. They would not tolerate filth of any sort, and the parched lands were their habitat along with the gazelle, the ostrich, and the desert fox. The life they lived was as clean as theirs.

I would have gladly lived it all my days if my body and soul were free.

By Mohammedan law, a slave could not own property of any kind, and the clothes on his back and the tobacco in his pouch belonged to his master. Actually, most slaves had personal effects, and some accumulated valuables. Barter went on among us, and buying and selling—with Indian pice and annas, Spanish pesos, and Maria Theresa dollars—was not uncommon.

I had not stayed long in Suliman's charge before making the beginning of a hoard. Whenever Timor smoked or ate hashish and the drug took hold of him, he would give me a share, which I only pretended to consume, and instead saved to sell or trade for something useful to me. He taught me how to snare pigeons, sand grouse, and bustards at the water holes, which I exchanged with my fowl-hungry mates for cloth or worked leather; and thus I evolved a stratagem that in the course of time put several pieces of gold into my pouch. It was the catching of saker falcons, greatly prized throughout Islam. It required burying myself in sand except for my head and one arm, which I concealed under bush. In my hand was a small net on a stick; in easy reach was a live pigeon tied fast to a piece of thorn-wood. The bird's fluttering attracted the towering hunter; when he stooped for the kill, I covered him with the net.

By the close of my second year among the Beni Kabir, I had bought from a wandering mullah paper, pen, and inkhorn, and had five Maria Theresa dollars with which to bribe an Egypt-bound camel driver touching at our oasis. The letter I entrusted to him, to be passed secretly to any Christian in Western dress, was addressed to the President of the United States. It stated that an American, Homer Whitman, a native of Batli in the District of Maine in Massachusetts, and known in Africa as Omar or Sittash, was a slave in the care of the Beni Kabir about the Baeed Oasis; and at the death of the sheik, he would be returned to the Jebel quarries of Yussuf Pasha. I did not feel that my sending it broke faith with Suliman. It was not an attempt to escape; if American authorities tried to help me they would do so, of course, through the Tripolitan government. But it took far more courage than sending the horsehair token to Suliman, simply because my plight was not as immediately desperate. If the letter were intercepted, the camel driver would be cruelly punished and I would pass my last hours on the iron hook.

My fears proved as vain as my hopes. I did not hear of the letter then or in the future: in the words of another Omar, the tentmaker, his verse and epigrams known by heart to many Beni Kabir, the matter passed away like snow on the face of the desert. Meanwhile, I undertook a less momentous but exciting venture, that might win me izzat with Suliman and my wild companions.

The Stone of Kismet had been cast in the Pool of Life when the world was made, causing ripples throughout eternity. But the real starting-point understood by us mortals, occurred four years before my arrival and was of no great mark. During a journey from Derna to Alexandria, Lilla, tlie riding mare of Zaal, Suliman's nephew, one of the Beni Kabir's most beautiful and swift mares, came in heat. There was no reason to think any stallions ranged in five days' journey of that sun-blasted shore, so Zaal did not order a special guard and had been content to put hobbles on her forefeet. In the midnight amid blown sand, a stallion came up the wind, covered her, and was trying to make off with her when the hostlers heard the uproar and drove him away with rifle fire.

In due course she was delivered of a colt straightway named El Shermoot (The Bastard). A large colt that had brought great pain and danger to his mother, he fell immediately into ill repute with the hostlers, and perhaps that had something to do with his subsequent career of crime. Gawky and odd-looking, he had an oversize head with a Roman nose and dark gray dapples with soot black rims—such color as was never seen on a pure-bred Arab and, in the men's eyes, ugly and of ill omen. Only his luxurious black mane and tail recalled his beloved dam; from his knees to his big feet— and well-bred Arabs have small feet—he was likewise black.

In three years he stood sixteen hands, weighed a good twelve hundred, and was a raw-boned bastard if the Bedouins ever saw one. His big, block-shaped head with its hook nose was ugly as a baggage camel's, and he carried it low instead of lifted, as does a queenly Arab. He had a very long neck, powerful sloping shoulders to take the shock of his down plunge, great depth of chest and hence lots of heart, and the most awe-inspiring quarters that these Bedouins had ever seen. By now he kept to the most distant flank of the herds, but after his first capture of a mare—and generally our mares were not attracted to immature stallions—they could see him at close range simply by chasing his bride. At middle distance he would circle between the rider and his beloved, pawing, snorting, and trumpeting. If the pursuer drew close, El Shermoot would charge him in screaming fury. Whether or not he would press home the attack remained an open question. When a small Bedouin on his delicate-looking fifteen-hand-high mare saw the dappled monster bearing down on him, he beat a swift retreat.

In the next three years he stole several mares and successfully resisted aU our efforts to recover them. Some, with Shaitan in their hearts, followed him from pure sluttishness, my companions maintained, but some were plainly seduced by whirlwind courtship, his bravery and fleetness, the scent of the wild upon him, and even his ugliness, which is known to appeal sometimes to the most delicate females. Their foals grew up in outlawry, of no use to Allah or man, stealing precious grass out of our children's—for the tender-eyed mares amounted to that, in the Bedouins' sight—mouths.

Still Suliman would not consent to our shooting El Shermoot. Our sheik was born and raised on one of the most ruthless of the seven deserts, yet was gentle and chivalrous to a noble degree. When a horse had to be destroyed because of sickness or broken bones, he would get out his silver-mounted rifle, load it with great care, and then hand it to the executioner with these words that every one of us knew by heart.

"Are you going to bungle it? If you are, I'll do it."

Invariably the answer was: "If I bungle it, O Sheik, I entreat that the next bullet may be mine!"

The hard job was never bungled. As Suliman walked quickly away, the bullet was placed with greater care than in the breast of an arch foe in a blood feud.

For other reasons than humanitarian, I rejoiced that the liberty-loving ungainly brute was spared. And when he came five and I thirty-one, I found a special justification for his survival.

I stood concealed on a rocky hillock, less than a quarter of a mile downwind from El Shermoot's herd. The season had been severe, so he had driven off all his barren mares and well-grown foals, retaining only gravid mares and those giving suck, by no means exceptional behavior by a stallion in hard times, but proving to me that his ferocity toward us was not viciousness but the instinct of protection for his charges worthy a desert king. As I watched, a mare acting as sentinel was remiss in her duty. She failed to see a cheetah—the long-legged hound-shaped hunting leopard—stalking a young foal.

If I called or shot or moved, I would attract the attention of the herd, giving the cat a better chance to do her deviltry. Still, I thought she had been rash to approach this near El Shermoot, and I became sure of it when he caught sight of her between the thorn clumps. Whirling, he charged her, uttering short, sharp neighs of fury in rapid succession, a far-carrying and truly terrifying sound.

The prowler took off, gathering speed at every bound, until she reached her top pace. This, the desert men believed, was the swiftest gait of any earthly creature without wings. Zaal had told me that an Indian prince had timed his pet cheetah's dash from the instant that he was slipped until he overtook a fleeing buck at 18 seconds for 430 yards. Yet in the covering of about that distance, I thought that the stallion might overtake the marauder. Perhaps he could have done so in a longer race—the hunting leopards are short-winded—but the cat dashed into brushwood and disappeared.

I lost no time in seeking admission to Suliman's presence to report the incident.

"O Sheik, it comes to me that the stallion that stole upon Zaal Malik's camp six years ago and covered his mare Lilla was no common cob, but a great runner and jumper of good lineage."

"I've been long of the same opinion, but how did you arrive at it?"

"When I was in the Sepulcher of Wet Bones, I heard of how General Eaton, from my native land, led a force from Alexandria to Derna in the hope of casting Yussuf Pasha from his throne and putting there Hamet Pasha. It was said that he set forth on a gray stallion, bought in England, and a gift from Hamet, but on his arrival in Derna his mount was a white camel. Perhaps the stallion had escaped and strayed away."

"Verily it was so. The gray stallion that the Yanki sirdar lost was none other than Ottoman, whose pedigree began with the Byerly Turk, and one of the greatest 'chasers of our times. The dapples of his skin were ringed with black, and he had black points."

"That's almost certain evidence, O Sheik."

"Furthermore, one of Zaal Malik's slaves caught sight of the raider as he thundered about in the dust storm, trying to take away into his deserts the hobbled mare Lilla. He gave him as dark gray with black points."

I told Suliman of the race I had seen today. There came a faint flush under the parchmentlike skin on his cheekbones, and he watched me closely.

"O Sheik, of all our horses, there's only one who can race with Ottoman's bastard son, the mare Farishti, full sister of Kobah."

"That I believe."

"Farishti will pine for a mate on the next moon, and if you give me leave, I'll take her to El Shermoot; and if she drops a filly, it may be her like will have never been seen on the Seven Deserts."

"She would not be pure-bred, but—by Allah, she would fly like an afrite. And what family is so old and noble that it will not benefit from a little bastardry? Omar, how could you bring Farishti to EI Shermoot without putting yourself in great danger?"

"I'll speak of it to Timor, O Sheik, and we'll devise a plan."

"You have my leave, but only if you carry your rifle, and, if your danger waxes great, shoot to kill."

El Shermoot remained in easy distance, perhaps because the mares divorced from his herd had returned to our bivouacs. Timor gave me good advice and fixed me a twenty-fathom line, one end of which I looped around Farishti's head for a halter. Riding her bareback, I encircled The Bastard's band until I was straight upwind, then cantered straight toward him. When we were still a mile away, he gave forth the prolonged, deep-pitched neigh that all horsemen know.

But he was soon aware of me, too. Instead of rushing in, he continued to circle between us and his mares. Often his lusty trumpet-ings changed to staccato blasts of rage, not ineptly transcribed as "Allah!" in the Book of Job. He was moving toward me now, with mingled pugnacity and fear. When he was still two furlongs distant, I came near a pile of rocks that would give some protection if I must face a lethal charge. I slid off Farishti's back and ran, the rope uncoiling in my hand. Taking a bight around the rock, I crouched down behind it, my rifle primed and cocked.

El Shermoot saw the movement and broke into a furious run. Still I did not believe I would have to shoot. A motionless figure seems to become almost invisible to animals—I had learned to take advantage of this fact when hunting gazelles—and often allays their belligerency. Besides, the counter-attraction was a force as elemental and mysterious, akin to that which makes a tree root shatter a stone wall.

Timor's foretelling came true—El Shermoot forgot or scorned my existence. This scene of the dynamics of procreation was one I would never forget, never cease to hold in mystery and awe. The dun desert stretched afar, the sun blazed down, before my eyes these two—the great gray steed, fit to lead a battle or found a breed honored by equestrian brotherhoods all over the world, and the gentle, sable— brown mare of small and beautiful contour—joined flesh to make new life.

Their chorused scream of agony and ecstasy woke the sleeping desert, and they shone in the sunlight with ineffable vividness. I could not begin to grasp the significance of the event, for it was cosmic and eternal, but when the storm had passed and the stallion tried to drive his mate into the herd that he led and protected, surely I witnessed lowly kinship with human love.

These were my moments of greatest danger. If I made the slightest motion, quite possibly he would come and tower and strike with his terrible front hooves. As it was, the rope that held Farishti, bighted about the rock and in my hands, had no clear meaning to him, and my scent, long in his nostrils, had become cold or without power to arouse his rage. Meanwhile his mares were drawing further off, calling with high-pitched neighs. He began running in ever larger circles between them and his tethered bride. When a great sweep had taken him nearly a quarter of a mile, I freed the rope, coiled it as I ran, and sprang on Farishti's back. Lashing her with its end and kicking her in the side, I headed her toward the bivouacs fast as she could go.

This was no mean pace. She had feet that she picked up cleanly, and an arched neck and tail, and the desert wind whistled past my ears. Looking over my shoulder, I saw El Shermoot coming full tilt. A whole mile he chased us, but our lead was too great for him to overtake in this distance, and at last he must return to his wards.

My mullah Timor and my fellow hostlers were delighted with the match, and many bets were laid and speculations made as to its outcome. My companions held the Old Testament belief that whatever took the sire's eye at the instant of conception would mark the offspring; and since I could make no capital out of a pile of rocks, a rope, the sun-baked desert, and the blazing sky, I told them of beholding a vision of countless horses marching in file from one horizon to another, stallions of valor and mares of matchless beauty, the posterity of El Shermoot and Farishti's for a thousand and one years; and perhaps the same vision was given to El Shermoot and would thus come true.

The months flew by. There came a night that all our horsemen ringed about a thorn-log fire with their women crouched at the flickering rim of shadows. Farishti had been in labor more than six hours. In the early part she had alternately stood or laid down; now she lay grunting, panting, and moaning, and unless she could be delivered of her foal in a short time, she would never rise again. Suliman crouched beside her, stroking her muzzle, letting her hear his voice. Three of our best veterinarians—and truly they deserved the title better than many alumni of Lyons—worked with cool, steady, but desperate diligence to save life.

At every labor of the brave mare, the colt's shoulder or hip blocked passage. All spoke of him now as the colt—his size settling the question. In my great desire, I had been among the last to abandon hope of a filly, and now my dispute with kismet when his finger wrote so plain had frightened me, for my mind had become deeply inured to Arab superstition.

Actually, the danger grew greater every minute. The doctors had fixed halter ropes to the colt's forefeet, but all they could do was keep them taut, so that when Farishti's labor thrust him outward a little further, the retraction of her muscles would not draw him back again. There was no sound now but the crackle of the fire, Farishti's pantings, and the low voices of Suliman and his helpers. The rest seemed hardly to breathe.

One of the doctors, the graybeard Ali ibn Ahmad, rose, touched his hands to his forehead, and spoke to Suliman.

"O Sheik, it comes to me that we cannot save the colt, and unless we slay him and take him forth piecemeal, we cannot save Farishti."

"Would that be a surety of saving Farishti, Ali ibn Ahmad?"

"Nay, but I count it the best hope."

Suliman pondered a moment, stroking his beard. Then he turned to Ali ibn Ahmad, the eldest of the three doctors, and asked for a lump of musk from the medicine box. While Ali held Farishti's mouth open, he forced it down her throat. After waiting a few minutes for the stimulant to take hold, he began to coax the mare to her feet. Perhaps he believed that her dead weight in her prone position prevented the full extension of her womb. More likely he wanted to make the utmost appeal to her spirit. It caught the imagination of the Beni Kabir and arrested every movement.

"At her next pain, pull hard," he told the holders of the ropes.

As Farishti laid her muzzle in his hands, we heard his low but insistent "Jhai—jhai!" Jerkily and feebly at first, but with growing strength, she got her feet under her and heaved. Once her foreknees buckled, but she tried again, and with a surge of her quarters—whose beautifully rounded muscle structure is the driving force of the great runners—she lurched to her feet. The exertion instantly brought on a heavy labor pain. The ropes tightened ruthlessly, heightening her agony and causing her to bear down with all her strength. Farishti gave forth a long-drawn scream, humanlike, awful to hear, that carried me back to the terrible outcries from the Sepulcher of Wet Bones. But as it died away, we saw the whole form of the colt emerge and drop into Ali ibn Ahmad's waiting arms.

Seconds later the dam and her foal lay side by side. We saw Farishti raise her head to put her muzzle in Suliman's hands—that was all the proof we needed of her well-being—and the faces of the doctors soon assured us that the colt had taken no hurt. Wet and dust-smeared though he was, I soon had a good enough idea of his appearance.

He was dark gray in color, the dapples being ringed with black. His mane and tail were jet, and so, too, his legs from the knees down. His head was too large even for such a big colt, and if he would not grow up raw-boned, I missed my guess. But not until he raised his head for his first clear look at the world was my final suspicion confirmed. The hook of his nose would do credit to a highborn Hebrew elder.

As we waited for the next development, we watchers were too elated to do more than hold hands and hug one another and beam into one another's faces. It came when, about thirty minutes after birth, the colt tried his legs. We feared to cheer lest we frighten him, but we watched in greatest joy. Without one tumble he rose on the spindly stems, wobbled, got his balance, and took four precarious steps nearer Farishti's teats before he sprawled.

"The time has come to name the newborn one," Suliman announced solemnly, after Ishmael ibn Abdul, our tribal bard, and a markedly handsome youth, had composed a song in honor of mother and son.

The elders nodded wisely.

"It comes to me that the slave Omar should have a say in the matter," Suliman went on. "Omar, have you thought upon a suitable name?"

"Nay, O Sheik." For it was honor enough to be asked, and I must not press it in the hearing of my mates.

"When I first met you, before you went into slavery, you were a rider even then—of a horse-of-tree. You told me her name, and it was a stirring one—though I have forgotten it. Think you it will be good fortune, or ill, if the colt were named after your good ship?"

Deeply stirred, I could not at once reply. That did not count against me—the sheik thought I was giving due thought to the question.

"Good fortune, O Sheik," I said, when my breath came back. "And the name of the ship was 'The Vindictive,' which in Arabic—as near as I may come to it—is El Stedoro."

"Allah bear witness it is a good name, one of great meaning to us Bedouin. So shall he be known among us and, if Allah wills, far beyond our deserts, for truly he has the makings of a great steed, and even now I would not sell him for a hundred gold dinars. Furthermore, I wall entrust him to your care. See that he does not grow up an outlaw like his sire, at the same time making sure you do not break his spirit. You shall put the first halter on his great head, the first saddle on his stout back. When the time comes to train him as a hunter and jumper—"

But Suliman stopped, white and short of breath. We had forgotten the late hour and the strain he had been under; and while the others remembered these things now, I thought of so much more.

"If Allah spares my life that long, you shall do those things," Sufi-man went on, his eyes sunk in his head.

There were visions before my eyes.

"Yea, yea, O Sheik," I answered.

I had been waiting my chance to ask permission to trap El Sher-moot at a water hole, in a steep-walled wadi, let him go hungry until I could half-tame him with food, then ride him until he acknowledged me his master and have him for my use. But I could not afford the venture. It would take thought and effort for which my pleasure and such izzat as I could win would not recompense me. My usual tasks plus the care of El Stedoro would keep me busy enough; the life in the camps and the field was good enough. What extra time I had must be put to a greater use. That much I knew. What I did not know was which way to turn.

CHAPTER 12 Signs and Wonders

If coming event cast its shadow before, the only one who saw it was Timor, my mullah.

When El Stedoro was a yearling, we had followed the grass to the extreme southeastern border of our hereditary domain. At a water hole, Timor set traps for far-flying pigeons; and in the crop of one he found pearl millet, not grown west of the oases of Central Egypt, south of Baeed Oasis, or east of the lands of the muleth themin—the Veiled People—the lordly Tuareg. It was unthinkable that a bird could cross such expanses in a matter of hours, but she could have robbed a caravan on a rarely-used road some sixty miles southward.

"A great caravan," Timor remarked thoughtfully, stroking his beard.

"It may be so, but how can you know?"

"From whence would a small caravan start, and where would it go? There is nothing but desolation, with a few water holes in the wadis, from the Oasis of Kawar eastward to the Nile. The Tuareg had traveled a whole moon when they came to Kawar. Would they have set out those many miles with fifty camels? Nay, there be five hundred, and the sheik and his sons and his women and their riding beasts subsist not on bread flaps and camel cheese and thorn! A trifle among good things, they carry enough pearl millet to waste it on the ground!"

"Bismillah!" I cried. This was to invoke the mercy of Allah on the wasteful rich and the needful poor.

"They are passing even now within a stone's throw."

"Nay, the toss of a stone—by an afrite tall as a mountain. We can almost see their dust!"

"Truly they are in two, at most three days' journey. And why should the lordly Tuareg come to these wastelands accursed of Allah? Listen, my son, to what I unfold. The Beni Tuareg are not Unbelievers, but they have strange ways. The men mask their faces instead of the women as with us."

As for my face, I kept it straight, although one of the most amusing of the Bedouin's illusions was that their women wore veils. Actually I had seen them worn only on one or two ceremonial occasions.

"Also, the women sway more power in the councils and over their husbands than is meet," Timor went on. "Still, it must be admitted that they are most beautiful."

I had heard all this before and a great deal more. The tall, light-skinned Tuareg, although nominally Mohammedans, were the scandal of all Islam. They ate what they pleased, prayed when they liked, venerated the Cross—perhaps from some early contact with Christianity—and, most impious of all, allowed their women as much freedom as they enjoyed themselves. The bold-faced Bedouin girls were models of modesty compared to the tall daughters of the Tuareg, who sang and danced and recited poetry in open assembly, took the leading part in courting, and uncovered their breasts. Descent was traced through the distaff as in matriarchies. Wives were treated with real chivalry.

"About five years ago the Emir of the Kel Innek—that is one of the greatest and richest of the Tuareg clans—fell under the spell of a marabou from Yemen, and since then you would think him a whirling dervish for piety," Timor went on. "And it comes to me that he has now set out for Mecca on holy pilgrimage."

It was good enough guessing, I thought, but far from a surety. If indeed an emir of the Masked Men was on pilgrimage to Mecca, I wished that I could fall in with him on his return journey. If excessive piety had not dehumanized him, I could be confident of arousing his interest in a Yankee slave, and quite possibly make an arrangement of shining hope. He was not subject to the Pasha of Tripoli, and the Tuareg held sway beyond Ghat, only four hundred miles from the Sepulcher of Wet Bones. When my time came to break out, some of his riding camels might be waiting. . . .

But kismet had written otherwise.

In the middle of the night following Timor's finding of the millet, I was brought up out of my dreams by being gently shaken. I wakened to hear Timor murmuring "Omar," and to see his finely wrinkled ascetic face by the rays of the moon. Plainly he had just come in from riding herd.

"Saddle and come with me," he told me in low tones.

At once he set about filling extra water jugs and fastening them to his croup. Finally he saddled and haltered one of the spare mares-there were always a number in camp, either lying underfoot with the greyhounds or having to be pushed out of our way—and with her bridle, tied her to my saddle strings. Stuffing some balls of camel cheese into his bags, he mounted a fresh mare and led me onto the silvered desert.

"None but Allah knows what may come over the desert," he remarked when we were riding up the steep slope above the wadi.

"Yea, verily," I responded, as he would wish.

"There may be an afrite, tall as a mountain, or there may be only a whirlwind, and there may be a caravan of the dead that lost its way and died and must wander for a thousand and one years, or there may be a great emir with his thousand horsemen, or a hermit following a dream. Truly there are no bounds to its wonders. But tonight a thing comes over the desert I have never seen."

The back of my neck prickled fiercely, but I did not speak.

"It may bring evil, and it may bring good. Only Allah knows. Certain signs given to me were favorable, such as a jumping of my left eye and a jerboa bounding to the right across my path. As I came in to waken you, I saw the sheik's female slave coming from the well with a brimming water jar—in daylight a good omen, but at this midnight hour a foreshadowing of great portence, whether for woe or weal. Yet I kept my resolve to waken you, and to let you ride foremost on a path we will presently come on, if such is your will, so thereby the good or evil fortune waiting at the path's end will mainly fall on you."

"I am your protected, O Mullah!"

"Nay, but you have learned to ride under my teaching. Mark, now, that I am no longer young and have no sons. If great fortune came, I would not know what to do with it, and I am hardly worth evil fortune's trouble. Also, your lot is a most strange and terrible one, for when the cup of death is brought unto our sheik, you must go again into living death. Tonight I saw what may be a lucky chance. At least it comes about from no common happening on our desert. It is all I have to give you and it is yours to play or to pass by."

"Whatever it is, I won't pass it by."

"Then hear me now, while our horses labor up the hill, for when we gain its crest we must ride fast. There I found the hoofprints of a horse going straight north. They had been made since sundown, for before then there was light wind that would have effaced them with blown sand. The horse had not veered in his course for rough ground or smooth, and once had crushed through a thicket of tamarisk that he could have avoided by swerving no more than twenty strides."

"If he were blind, he wouldn't keep a straight course. He would go mad and run into the rocks and die. It must be his rider is blind."

"No, for the horse can turn right or left enough to avoid a single rock or bush. That I saw. I think the horse is still in his right mind, although his rider may be dead. I think he wears a thing that I had never seen, but which I heard of long ago—which certain tribes on the far deserts use when one of their number is sent into banishment forever. It is two rods of wood or iron fixed under the edge of the saddle on both sides and miming forward to the rings on each end of the bit. Thereby the horse cannot turn his head to right or left except for such play as the rods might give. The banished one is set in the saddle with his hands tied, and the horse headed in the direction the tribe wishes him to go. Sometimes he is seen and stopped before he runs over a cliff or into a cul-de-sac, but on deserts such as these, usually not."

"Can't we go faster?"

"Is that my good teaching, or has all I've taught you run out of your head when you need it most? If we wind our horses on this climb, how may they run when the race is to the swift?"

"Yoiu pardon, O Mullah!"

"Aye. And in the tamarisk thicket, I found this." He took a small bundle from under his burnoose and put it in my hand. It was a tattered scarf of heavy Kashmir, richly embroidered.

Neither of us spoke again till we gained the height. At once we slipped into the easy, seemingly effortless canter of the trained, true-bred Arab, the gait we call "the wind off the hills of Hejaz." It was the pace that would take us farthest fastest between now and dawn.

Timor led until we came to that strange straight line of footprints, then turned out to let me pass. My first comfort was, the horse that had come up out of the south into our domains was walking, not running, and at a steady pace. I saw no footprint out of line to show reefing and staggering. Of equal importance, his northward course had brought him onto the gently rolling Plain of Jerdaz, with low bush scattered here and there, but no rocks and no deep-cut wadis for thirty or more miles. The bare ground showed clean tracks about two inches deep. It was of yellow clay that blasted a man's eyes at midday, and its fantastic mirages were the wonder of our tribe, but now it lay cool and luminous, silent and empty; and now my soul became serene—open to any wonder—and my mind worked better.

"If the rider is a Tuareg, why isn't he on a camel?" I called back to Timor. These pale-colored nomads of the Sahara were cameleers second to none, and rarely seen on horseback.

"Their emirs keep a few fine horses for show," Timor answered.

A little later a patch of clay damp from underground springs showed the prints perfectly sharp.

"I've never seen a horse shod like that one," I told my companion.

"I think the shoes are silver or gold."

Thereafter we rode in silence for about two hours, cantering or trotting fast. The horse we were tracking was not quite as steady as at first. I pulled up for a quick glance at an unfavorable sign about a thicket of asla bushes. The horse had tangled his feet in the growth and fallen—plain proof he was close to exhaustion—and had staggered badly before he had gained good foothold. Yet this evidence raised a thrilling question in my mind. Would he have risen at all except by the strong will of his rider?

I did not waste breath putting it to Timor. Anyway, our wasteland horses know the necessity of marching on—knew that immobility on the desert spells death—and the dauntless beast might have won the fight alone. He had fetched up heading in a slightly different direction, so now his course was more to the west. That way lay rougher ground and, not far off, rocky gullies.

I made a calculation for the twentieth time. If the tracks we had intercepted had been made after sundown, the horse could have walked thirty miles by now. We had followed the trail for about twenty miles. If we came on her in the next mile, he had traveled, perhaps trotting a good part of the way, at least eighty miles, for the caravan road crossed sixty miles south of our camp. The rider had been bound in the saddle perhaps as long as twenty hours, certainly through the heat of the day, and might be an hour's ride further on.

"Omar, we draw close," Timor called.

"How do you know?" I asked.

"By the tracks. These are very fresh."

"I can't see any difference."

"Your eyes are younger than mine—but mine are older than yours." This was a typical Bedouin mot. And I did not really doubt, in spite of its seeming improbability, that although there was no breath of wind to stir the dust, those old trained eyes could see a clearer shaping of the print than at first.

When we had ridden another mile, he called again.

"By Allah, this horseman is no weakling."

"You speak as though you know he's still alive."

"If he's not, his ghost still keeps the beast in good control, in spite of his thirst and his head shafts, enough to drive him mad."

I tried not to strain my eyes peering ahead, because I had learned long ago that an easy glance will catch an obscure object or distant glimmer of light that will escape an intent stare. When the eyes are relaxed, half-seen things signal the brain. I craved the sight of the strange traveler and felt a deep need to discover him before Timor did This was a superstitious urge and something more. Timor had vested in me the good or evil fortune of the venture; if he were the first to spy the quarry, it would be a sign that fate had not sanctioned the appointment and the main consequences must fall to him. He wanted me to succeed, but he did not look away.

Then, almost before my brain acknowledged the discovery, i raised a triumphant cry.

"There he is!"

At the far frontier of vision a shadow among the shadows tucked and faded out.

"Allah be praised!"

We rode another hundred yards before a speck on my eyeballs became the merest moving smudge in the silvery dimness ahead; then it swiftly took shape as a horse and rider. The latter was leaning forward against the horse's neck, but his head was up instead o lopping; and as we let our horses run, their hooves beat a joyful cadence on the hard ground.

"The horse must be bigger than his tracks showed," I called to my companion.

"Nay, it's a small rider, and that is a strange thing, for the tuareg are tall people. Even their women are tall—"

The rider had sat up straight. "Timor, is it a woman?"

"My son, I think it is."

In a few seconds more we knew. I rode upon the flank of the trammeled animal and seized his bridle. The rider turned her face full into mine. It was not that of a man or a woman either, or an afrite, but of a girl of about thirteen.

Her left wrist was strapped tight to the pommel of her saddle. Her right arm was fixed in a kind of sling, whereby she could unstop and drink from a water jug hung on her breast. Her ankles had been fastened with a strap running under the horse's belly.

I put my jug to her lips while she swallowed thrice. In a few quick slashes of my kris, I had cut all her bonds. Then the sensible thing would have been to lift her off and set her on the ground, for I saw terror and hope in desperate conflict in her face, and back of these an unbelievable struggle to conceal them both, but I could not keep from bringing her to my saddle and holding her a little while in my arms.

Timor broke loose the ivory shafts on each side of the horse's neck. I had noticed now that he was a snow-white gelding, probably a high-bred barb; his saddle was Spanish leather with gold and silver inlay, his cloth of green felt had a heavy fringe of gold threads, his bridle rings were silver, and he wore silver shoes slipped on over his hooves. But Timor had hardly rid him of the last of his load when he toppled down.

Timor opened his mouth and poured water down his throat; then he turned to me with a shaking head.

"He dies even now."

"But the rider is saved."

"I said the rider was a horseman, and even now I do not deny she's stuff of one, to have made him come this far without whip or spur. And we've saved a saddle, bridle, and cloth of no mean worth, not to mention silver shoes fit for El Borak."

"True, true," I answered, not knowing what I was saying.

"A horseman grown might be a victim of thar (blood feud), but this child "

I came to myself, handed down the trembling girl, and laid her on my burnoose outspread on the sand. She looked at me half in dread—my gaunt face in the moonlight appalled and repelled her— half in desperate trust. After letting her drink a little more, I wiped the dust from her face and throat with a wet cloth. The skin was fine and smooth, and in the moonlight appeared a fight reddish brown. If she could make a horseman, she was already made a beauty. I noticed now that she wore white cotton trousers, a gorgeous Kashmir waistcloth, and a kind of short smock, richly embroidered, put on overhead without sleeves or sides. This was not intended to hide her breasts, of proper development for a girl in her first flower, but too small for a bride. Her hair was tight-drawn and dressed in several narrow black braids, a delicately fashioned cross hung at her throat, and on her feet were sandals of oryx skin.

I could believe that a faithless bride might be cast forth into the desert for one chance of rescue, ninety-nine of death. There were savage chiefs who laid such punishments on their chattels. I knew, too, that many girls of the backward races married at twelve. I wished I were a free Bedouin, who had never ridden on a horse-of-tree, who could follow thar.

The maiden—she was one, regardless of what had happened— swallowed painfully and sat up. I did not try to restrain her, for it was an act of pride. Tears flowed from her long-set eyes—so light-colored in the moonlight that I thought they were blue—down her beautifully molded cheeks. She asked a question in a tongue I did not know. I glanced toward Timor.

"I think she asked if we speak Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg," Timor said.

I shook my head.

"I speak Arabic, also," the girl said in an unmistakable tone of pride. "Are either of you nobles?"

It did not seem a strange question out on the limitless silver desert.

"The elder sits high in our councils," I answered. "I'm a slave, but I was born free and equal to any man according to the Writing which I believe."

"Then I will speak," she went on. "I am Izubahil, descended through my mother from Izubahil, queen to Yunus, Emir of Assode. My mother's husband Mahound, who had taken the name of Rab ed Din (Lord of the Faith) is Emir of the Kel Innek."

I had noticed that she did not say "my father," but thought her usage might be customary among a people who traced descent through the distaff. Timor threw me a triumphant glance. "Kel Innek" were the people of the East whom Timor had guessed were the banished one's tribe. But I could hardly think of these things because of her trembling voice and her effort to hold it firm.

"You are a princess and we pay you honor," I told her. "Now will you eat a little? I have dates in my saddlebag."

"Mahound Emir denied I was a princess, and today I believed him. It may be that proof has now been given—of that you shall hear. My mother was a princess of the Kel Allaghan (People of the Spear), but she is dead." Izubahil clapped her long hands with their beautiful pointed fingers to her face and was convulsed with sobs, but in a few seconds she recovered and again looked me in the face. "It is my wish to tell you these things," she went on in classic Arabic. "Then you will know better what to do with me. Also, I would not have you think I have done some great wickedness, deserving of banishment. When I have spoken, I will, by your mercy, eat."

"As you wish, Izubahil."

"Mahound barkened unto a holy man from Yemen and himself became most holy. He commanded that our women veil and live behind the curtain. When they would not obey and their husbands would not try to make them, Mahound grew greatly angry and killed his brother. To atone for the sin he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, taking with him my mother and me in a great caravan."

Timor interrupted the strange story with a little cough of triumph.

"Having gained more holiness, Mahound started back by way of Sualdn." At this point, I coughed to taunt my companion for making at least one mistake. Little princesses could come and go in the night, be saved or perish, but a jest between Bedouins must be followed to its end, like a point of honor.

"You mock me?" the child asked, as though we had struck her.

"Nay, nay." And I bent and kissed her between her straight, black brows, an offense to have me hook-hanged in some parts of Islam, but Izubahil took no umbrage and almost smiled. When I had given her some more water, she continued her story.

"We came by Berber, where dwell my kinsmen of the Sennar, and by the Oasis of El Rab. In due course we passed within sixty miles of the land of Sheik el Beni Kabir, who must be your master."

"Aye."

"It was desert more forsaken and dreary than the Sands of Gidi, whereupon the holy man, who hangs ever at Mahound's side, saw a vision. It was of a lover to my mother, a great lord of Hogar, before I was born. When Mahound reproached her, she said it was indeed true, and laughed into his face like the Princess of Spears that she was, but said I was of Mahound's seed. Then Mahound took the knife that he wears on his left arm and cut my mother's throat, and her blood gushed upon the ground, and she fell dead."

Then Izubahil cleared her throat, causing Timor and I to remember our good jesting, and his hand went up to his amulet, and my heart stood still.

"It was then a question in Mahound's mind whether my mother had lied as to my begetting, for the holy man had turned white, and would not or could not tell. Then Mahound swore that Allah would judge, and ordered that I be set upon my horse of state, with a handful of dates, a square of camel cheese, and one jug of water, the horse to wear the neck shafts that we call the Withholders from Wayside Desire. If Allah preserved me, it was a sign I was of his seed. If I died, it would be only the death of a shermoot. And at first I thought I would rather die than be proven of Mahounds begetting but when the morning turned to the heat of noon, and then to the cool of evening, and this to the cold of night, and the food and water were gone, and my tongue swelled m my mouth, then my spirit failed, and I entreated Messiner (Messiah?) and his enemy Shaitan that I might be found, even if I were made a slave girl to a beggar. It was written that you should find me, and lo, it came to pass. It must be that I am Mahound's daughter, but whether I am or not I am your protected."

I could not answer for a while, being carried out of myself by her story and its telling. She told it with the grave eloquence to which Arabic is so well adapted—the noble language of poets, singers and dreamers. It was not her native argot, although no doubt all well-educated Tuareg girls mastered it. She was no more than fourteen. She had been exposed to desert death for around twenty hours and was just now saved. I knew that the worsen of the Tuareg were the depositors of their songs and poetry and tales, that they were taught when children to perform in the assemblies, and no Tuareg woman would ever dream of acknowledging inferiority to a man; still I believed that the answer went deeper than this. Mahound daughter or not, she was an authentic princess of one of the most proud and dauntless races that ever lived.

Then I knew that in bringing her into my life, fate that had always dealt greatly with me, whether for woe or weal, had, after many a winter, moved nobly in my behalf.

While Izubahil ate—not turning from our gaze as would a Bedouin girl—I had a chance to contemplate her half-ripe beauty and to dwell on her in reverie. The moon was still high, and its vast, copious downpour on the desert, like solid silver rain, invoked a mood of mystery and wonder. Without high lights or glare, the light was like the north light that painters love, marvelously softened.

Kerry, an Orientalist, had told me long ago that the Tuareg are one of the purest of the Berber strains, their ancestral whiteness darkened by the sun. They had adopted a mild version of the Arab's religion, but had not mixed their blood, and there were subtle but telling differences between Izubahil and our Bedouin belles. Beauty was no stranger to the daughters of Kabir, but this was richer and more voluptuous. The lips were more full; the eyes, larger and softer, if not as brilliant; the expression conveyed by the countenance in repose, more happy. Izubahil was lighter of skin than Timor, among the most pale-colored in the tribe; but its tints and not its degree of pallor would determine its beauty.

Indeed, I did not think she would be beautiful if her skin were white and her hair golden: the primitive molding of her face needed the pale dusk of the desert where she dwelt and of which she was a part. She was a princess who had never seen a palace. Her hall was a tent or a thorn-enclosed camp under the sky, her wardrobe a bale on a camel's back; she might have owned great herds of camels before her banishment, but her jewels were some silver ornaments and harness trappings. Yet her pedigree might be longer and far more reliable than any in Europe. If an English colonial officer would not admit her to his stuffy parlor—if an American missionary would see her only as a benighted soul to be saved—still I dreamed that a great traveler, a poet, or even a prince of the Valois would instantly perceive her royalty. Perhaps it was far more real than most so-called, since it was not based on trappings and needed none.

The chill of the night caused Timor to gather faggots of camel thorn. I lighted them with my flint-and-tinder; the girl spread her long, shapely hands to the flame. I saw now that her skin was light brown with pale red tints. Her eyes appeared dark blue, her hair raven black. Her developing beauty lay in a symmetry of face and form, more Egyptian than Grecian, but of classic purity. She was already as tall as our tallest Bedouin women, who, like most of our mares, stood fifteen hands; when Izubahil shot up to her full height, she could stand with El Shermoot at sixteen hands. The joining of her long bare arms with her glossy shoulders told me she was clean-limbed as a gazelle.

"Although I am a slave, my having found you on the desert gives me a claim upon you until I deliver you to our sheik," I told her lightly. "Is it not so?"

"It would take ten judges, each as wise as Daniel, to decide the matter, still it may be so," she replied with surprising sprightliness. The Tuareg women were famous for their love of jest.

"If a slave may not address a princess by her first name, surely the finder may dub his foundling what he sees fit. In my native tongue, the name Izubahil becomes Isabel. Also, your eyes and your young limbs are like those of a ghazal, which word in my speech is gazelle. So I will call you Isabel Gazelle."

"Iss-a-bel Gah-zaille?"

"Yes. I think it fits you well."

"My mother had a pet ghazal—gah-zell—when she bore me in her womb. Do you think it marked me?"

"It could be so."

"I accept the name. And what will I call you, my lord?"

"Omar."

"And the venerable freeman who followed you?"

"Timor."

"Now is it your will that we ride? If we do not, I will fall asleep."

"You can ride and sleep, too, Isabel Gazelle."

"I pray you not to put any bonds upon me to hold me in the saddle. I swear I will stay awake and not fall."

Timor fastened the dead gelding's silver shoes, saddle, and bridle on his croup. The ivory neck shafts that Isabel called Withholders from Wayside Desire he broke in his strong hands. I set her on the neck of my spare mare, mounted behind her, then laid her across my lap.

"I entreated you not to put any bonds on me," she murmured as we started the long trail back.

"Have I done so?"

"What are these?" She touched my arms, her eyes brimming with moonlight in spite of the sleepy curl of her full lips. "Since I am yet young, no doubt they will wear off before I must go to my husband's tent, but I cannot run with my namesake, the gah-zell."

The daughters of the Bedouin and no doubt the Tuareg learn flirtation when very young. Yet I doubted if this remarkable utterance could be called that. She had been giving me quick, furtive glances, no doubt trying to get used to my appearance; and although she had decided to trust me—what other choice did she have?—plainly she found it ugly and most strange. More likely she had performed a courtesy according to the highly conventionalized etiquette of Tuareg belles. A great many gifted but primitive peoples pride themselves on their fluency in the language of love.

"You will run soon enough and too far from me, Isabel Gazelle," I answered.

She gave me a wide smile, wriggled until she was comfortable, then fell instantly asleep.

We trotted the horses for the first hour, but I was so yielding to the jerky motion that my little passenger slept well. When I changed to my gelding, she barely roused, and in spite of the loss and ordeal she had suffered, I thought that the safety that she felt in my arms saved her from evil dreams. My own waking dreams were manifold and strange. Again and again I had the illusion of being under Isabel's protection instead of her being under mine, and when I dispelled it as a nodding man dispels sleep, still the air was sharp in my nostrils and pain zigzagged across my forehead and my body seemed without weight, as in that strange moment when I promised to take the name of Holgar Blackburn and make a good showing for him in Tavistock; and I believed that the spirit of prophecy was upon me—as it has come upon so many dwellers of the desert—and if I would open my mouth and speak, truth would come forth. Perhaps I was afraid to do so. As a morning or a night may be beautiful, so can an hour. It was not perfect, but it was lovely. I did not ask it to stop flowing and stand still; I was being borne down its stream on a voyage of discovery.

The lovely, warm relaxed body across my breast and in the hollow of my arm wrought upon me after a while, arousing a great passion, but it brought no pain or the least temptation to despoil her now. I did not yearn to relieve it, and instead would store it for some enchanted hour to come, for my gift to her, a gift fit for a desert princess, and which such as she could prize.

I was brought back to myself by Isabel's stirring and waking. Her eyes opened, she looked at me without surprise, glanced to the eastern horizon, and said one startling word.

It was orora and I could not doubt it was the Tamashek word for the breaking dawn. Since it was inseparable from aurora, I mused for a moment on some ancient tie between the wild, nomadic Tuareg and Eternal Rome. Yet it was not as strange as the tie between a Tuareg princess and a former Yankee sailor now a slave. I would not be content with those cold and distant thrills. I would not wait patiently for what might come to pass. If I could, I would force fate's hand...

The night had passed and the moon set while I was in reverie. Now we were nearing the encampment, but I could not slow my horse to a walk to prolong the vigil. I must spur him into a canter and finally to a headlong race with his own shadow, so we could arrive at the tents in a drum-roll of hooves and with yells befitting only a rider at breakneck pace. For the desert had brought forth a new wonder, and the Beni Kabir would never forgive an unsplendid return; and bards living and yet unborn would spurn the tale.

When Isabel saw the distant tents, she sat up and asked me to put her on my croup.

"Is it fitting that a princess ride behind a slave?" I asked.

"I was the captive of the desert and you took me from it, so now I am your captive—until you yield me up."

"That won't be long."

It was no feat for a Bedouin and a Tuareg girl to change positions on a galloping horse. When I let him run, meanwhile whooping like an Indian on the warpath, she adjusted her robe, pressed one hand into my short ribs to help keep her balance, and rode with her left arm akimbo, no doubt a ceremonious position among the Tuareg. I wished I could see her face as we swept by my wide-eyed tribesmen by the cooking fires. I could be sure she would show them only her beautiful profile, as African royalty were wont to do since the first carvings on stone, and her expression would be serene.

Circling the row of thornbush kraals where horses neighed and hounds barked, I pulled up before Suliman's pavillon. Timor and I dismounted and stood at our horseheads; he rose from his carpet, but did not speak until the whole encampment had gathered. Then he addressed Timor first.

"What word, Timor ibn Fareth?"

"None, O Sheik. But the slave Omar has word of what he found on the desert."

"Omar, you have my leave to speak."

I recited the girl's history as she had given it to me, speaking eloquently and punctuating with a finger in the palm of my left hand.

"There is no God but Allah," Suliman proclaimed when I was through. "Izubahil, the slave Omar, your finder, told that you speak Arabic. First, I offer you the shelter of the tents of Beni Kabir and the protection of my scimitar, and of the rifles, pricked and primed, of my followers."

The girl replied with the stately, "Dakkil-ak ya Shaykhe!"

"It is a great wonder that you were found, and it would not be so save by the will of Allah, and it comes to me that thereby your daughterhood to Mahound, Emir of the Kel Innek, is proven in all men's sight, the stars of heaven bearing witness, and the evil charge he made has been flung into his teeth; and if we rode swiftly and overtook his caravan, he would acknowledge you before the elders, or they would leave him on the desert impaled on his own spear, for a lying dog." Suliman paused and caught his breath. "But it may be you would not have us do so."

"Nay, O Sheik, I would not."

"For a delicate maiden"—but she did not look delicate to me, sitting straight as a lance on my gelding—"and a princess to be so cruelly cast forth by her own sire for the sake of a base suspicion could turn her love for him to hate. More, she would well fear some other deadly stroke at his lightest whim."

"Yea, that is so."

"What is your wish, Izubahil? Speak plainly without fear."

"I wish to remain with you, O Sheik, and your people, until such time as I wed; then by your leave, I will go with my husband to the tents of the Kel Innek and gather up my camels and donkeys and sheep, and the men of my mother's household who are my servants, and bring them here. For then my father Mahound will not dare deny me, I being no longer his daughter, but a wife of the Beni Kabir, and Allah had spared me not for a day but until I have taken a noble husband, which will indeed cast his lie into his teeth."

"There's no harm in that," the sheik replied, dropping from the classic Arabic of Oman to the dialect. "And I wish my only son, Selim, were old enough to become your husband when the time is ripe, but lo, he has seen only eight suns and may not wed for eight suns more. Even so, there are many sons of Beni Kabir, warriors and riders second to none, of good name, and tall, and valiant, who'll vie for your beauteous hand. And meanwhile you will be in the care of the widow of an elder who has no sons and her female slave."

"It is a great mercy, and also I entreat—"

Isabel paused, and I thought her eyes glimmered in the bursting light.

"Speak, my daughter."

"I ask not to be shut away from Omar, except as is meet, since it was his kismet to find me on the desert, and therefore we've made bond, and he stands closest to me among all your followers, even though he's a slave."

"Truly, he was the instrument of your saving and of our present happiness, and he may be to you as an older brother, as long as is meet. If he were my slave instead of a slave of another, I would set him free. If he were my son of the blood instead of my heart, I would do more than that. But as it is, he or I can do nothing." The effect of this on the throng was instantaneous and profound. The Arabs and especially the Bedouins are an emotional and ,m-lo native people; and suddenly a fact that they all knew, that S took for granted, was seen in a new light. I stood before the sheik's tent, holding the horse that had borne in from the desert this beautiful castaway, a maiden straight as a lotus flower just ere comes to bloom; of paler color than they; more graced than their daughters; only a little younger than many brides; more royal in their eyes than any fabled queen of Frankistan or the saki of he Egyptian Khedive. Kismet—or Allah—had moved in my behalf, they knew, but only so far. Now the new-risen sun cast its glaring av upon us far off the sand was stirred to hissing life by the morning breeze; about us stretched the desert, the beginning and the end of all things. I did not turn and look behind me, but I saw Suliman's eyes brim with tears, and I knew all eyes that looked upon us were the same.

Their sudden awareness of immutable fate and the wave of sorrow sweeping over us all undermined Isabel and breached the wonderful gallantry that was her last bulwark against exhaustion. I saw her sway and start to topple. Catching her in my arms, I carried her and lower on the carpet at Suliman's feet. Then rose a vibrant voice, chanting high and clear.

"O Suliman ibn Ali!"

"Ah, Ishmael ibn Abdul!"

At once the bard began his song, the words extemporaneous, et to a melody I had heard only once before, when Ishmael sang of a young tribesman who had been killed defending his mare against a lion.

Whose tracks are these that lead into the waste?

Omar looked at them and pondered.

Who has ridden from the southward into the great thirst?

Omar saddled his horse at midnight and rode forth.

With him rode his mullah Timor, wise in the ways of the desert.

Fast rode Omar, his shadow short beneath him, the white moon overhead.

Fast followed Timor, and the hooves drummed the clay.

What will Omar behold, what wonder hath Allah done?

Fast sped the beautiful horses, fast the hours.

Till they came to the desert's secret heart!

What is this that Omar spies, far away in the moonlight?

Lo, it is a maiden bound fast to her horse's back.

Now he has cut her bonds away.

Now he has taken her on his croup.

Now he has gazed into her face of matchless beauty.

O the deep wells of her eyes that reflect his own eyes,

O the cup of her lips from which a lover's lips will drink the nectar of Paradise.

He has found her, how soon may he have her for his own?

Allah hath wrought him of ungainly form and fearful visage,

Yet appointed him to find her on the desert.

She is not yet ripe for love, but the moon will return

And not fail to return until it looks down and sees her ready,

A maiden and a princess arrayed as a bride.

How soon may Omar take her to his tent for his bride of matchless beauty?

Must I answer, O Sheik? Must I tell you, Beni Kabir?

Never, never, never, never. For Omar is a slave,

And the bride that awaits him is a chain of iron.

CHAPTER 13 The Wakening

Not many months after Isabel Gazelle had come to live with us, I had a chance to dispatch a long-harbored letter addressed to the American consul at Gibraltar, and which I had written when my first missive brought no return.

The bearer now was a Jew, Aaron ben Levi, who sold dawa (medicine) throughout North Africa, and who needed bitterly five pieces of gold. These I paid him—my total store—for his promise to deliver the letter within two years, or return it to me with the sum. The Jews we knew were hard bargainers, but once the bargain was made, they could be trusted to keep it with great staunchness. Since Aaron was no renegade, I kept a lighter heart in the ensuing seasons, and my dreams were sweet.

In November, 1814, he returned to our encampment, and when my eyes sought his across the thorn fire, he shook his head. When the others were wrapped in their bumooses we met in the gray moonlight. Pale, he handed me my letter and five pieces of gold.

'I could not deliver it. There's no longer any United States consul in Gibraltar. The consulate doors have been closed and the officer has fled and so have all his countrymen. Even if he were there it would be useless to give it to him, the people said, because there's no longer any United States."

I waited a few seconds before I spoke. It was to clear my head put my tongue in good control, and to bid my informant not to speak wildly.

"What causes you to think that?"

"There's no doubt of the war. It was with England, and it began m the summer of 1812. For a while the Yankees made a good showing. But when the English had beaten Napoleon and sent him to Elba they brought their troops down from the North from a place called Montreal, and also up the rivers from Vugima. The capital—named for the first president—has been burned to the ground. That much is certain. I had it from one of my nation, one Gideon whose home is in Italy and whose kinsman Judah Touro is a merchant in the city of New Orleans."

"Does Boston stand, and New York, and Baltimore?" "That I don't know. Gideon had it from Judah Touro that the Redcoats had been driven back from the wild lands in the West and Yanki fleets on the lakes there—lakes as big as seas—have held their own well. Much land has been laid waste, but Gideon doubts if the old men who fought under Washington have been hanged as was first told, or the young ones captured in battle have been shot for insurrection. For a long while no Yanki ship was seen on the high seas. Lately Gideon has it that small ships, in some numbers, have come out of nowhere to harry the English traders. Now the rumor is that the king will make peace, spare the Yankis that are left, and forgive all treason, provided they swear allegiance to his throne and be ruled by his governors. Whether the Yankis have agreed to these terms Gideon did not know, but certainly there is talk of peace, and the great money—lending house of Bauer of Frankfort on the Main, which is called Rothschild, meaning the red shield, has given out to its agents that the guns will be silent before the Christmas of the Gentiles."

"If there's peace before Christmas—or Christmas ten years from now—you can be sure the Yankis haven't agreed to those terms."

"Think you they would fight that long before surrendering up their freedom?"

I started to say I knew it, but how could I know? Aaron told me, on Gideon's word, that no few Boston merchants of great wealth had connived with the captains of English warships blockading our coast to let their goods through to supply the armies and fleets attacking their own country. But I remembered the Boston men whom I had known, aft and before the mast. I thought of Ethan Allen, with whom Farmer Blood had sat at Sunday dinner, and Anthony Wayne whom my father had seen at Yorktown, John Rogers Clark and Joshua Barney and the silversmith Paul Revere. I had been gone from under the American flag for thirteen years, but I doubted if the ways of the people had changed very much.

When I was in school in Bath we were something like four million. In ten years, we were five million, three hundred thousand—I had proudly told Sophia so—at that rate of gain, more than a third, we must be eight million now. The wagons were winding up the western roads and the flatboats making down the Ohio River when I had left home. By now there were farms and towns, thick or scattered, all the way to the Mississippi. Could I picture a lank frontiersman beyond the Appalachians, wearing a coonskin cap and armed with a Kentucky rifle, bowing down to an English lord?

"England couldn't conquer the land west of the mountains, let alone to the River," I told Aaron ben Levi.

"If you mean the great river that flows by New Orleans, where dwells Judah Touro, one of the great of my nation—it marks only half of the American domain."

"I don't comprehend you."

"Ten—eleven years ago, the American president bought from Napoleon the Louisiana Territory, running clean to the Rocky Mountains. I saw Judah's letter, writ in Hebrew, with my own eyes."

My neck prickled fiercely and my scalp felt too tight and I could not speak.

"You turned red in the face, and now white," said Aaron gravely.

"I can't help it."

"Unwittingly I've dealt you a cruel blow, to remind you how long you've been gone from your native land."

"I needed no reminder. I've kept good count of the days. You only reminded me of how the world has gone forward while I've been away. And the news you gave me is good. I've no fear whatever of America ceasing to be free."

"My people wandered in the wilderness for forty years. Yet they came at last into the Promised Land, and waxed great."

"Ah!Ah!"

"You're not a young man any longer—thirty-four or five?—but add twenty years to that number, and you would reach only your full strength of character and mind."

"I'll be free—or I'll be dead—in seven years."

I had told myself this before, but now I had spoken it aloud before a witness, and I knew it to be true.

"I will entreat God to spare your life. Farewell, Omar."

"You've run a great risk, bearing my letter, and brought me news, good and ill, of use to me, so you're welcome to as many of these five gold pieces as you'll accept."

"My friend, I'll accept none. I didn't succeed in delivering your letter and the gold pieces came to me at a time of need, and I've had the use of them without usury for two years. We Jews are good husbandmen, but it is against our law to reap the corners of the field."

I thought to send the letter by some other bearer, but could not bring myself to do so. In the first place, I could find none in whom to put great faith; and I became afraid that if a search was ever made for me, I would not be found. It came to me in my dreams that this desert drama would play to the end without help from any god from the machine. The forces that would free me or destroy me were already on the scene.

The remainder of the year 1814 and a good part of 1815 were the happiest I had spent in slavery. The colt El Stedoro had been foaled in 1812; in this period he grew from a gangling colt to a wondrous chip off the old block of El Shermoot. An uglier three-year-old the Bedouins swore they had never seen—that beautiful Farishti had given him birth remained beyond their comprehension—but they could not keep their eyes from shining when they saw him run. He had neither the soaring motion of his mother nor the headlong charge of his sire: he appeared to progress in a series of tremendous bounds. He loved to jump—no common thing in horses—and no wall of thorns we had yet built, some of them close on six feet, could keep safe the women's store of corn. Running with the other youngsters, he cleared rock piles and dry watercourses as though taking wing.

My duties toward him were light—watering him when his wadi pools went dry, pampering him with camel milk and bread flaps, and tickling his sharp, leaf-shaped ears, almost the only mark of the Arab that he bore. All this was to keep him gentle and in hand. Suliman had forbade that he bear halter, saddle, or rider until he was four. Thereby he should develop strength and fleetness before going into servitude to man.

But there was a far greater wonder in these years than that of an Anglo-Arab colt bidding fair to become the best hunting and steeplechasing stallion the Beni Kabir had yet to see, and that was a foundling maiden of moving but immature beauty growing to be the most beautiful daughter of the desert they had ever seen. At fourteen she was breathtaking; as she neared fifteen she surpassed, in my fellows' sober opinion, any queen or concubine in Yussuf Pasha's harem, and was fit for a gift from Suliman to the Grand Porte of Constantinople, Defender of the Faith.

I did not measure her by these standards. I saw a tall, slender girl, whose skin was a light reddish-brown, and who was somehow the central and compelling figure in every scene in which she had a part. She took the eye of everyone; it was always with an effort that I took my eyes off her. I felt queerly, even mystically about her. Ordinarily quiet, not constantly singing like the Arab women, occasionally given to outbursts of strange eloquence, she made me daydream that she had come here from some other age or unknown continent, wherein people were happier than in these scenes, and more graced.

She moved so lightly that I could not for a long time believe what Timor told me—that she was remarkably strong. I began to perceive it by the easy way she lifted heavy bales and boxes, or swung pails of water in her long brown naked arms. She seemed to enjoy movement of any kind. It was a common thing to see happiness on the faces of children as they played or went about their affairs, and in this respect she was childlike. The promise of a smile was on her lips almost all the time—it broke and beamed on the least provocation—and although her eyes were beautiful before then, deeply dark and lustrous, then they became magnetic and mysterious as though they gave forth light.

Unlike a child, she was never bashful or timid. Partly this was an effect of her upbringing in a society wherein femaleness was a glory instead of a disadvantage or mild disgrace, and where she was born to high place; partly though, it was self-confidence derived from physical strength and beauty. She paid not the least attention to the Bedouin's taboo against women riding horses—she was forever taking the pet mares for wild gallops around the camps, unbridled and unsaddled and often unhaltered. She made herself at home in Suliman's mukaad, ordinarily forbidden to all except the elders and male guests.

She waxed more womanly with every moon. This development would have suited a far more voluptuous form than hers; and seen in relation to her slender body with its taut waist, lithe hips, long, tapering legs and arms, long neck, and countenance carved with a sword, it was at once startling and thrilling. I could not help but beam when kinsmen from the oasis visited the Bedouins, saw her, cried out on Allah, quoted verses by Jamil, but never asked if she were for sale. Sometimes I grinned to see Suliman watching her, stroking his beard and sighing, but the grin died in a chill wave of ill omen, for the sighs meant that the sheik's sixty and more years lay heavily upon him, weakened as he was by capture and torture not long before I met him in Calypso's cave, and he might not have long to live.

What right had I, Omar the slave, to be proud of this tall, dark princess of the Tuareg who graced our camps? I had found her only through the chance that Timor gave me; and I had no real claim on her. But she had made one on me as her protector and companion. She was never very far from me for very long. If I invited her to accompany the old hostler and me on our varied jaunts, she came in joy, not even asking how many nights we must sleep under the stars. If I did not invite her, we had only to ride a few miles to see her loping along behind us on one of Suliman's pet mares. When she overtook us, she would ride into the wind, kick up dust in our faces, then return with her eyes agleam.

"You might as well have asked me in the first place," she would say. "For I intend to stay with you as long as I'm a virgin."

So long inured to celibacy, my body and mind adjusted to it, I was not greatly taxed by the presence of this vivid, vital girl, entering into marriageable age, in our lonely bivouacs. Vividness and vitality are essential components of female beauty—the thing itself is bound round with male desire—yet I remained intensely conscious of Isabel's beauty without being tormented to possess it in its full. Partly the answer lay in my profound acceptance—a different thing from reconciliation—of slavehood. I did not feel eligible for a free-born woman's favor. I could not offer her the refuge of my arms because they were chained; I could not endow her with my worldly goods—such as the strength of my body and brain, my prowess, even my whole manhood—because they belonged to another. They did not do so in any law I would recognize, but they did in fact.

However, my attitude toward her was delicately balanced, caused by counteracting pressure, and although it held throughout the year 1815, the third since her coming, it could quickly change.

Just before dawn of a cool and dewy January morning, when Timor and I and our entrancing camp follower were bivouacked on the foothills of the Tibesti, the old hostler rode off to investigate some khors that might hold water. As the Sahara daylight broke, Isabel Gazelle made quite a display of waking up—she had been covertly watching me clean my rifle for the past ten minutes—then an even greater show of modesty as she dressed. However, she had managed to give me a view of a long thigh of superb molding as she donned her skirt.

I paid her no obvious attention, and presently she came and squatted beside me.

"What are we going to have to eat today?" she asked.

"Why, doesn't the fare suit you?"

"Bread flaps—camel cheese—dates. I'm getting sick of them."

"It will be different today, because all the dates have been eaten."

"Why don't you spend the day hunting? I'll go with you, and you can shoot a bustard or maybe an oryx. But you mustn't shoot any gazelles because I can't eat them."

"I didn't know that."

"You should know it. It was you who named me Gazelle."

"You've eaten plenty of them before now, and sucked the bones for marrow, and got the grease all over your face. Why have you changed?"

"I haven't changed. I'll eat them other times, but not today. If you're not a good enough shot to get any meat, maybe you can rob an ostrich nest. You ought to find some wild honey, too, so tonight we can have a feast."

"Is this a Mohammedan feast day? I didn't know it."

"No, but it was once a feast day among my mother's followers." "What was the occasion?" She was waiting for me to ask this. "Oh, just my birthday."

It would be a base slave indeed who, looking at her and hearing her announcement, would not feel a glowing of heart.

"It was just as proper for the Tuareg to celebrate it as for the Spartans to celebrate the birthday of Helen of Troy."

"You think I've not heard of her, but I have. The Tuaregs are pure Berbers"—this was no longer quite true—"and long ago we had much to do with the Greeks and the Romans, and their stories are written down in Tamashek and many maidens know them. That isn't what I started to say. I wonder how the Tuareg—those who came with my mother—keep my birthday now."

I could not answer lightly. I remembered too well a girl of thirteen cast away on the merciless desert.

"I think many tears will fall, Isabel Gazelle. But they will be dried when you return, the bride of a chief's son."

"It comes to me, Omar, that until then we are both exiles from our native lands, you from Frankistan, I from Tuaregstan." "Now that is so."

"While among the Beni Kabir, we will do even as they, in their sight, but when we are away from their kraals, or alone together, can't we do as we see fit?"

"There's no harm in that—perhaps." "You've not asked me, Omar, how old I am today." "I don't need to ask. You're sixteen."

"More than once, you've spoken of me as a child. Dare you do so any more?"

"Nay, lilla Kabeira (great lady)."

"Yet I'm in no haste to marry. The women of the Tuareg are not given in marriage by their fathers when they are little children! We choose our husbands after wooing—being wooed by many young warriors, and often a maiden is eighteen before she setties to the loom. Is it the same in Frankistan?"

"It is something the same. Some of our maidens have many wooers, and take a good while to make their choice."

"Now sometimes we woo for the pleasure of wooing, knowing that the youth is too lowly or hasn't enough camels and goats and donkeys to make a good match." Isabel's voice trembled slightly.

"Does a princess of the Tuareg ever woo—or let herself be wooed—by a slave?" I asked.

"I could tell you a story of a young slave, most good to look upon, who fell in love with his master's daughter—"

"Would that I were young and good to look upon!"

"It's true you're not a callow youth. I know you're old enough to be my father. Also your shoulders are too broad for your gaunt legs and arms—to judge from what I can see of them—and no doubt your whole form is ungainly. But didn't the sheik's beautiful mare, Farishti, yield to the great raw-boned El Shermoot?"

I could not resist one wondering glance into Isabel's face. It was grave, and her eyes were wide and bright. I had named her Gazelle because of her litheness and lightness and long clean limbs and melting eyes, but it did not begin to do her justice, for there is no such beauty within human imagination as the beauty of woman, and if I should take the wings of morning to all countries and climes, I would find thousands upon thousands who equaled her in this, but few who surpassed her. At present she squatted on her heels by a dying fire of thorn-wood in the hollow heart of ultimate desolation.

But a change had come over her since she had first come up beside me. She was no longer flirtatious, and some very real emotion wrought in her was struggling for outlet.

"Farishti did so yield," I answered, quietly waiting.

"Omar, in spite of your years, in spite of you being so gaunt and gangling, I wouldn't be angry if you made love to me."

Then as I was catching my breath to answer, she gave a little wail.

"Liar that I am! The truth is not in me, Omar, and you should take a stick and beat me, but do not, for then I must kill you, and go down to hell. It's not always in spite of those things. Sometimes it's because of those things. Your form is like an old lean Hon's—nay, like a griffin's with a lion's chest and head and eagle's legs, and your face carved of rock. Often I can't stand to look at you, yet not once but many times you come to me in my sleep and give me lustful dreams. Omar, I'll save my maidenhead for an elder's son, as is meet. He'll be young and tall and shapely, and laughter and song will be in his mouth, and his face will shine in the sun. With him I may return, his kinsmen riding with us, to the encampments of the Kel Innek, and take my mother's followers and my flocks and herds, and cast my father's lie into his teeth. You will go from me some day, and I can't cook meat for a shadow and sleep beside a ghost. But you said the maids in Frankistan are often wooed by many youths before they make their choice. I can't choose you, Omar, but can't you treat me as though I might? Is there any harm in playing I'm a maiden of Frankistan you want for your wife? Play like my other wooers are richer in camels and sheep, and garments of gold and silver cloth, and many are youths of my own age, and some are as good to look upon as Ishmael ibn Abdul, the singer, but you were born the equal of any—haven't you told me so?—and what you lack in riches and youth and handsomeness you can make up in ardor!"

I took both of her long, dusky hands, their pointed fingers more shapely than hardly any under palace lamps.

"Isabel Gazelle, wouldn't you rather have Ishmael ibn Abdul woo you? He'll sing songs to you that the Beni Kabir will remember a thousand and one years."

"He makes songs in my ears, but you make them in my heart. My heart beats in song when you are near. Don't turn from me any more, as though I was a child, or ugly. If you do, I can't go with you and the old hostler any more, or eat from your bowl, or sleep beside your fire, and I must stay in a kraal of thorn-bush, out of your sight, until the sheik sends me a husband who'll take me away."

"Isabel, let me speak."

"Speak, then."

"You're not in the tents of the Tuareg, whose daughters make free before marriage, but a ward of the Bedouin. You know what store a Bedouin bridegroom sets upon the virginity of his bride."

"I told you I would save—"

"Fire set in the thorn may spread to the kraals. That is a saying of the desert, and here's a stanza from a desert song you know well. 'If you teach me to love the warm wild honey of Bornu, how will I fare on the hungry hills of Borku?'"

"We Tuareg women aren't afraid of fire. The women of Bornu tattoo their faces and are most ugly, and the hills of Borku grow camel thorn and good grass. You are a farengi and a Frank." Then, hanging her head in contrition, "Nay, you found me on the desert and I rode behind you, but you make too much of a few kisses, Omar."

"Do I? We shall see."

Instead I had made too little of them, as I found out when I took them. For Isabel looked wildly into my face and fled, white and weeping.

My next few days were days of waiting—but not for Kismet to move. I was not a Bedouin in heart and soul—I could never embrace Islam—Omar the slave was still the Yankee Homer Whitman. Fatalism is a comforting philosophy, but I was suckled in a more stern creed. Nor was I waiting for any sign or sending to light my way.

It was much simpler than any of these. I waited for Isabel to chart a course. That charting would be by instinct. She knew the desert and its people like her own hand. She had a great capacity to survive—the impulse to conquer and live. She would take risks, but not the kind taken by a fool—of great cost if lost, if won, of trifling gain.

In about a fortnight we came on good grass out from the Wells of El Gamar and drove the herds there. The name meant the Rising Moon, a term of endearment, implying great beauty, among the Arabs, and I wondered idly how it came to be applied to some unreliable wells until I saw tonight's moon coming up above basalt outcroppings eastward of the encampment. One night's sail from full, she shone with an intensity that amazed and charmed me. Perhaps the evening air was unusually dry and free from dust in this area, causing the round lamp of burnished silver to hang so near.

I had wandered out of sight of the camp when I discovered Isabel following on Farishti. She slipped off, and with the moonlight on her face, came up to me. That she was on a momentous mission I could not doubt.

"It was my fault, Omar, that you kissed me at the bivouac in the Tibesti foothills when the moon was new," she said.

"I think it was no one's fault," I answered.

"Many would say it was a great fault—when I'm a princess and you're a slave. Since then I've thought of it day and night. I ran away from you—and now I've returned—to find out something. It may be I'll run away again. If I do, if I get on my mare and ride, it's a sign we must part forever. Then tomorrow I'll go to Suliman and tell him I've chosen Ishmael ibn Abdul, for he sings songs that bring my tears, and he's good to look upon, and the son of a malik, second only to the sheik. But if I give you a sign, you'll know I can't part with you."

"For how long? I ask the question in my need."

"For one year—perhaps two years more. And if then you are set free--"

"There's no hope of that, Isabel Gazelle. You heard Ishmael's song and know it was a true song. Still, if we could be sweethearts even for a half a year, I'd be thankful all my life. Many of the days I spent in the slave pen would be paid for."

"It's those days in the slave pen that may part us now."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Hear me, Omar—and don't blame me for what I can't help. When I first saw you, it was on a night like this. The moon turned the desert into silver. Your face frightened me that night—I can't tell you how much—yet I came with you. Since then I've looked at it across a thousand thorn fires, but it still frightens me sometimes. The men say it turned to stone in your eight years in the Sepulcher —and you have other marks I've never seen."

"They told the truth."

"Are the marks ugly, Omar? If they are, I can't take you for my lover. I'm only a Tuareg woman! Forgive me."

"You shall see for yourself."

I slipped off my aba, baring my gaunt chest and gangling arms. Her eyes slowly widened.

"Omar, they're dreadful marks!"

"Look at them closely."

"The Daughters of the Spear would laugh to think of Izubahil accepting courtship from such a scarecrow."

"Then go quickly and get on your horse and fade away in the moonlight."

"Shall I?" she asked herself.

"Yes, if I'm ugly in your eyes and in your heart."

"I didn't say you were ugly in my heart. You put song into my heart. It will live there always. When you're gone across the desert, I'll hear it still."

"When I'm gone across the desert, I'll love you still."

"The love of a slave?" she asked in a low, wondering murmur.

"Yes. Can't you see?"

"I do see, Omar, and now I'll give you a sign."

Up from my back across my gaunt shoulder ran the black scar of the ox whip. Isabel stood on tiptoe and pressed it with her lips. If the wound were still raw upon my soul, it was instantly healed.

CHAPTER 14 The Sword of Kismet

In ensuing months my fellows noticed little change in Isabel Gazelle's and my dealings with each other. Her excursions with Timor and me caused no more comment than before—actually the tribespeople had always been pleased by her attachment to me, as a poetic outcome to my finding her on the desert. Quite possibly there was a bar across their minds against them suspecting a love affair. Ishmael ibn Abdul had told in song how I could never have her for my own, and a princess of the Tuareg would turn away from an ungainly slave, twenty years her senior. If sometimes we yielded to brief love play in the sudden lusts of solitude, that was a matter of course among the unwedded, and of no more moment than a little whirlwind rising and toppling far away on the desert.

They might have guessed the truth from the burning glances she sometimes gave me. A surer sign was shown when she and I had been separated many days by the exigencies of desert life—the women campbound to gather precious myrrh or dye, or for a great spinning and weaving of camel's hair, or the men venturing so far into the Thirst that no measure of food or water could be spared for Bringers of Delight, or entering regions harried by robber Bedouins. The hour that she was free to join me, she would saddle a riding camel and strike out, sometimes eighty miles across hissing sands.

Often she sang to me, fierce songs of the Tuareg warriors or tender lyrics of love, and told me many a thrilling tale handed down by mothers to daughters in her tribe. Once, as I lay with my head in her lap while she combed out my tangled hair with a thorn comb, she recounted an adventure of which she had personal knowledge, occurring only a few weeks before I met her. Its region was the northern part of the Bilad-es-Sudan (the Country of the Blacks), two long days' camel journey southeast of the Nile town of Atbara and east of the river of the same name. On his return journey from Mecca, twenty of Mahound's best riding camels were stolen by the Beni Amer—the dominant tribe—and tracked by a force of Tuareg.

In the course of the pursuit a servant of Isabel's mother, named Adem, had encountered a former clansman who had been captured in battle and sold into slavery. Now free and prosperous, he had entertained Adem at his kraal, and in the absence of the other Tuareg, had told him of a strange thing. Of this Adem did not speak to Mahound's men—they were not the Sons of Spears—but he had confided it to Isabel Gazelle.

"On the cliffs separating the desert from the plowed land, there had been a rockslide," my companion told me. "It had revealed a flight of steps leading up, a passage, and then another flight of steps under the cliff. The painting on the wall was like those a fellah had seen far to the north, and which showed it to be a tomb of a Pharaoh living long ago. But while those tombs had been robbed of their gold and silver furnishings, this tomb had not been robbed."

"I'll wager it didn't take long."

"You'd lose the wager, Omar. It's not yet been robbed. The tomb is guarded by spirits of the dead who kill all who go down the second flight of steps. A good many tried to go down in the first years after the steps were found, Adem's clansman told him. Those walking behind would see their torches flicker and go out. When they called, there was no answer, and none of the silent ones ever returned. At last the king of the Beni Amer decreed that no others should try, lest the evil spirits come forth from the passage and kill all the people, so he had many cartloads of rock brought to the place and dumped over the entranceway, closing it forever."

"How long ago was this?"

"Adem said that it had been closed for twenty years, and most folk had forgotten the steps were there."

"I didn't know that any Pharaohs were buried as far up the Nile as Atbara."

"I can't say as to that, Omar."

"Is the country rich in gold?"

"Not now, but long ago, much gold was found. The country was then known as Aphar, Adem told me."

Aphar was suggestive of Ophir, the gold-rich region of Biblical times. The story worked on my imagination and recurred again and again to my mind. That I should hear it from the lips of Isabel Gazelle, who had ridden across the desert into my life, smacked of fate.

"When you return to the Tuareg, will Adem become your servant?" I asked on a later occasion.

Her eyes filled with tears. "He fought for Mama when Mahound was about to kill her, and his body was riddled with spears."

In due course I asked, "Did Adem mention the name of his clansman that he found in the Bilad-es-Sudan?" It would be only a tenth chance. . . .

"Yes, and I had heard of him before. He was Takuba, whose name means 'sword.' He was a great swordsman as well as spear-thrower, and my mother's distant cousin."

"He may be still alive."

Isabel gave me a great wondering glance, then touched the silver cross—with her a pagan amulet—which she wore at her throat.

This was early August, 1815. The far-off belated echo of the guns of Waterloo had reached us only a few days before. I had been in slavery over fourteen years, six of them as Suliman's ward, and I had begun to be darkly haunted by the flight of time. It was like that of an arrow that ever missed its mark.

Late September brought one whole day and night of heavy rain, an occasion for great rejoicing among the Beni Kabir. Only the little children slept under such pavilions as we could raise; the sheik stayed up, beside himself with happiness, to listen to its gurgling drums and to drink green tea and barley beer and smoke endless pipes with the elders. Soon after sunrise he rode to look at a near-by wadi. As he rode back, I saw that his face had a gray cast and the skin over its bones appeared taut. Hamyd, his old sais, noticed it too, and stood near as Suliman started to dismount.

But the rein fell from his hand as some awful agony clutched him, convulsing his countenance and form. He could not move or speak—we stared at him in helpless horror—then he stiffened and toppled like a falling palm tree.

Hamyd caught him, carried him into the tent, and laid him on his carpet. A long, anguished wail went up from all the people at the sight, and the elders ran from their kraals to crowd around him. For once I did not stand and wait for a slave's portion. But at my pushing through the pale, gasping, terror-stricken mass, none rebuked me, and some made way for me, because they remembered that on a few other occasions I had given dawa of some sort while their hands hung at their sides.

"I speak for the mullahs of Frankistan," I told them. "Stand back so the sheik may have more air."

They obeyed, entreaty in their eyes, but when I turned to Suli-man, there was almost nothing else that I could do to help him. His lips and temples had turned blue, his eyes were half open; and I could hardly see his chest rise and fall. When I laid my ear over his heart, I could hardly hear its beat, faint and fast. At my nod to wide-eyed Timor, he ran to get a bowl of moldered horse manure. This I worked until the smell of ammonia came forth strongly, and held it under Suliman's nose. He uttered a coughing sound, and I thought his breathing was a little deeper. When I listened again to his heart, it was still fluttering, but easier to hear.

Then there was nothing to do but watch and wait and pray. My prayers were of different form than those raised to Allah by the weeping Bedouin prostrating themselves on the sand, but their intent and content was the same. Yet the long day passed, the camels went unmilked, the mares nuzzled and shoved us wanting pettings to help some trouble they smelled but did not understand, and the falcons screamed and the greyhounds lay in disconsolate sleep before we could say for certain that the sheik was better. I knew it when the blue tints faded from his face. At midnight he mumbled a few words that we could not catch, then moved up out of trance into slumber.

At dawn he aroused enough to tell us that he would not leave us yet—that the cup of death had come nigh but had passed from him— and we must attend to our work. That night he drank some fermented camel milk and ate a handful of dates—these last a famed restorer of lost strength. I thought of a date seed I had found by torchlight in a black chamber of Calypso's cave, far away where I was free, long ago when I was young.

Thereafter he appeared to mend with thrilling swiftness and surety. In a week he was walking about, in two weeks he took out Farishti for a little canter over the young, thin, narrow-bladed grass which when seen at an angle in certain lights made the ground a delicate green. The Beni Kabir watched him with glowing faces and proud eyes. Behold him, straight in his saddle, guiding the sable-brown mare with the pressure of his knees, controlling her gait with his voice, in his youth one of the greatest riders in all Islam, still a horseman before Allah! They said he rode with green spurs—one of the most cryptic and untranslatable compliments in the Arabic language.

In another week his followers had forgotten their terror and blamed his attack on a cramp, caused by his riding in cold rain with a full stomach. Now he looked as well—even a little better— than before. But their need of him was not as dire as Isabel Gazelle's and mine, and that caused her eyes and mine to search deeper than theirs, and then to meet in swift compassion for each other. We perceived something in his face that was not there before. How did we know it was not the mark of death?

In these weeks we hardly dared leave the encampment. In our rare moments of privacy, all we could do was hold hands and say comforting things that neither of us believed. Then came the sheik's word that on the morrow we would break camp to follow the young grass. Wasn't that a sign that the danger had passed? But at sunset my heart fainted at the word brought by his sais Hamyd. Omar the slave was to come at once and alone into his mukaad.

"And may Allah be merciful upon us both," Hamyd breathed.

I found Suliman seated on his carpet, resting one shoulder on a camel saddle. He permitted me to sit, then offered me green tea and a water pipe, as though we were to converse on the beauty of woman and of horses, and the splendor of war. I declined these good things once and then again, and he did not offer them the third time, to let me know that this was not a meeting of pleasure, and everything had changed. Anyway, I could not have smoked or quaffed through my full throat.

He raised his hand in some ancient gesture of kings, let it fall, and spoke in classic Arabic.

"O Omar, when a soothsayer of the emir casts his master's horoscope and finds that his days are niggardly numbered, sometimes he does not bear him the evil tidings, lest his master vent his terror and woe upon him. But if the emir is worthy of his throne, he will honor the word-bringer, for thus forewarning him to put his affairs in order and keep the vows he has made unto Allah, and do good works, and, at last, to bring about him his loved ones, that he may gaze once more upon their faces ere he drinks the cup of death."

"Ah, ah, O Sheik!"

"Harken to me well, Omar, my son. When the sire of my grand-sire was in his fifty-sixth year, he wakened in the night with a fluttering in his left side, in and about his heart, not unlike that in the womb of a young wife when she first feels life. It came and went from the time of the dawn prayers until midday prayers, then suddenly my grandsire's sire was stricken with a woeful pain, in which he groaned pitifully, after which he fell down as though dead. But he did not die then. He lived to tell his son, my grandsire, of both the fluttering and of the nature of the pain, which he said was as if his heart were put into a vise and grievously compressed. This was in the early fall; and in late winter he felt the strange fluttering again. It lasted from the sundown prayers until the middle of the night, then again he groaned pitifully, in great pain, and again he fell down, and this time he did not arise, for the cup of death had been brought to him, and he had drunk it."

"Bismillah!" I muttered as Suliman paused. He nodded his head and spoke on.

"Now my grandsire's sire had been a man like to me, in being lightly made, with his hair and his beard growing like mine. But his son, Ibrim, my grandsire, was a man of big bone, taking after his mother, a Kababish woman, and he lived to the winter of his years. But his son, my father, All ibn Ibrim, was again light-boned and light-bearded as I am, and in his sixty-fourth year he, too, felt a fluttering about his heart, and in a few hours the great pain came, and he fell down as if dead. And he too walked again—from seeding until harvest—then the fluttering came back, and in a few hours the pain came back, and again he fell writhing, and so he died. And it must be, Omar, that you have divined the tale's end, for you have turned white."

"I cannot help it, O Sheik."

"In your place, I, too, would blanch. I felt the fluttering, coming and going, before midnight on the night of rain, and the pain smote me at sunrise, as you know. In some months, how many I know not, the warning will come again, and—and I will no longer be your protector and stand between you and the chains of iron. The word has gone forth from you and from me that you will return, and it is so written in the stars. But when the door of the Sepulcher of Wet Bones has closed behind you, then the bond is taken up, your debt to me and mine to my pasha have been paid, and if you find a way to break out—perhaps with help of friends from across the desert— I will lift my voice from my deep grave in thanks to Allah."

"What friends, O Sheik? I ask the question in my need."

"Timor is one. If ten or twelve, a number easy to spare from the herding, would follow him across the desert, much might be done. They would have to come in secret some months after you had been sent back, and be a different party from the other, so their faces would not be known. But my pasha is their pasha; to offend him is to offend Allah; the way is very long and the danger great and—I do not know." Suliman began to speak in the vernacular. "It comes to me that Izubahil will help you all she can, which may be more than we dare believe. When Mahound dies—the dog still lives, whining to Allah—she can resume her place among the Tuareg; or if she weds one of their chiefs or becomes the wife of a noble Arab, she'll have certain limited power. True, her people dwell a thousand miles across the Thirst—and no prisoner has ever made good his escape from the Sepulcher of Wet Bones. But remember, there's no desert that can't be crossed at last, no wall too strong to break down."

I longed to make some worthy answer, but my tongue stuck.

"One thing more. Tell only Timor—and if you like, the maiden Izubahil—of these tidings, for my great horsemen are also children in some things, and there would be no laughter or no singing for months on end, and no good talk at the fires. I want them to be happy to the hour of my departure, then when they have wept their fill, to be happy again. And I would you were one of them, Omar, to take Izubahil to wife, and to live out your days as a Bedouin, worshiping what God your soul decrees as long as you keep faith with the bread and salt, for I have learned to love you as a father loves his son."

He raised his hand in a kingly gesture, about to give me leave to go, but instead his eyes turned dark and he made a plea.

"Now leave me quickly, Omar, so you won't see my tears."

I saw Isabel's tears when I called her from the cooking-fires and told her the news. There was only a young moon, but it showed them welling in her eyes and on her brown cheeks. She asked me to meet her in an hour at the place we called the Stairway of the Jinns.

It lay about two miles from the encampment, and was an outcropping of some great rock-fold—as though it were a mountaintop rising out of a sea of sand. It towered about three hundred feet, and got its name from a series of receding ledges about ten feet apart, the first two easily gained by climbing broken rock at one side. When I arrived there, Isabel Gazelle had unsaddled her horse and was waiting for me on the bottom step.

"Bring your saddlecloth," she told me.

I did so, and found hers already spread on the fiat stone. Near by was a jug of water, and another that I guessed held fermented camel's milk, and a cluster of dates. She took my cloth and spread it on top of hers.

"Will you take your ease, my lord?" she asked.

"Yes."

I dropped down on the cloths and she crouched beside me.

"Omar, I've decided not to marry a youth of the Beni Kabir," she told me.

I nodded and waited.

"There's none of great enough name to be able to do what I want. Unless I've married a chief who can lead a bold and well-armed band to my people's tents—it need not be large, but it must speak for all the Beni Kabir—I'll lose izzat, my father Mabound may not repent the lie he told, and he may be able to hold my mother's followers, the Men of Spears, from coming with me on a journey. Ishmael ibn Abdul is good to look upon and is a sweet singer and the son of a malik, but how many would go with him to right the wrongs of his bride, once a princess of the Tuareg cast out by her sire, but now joined to a Bedouin?"

"His brothers and his young uncle. Not more."

"So I've decided to go with some caravan until I join a tribe of Tuareg other than the Kel Innek, perhaps even the Kel Allaghan (People of the Spears) if I can get to their star-far land, and marry a young chieftain. With him and his followers, I'll go back to the Kel Innek and take away my mother's followers, as well as my flocks and herds, and the men will go with me to the desert close by your prison, and with us working from without and you from within, you can break out and go with us on our fleet riding camels far beyond the sway of Yussuf Pasha."

She paused, her eyes fixed on mine. I nodded, but could not speak.

"Oh, don't you believe me, Omar?"

"I believe you, Isabel Gazelle, but it will take a long time. If it takes more than four and a half years from now—when I've spent twenty years in slavery—I'll not be able to go."

"I'll come before then. I swear it by Messiner, my God."

"There's no harm in that," I told her, smiling—yearning to see her smile.

"Omar, do you love me?"

"I do."

"Will you always love me and think of me with joy?"

"Yes, with great joy."

"Do you want me for your own? Your woman—your mate—your saki until we part forever? Then I'll be your widow whom a young Tuareg weds in pride. And a widow stands as high as a wife in Tuaregstan. . . ."

There was a strange stirring deep in my brain. It was like the ominous rustle of air before the wind sweeps down out of the clouds and lightning flashes. My heart stopped, it seemed, then hammered my side, and I heard my own voice.

"Isabel Gazelle?"

"What do you want? I thought you wanted to come to me, but you're a cold-eyed Frank with water in your veins—"

"I must ask you a question. You must hear me and answer. It's life or death to me."

Her gaze became slowly intent.

"Omar!"

"What if you returned to your people not as the wife of Ishmael the bard but as the widow of Suliman ibn Ali, Sheik of Beni Kabir?

Her arms slowly rose, her hands drawing in until they covered her face. The strength ran out of my sinews and I felt bitter cold. As we started down, I held out my hand to her, and it seemed I had never known a fear as great as this, but she took it in hers with a little gasp, her long, firm, strong hand with beautifully pointed fingers, but now cold with icy sweat; and tears filled my eyes. Farishti came trotting to her, whinnying, but the gelding made me chase him a short distance into the desert. When at last we were saddled, Isabel turned to me and answered my question.

"If I could go to my people as Suliman's widow, if only with an escort of two old men, Mahound's lie would be cast into his teeth, and I could take away my mother's followers and my flocks and herds."

"If he'll take you for his wife, will you take him for your husband?"

"Yes, until death parts us."

"Then I'll go to speak to the sheik, and I bid you come with me, for I'm a slave and you're a princess of the Tuareg."

"When shall we go? At first light? If we wake him from his sleep—"

"We must go now."

She nodded to the young moon as though to bid it farewell. I led the way to Suliman's pavilion. We found Hamyd drowsing by a watch-fire; instantly he rose, looked from my face to Isabel's, and touched his amulet.

"The sheik is asleep," he said, "but if it's something of great moment—which well I know—I'll wake him."

"Wake him and tell him the slave Omar and the Tuareg maiden Izubahil beg audience."

Hamyd vanished within the tent. We saw the curtain glimmer as torches "were lighted, and heard the stir of women setting out water pipes and sweetmeats. In a few minutes Hamyd returned and drew back the curtain for us. Suliman had put on an embroidered caftan, white trousers, and a belt with a golden buckle. I touched hand to heart and forehead as though I were a freeman; he replied and told us to seat ourselves on the carpet.

"I beg leave to speak plainly, and at once," I said.

"Ah, ah."

"In some weeks or months, it's my fate to return to the prison out of which you delivered me, and before I go, I wish to see Izubahil, who has become most dear to me, wedded to one of the Beni Kabir and in his tender care."

"Surely she's of proper age to marry, and, when you are gone, she'll need a husband. If you'll tell me which one of my followers you've chosen as worthy of her hand, I will myself speak to his elder kinsmen so the matter may be pursued."

"I have your leave to speak plainly, so I will. There's only one of the Beni Kabir fitted by ancestry and name and place to become the husband of Izubahil of the Tuareg, and that is Suliman."

Suliman's eyes seemed to change shape in the lamplight, but I could not tell what it boded. He reached for his flint-and-tinder, but Isabel darted forward, took it from his hand, lighted his water pipe, and put its stem between his lips. He puffed until the bowl bubbled with a growling sound.

"A princess of the Tuareg wouldn't be easy to please," he remarked at last. "And since in her own tribe she may say 'aye' or 'nay' to a great emir, let alone a sheik of the Bedouin, I'll ask if she would be agreeable to that marriage."

"O Sheik, as it would be among her people, let it be here," I replied. "Isabel Gazelle, will you answer his question?"

"Suliman ibn Ali, it would give me great joy and pride, and a great hope."

"Spoken like a princess. More, it comes to me that if I die soon, she would bear my name well among her own people, and cast her father's lie into his teeth to rejoice my soul, and—and do other things dear to my heart. But Omar, my son, if I take Isabel Gazelle to wife, not merely as a concubine, it's needful that she be a maiden. That is the law of the Bedouin. Who would warrant it in Allah's name?"

"I'd warrant it, O Sheik."

"It's the word of a slave, but I took it once before, and once before then—in a sea cave in Malta—when you were free. Fourteen and half years have gone by since we ate the bread and salt, and the bond still holds. Omar, she's one of the most beautiful maidens I've ever seen. She is as beautiful as the morning star—you've yearned for her as for the Moon of Ramadan. For the while that I live, she would give me great joy. So I fear that the bride price may be beyond my means."

"It's only that I may ride El Stedoro to the wedding feast." And I could not keep my eyes from filling with tears.

"I'd do more than that. I have a little horsehair band, with brass ends, that I greatly prize, and this I'll present to you, to keep forever."

"I'm your protected, O Sheik."

"Then at sunrise tomorrow I'll declare to my followers my intention of taking Izubahil to wife, and at sundown you shall come for her, at her abode, and you and Timor and the widow her ayah will bring her to my tent, and I shall deliver to you the horsehair band. And on the following day, all the Beni Kabir who have followed the grass with me shall feast, and there will be riding, and games, and at that feast you shall ride El Stedoro, and it shall be written by the scribe, and enjoined upon my son, that when again you are a freeman, El Stedoro shall be yours, to be delivered to you at Alexandria whenever you send word. And now you have my leave to go, with this injunction. We have all been weakened by tears flowing from our eyes inward instead of outward, which are the most grievous, and sometimes an evil fate defeats the stoutest heart. Therefore I'll send my sais Hamyd with you as you depart, and he will mount guard over Izubahil until she reaches her abode, and remain to guard her through the night and until tomorrow at sundown, when she's to be brought here and bestowed upon me in marriage."

I knelt before him and touched my hands to my forehead, as was meet, and although she was a Daughter of Spears, Isabel did the same. He raised us up, and kissed us between the eyes, and we went our lonesome way.

CHAPTER 15 Sunlight Through Cloud

That night I dreamed of climbing the Stairway of the Jinns, seeking Isabel. It was a perilous and futile climb, and on the summit three men sat waiting for me, with pale, grave faces. They were Enoch Sutler, whom the Vindictive men called Sparrow, an Irishman whose real name I never knew but whom I called Kerry, and Holgar Blackburn. To my amazement, all had shed their chains, but I looked and found I still wore mine. They were going away, and I could come with them if I liked. I told them I could not go—I had a watch to keep—at which Sparrow and Kerry smiled strangely and disappeared. When I asked Holgar why he stayed, he showed me that a hole in his chest and another in his back had been stuffed with straw. Then a flock of crows came flying over us, saw us, and darted away in fright.

When I wakened, my face was wet with tears.

I rode hard until late afternoon and did not watch the sun. Just before sundown I donned what finery I had, including a bright head-cloth, and Timor decked Farishti with the silver-mounted bridle and saddle, the fabulous saddlecloth with its gold fringe, and the silver shoes that had adorned the Princess Izubahil's horse when she was banished from her father's caravan. We waited for her at her guardian's kraal; she came forth wearing the same raiment she had worn that night, with the addition of a brightly embroidered sash, fastened with manifold knots and bows, quite possibly a gift from the sheik. When she was up, showing only her profile to the crowd, I mounted, Timor fell in behind me, and we led our foundling to the sheik's tent, with the widow and a slave girl, mounted on donkeys, bringing up the rear.

Gorgeous of dress, Suliman received us in his mukaad. There was no ceremony; a feast and other acknowledgments and celebrations of the sheik's marriage were to occur tomorrow. He handed to Timor and Timor passed to me the bridal price—in this case a horsehair band with brass ends. By strict Bedouin law, he would have the right to demand its return if Isabel did not prove a virgin. The widow took Isabel's hand and laid it in Suliman's hand.

"La illaha ill' allah, tea Mohammedu rasul allah!" Suliman intoned. (There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.)

We retired, and as the night deepened, there was high suspense and ill-concealed anxiety among the people. That the gray-beard sheik had taken a young and beautiful bride thrilled them deeply, and it was impossible for the thought to occur to them that it was inappropriate; if the marriage was made good, they would take it as an omen of his long life and their own prosperity. But he was three score and five and was not as strong as most of the elders, and besides that, they feared the chance of accident during her excursions with me. If so, I would not be blamed. It would be only a doubly unhappy kismet falling to me that I could neither have her for my own nor see her the accepted wife of the sheik. Now and then they looked sharply into my face as though to guess my thoughts, but just as often they gazed at me with compassion or even awe.

Few of the men slept much, mostly they smoked and told tales about the thornwood fires; and at the first light they began to assemble near the eastern wall of the sheik's tent. By sunrise all were there, the women squatting further back. Then Hamyd came forth with a sheepskin and hung it out for all to see. There rose a great shout of triumph.

Over my spirit hung a heavy cloud, but not all of it was dark-there was a paleness here and there, as though the sun were trying to break through.

After the morning meal I called El Stedoro by a name he knew, petted him, gave him bread flaps, leaned upon him as I often did, and with one hand on his withers and the other on his loins, leaped high enough that he could feel my weight. He turned his great head to regard me curiously. Presently I leaped powerfully, swung my leg over his back, and caught my hands in his mane.

For some seconds he stood still, greatly astonished by the situation, and somewhat alarmed. I spoke to him in gentle tones, but was not able to reassure him, and in growing panic, he pranced and broke into a run. Still he never knew real terror. My voice and my smell were strongly associated in his mind with coddlings and petting and care, even with safety from unknown perils, ever since he was born. The weight on his back was new and frightening, and he tried rearing and leaping to throw it off, but like all blooded horses, he landed with springy legs, so I was in no danger of falling. He took another dash, but with my knees and by shifting my weight, I turned him back toward the encampment. As he slowed to avoid running into the kraals, I slipped off.

He ran a short distance and stopped. I walked slowly toward him, calling. When he turned and came toward me, his lips working for corn flaps, the breaking of El Stedoro was done.

I rode him with a halter on short jaunts in the course of the morning, and in the afternoon showed him a saddle and put it on his back. When the other Bedouin had mounted, we fell in with them and made a dashing sweep about Suliman's tent. By now Hamyd and his other attendants had fixed a carpet with cushions before its door; and the sheik and his bride came forth in new and gorgeous attire. When they had seated themselves, the men rode round and round, howling like red Indians and performing feats of equestrian-ship. Some sprang in and out of their saddles, rifles in one hand, at a full gallop; others rode standing, or picked up scarfs; and although I did no tricks, both El Stedoro and I came to honor in the display. When we dashed out into the desert, the gray stallion wanted to pass every horse in front of him and refused to be passed by any. In this band ran some of the swiftest horses ever bred by the Beni Kabir— sable-brown mares and geldings with white points that moved in a soaring motion light as gazelles—but the great bounds of El Stedoro invariably brought him to the lead and, if I had let him tire himself, he would have left the others in his dust.

There followed a sword dance performed by eight youths, a beautiful and frightening sight. It ended with the star performer turning cartwheels—so we called the feat when I was a boy in Maine—at dizzy speed, hurling himself over with one arm while he held a short sword, its point to his breast, in the other.

Then the great metal trays were brought forth, laden with banks of rice and heaps of boiled meat. The elders dined first, and Suliman left his seat to pass among them, sometimes handing one of them a tidbit. When the young freemen had feasted, we slaves had our turn. But as he gave-me a hucklebone, supposed to be lucky, I was suddenly carried far away.

A movement of his hand had caught my eye. On its blue-veined back was a slight cut that might have been made by a knife a few hours before, deep enough to have stained the sheepskins of the bridal bed. I could not doubt that it was self-inflicted and that he meant for me alone, of all his wedding guests, to notice it and perceive its meaning. The message was for me. Only two others—himself and Isabel—knew the secret.

Its effect on me was profound. I could not bear to glance at the still, beautiful face of Izubahil, my foundling Isabel Gazelle, but I looked into some strange, far country of the soul I had never seen before. Now Ishmael ibn Abdul began to sing a marriage ode, his clear voice ringing out to the silent throng, but I hardly heard him, because of a song making in my heart.

Suliman ibn Ali, Sheik el Beni Kabir, you've kept troth with me from the eating of the bread and salt even to now. I did not call the provost when I found you hiding in Calypso's Cave, but that was no cost to me. Years passed before I sent you the token from the Sepulcher of Wet Bones; you had only to say to yourself that kismet had brought me to that pass, that you would like to help me and would do so if it came your way, and put the matter by. Instead you traveled hundreds of miles across the Thirst in my behalf, you brought great influence to bear, you brought me forth, you let me live again.

I have lived again. Although you could not set me free, I have labored with my fellows, rejoiced or mourned with them, fought the desert, rode, eaten bread that tasted like the bread of freedom, drank from the desert wells, sat by thorn fires, beheld the sun's rising and the sun's setting at the desert rim, watched the moon in her courses, and gazed upward at the stars. It came to pass that again I knew the glories and the pangs of love, far deeper than before because I had been divorced from beauty so long, and by then its least finding rejoiced my heart, and this was a mighty finding. I did not find fulfillment, but not through your denial, only Fate's.

Suliman, my captain, you have only a few months to live. For tliai time I have bestowed upon you the desert's gift to me, and whatever beauty of bliss you may find in her, take it with the full wish of my heart, by the proud endowment of my soul. If I begrudge you that, I liave not come through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and my soul is lost.

In mid-March, 1816, when Suliman and Isabel had been married five months, he ordered an oryx and gazelle hunt with greyhounds on a thorny plain on the western border of the Oasis of Baeed. The hounds had run at sunrise and killed when Suliman made me a curious address. Riding up beside me, he extended his hand. When I put forth mine, he clasped it warmly.

"Omar, sahahti (friend), I've taken great joy in Izubahil."

He gave me a wonderful smile and rode on. The strange thought came to me that Isabel Gazelle might be with child. I did not believe it enough to dwell upon it now; more likely in his elation over the good hunting he had been moved to tell me something long postponed. A few minutes later the hounds flushed a fox that quickly earthed; then they had a glorious run after a white oryx, whose horns bent back like sabers, only to lose him in the heavy thorn. For an hour or so in mid-morning, we rested the dogs and horses at a water hole; and we had hardly saddled when a joyful cry went up. Half a mile across the plain browsed a small herd of addax, long-legged, brown-maned, spiral-horned antelope who will lose in dust all but the swiftest hound or horse.

When the race was underway and I was holding in El Stedoro for a final spurt, again Suliman brought Farishti on my flank. "Let the gray jinn go," he shouted. "If you don't, his dam will shame him even now. On, on, Farishti, moon of beauty! Teach your great, gangling son how a lady runs!"

I loosed my rein and thrust my heels into El Stedoro's side. He bounded forward, but Farishti was so fired by Suliman's fervor that she would not be passed. Three full furlongs the gray stallion and his beautiful dam ran abreast, and since the track was perfect and the day cool, our hard-riding chasers had never seen such flying hooves, and yelled their joy.

Then the stallion's youth and greater gifts let him forge ahead. When we had gained two lengths, I cut away from her to come up behind the greyhounds, but Farishti kept a straight course. To my amazement, Suliman had dropped his reins and rode with his head bowed.

"O Sheik!" I shouted, in sudden terror.

His arm rose to touch his forehead in the grave Arabic salutation. Then it fell limp, and he swayed in the saddle and pitched down.

A wail rose from our rear, and the young riders as well as some of the elders sprang o£F without checking their madly running mares. In a few seconds they had gathered about their fallen chief, gazing at him in a great silent sorrow whose like I had never seen. As I crouched beside him, only a few gave any sign of hope. They remembered that my dawa had helped him after his previous fall, but now he had a different look from then and seemed to lie closer to the ground. When I laid my head on his chest, I could not detect the slightest stirring within, so I took a handful of dust and held it in front of his lips. Not one grain was blown away.

"Slave though you are, you were as a son to him, and if it comes to you to speak, speak," an elder told me.

"It comes to me to say this. I believe that our sheik was given a warning of his death this day, and he led us to the hunt so he might die when riding hard after hounds in the pursuit of game, a sport that he greatly loved and which we love; and so we could be happy with him to the last."

Farishti came up then, whinnying, and nudged Suliman with her muzzle. I thought then that the weeping men might bind his body in her saddle, but instead they passed it up to an elder's son, who rode with it in his arms. With Farishti following us, whinnying pitifully, all rode fast for a mile or more, then the rider passed his burden into the arms of another youth. So the young men took turns until we came in sight of the encampment. I had hoped one of them would choose me for the office, a last service to one I loved, for although I was no longer young, I was far stronger than any of them and rode the strongest horse. Perhaps because I was a slave, more likely because his death put an end to my place in the tribe, I was passed by.

Now the elders took Suliman's black burnoose, and spread it on Farishti's back and fastened it well. With light blows of a rope they drove her ahead of them, and when the penned horses whinnied to her, she trotted into the encampment. At once there rose a woman's cry, and then, as we rode in slow and solemn file, the sound of wailing came to meet us on the desert. As we came up to the kraals, all the women save one were weeping and smearing dust and ashes on their faces and hair. One, beautiful Izubahil of the Tuareg, my foundling Isabel Gazelle, stood white but dry-eyed, and no one had ever seen her head more high than as she walked to the bearer of Suliman's body and took it in her long arms. For a moment she stood there, holding it against her breast.

"I am Izubahil, widow of Suliman ibn All, Sheik el Beni Kabir," she said, looking into the elders' faces. "It is my command that a grave be dug, not in the village and not in the oasis, but on the Hill of the Broken Pillars overlooking the desert, and ye are to gather here in white raiment an hour before sundown, that we may lay him there."

She turned and bore the sheik's body into his tent. Thereafter events appeared to move with gathering speed and fatefulness. By mid-afternoon the grave was ready; as the sun pitched, we climbed the hill, four young men bearing the bier, with Farishti shaking her head and whinnying behind; before the light failed, we had completed the strange task, including covering the new-turned dirt with a cairn of stones. That night was given to mourning. The women wailed and the men wept; and in the flickering light of the thorn fires, Ishmael ibn Abdul sang a death song of noble eloquence and beauty. But it was no more moving than the strange, wild outpourings of the old horsemen who had followed the grass with Suliman for nearly half a century and could hardly bring themselves to believe that he had gone.

In the morning Izubahil—for she had not yet returned to Isabel Gazelle—spoke with the elders in Suliman's tent. Soon the word passed as to their plans for the Beni Kabir. Osman Malik, Suliman's cousin, and Isabel would be joint guardians of Suliman's son Selim until he came of age; and Osman would lead the people alone until such time as Izubahil returned from a journey. With her would go the widow who had been her ayah, a female slave, twelve riflemen of name, and camel drivers and tenders to make up the caravan. It was her purpose to return to the Kel Innek and establish her birthright and bring away her patrimony. Meanwhile, six freemen led by Timor and with the help of a few followers and slaves would escort me to the prison from which Suliman had brought me, according to his bond with Yussuf Pasha and with me. The two missions could make a joint caravan for part of the distance, then go our ways.

Almost before I knew it, these plans were underway. Although we used only a minor fraction of the Beni Kabir's great stock of riding and baggage camels, still the caravan stretched long, and was strong enough that a band of acrobats, with marvelously trained hyenas, fell in with us at the Baeed Oasis for the journey to Wau.

By not any great count of days or many swoops of the Black Falcon Night, we came to the village, the parting place for the two missions, and of Isabel and me. I had spoken rarely and briefly to her throughout the journey—this was proper in the eyes of our companions, since there were strangers with us—and as the time neared to go our ways, we stood at the door of her small pavilion in full view of our fellow travelers. Her sword-hewn beauty was never more moving; her eyes were dry and burning. Now we must make an assignation of last hope to me.

"Omar, I've counted all the days before the day that I can surely come to you," she told me. "With good luck, I could come sooner—but the luck isn't always good. So that day is far off."

"I hoped you could say one year," I answered. "Is it two—or three—or five? Unless it's within five years of this coming June—that makes twenty years of slavery—it will be too late."

"Five years? O Messiner in Paradise! Omar, it's five months! Am I a land tortoise making across the Igidi Desert? In four months and a few days begins the Month of Ramadan. At the end of that month will rise the Moon of Ramadan to break the cruel fast, and all the guards will be on the hills to catch the first glimpse of her. If you can, file off your chains, for they would slow your running and rattle in the dark. Your fellow Jeem will have files of Damascus steel; if he's not alive, they'll be hidden under the tree of the rook's nest. You and he make eastward to the first wadi beyond the oasis. Hamyd told me it's a secluded place, only a mile from the prison; there will be an old marabou there, with a stick fire, and the fastest riding camels in the droves of the Kel Innek. Once there, you're safe. I swear it in the name of my foremother, Izubahil, wife of Yunus, Emir of Assode. By my teats, in five years of famine I, too, would be dead!"

The outburst was low pitched, but it rang in the still dawn.

"I love you, Isabel Gazelle."

"I love you, Omar, and my love will make atonement, only a moiety of what is owed, yet more than you dream, for your years as a slave. Am I not the Daughter of Spears? So go in hope. Admit not one black devil of despair. I'll come, Omar. Hear me? I'll come if I'm alive, and if death takes me before the day, someone will come in my place. Is it a bond, Omar? I give it by this barraka { magic) that I wear at my throat and don't understand."

"Truly, it's a bond."

"The rising sun has heard me, Omar, and he'll dry my bare bones if I lie. I've spoken it in the morning breeze, and it will remember, and unless I keep faith, it will mock me by every thorn fire until I lie down and my mouth is stopped with dust. Now go. I'm the widow of the Sheik el Beni Kabir, and it's not meet that I should weep over a scarecrow with a stone face. But when you are free, I'll be free with you for a certain space. Then I'll weep to my heart's content."

I left her and went down toward the Sepulcher of Wet Bones. Day after dogged day we had pushed on or rested in the shade, night after moonlit night we had followed pilot stars or, in the deep dark, slept; and the long empty miles had fallen away behind us. We did not hurry to my chain, nor did we loiter. But on the day that we saw the plumes of the oasis against the burning sky, Timor drew his camel beside mine, and put his hand in mine. Thus we rode for about a mile. All who saw us wept, even slaves and camel drivers from Baeed whom I had not known till now, but Timor and I were two old hostlers, inured to blown dust and sand, so our eyes stayed dry.

We reached the stockade late in the afternoon, and there was a darkness in my soul that would not pass away, no matter how Isabel's farewell rang in my ears. It seemed more concerned with Sparrow, Kerry, and Holgar Blackburn than with me, and the dream I had dreamed of them was upon me again, just around the corner from my conscious thoughts and fears. The quarry master's scribe came out of the groves to meet us, showed no surprise or hardly interest in my return, and made an entry in his book. At once the smith welded shackles with chains to my wrists and fixed them to the iron rings I wore on my ankles. They were somewhat lighter than before, but that was no comfort to me because it only meant they were shorter, and so I had less arm and leg room. Then a guard I had not seen before led me around the building to look at the iron hook.

I started to ask a question in Arabic-stopped-then asked it anyway. If, after six and half years among the Beni Kabir, I did not confess to speaking their tongue, I would be suspected of some design. My concealing it before, as though it were a tool I had hidden away for some hour of need-seven years of silence depriving me of some little fellowship with the other prisoners-had come to precisely nothing.

"Is this the same hook 1 saw before?" I asked. "It looks like it."

"The same one, although not quite as sharp. But that's no comfort to the meat when it is hung."

In the dusk rose the awful sound of chains clanking in unison, faint at first, but growing louder. Torches flared, and the dust-smeared file trudged through the gate. The fore guard was called Majid, he who had taken Caidu's place after Holgar had danced a dance macabre with his chains; and I hoped to see Ibrim, the least cruel of our wardens, bringing up the rear. Instead I saw a brutal-looking European, his bared chest matted with reddish hair, who had come here since my departure.

Then I must stand with a face of stone while my whole skin prickled and crept. Several of the chained marchers were Negroes, and one, still in deep shadow, had a familiar look. In an instant more I knew. He was James Porter, called 'Giny Jim, and he had come upon evil days, I had not the least doubt that he recognized me, but he made not the slightest sign.

Then the rear guard, whom I took now for a Slovak or a Pole, showing powerfully built and even more brutal-looking in the lamp light, spoke to his fellow and then came up to me, grinning, and asked me if I spoke German.

"No, sir."

"But you're Omar, known as Sittash," the man went on in corrupt Arabic.

"Ah."

"I'm Otto Effendi. I've a little account with you. It's stood on the books before I came here. It appears that on your last day here your workmate, known as Kerry, jumped off the shard dump and killed himself."

"True, he did!"

"He shook hands with you before he jumped and you didn't jerk him back. When it was reported to the quarry master, you were charged with negligence of duty and neglect of property—you could have saved a slave past his prime but still worth a hundred dinars. But the master had already put you in the sheik's care—he did not want to offend his noble guest—so he postponed the punishment until you returned."

"What is it, ff you'll kindly tell me?"

"Not the hook. You're too good a workman. Also, your record had been good as to violations. However, you're to be taught a lesson. Forty blows of the kurbash—twenty on the sole of each foot—with the blunt side. Come with me to the block and I'll give them to you now. They'll be to welcome your return to the Sepulcher of Wet Bones."

In the midst of terror I thought of something, and a wave of happiness washed through me. Isabel had promised to come for me on the new moon of Ramadan, in a little over four months from now. It was possible that unforeseen circumstances would prevent it. Perhaps Jim and I could not do our part—his being chained and no longer having the run of the grounds increased our difficulties and dangers manyfold. Yet I was committed to the attempt, and Jim would go with me. I would go to any lengths not to be taken alive, and Jim would join me. If this, too, failed and we were brought back, we would surely be hung on the iron hook—both of us together, most likely, a sight for the prisoners' sore eyes—for that was the punishment for attempted escape, not to be slacked if the slave were worth a thousand and one dinars.

What did it mean? Why, it meant that in about four months our slavery would end! I would not have to stay the few years remaining of the twenty-year term I had set as the ultimate limit. By a bright road or a dark road, I would go forth. If I took the dark road, Captain Phillips's last command would remain unobeyed, a great wrong to God and man, but I would have done my best and failed, and all the Vindictive's company would be in the same boat.

Yet on the one occasion that Jim lost heart—the night watch had been doubled because of the desperate actions of several prisoners— I did not remind him of this certain outcome, and instead used subtlety to encourage him.

"I wish we could make a good try, when de time come, but it look to me hke we ain't even gwine make a good try," he told me, whispering in the dark.

"I'm not worried about that," I answered. "It's what will happen afterward that worries me."

"What you reckon, Cap'n?"

"Isabel will bring help to us, and we'll do our part. There'll be risk of getting killed, but none of getting caught—and I feel it in my bones that we'll live and go free. But what then, Jim? How are we going to start to obey Cap'n Phillips's orders? Maybe we could do what Sparrow said he could do—run up and kill—but that wasn't what Cap'n said. Two penniless jailbirds against the high and mighty, and a trail fifteen years cold!"

"Cap'n, is 'at what you studyin' about so hard lately?"

"Aye."

"It ain't how we gwine break out?"

"I'm thinking of two or three ways and will choose the best."

"Well, then, I ain't gwine to let it worry my mind no mo'."

"No, don't worry about that."

But in bracing up Jim, it turned out I had not concealed as much as I had revealed. For the first time I had put in words some plain facts that I had long ignored and would continue to ignore until Jim and I were free or until they, too, were shadows. I knew that I had told a truth that had haunted me, under my more urgent anxieties, for many years.

"As for how we gwine go 'bout de duty, I won't study 'bout 'at neither, 'cause I wouldn't get nowhere in fifteen years mo'. All I know is, you got to get high and mighty, too, for a fightin' chance to win."

Jim, too, had spoken truth.

The days crept on, the nights sped by, and the time to strike for freedom grew near. Jim and I had had one strange stroke of fortune in the cruel death of a Negro for the murder of his teammate. His body had been left to hang on the iron hook until it would fall; and as a consequence, all the prisoners had moved the black burnooses on which they slept from that end of the building. In the dead of night in this clear coast, we prepared a means of exit under the wall.

To dig a tunnel through the hard-baked earth with no tools but hand drills would be an impossible feat in the course of one night. But one night we removed a third of the necessary dirt, replaced all we could, and scattered the rest. On the next night we easily took out what we had packed in, dug some more of the hard dirt, and refilled the hole. Out of the nightly period of three or four hours that we could give the task without slackening our next day's labor, a continually greater part went to taking out and replacing loose dirt; even so, we delved further every night, and in six nights only a shell of solid ground remained to break out. We need not fear someone stepping on this shell and finding loose earth beneath it. It lay directly under the hook where some grisly carrion still hung. There was hardly more risk of one of the prisoners venturing near our digging place.

By careful testing, we discovered that we could not be seen by our prisonmates so far from the watch lamp; and we took great care not to rattle our chains.

The day that the cruel fast of Ramadan was to end, we quarry slaves were brought back to the prison half an hour earlier than usual so the guards could repair to the high ground to watch for the new moon—the Moon of Ramadan whose first glimpse signals the feast. From within the walls we heard their joyful cries; and Jim and I looked at each other across the darkening room. Shortly the prisoners grew quiet. The night darkened, and the stars shone brighter as the moon set. We waited till every form was still, then crept to the wall.

In less than an hour we had scooped out the loose dirt from our passage; then, crawling in and stabbing upward with the drills, I broke the shallow crust that still penned us in. In a moment more we stood outside the wall, holding our chains so they would make no sound. Jim knew a quick route toward the rook's-nest tree—he had learned every footpath in the oasis in the days before Zimil died from a fall and he had been sent by a jealous foreman to the gangs.

We came up into the hard-packed road leading to the quarry. There was no reason to expect any traveler here at this time of night, and in our awful urgency we did not take great care with chains. Had their occasional low rattling carried far? I must ask the question when I heard one stone knock another far up the path. It might be a stray camel or donkey or even a wild night prowler venturing this close to the reek of man, but it might be a man in some venture of the night.

"He comin' dis way," Jim whispered.

"Who could it be?"

"He wearin' hard sole shoes lak Otto de guard."

We had time to hide, but very little room. The greatest safety lay in the thorn thickets, some of them shoulder high, growing beside the road; just beyond lay naked ground whose dim, illusive starlight would surely disclose black shapes. Jim found a refuge about ten steps up the road from the one I chose. As I crouched behind a thornbush, I reached down and found a stone as big as an orange and held it at my shoulder ready to hurl in a short-armed throw.

I died for a time, it seemed, and the world died with me, and nothing was left but the darkness, the watching stars, and the sound of footsteps drawing nearer. Time neither sped nor crawled: its passage was apparent only in the increasing nearness of the traveler. My eyes grew strangely relaxed. I made out his shape far beyond any vision less keen than a night hunter's. He walked briskly, with his head high, and on the opposite side of the road from the thickets. I thought that he was watching them out of the corner of his eye.

Such alertness was natural enough by a walker in this lonely place at night. His mission might be easily guessed by some object—I took it for earthen jug—under his arm: likely it contained a liquor forbidden good Mussulmen, but which he had got hand on, concealed at the quarry, and had now retrieved to drink at tonight's feast. This was instantaneous perception-he had not yet come opposite Jim. As he did so, I detected not the slightest change of his step or suspicious action.

But as he passed on, his head turned a little toward the thickets, so that he kept a narrow field of vision over his shoulder. Now he was in ten feet of me, and I hurled my stone.

It struck him in the belly and he fell hard, like a butchered camel. Instantly Jim and I had crouched over him, ready to strike him with our chains if he tried to rise or to call for help. But he could only groan and tremble.

"Jim, can we bind him and gag him and put out of sight till we can get away?" I murmured. But I knew better than that.

"They'll come lookin' for him when he don' bring 'at booze, so I gwine kill him."

I could not bear for innocent, great-hearted Jim to be the one of us two to take human life. And that was the reason, not forty blows of the kurbash on my bare feet, that I quickly picked up the stone I had thrown, struck quickly with it and with great force. In a few seconds or two more, we had sped on.

"Cap'n, le's don't stop to file off 'em irons. Le's run as fast as we kin, and not mind 'at noise."

So we ran like burdened camels running toward water after great dearth on the desert. Jim knew the shortest way; we had hardly got our second wind when, from high ground overlooking the wadi, we saw the beautiful yellow flicker of a thorn fire. We ran toward it, our chains clanging. Soon there rose beside it a man dressed like a wandering mendicant, but these profess poverty, while picketed near the fire were three of the most noble riding camels I had ever seen, beasts of great price. "Ick, Ick," he told them in a low voice, and they straightway kneeled. I could hardly believe they would let us mount, with our jangling chains, and smelling as we did of the prison and of human blood, but if their strange dignities were offended, they gave no sign; and at once Jim and I were hoisted to a giant's height.

Our leader took up the wadi until it leveled off, then across the desert. I saw that he was guiding by the great star in the east that the Arabs called Azazel, but when we had crossed a rocky ridge, we turned due south, toward the caravan road from the oasis to the military town of Misda. Long before we gained it, a company of camel riders bore down on us from a hillcrest where they had stood vigil. As they swept around us, I saw that they numbered about twenty, and all but one of them wore black veils. The bared face was only a pale blur in the darkness, but it caused a painful swelling of my heart and a great exultation of my soul.

One of the men passed me a robe, a cap, and black slit facecloth; another gave Jim the same. We put them on the best we could over our irons, during which our smoothly running camels never changed pace. Before long we came upon the road, and when we had followed it southward about an hour, we met a small caravan of Fezzan Arabs hastening toward the oasis to celebrate the feast of Ramadan.

"Who are you?" their captain called in Arabic.

"The Tuareg," our veiled leader answered.

"Bismillah! The Men of the Black Veilsl"

They would tell tonight of meeting the Abandoned of Allah, and on being questioned might remember that the garments of two of them seemed awry, and a clanking sound rose as they rode past. But we would not be traveling this road if it would lead us into danger, and my fear passed away like a puff of smoke in the cooling breeze, and only joy remained.

We turned off in about an hour, and to my surprise struck, not west toward Tuareg country, but southeast. For three hours more we kept a steady gait, guided by the stars, until we came to a little wadi and followed it down to a well-pitched camp by an abundant water hole. Here fires of thornwood and dried camel dung blazed cheerfully, two small pavilions and one large one had been raised against the sun, and white-veiled men picketed the camels and tended fires and cooking pots.

I lost sight of Isabel before 1 had one clear glimpse of her face, but her orders were being forthrightly carried out. Two white-veiled men with files began to cut away my irons; two others were removing Jim's. The chains fell and rattled on the ground. The iron rings on my ankles, never letting me go for more than fifteen years, soon lay impotent on the ground.

Presently a Negro slave girl came forth from the largest pavilion with some garments which she passed to Jim and me.

"Izubahil sends these to you, to take the place of your rags," she told me in Arabic. "Also, a little way below the big water hole is a smaller one, and since you and your companion are foul and stinking from the prison, and since it is the custom in Frankistan, you have her leave to lave in it. But she bids you not stay long, for to be immersed in water causes a man's strength to wane, and he's likely to die from fever."

"Tell Izubahil I won't stay long."

"Afterwards the black effendi may go to the cooking fires. To you, Izubahil will speak."

When we had laved and scrubbed with sand, Jim put on white garments sometimes seen on Negro travelers from the East. I dressed in a kind of loincloth under a resplendent deep blue Kashmir robe not greatly different than some of the barricans worn by rich Arabs. There was no headcloth or face veil, no cross-handled sword and dagger that the Tuareg invariably wore. Plainly Isabel had no idea of arraying me as one of her tribesmen, no doubt good policy by a capable princess.

When I returned to the fires, I found her seated on camel's-hair cushions in front of the closed doorway of the large pavilion. At once she rose and showed me her profile. She had gone a little farther from childhood since I had seen her last; her manner was more grave and ceremonial. She was dressed in a sleeveless, side-less jacket and tucked-in skirt, as when we had first met. Her beauty was the same I had seen in manifold dreams.

She turned her eyes on mine and began to speak in Arabic.

"Omar, you're no longer a slave. You've escaped from slavery and shall never return to it as long as you ride with the Tuareg. Do you think the Tripolitan dogs could catch you now? If they discovered your flight before butter can melt in the sun, and some barraka (magic) brought the quarry master and his guards straight to this camp on camels as fleet as ours, do you think they'd show themselves beside our fires? Not when they are guarded by the Sons of the Spear.

"Will they not send to Misda for a great company? What if they do? We've already ridden sixty miles from the prison; before they can bring the Mamelukes, we will ride three hundred miles. Will they guard the water holes? What if they do? Give us dew-wet fodder for our camels and we can cross the Igidi Desert with no drink but their foaming milk. They will be as jackals trying to catch the white gazelle with back-bent horns. They will be as vultures trying to catch a falcon.

"So until the stars pale, we will rest here, in the cool, and then vanish like shadows in the desert."

She paused for dramatic effect—I could not and never wanted to forget that she came of a people as poetic and language-loving as the shepherds who roved the hills of Judea with David for their king—then she began to recite an ancient writing.

"Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth, for his love is better then wine.

"A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved, and he shall lie between my breasts.

"Lo, the winter is passed, the rain is over and gone, and the flowers appear; the time of the singing of the birds is come, and the fig tree puts forth green figs.

"My beloved is mine, and I am his; he shall feed among the lilies. Until the day break and the shadows flee away.

"Awake, O North wind, and come, thou South, blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into the garden and eat his pleasant fruits.

"Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountain of spices."

Her eyes shone, and with the promise of a smile she held out her hand to me while with the other she drew open the pavilion door.