American Captain

CHAPTER 16 Fall of the Chain

The new moon of Ramadan had waxed but half her fill when we passed beyond the last vague border of the Pasha of Tripoli's dominions, out of danger of pursuit. For the first time I saw what true-bred, well-trained riding camels could accomplish as ground-coverers when expertly ridden and managed. Our band of forty-some people had over two hundred beasts. Every day one camel in five carried riders, two in five bore light loads of baggage, mainly grain and water bags, two in five ran free. The baggage-bearers were always offended and tried to bite their wallahs; those running without burdens were the most nervous; those that carried the black-veiled Tuareg, the most proud. Traveling in the early morning hours or, later on, by moonlight, with ample rest for man and beast, we sped five hundred miles in seven days.

Thoughts can fly faster than that, and sometimes mine turned back, for a few troubled minutes, to the Sepulcher of Wet Bones. The keepers would not have taken lightly the breach Jim and I had made in its boasted inviolate walls. The Pasha in Tripoli would thunder his rage, heads would roll, new rules and regimes would be enforced; but I did not think that the prisoners would have it much harder than before, because otherwise their output of beautiful marbles would be diminished, which would lighten the Pasha's purse. Perhaps the greatest impact would be made on the prisoners' souls, whether for good or ill, I could not reckon. Some might be encouraged to attempt escape, only to die on the iron hook. A great many might dream of escaping and hold to that dream to the dreadful last.

During this week of flight an Arabic-speaking Tuareg told me some news of the outside world, no hint of which had reached me in the prison. In the preceding year a strong flotilla of warships from Frankistan had bombarded Algiers and forced the Dey to surrender prisoners. Of late the Pasha of Tripoli had broken treaties made with these same Frankistan captains some dozen years before, again harrying their ships, so he, too, took terror at the sight, since he thought their power had been broken in Christian wars. In the upshot, both of these pirate kings and the Dey of Tunis to boot had begged mercy from "the terrible captains with blue eyes" and had sworn by Allah to give wide berth to all their vessels.

I wondered what captains these were. Some captains from U.S.A. had treated with the Pasha about twelve years ago. Frankistan was a general term for Western Europe and beyond. . . .

"From what tribe of Frankistan did the captains come?" I asked my informant.

"I didn't hear that, Omar."

"Were you told the color of their flag?"

''Ah! Ah! It had a blue square in one comer, with sixteen stars, and red-and-white stripes to the number of thirteen."

"Why, I know of that nation," I remarked when the Tuareg warrior peered sharply into my face.

"And you too have blue eyes!"

So all was well with my native land! Wondering what it would be like to be homesick again, I rode on with my good companions. On our eighth day of flight, generally southward but veering a little eastward, we came on some good wells in a lake bed grown to camel-thorn, in striking distance of the caravan road that Mahound had taken on his return from Mecca. Now we must take new bearings, and chart a course.

"It would be well, and pleasant, to rest here for five days," Isabel Gazelle told me as we sat by a dying thorn fire when the camp had stilled. "Then we will strike the road to ride either east or west."

She was grave, and her eyes were big and bright. "Is it a hard choice?" I asked, well aware she was leading up to something, hardly daring to guess what it might be.

"It won't be hard or easy either, for I'll not make it. It's for you to say. For as long as you want me and can stay with me, I'm your woman. These Tuareg, the Sons of the Spear who followed my mother and now follow me, will take you where you wish to go and do what you desire. If we go west, in due course we'll come to the tents of the Tuareg. But I know you wouldn't stay longer than the second caravan making toward the Christian settlements, if indeed you don't join the first."

"How did you know that, Isabel Gazelle?"

"Because for many moons I've watched your face—when I could bear to look at it-and lately have lain all night in your arms. The Beni Kabir say you will foUow a great blood feud, but I doubt if it's business of the blood. It may be to go on a pilgrimage to-what can I say? It may be to cast some lie into its teller's teeth. It may be to raise a cairn of stones over the bones of your brethren whom you greatly loved."

"It's all three of those things, but especially the raising of a cairn of stones over the bones of my brethren whom I loved, for the peace of their souls wherever they may be, and the peace of my soul, and to vindicate my survival in the sight of God."

She swayed to me then, this beautiful young woman whose lineaments and form looked as though carved with a sword, this daughter of the merciless desert, and I felt her tender lips warming with the warmth of life and transfiguring with love my jagged face of stone.

Isabel Gazelle fed the fire and brought squares of camel cheese, a handful of dates, and a wooden bowl of fermented camel's milk. This was to tell me it would be a long time yet before we went to bed.

"Behind the little Christian settlements of the Rio de Oro, the Sultan's Mamelukes raid to catch slaves, and his ships rake the seas," Isabel told me.'"I never want you to hide again, or run. So what if we journeyed eastward to the tents of the Beni Kabir? It would be a fit thing for me to dwell among them until my husband's son becomes a man, and you could ride El Stedoro while I rode Farishti. But I might as well ask the moon to ride backward across the sky."

She spoke cheerfully, plainly having still another string for her bow. I was almost sure what was forthcoming, but life with Isabel Gazelle was one continuous adventure of surprise. . . .

"What if we went still further east?" I asked.

"After many days we would cross the Libyan desert and come to the Nile. Beyond lies the Atbara River and the lands of the Beni Amer, fiercest of the Beja. But my mother's cousin, Takuba, of whom I told you, has become a great chief among them; and he would be of help to you when you try to rob the lost tomb of the Pharaoh."

Now that she had come out with it, I felt belated wonder. I wished I had no more need for buried treasure than the Tuareg or the Beni Kabir. Isabel and I could live together on the desert until one of us died and dusky sons and daughters could live after us. Our sons would be great cameleers and horsemen and hunters; our daughters would be beautiful and proud.

"I've never mentioned robbing the Pharaoh's tomb," I remarked to Isabel.

"Your eyes did when I told you about it, your head on my lap."

"Now I'll tell you why I must have gold—much gold. Two tasks have been laid on me by my captain. Many years have passed since then, and the trail is cold. Without gold, I can't come close to the doers of the crime or enter the same doors or even speak to them, for would they hire one with a face like mine for a body servant? My fellow Jim and I are long forgotten and unknown and unarmed. Also, I'll need gold to build a cairn of stones in memory of my brothers."

"Much of that, too, I knew," Isabel answered. "Suliman told me you would need gold—he said it's king in Frankistan. I myself have seen how with trade goods bought with gold, the captains of the slave ships can buy whole villages of black men and women, sometimes whole tribes, and carry them away over the sea."

"Did Suliman think the tomb might contain gold?"

"Yes, for those tombs downriver, beside the Gezira desert, gave up gold—as much as a donkey-load in the times that men remember."

No doubt she meant the pillaged tombs along the Fourth Cataract which various travelers had described, insignificant compared to many in Lower Egypt. I had retained very little of this lore; but I did recall that dark-skinned savage conquerors from the Nubian deserts had more than once swooped down on the luxurious courts and sat the golden thrones like camel saddles. Might one of them be buried in Egyptian splendor on his own steppe?

"You told me the king of the Beni Amer had rock dumped on the tomb entrance to close it forever."

"Yes, so the demons wouldn't come out and kill the people." "Wouldn't we have to open it on the sly?" "I think we could hunt elephants, as though to get ivory." "Do you think the demons that guard the passage will kill me?" "I asked Suliman about that. He said he had never seen anyone killed by a demon. Perhaps you can find some kind of barraka to keep you safe." She paused, collected her thoughts, then went on in great earnestness. "There are many other dangers, but none in our own camp—you can be sure of that. If you brought forth gold to load ten donkeys, not one of the Tuareg would take a grain." "Now, that's a wonderful thing, and will you tell me why?" "To start with, they know very little about gold. They've never dealt with it or judged things by it, and the thought of it doesn't make their hearts beat fast. They count wealth in camels, horses, donkeys, and sheep. Besides this, I'll tell them a story they'll believe and love. It won't be true and yet it won't be wholly a lie. It will be, that a prophecy has been made, long ago, that you shall come to this tomb and seek for gold that was put there for you by certain gods; and that other gods are arrayed against you and will try to kill you, and your quest for it is like the great quests of old. With that in their hearts, they'll vie with one another to help you find it, and get it out, and bear it away. Remember they are sons of the desert—they love a tent more than a palace, one fleet she-camel more than a drove of plow beasts, a tale more than a feast, a verse more than a silver bangle, a dream more than a victory, the young moon with a star beside her better than a field of durra, and a princess they deem beautiful best of all. And aren't you her finder when she was lost in the Thirst-long her lover separated from her by the curtain of the sheik's tent-and at last her husband?" "Ah! Ah!" I murmured, trying not to break the spell of prophecy suddenly come upon her.

"We loved each other with great passion, yet I made marriage with the sheik," she went on in a beautiful soaring tone. "I would have given him my flower, not in begrudged due, but in joy and pride, for I'm a princess of the Tuareg, and I'd taken him for my husband; but that was not to be, for causes forever secret between him and me. And that did not keep him from being a husband to me in his heart and mind. And lo, he gave me of his wisdom, and of his truth, and of his greatness as much as I could bear."

Something was coming, and I did not know what it was. My neck pricked fiercely, tinglings ran up and down my spine and across my back, the air was sharp in my nostrils, the fire burned with strange, sharp crackhngs, the stars leaned down. I looked at Isabel Gazelle, and again she was Izubahil of the Tuareg, and beauty was upon her beyond my comprehension, and something more than beauty, something born of the desert or the night.

"When I went to dwell in his tent, I was a child, I knew the joy of living and loving, of work and play, of peril and sweet escape, but I knew no evil. I did not know that it dogs the soul of a man like his shadow follows his form. It was Suliman, my husband, who taught me to fight it tooth and nail, so it might not fasten upon me or upon anyone in my heart or in my charge."

"I am in both," I answered, "so tell me what I must do."

"What I say now is what Suliman bade me say. I—I could not have thought of it myself. I was the one appointed to free you after fifteen years of slavery. If besides that I give you a sword of gold to fight your battle, you must promise never to use it in revenge."

"I don't know what you mean."

"How can I tell you when I can feel it only in my heart, not in my head? But it is a great thing. Unless you live by it, your soul will die."

"You've set me free, and if you also give me a sword of gold, I'll never use it in revenge. I'll take no blood price for the wrongs done to those I love and to me. I'll do only what my captain bade me with his last breath."

"Do you swear it by the bread and salt we've eaten together?"

"By that, and by my love for you, and by my soul."

"It's by my love for you I ask it, which is all I know."

Suddenly she was sobbing in my arms. Over the eastern hills the moon rose shield-shaped and red, and the jackals raised their voices in eerie cries. But there was only one sign that I believed, prophetic of my future days, and it was of love that would guide and guard me still. It was the sign of her lips on mine, her tears upon my face.

CHAPTER 17 The Challenge

We came from the raw desert into a steppe rimmed by purple hills. Thorn and acacia thickets became a commonplace; some of the watercourses had little rivulets among the rocks in the cool shade of the heavy growth of the wadis; water holes were no longer hard to find. No few sheep, camel, and cattle drovers followed the grass, sometimes in bands no larger than a patriarchal family. But the fodder was not as good as it used to be, they told us, and the steppe not as broad. In their grandsire's time they could range far east and north where now stretched burning sands.

Although we had entered what was called the Country of the Blacks, the people we met were not Negroes of any kind we knew, being slightly built men of brown or reddish skins, broad between the eyes, with straight high noses, pointed chins, and sparse beards. The children's hair showed wavy; the men wore it fantastically dressed. Invariably there was one or more in the band who could speak Arabic. Only a few had heard of the Tuareg, star-far on the western Sahara; almost all knew of the horse-raising Beni Kabir. The most immediately exciting feature of the country was its numberless and varied kinds of animals. As soon as we got into partially wooded lands, we could hardly believe our eyes.

Crossing the Nile on ancient ferries, we went forth into the bush without great trepidation. Most of the robber bands were small and poorly armed, and far weaker parties than ours went about their business, largely unmolested, savages as well as thieves being restrained by fear of battle, fear of reprisal, and fear of breaking that oldest and greatest of all laws, moral and economic, to live and let live.

The plain was largely steppe, broken by thorn and acacia thickets and occasional clumps of wadi thorn and dwarf mimosa trees; tall trees I did not know and dull-green thorny jungle filled some of the watercourses. Many kinds of antelope and gazelle thrived on the coarse herbage. We must keep our guns loaded for rhinos, watch for snakes, approach no big water hole without looking out for crocodiles; burn night fires against lions and leopards, and be ever ready to turn out for elephants.

We saw several cows and calves and young bulls, none with ivory worth the taking, on our first day east of the Nile. On the second day we had distant views of several lone bulls, and toward evening came close to colliding with a herd of thirty or more elephants, led by a monster whose height I might have guessed in feet, but having horses on the brain—as all men do who live by them for a few years—I took pleasure in reckoning him at thirty-six hands. That was twice as tall as the largest Clydesdale draft horse. I could not believe his weight to be less than six tons.

Yet he, his cows, some young bulls, and several calves were making through the thorn forest like so many clouds of smoke. By staying downwind, we did not wake their rage, and they let us pass.

"Collecting ivory, if only as a screen for robbing graves, will be excellent sport," Zoan, the intrepid Tuareg chief, remarked with a boyish smile showing through his veil.

Three days from the Nile we came to the Atbara. Only trickles and pools remained of the late summer floods that had brought down whole trees from the Ethiopian forests, the flotsam of villages, dead herds of cattle, and drowned elephants. We crossed the deep-scoured bed, and in half a day's journey came to the village of Takuba, Isabel's kinsman, a Tuareg of the Kel Allaghan, who are Sons of the Spear.

He dwelt in a house of baked mud with a tiled roof; his kraals spread far and wide, bursting with cattle and sheep, goats and horses, and the thatched-roofed huts of his serfs dotted the plain. He was away on his pastures when we arrived, but when the shadows longed, we saw him coming on an excellent sable-brown mare-one bred by the Beni Kabir unless I missed my guess—his face hidden behind the black veil of a Tuareg nobleman. His bearded scribe was riding beside and a little behind him, and his Negro sais brought up the rear.

At sight of his black-veiled kinsmen he uttered a great cry of "Sano!" and spurred his horse. But before he could greet them, his eyes fell on Isabel, and then he could hardly keep his seat. The Tuareg were haughty and stone-still with strangers, debonair in times of stress, and I had not lately seen a man so overcome. His hands dropped to his sides, and he blurted out a question in the Tamashek tongue. It contained the name "Izubahil."

She made some warm answer and, hurrying to him, put her hand in his. It was as though she wished to show him that she was Izubahil in the flesh. Deeply moved, he dismounted and kissed her between the eyes, as might an Arab elder. During the grave talk that followed, he glanced at me with friendly interest. Then while his slaves passed tobacco and barley beer to the company, he led Isabel and me into a dim room with whitewashed walls.

Their conversation was in Tamashek, Isabel interpreting as tersely as possible. Granting that my barraka was of great power, yet he believed the demons guarding the tomb to be invincible, and he would counsel me not to meddle with them in any maimer; but plainly it was my kismet to do so, and no man can fight his kismet. A hunting party could well choose as its base camp the bank of the Atbara close by the buried and almost-forgotten stairway. But there was one obstacle that must first be overcome. This Isabel repeated to me in direct translation.

"The king of the Beni Amer won't let foreigners hunt ivory in his dominions without his consent," Takuba said. "If I ask him to come here—his kraals are a day's journey southward—he will do so, and decide the matter, whether yes or no. You have a fearful face and an ungainly form. This will go against you, but Izubahil wouldn't wife with you if you weren't strong and brave, which Simba—the name means Lion in the tongue of his mother, a slave trader's daughter from Mombasa—demands of every man receiving his favor. Also, he shall hear that you were born free and equal to any man in your tribe, according to the Writing, which Izubahil has told me, and which will please the king."

A runner to Simba's kraals sped on his way. For three days we travelers rested and were richly fed. Then midday brought a swiftly moving dust cloud that soon disclosed a band of fifty riders on good but not pure-bred Arabian horses. Less than half had guns, the rest carried spears either of iron or, longer and fully as formidable, bamboo sharp as bayonets and hardened in fire. They wore woolen robes, and their hair grew in a fuzzy mop, projecting above the forehead and standing brushlike all over the head to the nape of the neck. They were lightly built men, not as tail as the Tuareg, with glowing reddish-brown skins. Patently they were horsemen and nomads since time out of mind.

Their king was more like Zoan than anyone I knew. Not more than thirty, he had a like grace of movement and an equal beauty of countenance; his body was wonderfully put together, and he did everything, whether only to give me his hand, with the same magnificence. 1 thought that his life, crammed with adventure, was as poetic and thrilling as Zoan's.

To my great joy, he spoke Arabic—many of the Beja did so, and Simba's mother, being a slave trader's daughter, was probably almost pure Arab—greatly augmenting my chances of winning my point. Whatever business I had with him, he wished done at once. He chose for our meeting place the shady side of the house with his followers and the black-veiled Tuareg seated in a semicircle in easy hearing. Benches were provided for him, for Jim and me, and for Takuba. With no trappings of royalty but a black-maned lion skin over his shoulder and a slave with a palm-leaf fan to shoo off flies, he listened impassively to my host's plea in my behalf. Meanwhile I could read nothing in his face, but afterward he turned to me such brilliant eyes that I became at once fascinated and on guard.

"Omar, your face would frighten vultures from their meat," he remarked in a casual voice.

"So does a lion, O Simba!" I responded, my head screwed on well today, as Maine folk used to say.

The response pleased the listeners who could understand Arabic, and it was immediately translated into Tamashek and into Tigre, the language of the Beni Amer, behind many dark hands.

"And to judge from your form, the mutton was lean last year," the king went on.

"It was fat enough, but I fed on addax, which only a hunting leopard can catch—or a very lean lion."

"If you fed on addax, you must know how to ride a horse."

"Yea, Simba Pasha."

"Yet you are all mounted on camels."

"We came a long way across the desert."

"Think you that your best rider might ride with one of the better riders among the Beni Amer?"

"It might be so."

"Then I'll tell you of a custom of the Beni Amer. Sometimes when traders come up the Nile or from Mombasa, we go forth to get ivory. But the elephants ruled the land before the first men set foot here and are kingly still. Thus it isn't right that we should dig pits for them, and slay them by base stratagems, or even kill them at a distance with rifles until we've proved ourselves in a more even match. So the first bull must be slain by two horsemen, armed only with bamboo spears. Sometimes the bull does not fall; instead, one or both of the riders are scattered in pieces over the plain, and others take their place. Now, if one of your band will ride with one of my band to kill the first bull elephant—each helping the other in his need according to our custom—I'll give you leave to hunt in my domains. But if none of you will so prove himself as a rider and elephant fighter, I refuse your plea. That is my word, not to be recalled, and you may give me your answer when the double-tongued repeat it to our followers."

When this had been done, a wave of excitement swept through the throng. The Beni Amer looked exultant, the black-veiled Tuareg drew their veils closer, always a sign of deep feeling, Isabel Gazelle turned pale, and Takuba gazed from me to Simba in perturbation.

"We have no horses or bamboo spears, O Simba. But if you will supply them, one of us will gladly stand the test."

"Will you appoint him now? He may have his choice of all our mounts, which tonight will be well fed and rested for tomorrow's run. But by mercy of your gods, choose well. Meeting Tembu in the tusks—so the ivory buyers call him, teaching the name to all peoples under the sun—is not a game for women and boys."

The answer to this was easy. The black-veiled Tuareg were camel riders without peer, but not one, even Zoan, was a finished horseman. All were masters of the spear, their tribal token, but a little close thinking told me that a bamboo lance was quite another thing from the long iron spears of Africa; it was only a thrusting weapon and no good, from lack of momentum, for throwing. Certainly it was on horsemanship that the elephant fighter's life would hang. As to handling a long bamboo, at least I had clubbed rabbits going full tilt.

All this was open and shut. Still that did not account for my not dreading the encounter. I was a sober man of purpose, not a beau sabreur like Zoan. Perhaps the answer was deeply rooted in superstition. I would not be killed because there was no one else to do a hard, long, dirty job in the Book hereafter. Perhaps I had learned to be reconciled to the inevitable.

"I, Omar, aspire to the honor of hunting with the chosen one of the Beni Amer," I said with ceremony.

"La illaha ill' allah!" This great Arabic watchword was meant to impress his men. "By my mother's milk, I'll not be outdone. So I myself choose myself to be your fellow of spears! And Tembu had best drink deep tonight, for tomorrow we'll give him a hot race for his life or ours."

I grinned at Zoan, to which he made sheepish reply, and I was able to look Isabel in the eyes, for they were ashine with pride in spite of a worried drawing-together of her dark brows. But there was one of our hearers at whom I could hardly bear to gaze, seeing too well in fancy the heavy trouble, surging up from his heart, in his black face.

For tomorrow's race, I chose a horse from Takuba's paddock, a bay with white points, with some rough barb in her. Her sloping shoulder muscles, arched crest, rounded barrel, and clean, hard pasterns made me remember horses of free and easy movement; her quarters were magnificently rounded for great driving power. Equally important in this race, her small, high-held head with small mouth, melting purple-brown eyes, and far-apart pointed ears hinted at Arab wits. Her top gait was not nearly as fast as El Stedoro's, but she could gain it sooner. Indeed, I had never known a horse with a faster start. She could turn around on a prayer rug—a rather impious saying of the Beni Kabir—and when running up to dangerous holes and corners, she kept her head well.

Her name was Mariyah, after the beautiful Coptic concubine of Mohammed, and no doubt given her on some Arab's stud farm.

When the cooking fires had expired, Isabel drew the door curtain of the tent, bringing me a cheroot and a bowl of palm-toddy Takuba had supplied. Lighting a smoke for herself, she took a seat just out of my reach.

"Tonight I sleep against the wall," she told me.

"Why?"

"Tomorrow you must ride hard for your life. Your horse must be well rested, and you the like. The least diminishing of your strength might give Tembu victory."

"Show me a youth of twenty, who's my equal in strength. If you can, I'll show you a young bull elephant of twenty who can match old Tembu, with his scars and blunted tusks, whom Simba and I will fight tomorrow. Can a three-year-old stallion match a six-year-old except in a short race with a jockey-sized rider? Not in hunting or in battle or in getting colts of great heart. By our giving to each other, my strength tomorrow would not be diminished the least jot. Are you afraid that our happiness will anger the bad gods, and tomorrow they'll set gopher holes in my mare's path? Isabel, I know these gods—I've taken their measure—for although they can maim, they can't kill, for King Death retains that power alone. To the devil with them. I defy them."

"Don't talk so, or 1 must run to you and hold you tight and fall. Yes, I schemed to please those very gods, but that was not all. I know of the great strength that's been given you for some task not meant for me to know or share—still I can't believe it until I feel it ever renewed. I wanted you to long for me tomorrow as I once longed for one swallow from a cool well I bad barely tasted the night before. Then you would live to come back to me. Are you and I from the dim alleys of a great city where folk are only half alive, or are we riders of the desert? You saw El Shermoot with Farishti in the wasteland, but have you seen a maned lion and his mate? Takuba has, and told me of the burning. Think you he would spare the hunter who stood between him and his beloved?"

"Sometimes my eyes are dimmed, Isabel Gazelle, and I can't see the signs and wonders, and I too become half alive. Sleep with your head on my arm, so I may waken and look into your face, and watch you breathe, and wonder at the mystery of life, and drift into sweet dreams."

It was morning before I knew it. The sounds of fuel gathering and firemaking were queerly muted; and when I went out to water Mariyah, I could not fail to see the sober mood into which all tlie men had fallen. The black-veiled Tuareg bowed to no man, but they laid their long, dark hands on my shoulder as I passed in reach, and the Beni Amer touched their foreheads when I went by. The white-veiled Tuareg groomed the bay mare until she shone in the sunlight, filled water casks, and sharpened the long points of twenty or more fire-hardened bamboo spears.

But when I looked anxiously at Jim, he gave me a big grin. His heavy trouble over the risk I must run had lightened in the night.

Takuba, walking about with his gray-bearded scribe, beckoned me to the kraal on the excuse of showing me a young and likely foal. After I had looked at her, the elder addressed me in fluent Arabic.

"Omar, I speak for my master, Takuba, or by his leave, out of the lore I have myself gathered in this bush for two score years."

"I am your protected," I answered.

"Five times in my years among the Beni Amer have they played this game. Once the two players who began it, ended it. On three occasions, fellow tribesmen took the place of the players who fell. In these three fights Tembu killed one, three, and five, all good riders and spearmen, before he fell. In the fifth race he killed eight, whereupon the Beni Amer gave up the hunt and returned to their tents, knowing that they had somehow angered the gods. It might be they would have never hunted so again if, on the following day, they had not found the body of the great man-killing Tembu, bearing four broken spears."

I thought of something—a hard problem—and could not at once reply.

"Now hear this truth of Tembu. He can run with great swiftness, but he can't overtake a horse on hard, open ground. So don't let him decoy you into heavy thicket, which he can break down like a landslide while you plunge in one place. His sight is dim, but his ears are great traps for the least whisper of sound. Fight the battle with all your might, and with a warrior's joy, but never cease to take care, or you'll not fight again."

He touched his hand to head and heart and fell silent. To my wonder, Takuba drew aside his veil a little way, so I could see his face. I did not know the full meaning of the gesture, but it cast a solemnity over all that the scribe had said.

As the men broke fast, a brief ceremony was performed that struck me as being far more important than their laughter would indicate. One of Takuba's slaves brought out on a tray a little cake of durra meal, and a bowl of cow's milk. At once Simba's close kinsmen, no doubt leaders of his tribe, took hold of him and brought him, he feigning reluctance, to the offering. Meanwhile the black-veiled Tuareg did the same to me, I, too, pretending to hang back. Then both of us broke off and ate a piece of the bread, and in turn drank from the bowl.

Of course the bread contained salt, and the sharing of the milk might have symbolized a closer brotherhood than that of war—even that we were brothers of the breast. One thing was certain—he would not desert me during the day's strife, and would not hesitate to risk his life in my behalf. Beyond any doubt, I would do the same for him.

Assembling to go into the bush, the black-veiled Tuareg cameleers took lithe ease on Takuba's horses. Jim rode a white gelding, and being truly black with grizzled hair, he made a fine appearance. When I swung up on a spare horse to rest Mariyah, I took a bamboo spear and dashed in front of our tent until I met Isabel's gaze, then lowered and raised its point in salute—an act of ceremony that made the Tuareg throw back their heads. In reply she made a little formal motion with her hand.

Our party made for a hill about five miles from the kraals, overlooking a brush-grown plain. As we were climbing it, I dropped back from beside Zoan to come abreast with Jim.

"Jim, if I'm killed, the Beni Amer will expect one of our men to take my place," I told him in English.

"1 was thinkin' about 'at," he answered.

"None of the Tuareg are horsemen, although they're good with spears. You've ridden the horse-of-tree, but not the four-legged kind for many years, and you're not a spearman either."

"When I was a young'n in 'Ginia, sometimes I rode out bosses for or Mas', but I wasn't no real hostler, and bless Jesus know I ain't never had one of 'em spears in my hand."

"Yet if I fall out, I think the Tuareg would give you the first chance to take my place. But they won't think less of you if you stand back— they know you're not a horseman—and anyway, they're not your judges. At a time like that, you'll judge yourself the best you can in the sight of God."

"If you fall out, Cap'n, I gwine take your place. I can't stop to figga whether it right or wrong, wise or foolish—I just gwine do it. We're the last two alive of all 'em who sailed on the Vindictive. Just like you'd spell me in a hard job, I'll spell you."

I nodded my head and rode on.

CHAPTER 18 Appointment in the Thorn

Atop a little hill, the sharp-eyed Beni Amer did not take long to spy elephants. Most of them were young bulls and cows, their ivories too small to be of worth; but away in flat-topped woods of stunted mimosa roved three big elephants, any of which looked fit for our first kill. Not only their heavy tusks, but their association, aloof from the herds, indicated that they had outlived their youth, and were evil-tempered hermits. The woods showed open, with no thick thorn, as favorable ground for the game as I could ask.

We rode toward them, and when no more than two furlongs down the wind, Simba and a companion made a circling dash for a better look at them. When he dropped back beside me, his black eyes were shining.

"I've rarely seen three finer bulls together," he told me. "It must be that they chose one another's company as might three champions in a host. The least of them, Tembu Sheik, is about two score and stands six and a half cubits. The middle one, Tembu Khan, is ten years older and a good seven cubits at the shoulder. The great one, Tembu Emir, has as great a frame as any Tembu I've ever seen, and if he were as massive as the others, would weigh forty gislas (seven tons). As it happens, he's gaunt as you are, which we know by now doesn't mean he's frail. Although three score and perhaps more, I believe he'll be fast as his own sons of thirty. Truly, he's so much like you in so many ways—you should see his lean face carved of rock —that we would have named him Tembu Omar, save it might have caused you to die in his place. His tusks are short but of exceeding weight—I'd guess them at four ngomas each (one hundred and eighty pounds). We believe he once fell into a pit and was raked with a sharp stake hardened in the fire, for he bears a great scar on his side—and didn't you fall into a pit when you were young? So if it's agreeable to you, we'll choose him for our quarry."

It would be more sensible to take the first one that came handy. To try to separate the giant from his vast companions would be to carry folly beyond all bounds. My brain knew it and told my thudding heart; still I would not, even if I could, interfere with the plan. I told myself I would lose face, but the real reason would be that I would break a spell. I did not know what had cast it over us all. I knew only that if once I began to count odds, to measure folly, to make compromises, and to alter rituals, I would find myself little and alone in the lap of terror. I was committed to a certain role in an antique drama of blood and death, the same as Jim was.

Then an unearthly light broke upon my mind, but whether the visions it disclosed were truths of life or mirages of the desert I could not tell. My survival or my destruction depended on how well and how valiantly and how luckily my companion and I rode. Then when all was said and done, was it not a test of horsemanship? Could I try to dodge it or mitigate it, when I had been delivered from the Sepulcher of Wet Bones to ride seven years with the Beni Kabir? What of the two great prizes I had won thereby? Was I willing to give them back as undeserved?

"Tembu Emir will suit me well," I said.

"Then you shall try for the first thrust while I divert his attention. Don't come full alongside, for he'll turn and strike sideways with his trunk. Cut across his rear at an angle, the spear entering in front of the thigh. Meanwhile, we'll try to cut him off from his two friends, but look out for them well."

He went on to give me final instructions and advice. As soon as I had struck, I should try to draw the bull's attack so Simba could come up on his rear and likewise strike. Both shafts would then be sunk or broken or lost, so as soon as possible we must take others from the outlyers. The right arm lifted high was a signal to come up. Straight out from the shoulder warned of hidden danger.

Our horses were brought up, sweating with excitement. While the spear holders posted themselves in the open, Simba and I cantered toward the quarry.

In a few seconds I made out their gigantic shapes, then saw them in vivid detail among, not under, the mimosa trees. All three were waving their trunks, feeling for scent, their great ears spread. Tembu Sheik and Tembu Khan stood side by side, as mighty and magnificent as the herd bull we had met in the thorn; Tembu Emir was a little in front, and a strange cold thrill came over me at sight of him, for I knew we were in each other's fate since we were born.

Simba had seen him with less searching eyes than mine. Instead of three score, he might not be any older than Tembu Sheik, who was about two score; and the gauntness of his vast frame and his craglike head were not the wastage of years, but the buming-away of fires. Simba had spoken of a scar running up his side. Instead, it was a ridge a foot wide standing out several inches, white as leprosy, the dreadful mending at last of a gash that must have barely missed ending his colossal life. How many years ago did you fall into the pit, Tembu Emir? Have you kept the count of days? Were you a young bull then, in your first love affair? Didn't you know that little beings with cunning brains and hearts full of hate dig pits in which sharp-pointed, fire-hardened stakes are set, and screen them well, in your cool dim forest paths?

I do not believe you are native to this ugly sun-baked bush. I think you were born on some snow-capped mountain far to the south. And why did you choose this place, close to the desert, so far from your green hills, to dwell in exile with two brave companions? Must you come here to meet someone?

Simba did not tell me of the two other scars you bear. Both are rings about four inches wide, above the right forefoot and left hind foot. Looking closer, I see what may be vestiges of similar rings above the other feet. When you lay close to death from the wound in your side, did your capturer weld on great iron rings and fasten you with four chains to posts, veritable tree trunks, deep-driven in the ground? If he could tame you, he could sell you to a king. What other king in Africa could ride so high?

A moment ago I burned with fever, shivered with fear. Now both have passed off, and a deep quiet is in my brain, as though waiting instruction, and wonder and pity are in my heart for great hearts such as yours, and for small, fast, frightened hearts wherever they may beat.

You and your two companions see us advancing.

But you do not seek battle with us, your rage is not yet aroused as we ride up on your flank. You move in long, swift strides, but not as fast as running horses on this open ground, and soon we pass you. Then we turn in your fore to perplex and anger you. You stop, again stretching forth your trunks.

As we ride in opposite ways to encircle you, you turn back and forth and around, shuffling your feet. The first to tire of the silly game is Tembu Khan. His trunk drops, and his only movement is a heavy swaying from side to side. Suddenly his trunk rams out on a downward slant, and he utters a blast of rage.

Wildly riding, Simba cuts in front of him. Tembu Khan does not know Simba is trying to separate him from his mates. As I press the others close, the dauntless horseman decoys him further and further from the arena. In a moment he comes cantering back, while Tembu Khan continues across open ground two furlongs distant. He has not been able to vent his wrath, and it has turned cold inside of him, and he is balked and beating sullen retreat.

Tembu Sheik and Tembu Emir have been tried almost beyond endurance by my riding and shouting, fury is breaking within them, and at the sight and smell and sound of Simba returning to torment them, they trumpet in unison and rush forth. But Tembu Sheik cannot keep pace with his gaunt captain; he is not as battle-tried or as resolute, so my riding on his flank deflects his aim. As he veers toward me, I see my chance for my first blow in my war with Tembu Emir.

For it is between us only, great kinsman. We have found each other after many years of waiting. I do not know who you are, unless you are Death, You look like Death and you shake the earth like Death.

I look somewhat the same, Simba said. Am I marked to die on your tusks, or will I conquer you and clear you from my path and myself kill in your place? The issue is very close.

I veer in my course, across Tembu Sheik's fore and toward Tembu Emir's flank. For the first time I give spur to Mariyah, and she dashes forward at top speed. In my right hand is the nine-foot lance, with a needle-sharp yard-long point hardened in fire, made of male bamboo, easy to grip and light to wield. I allow for Tembu Emir's shuffling run—so much faster than it looks and frightening to behold, as though some raw, crude force of nature had taken animate shape and superhuman wrath—so that I may cut across his rear at an angle, as Simba bade me. The vast gray shape looms close in front. I rise in my saddle and thrust the spear forward and outward, so that the point enters in front of his great driving thigh. We are riding fast, and my thrust is strong and swift besides, so the point enters its full length. A second later the shaft strikes a tree branch and breaks off.

Tembu Emir, why don't you turn on me and seek revenge? Do you not know I have given you a grievous and perhaps a mortal wound? On and on you charge, trumpeting; don't you see you can never catch that sure and daring rider? This is too easy, kinsman.

Simba rides in a great circle as I rush up to draw your charge. But now there comes a change in the tenor of events, hardly discernible at first, but perhaps of great moment before the course is run. The happenstance of Tembu Sheik falling in behind his leader prevents Simba from completing his circle and planting his spear; but it is some design of action, an intent we cannot yet guess, that causes Tembu Emir to continue on his course, paying no attention to either of us. For the first time our spear holders must change ground to keep in touch with us. I take the opportunity- to ride up to one of them and rearm. By now the two monsters are three hundred yards off. They have slowed down to_ a swift walk, but do not veer right or left.

Simba and I ride after them. Watching our chance, we cut in between the pair, and by dashing back and forth in front of him, I bedevil Tembu Sheik into charging me. When after a hundred yards' run he gives up the chase, Simba's yelling and dogging drive him to another charge that carries him an equal distance into the mimosa woods. Our purpose is to get him out of the way; then we will give short shrift to his wounded comrade. Running away from the woods into the sun-baked plain, he cannot escape us now.

As we wheel away from Tembu Sheik, Tembu Emir strides a low hill. At once Simba raises his right arm and rides after him full pace. He remembers now what lies on the other side; but he is too late; and he had better rest his horse for the trial ahead.

It will be a mighty trial. Over the hill lies forty or fifty acres grown to heavy thorn bush and trees. Wounded, dying perhaps, the Death King of the Elephants has gone there to take revenge.

Sometimes my night dreams of adventure and conflict, usually involving hard riding or hard sailing, turn suddenly into nightmares. So it was with my fight with Tembu Emir. At the close of one tense but exhilarating moment, I was riding down a kind of avenue through the thorn bush looking for the monster, my main anxiety that we would lose him altogether, Simba skirting some thickets on my flank. At the beginning of the next moment I had run up on him and was instantly in desperate flight from him and seized by terror more profound than any my conscious brain had hitherto known.

It was unmitigated terror, unlit by hope. Countless thousands of men have felt its seizure in the second before they died: very few have lived to remember it because it can be caused only by danger so enveloping and extreme that escape therefrom is preternatural. I saw him suddenly in what had seemed, the instant before, an unmenacing stand of thorn trees. There he loomed, vast, dark, his ears spread, but his trunk down, the most terrifying animate shape known to man, with the possible exception of a charging whale at sea.

His seven tons were poised to obey a signal from his brain. It came, and he rushed forth with an unearthly blast of sound, and the place I had thought safe was a death trap. The brush thickened ahead of me; his charge cut off my retreat. He came from my left while my spear was on the right hand; anyway, I never dreamed of using it in self-defense, my mind denying admission to the useless notion. I began the action of checking and wheeling my horse, knowing well it was too late. He swung the hammer of many hundredweight. I was in easy reach, and there was not even time to tumble off my horse out of his first aim.

But I lived on. It was some seconds before I knew what had saved me—the only thing that could—a thing at once true to life and inordinately strange. Somehow he had mistimed his blow, and it had missed clean. Before he could recoil and strike again, I had completed the turn and was out of his reach. An instant later I was riding full-tilt down the avenue I had just come up, with Tembu Emir in furious pursuit.

Then there was no longer any pattern to the fight, any art or science, and its nightmare likeness grew. In every case that one of us was free to fly, the other was penned in. Sometimes we were both in frantic flight between and around the thickets. You would have thought our horses would go crazy and bring the chase to a quick and bloody end. They stopped, wheeled, turned, dodged, or ran with incredible swiftness. It must be that Mariyah often acted on instinct, and her response to my unconscious signals, such as shiftings of my weight and pressures of my knees and heels, was so complete and swift that she appeared to do my will the same as my own hand. For my part, I had never ridden as well. That much the gods gave, Mariyah and I had become, in a very real sense, a centaur.

In the deeps of my mind the elephant became very Death. I dreamed that when Death comes, he shows vast and dark, sometimes with a terrible hammer that can strike in all directions and, in some eerie fashion, in his victim's image. I dreamed that Death was a mirror in which our own shapes melt away. Death was my great kinsman. He had come with a craglike head and a gaunt body bearing awful scars. But when he had taken other shapes, I had sprung out of his reach. In the blazing sunlight between the thorn I dreamed of escaping him again.

Amid low bush that slowed but did not trap me, Tembu pressed me so closely that his shadow fell across me, but I rode on. Looking back, I saw Simba cross his rear on a bold dash and thrust with his lance, but the point broke off when it had barely pierced the skin. Still it stung the monster, for he turned from my pursuit to chase his tormentor, who more than once had interfered in our affairs. I saw no danger of Tembu catching him, since the course was fairly open, and in the same glance saw my chance to deal a telling blow.

It was my first chance since the battle had moved to the thorn, and to judge from Mariyah's snorting breath and the sweat foam on her sides, I might not have another. She wheeled and darted on a slanting course until we were sixty feet behind my enemy, and about forty on his right. Then we cut in to strike.

Perhaps the drum of Mariyah's hoofs on the sun-baked ground warned him. I was poised to strike and leaning forward when he turned, in the opposite direction from what I might expect, bringing him up parallel to my course. There could be no doubt of his deadly intention—to strike me with his trunk as soon as I came abreast and in his reach.

I had no time or room to veer further to the left and away. I was committed to my stroke, and I gave it the instant his great side became vulnerable, far more forward than the other, slanting toward his vitals, and with the swiftness of Mariyah's run and of my thrusting arm. In the same instant, Mariyah began a wheeling movement to flee Tembu's vengeance, but she was too late. The outstretched trunk made a scythehke, sideways sweep, aimed low enough not to pass over our heads. Its end struck her in the throat a handsbreath under her jutting jaw. I heard heavy bone explode into splinters as she pitched down headfirst.

I went over her head and tumbled and rolled to the edge of the thorn. The shock of the hard fall saved my life in the next few ensuing seconds because I could not obey the fatal instinct to spring up and try to break through the brush, and instead lay still. So Tembu Emir did not see me yet. Screaming, he rushed upon the still quivering horse. I saw what no man could forget as long as his mind lived.

Tembu lifted his foot that was two feet thick and set it down on the mare's chest. With a fourth of his weight he smashed it flat with a horrid sound. Lowering his head, he drove one of his tusks through what remained of her torso, lifted it clear of the ground, then heaved it over and on the other side of the thicket by which I lay. I was reviving now; if Tembu turned his back to me I meant to try to crawl away, trusting to his blasts of rage to hide the sound. Instead he moved to the front of the half-obliterated carcass, which brought him up facing me. Lopping his trunk around the broken neck he pulled it till it stretched to ghastly length; then the head broke off. This he dropped in sudden indifference and fell silent as in deep thought.

That silence let me hear the drum of hooves. Simba was riding hard and close in and around the thorn clumps, trying to provoke Tembu into charging him. But the monster did not look at him and appeared oblivious of his presence. He began to shift his feet and move a little back and forth, the end of his trunk close to the ground.

He showed no anger now, only preoccupation with one train of thought, concentration upon one goal. But as the moments passed without gain, he began to be puzzled, then perplexed, and finally deeply anxious. Was it so? Was my mind wandering? Once he bowed his head in a curious way, then shook it as though to clear it of a mist. Moving slowly, he neared the bush beside which I lay, touched it with the quivering, probing fingers in the orifice of his trunk, then turned his head to sniff the ground about three feet to one side.

Now he showed what I thought was joy. Taking a brisk step, he sniffed the ground carefully but confidently for about six feet in a straight line. I realized at once that I had passed that way in my rolling tumble after being thrown from my horse, but in the opposite direction. He was back-trailing me. And now he came to the place where I first touched ground. Here the trail ended.

He searched the ground in vain. Then with a long sweep of his trunk he picked up the scent where he had first found it and again followed it to its end. For a moment he stood motionless, his trunk dangling, his ears laid back, and, I thought, his eyes closed. His vast frame swayed slightly as might the strongest blockhouse in an earthquake—a different motion than he sometimes made just before he charged.

Now Simba rode up on one side, shouting. He was taking a most terrible risk to come in so close on an almost exhausted horse: had Tembu charged him, he would have surely pinned him among the thorns. But the monster only half turned, curled his trunk, and uttered a warning blast. Then, so strangely floating into this nightmare world into which I had been cast, came Simba's voice.

"Omar! Omar! My horse has given out, but I'll get another, and a thirsty spear. There'll be another rider, the best in your band, to take your place. If you yet live, we'll try to help you. If you're dead, we'll avenge you. All of us will die before we'll forego revenge."

But I scarcely heeded him. My whole mind was fixed on two circumstances. Both might be straws to clutch at ere my nightmare ended in darkness; and taken together, they were only the stuff of hope. Yet my numbed spine tingled with rekindled flame.

As Tembu had turned to trumpet at the horseman, I saw that the small, dark red trickle down his side from the frontmost of his two deep wounds was hidden under bright red froth. And as he turned back to the hunt, he reeled so heavily that only by a sideways thrust of a forefoot did he keep from falling.

The time had been running out for one of us ever since the fight began, and for one of us only a few grains of sand remained in the glass, and of late I had felt almost certain that I was the one. Now it was as though a coin had been tossed and was still spinning. Now it had become a game of chance played by the great gods.

I had ridden well today, but it was not yet decided whether I rode well enough to win and ride on. Tembu had fought well, but it was already decided that he would not go forth from this patch of thorn to pursue his loves and hates. He did not even ask it of his god. He asked only for a few minutes more—less than a minute, perhaps—to search out this little piece of bloody ground, find his fatal kinsman, strike, and die unvanquished. But it may be this would be denied him. The ancient writing would presently be shown.

If I can live to gain my feet and give one bound, I can escape. Still I dare not move: at the first flicker of movement his dangling trunk will whip and strike fast as a python. Once more he sniffs at the tainted ground without avail. But he has nailed his flag to his masthead. And now as he starts back toward his starting place, he becomes aware of a strange and startling thing. The scent grows stronger as he nears the bush, instead of weaker. No longer will his brute brain mislead him. He thinks he has found the path to glory that beastlike man and manlike beast must seek, forever in vain.

Tembu Emir has found it too late. The spinning coin falls, the wheel turns no more. One of his hind legs suddenly gives way; while his front legs stand like pillars yet, he drops on both hind knees. Still his trunk probes the ground between us, but before it can touch me, it sags in weakness terrible to see. As I roll back and spring up, it lifts once more.

But its speed slackens as it ascends, instead of gaining to become the whizzing hammer of doom. It stops, and its end droops beyond the noble arch. I am running now, but as I gaze over my shoulder, I must stop and wait. The trunk falls, the head lowers, the tusks drive into the ground beneath the mighty weight.

He does not see me now. He has forgotten me. He beholds only the vistas of his birthplace, not this sun-blasted land at the desert edge, but green forests on the slopes of a snow-crowned mountain. He has never heard of pits dug in his paths, in which sharp fire-hardened stakes are set and cunningly screened. He knows no hate and no vengeance. He is forever safe from evil, forever free.

CHAPTER 19 Sepulcher of Dry Bones

When the Beni Amer had departed, the Tuareg built kraals close to the Atbara River where low cliffs divided the silted land from the desert. Here Isabel and I raised our tent; from hence rode out black-veiled hunters to the elephant grounds to lay low the giants with bullets and take their ivory. This hunting also was not due sport for women and boys. Unless the ball found the brain, no larger than a washbasin in the gigantic head, the monster did not drop, and instead fought or fled.

Thus it seemed unlikely that all the hunters would in time ride back to Tuaregstan, but those who did not had played a great game, and lost.

In seeing us settled in our encampment, Takuba walked with me near some broken cliffs where a hot spring bubbled up, giving forth a smell like rotten eggs and another smell, very faint, of a fumelike sort. Just above this, a rift in the strata caused by a fault had been filled with broken rock.

To remove the obstruction would take weeks of labor by many hands and might easily tell our secret to passing shepherds. I hoped to tunnel through it, and started digging in the afternoon. By the midday following we reached the boulders that had blocked the fall of broken rock. Creeping down between them with a torch, I found the rift that had revealed the stone steps, and following it a little, soon the flight itself. It led up instead of down as in the tombs Kerry had described, and ended at a jagged hole in what was once a brick doorway sealed with plaster.

Beyond the flickering gleam of my torch showed a corridor of more than man's height and something like five feet broad, bored out of the solid rock and disappearing into darkness; and on the wall a fresco painting that thrilled my heart.

The figure was of a lean, brown man, unbearded, of the cast of feature of the Beni Amer. He wore a crown and was driving a chariot. Beside the horses stood a supernatural being with a man's body and a jackal's head, Egyptian beyond question. On the body of the chariot were two interconnected heraldic devices, representing an asp and a vulture, well-known emblems of the two kingdoms of Egypt and Nubia.

Was this one of the conquerors who had swooped down with his hungry horde on the effete capitals at Luxor or at Thebes, and founded dynasties over the joined kingdoms? Such an emperor, disdaining the lush and alien land where stood his palace, could have willed that his corpse be returned to his native desert. And if he had absorbed Egyptian religion during his reign, he must also have believed in the afterlife that it promised—almost a continuation of the same life, Kerry had said, in the silent, treasure-strewn palace of the tomb.

All of the next day we spent in widening the aperture, concealing it behind thorn, and securing the surrounding rocks from falling in. On the following morning Jim and I, with Isabel wide-eyed in our wake and a few adventurous Tuareg standing guard, began our first sally into the corridor beyond the broken door. I had wiggled my big shoulders through the gap and had walked on about thirty feet when I had my first encounter with a demon of the tomb. But she came of a different litter, and was of more solid stuff, than those that had snuffed out lights and human fives in the black beyond.

I think that my eye had fallen on her when I was yet several paces distant and had mistaken her for a long narrow shadow on the floor along the wall. Holding my lamp high and gazing intently ahead for taller dangers, I came fully upon her before we suddenly recognized each other as enemies. She was a dark-colored snake, fully nine feet long, lying perfectly straight with her tail toward me. Only when my leg drew in her easy reach did she raise her wicked-looking head. Probably because she was sleeping off a heavy meal, she had not fled or warned me of her presence. Torpidness in her yet and my sudden stopping had delayed her lethal stroke.

The lull would not last long. She was becoming more awake and more dangerous every second. No one need tell me what she would do if I moved; if I ever read a subhuman mind, it was hers. She watched for that motion with coldly glittering eyes. She only wanted proof that I was alive—she must not break her teeth on wood or stone. When she became sure, she would strike.

I was flexing my muscles for a desperate leap when a soft voice rose behind me.

"Stan' still, Cap'n."

It was Jim's voice and he stood on the other side of the broken door. Yet the tone, urgent in the extreme, was hopeful.

Then I saw a darting flash of light and an instant later heard a most strange sound. The sound was of the great snake in her death throes. I had leaped back before I perceived what had caused the swift glimmer in the gloom and now the flailing and beating of her head and body against the floor and the wall. Clean through the swell of her neck thrust the foot-long blade of Jim's knife.

The rapid, frantic bumping against stone, as by a green bamboo rather than a hard club, and most like a prayer rug being beaten to rid it of dust, changed to dry rustling, shuffling sounds. The spasmodic movements of the snake's body became slow and finally almost silent. Jim had come through the broken door and drew his breath hard beside me.

"Jim, I didn't know you were a knife-thrower." "Yassah."

"Were you saving it for a surprise—such as this?" "No, Cap'n. I was goin' to show you when we'd git around to it. It ain't anything much-not one time befo' did I have any use for it, 'cept the night we met Otto comin' down de road when we was nmnin' from de jailhouse, and then I didn't have no knife. I kin take a man in de throat at thirty feet and maybe forty, but it still ain't no good agin' a gun, and it won't stop no big animal such as a lion. I reckon it might stop a leopard if it landed jes' right, but he could do a lot of clawin' till de blood choke him." "How did you come to learn it?'

"It wasn't nothin' but a game 'tween me and Zimil. We was forever throwin' at coconuts and sech as that. I got pitty good, but I never come nigh to beatin' him. In three throws he could cut the stem of a cluster of dates clean off."

"It's been a good while since then. How did you stay in practice?" "It don't take no big lot o' practice. It's like swimmin', or like hand-writin' for them that's learned their letters. But I throws sometime, jes' to be doin' somethin'."

I wished that I could have known Zimil, Jim's Negro pard and workmate on the plantation before he died from a tree fall. But I might as well wish to know every man on earth, for everyone was as unique as he, and as impossible to know. I could only guess at my old shipmate, Jim.

I stood in the dimness, struck silent by the thought that each one was part of God or had broken off from God.

Takuba had testified to Isabel's account of the demons guarding the tomb. When the grave robbers had descended the second flight of stairs, watchers had seen their lights dim out and called to them in vain. But there could easily be ascending steps further on, rising above the heavier-than-air gas that settled in the hollows. If the burial chambers lay above that level, our venture would be immensely simplified. If they lay below it—but that was to borrow trouble when we had enough on hand.

When I brought a brightly burning lightwood torch to the top of the flight of steps, I was given a surprise. Instead of a narrow passage, I looked down into a pillared hall, about thirty feet wide, at least fifteen feet high, and far longer than my torch could show. The pillars began about fifty feet beyond the steps on a yet lower level, with some kind of a ramp between, and could easily form a colormade for worshipers approaching a shrine. On the whole, the discovery augured well. Most royal tombs in Egypt were associated with temples.

Half seeing, half imagining, I got an impression of a large sculptured form against the wall on one side of the colonnade. Also, some long shadows lay crosswise of the room beyond the third pillar. 1 could not guess what caused them.

My first chore was to provide an easily portable air tank. Every sailor had heard of children swimming with cattle bladders: the jump of the mind to elephant bladders of twenty times their content was an easy one. When it was inflated with air, I could open or shut the duct by pressure of my fingers and breathe through the reed. I did not make the mistake of inflating the two bladders with human breath, scant of Life-giving oxygen. With patience, I contrived a crude pair of bellows out of antelope skin and soon had two bean-shaped air bags, big as bushel baskets, which the Tuareg eyed with admiration and amazement. They did not see what possible use I could make of them in fighting demons, but they would have liked to have them for playing ball.

The Tuareg had strong, light picket ropes which Jim spliced to make a hundred yard—fifty fathom, as we used to say—life line. For light I would have to depend on a reflected beam from a fire fed with mutton tallow, since my candle-lamp would expire in the hall of demons. There was no getting out of going alone; Jim must handle the rope and I refused to let Isabel descend the first flight of stairs. Since the Taureg would not help me and only increased my cares, I sent them buck-hunting on the plain, and I wished with all my heart I could go with them.

Yet the moment came when Jim held the life line coiled in his hand, its end fastened about my waist. I was to jerk it like a biting fish every third step; if he did not receive the signal, he must haul in. One of the bladders was fixed on my back, the other proved so awkward that I left it on the landing. From my belt hung an old cavalry pistol, cocked and primed, the pride of one of the Tuareg. Isabel fed the fire.

I descended the steps with my candle burning bright and true, my black shadow jumping ahead of me. Here I began to get a faint and occasional whiff of the rotten-egg smell I had noticed exuding from the hot spring and, I thought, traces of some other fumes. Below the stairs the floor had a downward slant, and although I had expected it, I could hardly force myself on. Then the floor leveled, and I passed three pairs of pillars which seemed constructed of stone rather than rock-cut. Since I took the walls to be limestone, it seemed likely that much of the temple space had been a natural cavity which the builders had reshaped and enlarged.

The long shadows I had seen by my first dim searchlight proved to be three steps, each a foot high, again descending. As I took the first, my candle-lamp dimmed. On the second it whisked out, as though blown upon by the breath of death; but the rotten-egg smell, which I thought was from some sulphur compound, was not strong yet, and the fumes I had barely detected were much stronger. At once I slipped the reed of my air bag into my mouth and loosened the vent. On the bottom step I drew a little of the gas into my nostrils. The sulphuric smell had become suddenly very strong.

Only a few feet beyond I came on the outstretched skeleton of a man. Beyond this, all vision ceased, except for a far-diffused reflection of the fire on the chamber walls. However, there were other lights, very dim and ghostly, puzzling me greatly. They were more like a luminous mist that darted horizontally a few feet from my torch, then vanished. I thought they were some dim sort of will-o'-the-wisp.

In trying to take more shallow breaths, I felt dizziness and a faint nausea. I was a little short of air, it seemed, but I did not believe I was taking in any of the gas, or its rank smell would have warned me. Two patches of pallor were human skeletons lying side by side, as though the treasure seekers had been walking hand in hand when death felled them with one blow.

Then a wave of darkness passed across my brain and I suddenly realized I was losing consciousness. Instantly I dropped my useless lamp, and holding my nose with my right hand, took a deep breath from the bag. Meanwhile I turned and started back, reeling in the darkness like a man sodden with drink. Still I had felt no pain or terror, only dread and deep gloom, now strangely fading. It must be that the Death who laired in this black hall was of a kind sort.

I had come close to him, but his shadows lifted as I breathed through the tube. Hope returned to me, almost like light in my dimmed brain, when, too weak to jerk on the line, I felt it tighten. I was being hauled by strong hands; now I could lift my feet without heavy labor. What if I should fall? The heavier-than-air gas filled the hollows like water. My head was above it, on the steps and the steep incline, but I would drown if I lay down.

Against my orders, Isabel came halfway down the outer flight of steps to grasp my hand. In a few seconds more I was in the upper passage, gulping the fresh air. I felt as alert as though newly wakened from restful sleep. Still, I could not be content till the blue sky arched over me once more.

"Did you see any demons?" asked a white-veiled Tuareg skinner, overcome by curiosity.

"I couldn't see any because my lamp went out, but I wrestled with them, and although they forced me to turn back, the gods who wish me to have the gold kept them from killing me."

"Will you try again or turn away defeated?"

"Assuredly I will try again."

"Now that is good news."

"And you, Akasani, are the bastard dropping of a she-ape," Isabel told him in sudden fury.

Yet Isabel, too, would have been shamed almost past bearing if I gave up now. Not bravery, but necessity, drove me on.

A little of the poison was in me yet, for I slept a while after the midday meal. In the evening she and I rode forth to look at game and to clear my head a little. When we returned, we found Jim whittling a stick with his big knife before our pavilion door.

"I been studyin' about 'at gas," he remarked when I crouched beside him. "What you reckon caused it?"

"There's a fault in the strata, and an earthquake or some other disturbance caused a breach that let through hot water and gases from deep within the earth. That was sometime after the hollowing out of the temple. Some of the gases were forced up by pressure into the hollow space, and I think there are two kinds, one smelling like rotten eggs and the other having faint fumes I can't identify. There's been nothing to disturb them these thousand years, and I think they lie in layers with the rotten-egg gas, the heavier, at the bottom. I think that's the killer, but if there's a gas between it and the air, it would kill, too, in time, because it will put out fire."

Jim considered briefly, then spoke. "They seek they own level like water do?"

"Yes."

"How many feet do you reckon you went down befo' you got your head under?"

"I was holding the lamp a little higher, or on the level with my head. Counting my height at six feet, the gas is between eight and nine feet deep at the foot of those three steps."

"A man can walk fifts^ feet and back, holdin' his breaf," Jim went on.

"Certainly he can."

"Supposin' we made about six ladders about fifteen feet long. I could cay in one, set it up agin' the fust pillar, and come back and get another. When I got short of air, I'd chmb one already set up. You come along behin' me and fix lights on de top of every one. It would be jest like swimmin' underwater and comin' up when we need air. We can bof do 'at."

I stopped and thanked my stars for Jim.

"Fine," I said. "But it would be like walking underwater without knowing how to swim."

"'At's right. Cap'n, you reckon all dat quarryin' of de rock was for to make a tomb?"

"I think so, but I'm not sure."

"A sepulcher ain't nothin' but another word for tomb, is it, Cap'n?"

I nodded.

"Wouldn't it be queer if we could even up part way for de Sepulcher of Wet Bones by what we find in de Sepulcher of Dry Bones?"

"It would be another turn of the wheel of fate."

Jim and I made seven ladders of light, strong acacia wood, and to the top of each we cut a notch for holding a candle-lantern. These Jim carried down into the temple and set up in turn, climbing one of them when he needed fresh air. I came behind him, lighting the lamps.

The glimmer from a middle ladder disclosed the sculpture I had half-glimpsed, half-guessed before. It was a seated figure of a god or king, the hands resting on the knees. The head bore a round cap or crown, the forehead a projected seal or emblem, and the chin a square-cut beard. The form was fully twelve feet high and lighter colored than the limestone walls. Two pairs of pillars, set opposite to each other at right angles to the colonnade, approached the statue.

A little farther on we came on four other skeletons, representing stronger fellows than the first three, but not strong enough. One had clutched a Spanish sword with an intricately worked silver hilt. One had put on a devil mask to conceal his humanity and frighten the demons away, and it was a queer adornment on his naked skull above his bleached bones.

Beyond the sixth ladder, we found three steps leading up, identical and on the same level with those we had descended into the fatal pit. Jim raised the seventh against the last pillar of the colonnade and the light I fixed showed a ramp leading to a flight of steps the same as at the opening. These we climbed boldly, lighting an eighth lamp at the head of the stairs. Now the little flames made a strange and beautiful bridge across the whole dark gulf of the temple. Their beams did not quite meet, but the darkness never quite parted them: there was a kind of a pale yellow mist between.

Carrying a lamp, I led my companion into a passage apparently identical with that leading into the temple; just beyond stood a plaster-sealed doorway. Grinning, Jim raised his ax. I nodded, and he began to break away the plaster. Underneath was a panel of some very hard wood. The ax rose and fell, the blows echoed and reechoed against the stone walls, and the hole through the wall rapidly widened. In a moment more I had crept through, Jim close behind me.

We had come out in a rock-cut room, no more than eight feet square, empty except for two black statues, about three-fourths life-size, standing sideways to the wall and close beside it, facing each other. They were carved in obsidian by an expert hand to represent men very like the Beni Amer of today; since one of them had a sword and the other some sort of halberd, I took them for soldiers. They could easily be typical of the fierce desert tribesmen who had followed some Sudanese conqueror into Egypt.

As I was noticing these things and marveling over the realistic carving of the faces—as though the sculptor had picked and perfectly portrayed two members of the king's guard—there came a dim stir in my brain that almost, not quite, brought forth some associated experience. The memory escaped, and I did not pursue it, since a profound dejection had begun to take hold of me. The room appeared the dead end of a great subterranean enterprise itself as dead as the stone. Where was the king's coffin and his gold?

Jim went tapping here and there with his ax head. I examined the floor and cast my light on the ceiling. Presently he turned to me, the whites of his eyes glinting.

"Cap'n, how long has it been since we lit 'at first lamp?"

"Not much more than an hour."

"Well, sah, I reckon we better go back and blow out em lights and start agin tomorrow. I got a headache and de pessimism. Maybe tomorrow it won't look so gloomy as it do now."

"I think it will look even gloomier, but both of us are tired—we're not as young as we were, I guess—so we'll call it a day. But remember, Jim—we're both free."

" 'At's right." Jim squared his shoulders.

I let him go out first, and before I crawled through the opening, I turned to look again at the two black statues. Again there came a little stirring deep in my brain, and after a few seconds' intense concentration, I captured the memory that had escaped me before.

"Come back a moment, Jim."

"Aye, Cap'n."

"I've finally thought whom those two statues reminded me of. When I went to the Navy dockyard in Valletta, there were two jollies, with fixed bayonets, standing guard at the gate. They faced each other that same way."

Jim's eyes slowly rounded. "Cap'n, do you reckon?"

"If there's a hole in the wall, it's between those two statues.'

While I held the light, Jim looked carefully at the stone. A lateral crack ran from behind one statue to behind the other about three feet from the floor; it curved like other cracks and appeared indistinguishable from them. Jim took hold of one of the statues and, with a big heave of his shoulders, moved it about a foot to one side. Its side and pedestal almost touching the wall had concealed a perpendicular crack, running straight from the floor to intercept the other. In a sudden frenzy both of us heaved on the other statue. To our great joy we found another perpendicular crack, forming what might be the straight-sided, crooked-topped rim of a stone panel.

Where the crack was widest, Jim inserted the blade of his ax and pried. The edge of what was no doubt a facing began to emerge. In a few minutes it was free—a slab of limestone two inches thick which Jim set aside. Within were clay bricks laid without mortar. We had a little trouble loosening one of them because of their tight fit; thereafter we took them out with ease. The hole grew rapidly bigger and less dark.

"Go first, Jim," I said,

"No, sah, if you'll 'scuse me."

So I went through first. Jim was alongside before my mind could make the least sense of what I saw.

A long object occupying the full width of the room, perhaps ten feet, suggested to my mind the bottom half of a mummy case, but this was only because I was in an Egyptian edifice. There was no real resemblance, and nothing else to see but its contents and the bare walls. About two feet wide, with raised ends, it was crowded with fifteen or more wooden manikins about two feet high. One stood in the rear with a paddle-shaped stick, all but one of the rest faced forward with poles in their hands; one, a seated figure, bigger and finer than the rest, and evidently the master, faced the rear,

"It pertend like it's a real big bateau, with a lot of men to pole it." Jim remarked,

"Yes."

"You said 'em 'Gyptians was buried wi' things they thought they'd need in the nex' worl'. Do you reckon 'at king wanted a boat and men to take him across some big water, like de blessed River Jordan?"

"That's about right, I think,"

"Is 'at de king settin' in de bow?"

"I think that's the captain. The boat hasn't taken oft yet—you see the steering oar and the poles are still out of the water. She's waiting to take the king when he's ready."

"Accordin' to 'at, he belong to be still in de tomb."

"I guess so."

"Well, I'd like to know where he at. This here is the solidist-looking rock we've seen yet."

I held my lamp high. The room had been hewn out of solid limestone. There were no cracks in the walls or ceiling, or the least indication of anything beyond, Jim took hold of the boat and shoved it out of the way. The part of the floor it had concealed was as solid as die rest.

"We'd better go back before the lights go out," I told him.

In the following days of search, we found no hidden exit from either the boat room or its antechamber, and the tapped walls gave forth no hollow sound. Without a qualm I washed away the splendid fresco painting of the desert king in his chariot, in the feeble hope that the paint might conceal a trap door or inset stone. The rock-cut wall was inviolate.

The conviction grew upon us that if a burial chamber existed, its opening was concealed somewhere in the gas-filled temple where we could never find it.

Then there came the night that I was hurled up out of a dream by a startling realization. There was a part of the passage easy to search at which we had not even glanced—the outer stairway leading to the broken door. I rose at once, dressed, and wakened Jim. The fight was only beginning to clear, and close by in the thicket we heard a leopard cough, a sound like a dull saw drawn across a board. The sand grouse were flying to their water holes as we crept down our well.

The flight consisted of twelve steps about a foot high. We began our search at the bottom, fearful of finding any opening so low down, but more likely, we thought, to find nothing. But we had climbed only four when Jim looked at the one above and gave a little grunt.

In a moment he had his ax blade between the tread of the fifth step and the riser of the sixth. Plaster cracked and broke away; and a big grin broke on the black face. I lifted what was only a limestone facing on clay bricks. The tread of the sixth step was a similar facing; we continued to remove limestone slabs, vertical and horizontal, lightly plastered to bricks, till we came to the tread of the ninth step. This proved solid and continuous with the stone.

We removed the unmortared bricks, to find that they had rested on a heavy grating of wrought iron, supported by stone projections left when the stairway shaft had been quarried out, and level with the tread of the fifth step. It was as free from rust as though newly smelted, and had a fantastic design of snakes and birds—again the asp of Egypt and the vulture of Nubia if I judged aright. As Jim and I stood on the fifth step, it took our combined strengths to lift it by one edge, wheel on the stairway, and set it to one side. Now the treads of the fifth step and of the ninth dropped away in sheer cliffs into darkness. Between was a gap the width of the stairs and three feet across.

I fixed a string to a candle-lamp and lowered it into the pit. It burned well until about four feet from the floor, then suddenly went out. Since my hands would be in reach of Jim's and the drop was an easy one, I decided to go down. The corridor was plainly rock-cut and more narrow than the main passage into the temple; its floor appeared level as far as I could see. After making several tests, I was sure that the gas pool reached midway up my chest, still too high for comfort.

When we had broken our fast, Jim and I prepared for a first sally. Again I must leave Jim to handle a life line tied about my waist, although certain I would not need it, since the floor inclined a little and my lamp burned well. Sailors once, used to bawling in a heavy gale, we had no trouble making ourselves heard. Following the curving passage, I fetched up against what seemed another solid wall.

I was sure it was not solid. Although most of our findings made very little sense, a cunningly hidden passage leading nowhere made none at all. Anyway, there was some way around it. When Jim came with his ax, we found a suspicious looking stone about ten paces back from the dead end and dangerously close to the floor. Jim had only to push against it to make it turn. The aperture revealed was barely wide enough for my shoulders.

Holding his breath, he knelt down and put the lamp through the hole. Immediately he sprang up. In the wan fight his face looked gray.

"Cap'n, you won't like to see what's in there."

"Well, I've seen what I didn't like before now."

"It's the Sepulcher of Dry Bones, sho 'nough."

I kneeled and looked in. The room was on a lower level than this passage and larger than any we had seen except the temple itself, so my candle-light did not disclose its farthest walls. But it showed the floor, not strewn, but heaped with skeletons two or three feet deep in a jam like cordwood. I could not doubt that there were two hundred, and there might be four hundred.

I rose and we made our way to the open air. Under the burning sun the gray cast passed slowly from Jim's face. My dank blood stirred again, but I felt a great heaviness of heart.

"What you reckon now, Cap'n?" Jim asked at last.

"Jim, if you tried to keep your direction as we were making up the passage, where do you think we fetched up?"

"I don't think we was very far from 'at big statue at one side of de temple."

"I had the same impression. Well, that could explain all those skeletons. There's probably a hatch of some kind between the temple and that room. Maybe the rites included human sacrifice. Maybe the god was given a libation of blood from a slave's neck. Afterward they pitched the corpses into that vault. If they offered only one a year, on some especially holy day, they could pile up four hundred in due time. Time moved slowly in those days. The Egyptian religion endured without much change for three thousand years."

There fell a long pause. Jim looked straight into my eyes.

"Cap'n Whitman, you got somethin' more 'n 'at to tell me, 'cause I see it in yo' face, and I'd like to have you git it over with."

"I've become convinced that the digging isn't a tomb at all. It's only an underground temple. I guess the painting at the entrance represents the king going down to worship; the cult probably dealt with the mysteries of death—the Jackal-headed god would bear that out. Maybe the boat we found symbolized some hope of the future—the soul's journey to the next world. And if that's the case, which stands to reason, we're wasting our time."

"Why do you reckon they went to all that bother to hide them passageways?"

"It was a secret cult. There have been thousands like it."

"So we better take to iv'ry hunting sho 'nough?"

"Until we can find a better way to make some money."

When I returned to camp, Isabel Gazelle was drying elephant meat on a stick rack over a smoky fire. After one glance into my face, she caught my hand, led me into the tent, and drew the curtain.

"What's happened?-' she asked.

I told her of the charnel-chamber we had found and the conclusions I had drawn. She made an astonishing reply.

"If you looked only at bones, the world would be an ugly place."

"I'll look at you instead."

"At me before you leave me, and at trees growing before you chop them down to burn, and at gazelles before you shoot them to eat, and at great elephants before you kill them to take their ivories. None of that is evil. Suliman, my husband, told me about evil, such as had made Mahound cut my mother's throat; and killing of slaves to please a god would be terrible evil—worse than that Mahound did, although I can't tell you why. I know that evil dogs a man's soul as his shadow follows his body when he walks toward the sun. But if you look only for that, you'd be sorry the world was ever made."

"I take great joy in you, Isabel Gazelle. I'm ashamed that I came in with a sick face. I'll find some other way to get the gold we need. What does one defeat count, compared to having you?"

She had grown more beautiful in these months of our bridal, I could almost believe that her beauty had waxed in the last few days. Surely this was an illusion, yet I could not dispel it, and felt bewitched.

"Don't tell me how many days longer you'll stay with me," she said, as though she had read my mind. "Let me know the day before you go."

"I'll postpone the telling as long as I can."

"Once I thought I could hardly stand to have you go—that I might get on a horse and ride into the desert until I died—but that's changed."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"I'll have someone to love from the moment that you leave."

"So soon?"

"Omar, do you know what day this is?"

I did know. I still kept the count of the days begun when I first went into slavery. But Isabel counted days according to the changes of the moon.

"What day is it?"

"It's the fifth since the full moon, and I've not yet gone to make my bed beside the wall."

I caught my breath. "Perhaps it's only delayed—"

Laughing happily and almost wildly, she threw her arms around my neck. "Then what of the drawing of my breast, and the sharpening of every taste and smell, and the happiness in my heart? Omar, I'm sure! You're a lean old Hon, and this will be your cub."

My heart swelled, and it must be that my soul exulted, for I felt a lifting like that when I had dropped my chains.

"I wish we could return to the tents of the Beni Kabir and live among them all our lives."

"No, when the time comes, you'll go across the sea, and you'll be to me as one who's drunk the cup of death. Suliman told me so, and it will be so."

"Can't we go there and stay until the babe is born—" "I think you'll never see him except in dreams. And for the little while more before we part, we can't go to the tents of the Beni Kabir, because you'll be busy taking gold from the Pharaoh's tomb." "What do you mean? I told you it's only a temple—" "Didn't Jim Effendi tell you that the Sepulcher of Dry Bones weighs in the balance against the Sepulcher of Wet Bones? His vision was true. Today you've proved that he gave it the right name. You think the countless bones you saw were those of men sacrificed to some god of stone. I think they were killed for an evil dream of a wicked king." "What dream?"

"The taking with him of his gold into the Hereafter." "They were the men who had cut through the stone and built the tomb?"

"By his command, they were shut in one of the rooms they made, and the door sealed."

At present I did not dwell upon Isabel's conceiving. I needed a quiet hour—when we were alone, perhaps when she was asleep on my arm and I could look into her face, or when her arms were about me in a tenderness akin to that my babe would know—in order to contemplate the common wonder, the unsolvable everyday mystery.

I called Jim and told him Isabel's explanation of the charnel-chamber.

"I wish we could make it up to 'em mens, somehow," Jim said.

"I wish so, too."

"They was slaves, I reckon, and I was a slave once, but 01' Mas' set me free."

"He did?"

"After 'at I worked wif freemen, in fair weat'er and foul, and when de time came, I fought beside 'em. I reckon they was the freest men who ever lived in de worl'."

"There were none more free that I know of."

"We bof been in Africa a mighty long time. We ain't heard de church beUs ring in de little ports we stop at, and see the people goin' back and forf. But someday—"

"When that day comes, we'll do what two men can."

We had been walking slowly from the camp to the sepulcher. Now our step quickened, and our excitement rose to the pitch we had felt the first day. When we arrived at our cache, Jim got out a piece of carpet I had brought from the tent when we first began our digging, and which we had used for catching rubble as we widened the well.

"Cap'n, I want to try somethin," he told me. "'At bone room is nigh de passage end, and we left de do' open. Don't you reckon if I fan real hard at de opening in de stairs I can blow in fresh air and drive some of de poison into de bone room?"

I answered without thinking. "It won't hurt to try."

So when we gained the stairway aperture, Jim stood on the fifth step and fanned vigorously with the rug. After about ten minutes, as I sat on the step with my legs through the aperture, the inkling came to me that instead of facilitating our afternoon's work, we had quite likely bitched it. Whether or not Jim had fanned out any poison gases, he had certainly disturbed their layers, which alone had permitted us to penetrate the passage.

To test the air, I lighted a wisp of grass and dropped it into the aperture. As I did so, a possibility which hadn't occurred to me was dawning in my brain. Then there came a terrific explosion.

It happened in the passage over which I hung, and it blew me clear out of the aperture. Amid that deafening blast, I was hurled against Jim, and we both careened down the steps. Actually that fall saved both our lives, for it carried us below the level of the broken outer door which a second later became a three-foot cannon mouth emitting a prodigious charge. We were still tumbling when this second explosion, many times greater than the first, put out our sense, as a gust of wind puts out a light. There must have been flame above us, but we did not see it. There must have been sound beyond imagination, but we did not hear it. The solid rock must have quaked, but we did not feel it—we were not blown to pieces because the solid rock-cut steps down which we tumbled raised an unshatterable barrier between us and the blast.

How long we lay stunned, we never knew. When once more I became aware of time and place, Jim and I lay sprawled at the foot of the steps. Some of the rocks we had braced had fallen, but a jagged hole remained, and through it came a gust of wind blowing into the temple. I heard its rush and saw dust flying into the aperture and instantly disappear. Enough light came down so that I could make out Jim's face.

"We better git out o' here, Cap'n," were his first words.

"I'll give you a boost and you pull me out."

We were both used to taking sudden action. But we had hardly begun when the truth burst upon me. The demons were all dead. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the air rushing into the temple was taking the place of the lethal gases that had passed away in flame.

Jim's fright passed off and wonder took its place. The gale blowing into the aperture died away in a gentle breeze. The air smelled very fresh.

"It's a mighty big wonder we alive," Jim burst out after a moment or two in which we stood tongue-tied, with our arms dangling, as men do after a severe shock.

"We wouldn't be if we'd got dowm into the passage with lamps in our hands."

"Did stirrin' up dat gas wif de carpet fix it so it would blow up?"

"I think so."

We gazed off across the plain toward camp. Isabel and her Tuareg came miming. When they saw us, we thrilled to their jubilant cries of "Sano! Sano!" Isabel did not pause in her gazellelike pace, but if her followers had seen terror in her face, she had either shed it or hidden it by the time she dashed up to me and took my hand in hers. Around the black veils of the Tuareg, their skins still looked gray.

"What was the great thunder, O Omar?" an Arabic-speaker asked. "We heard two claps, the first one very loud, the second shaking the earth."

"We used some very strong barraka on the demons," I answered, "and blew them all to hell where they belong."

That quick retort and the Tuareg's happy laughter when it was repeated in Tamashek cleared the muddle from my brain. In a moment or two more I had found a reasonable explanation for what had happened and could propose it to Jim.

"It must be that the gases in the new passage couldn't explode until they were mixed with air," I told him. "The fanning did it, and when I dropped in a bit of burning grass, they blew up. Why didn't they mix before now, when we were walking about in them? Certainly we stirred them up a little. Well, in the temple I thought I saw very dim lights dart horizontally from my lamp—maybe small quantities had become mixed with air in the right proportions, but not enough to set off an explosion. That might be because the heavy gas at the bottom, smelling like rotten eggs, was an explosive kind, but it was cut off from the air by a layer of some noncombustible gas, not quite so heavy, lying between. The explosion in the passage blew out some door into the temple and mixed the gases there. In not more than two seconds the mixture became explosive and the heat—or maybe sparks—set it off."

"Look like we was workin' in a powder magazine de whole time."

"It amounted to that, and we weren't much smarter than those poor devils asphyxiated in the temple twenty years ago. But any gas that didn't burn was surely blown out by the blast. I see no reason why we shouldn't go down."

We waited a while longer, throwing in burning grass and sniffing at the apertures. The grass burned up and out and we could smell nothing but fresh air. Then Jim and I put lines about our waists and entrusted the coils to the dark hands of two black-veiled Tuareg. If we ceased to shake the rope every three steps, the holders must haul, but my light heart told me that the lamps would burn and we would be able to breathe.

We walked up the steps, along the passage, down the second flight and the ramp, and through the colonnade. The lamps never flickered as we descended the three steps into what was once the pit of death; when we came to the side aisle approaching the statue, we saw that it had been knocked over backward by the force of the explosion, leaving a ceiling-high gap in the wall. Perhaps our hearts stopped beating as we came to the fallen giant and cast our lights into the room beyond; then they leaped.

It was though a tornado had swept through a palace. Idols and images of all kinds, and couches, chairs, stools, tables, and chests lay strewn in ruin or smashed against the wall. A chariot with its wheels blown off lay on its side. An elaborately carved bed, almost intact, stood on its side. A harp hurled by the blast had fallen over the head and around the neck of a hawk-headed idol.

And amid the ruin, everywhere, and as far as our lantern beams could cast, came up the glimmer of gold.

CHAPTER 20 Harvest

Jim and I moved about the room in silence, picking up objects, putting them down, gazing, wondering.

The body of the chariot had heavy plates of gold. Wooden chairs with feet representing the hooves of bulls and couches whose sides were carved to represent animals, still warm and slightly charred from the explosion, had golden overlay or decoration. From the broken lid of a chest I picked up an intricately worked golden panel that weighed thirty pounds, and the floor was littered with such chests spilling their contents of clothes, cosmetics in alabaster jars, myrrh, wigs, and withered flowers that blossomed in some summer thousands of winters gone. In gold-inlaid cabinets or strewn on the floor lay countless scarabs of gold, lapis lazuli, and beryl; ivory wands; rackets and balls used in games; jars of ointments; gold collars and rings; swords and daggers with jeweled hilts; golden caskets containing perfume in vials; jeweled amulets and ornaments; and golden seals. Cups, bowls, pitchers, and pots in gold and silver or enamelware, glass and pottery whole or broken, and figurines in green and blue enamel lay everywhere under foot. We could not move without brushing against some treasure.

Twisted out of shape by its impact against the wall was a golden bowl, too heavy to lift, held by four servants four feet high, cast in silver. Two fallen statues of the king—the likeness to the fresco painting at the entrance was unmistakable—were of black stone with breastplates of gold and face wrought in sheet gold with crystal eyeballs and jeweled irises. Human-headed, hawk-headed, ram-headed, jackal-headed,-crocodile-headed, pig-headed, hippopotamus-headed, and lion-headed gods and godlings lay in profusion, mostly with gold decoration. Lying in one corner was the foot-high form of a leopard carved in black stone, on whose back stood a two-foot figure of the king as heavy as lead and presumably in solid gold. There were life-sized golden hawks, but the prettiest ornaments we had yet seen were a pair of song birds, also wrought in gold with inlay of jewels to imitate their colors, on an ivory perch.

We had no time to look at the bright fresco paintings showing farmers sowing and reaping, fishermen with nets and spears, hunters with bows and arrows and boomerangs, cart makers, armorers, butchers, and cooks; but we gazed through two apertures that had been broken outward by the blast. One, reached by a step, opened on the charnel-chamber. The other, a wide doorway on the floor level, gave a glimpse of a golden throne, a gold-lidded chest about which stood four female figures in black stone decorated with gold, a large screenlike object of gold overlay or solid gold with gods and goddesses in relief, and a burst-in door beyond.

"We'd better go up, now," I suggested to Jim.

"If we seen any more, I reckon we'd be struck blind," he answered.

I looked at my hands, and they were empty. I had picked up dozens of treasures and put them down. Before we left, I chose a golden bird with lapis-lazuli inlay, Jim, a golden cabinet of elaborate workmanship full of myrrh. When we came to the stairway pit, only the two line holders waited there. Isabel and her Tuareg had moved to the shade of a thorn tree about a hundred paces distant. But when they saw us, they came on the run.

"So you've found the gold!" Isabel exclaimed.

"Yes." I started to say, "Thanks to you," but all of us knew that.

"How much is there?"

"We've seen many donkey loads. There may be as many more."

She turned and spoke in Tamashek to her kinsmen. They nodded and smiled on me, glad that Jim and I had defeated the Kel Acouf (demon people) and I had come into my heritage, and they admired the golden bird and box that they passed from hand to hand, but they did not seem greatly excited. Then one of them asked a question that sobered them all. They watched my face anxiously as Isabel translated it into Arabic.

"The men wish to know if now you break camp and go to your own place."

"Are they in haste to return to Tuaregstan?"

"They are never in haste except in a race. They have never had such hunting as they have here, and they are afraid it will be cut short."

"Tell them it will take weeks to get out the gold and melt it into bars and many weeks more to get it safely to the sea."

Isabel gave a happy little toss of her head as she repeated this. The Tuareg smiled beneath their veils.

I could not match their calm and did not try. On the other hand, only Isabel divined my intense excitement. She saw to it that I ate bountifully at supper, the good meat and millet washed down with fermented camel's milk—such care as she had given Suliman when there were weighty matters on his mind—still I went to bed not expecting to sleep. But her sweet warmth against my side and childlike breathing and my glimpses of her face in the watch lamp lulled me, giving me a still, deep happiness which, when I lost it, no gold could buy; and my soaring fancies flew home.

Isabel and I liked to go to sleep in the first clear starlight and be wakened by the rush of dawn. Today I rose when a first glint eastward showed the shape of the hills, called Jim, and shared with him my rough breakfast of dried elephant meat. My fancies were again wild, for I thought of how many dawns had cracked since a cruel king had furnished his palace of death—close on a million, perhaps— and this present dawn, so like all the rest, was the one that his astrologers should have bid him beware, because it would usher in the day of his darkest dread.

We lighted our lanterns and went down. With hardly a glance at yesterday's finds, we made through the door into the throne room. What we had thought was a screen might be some kind of shrine, bearing a frieze of gods and goddesses worked in massive gold. The throne itself was an armchair made of some very hard wood, with plates of gold bearing the emblems of the asp and the vulture. The four goddesses we had seen surrounding the chest were likewise of wood, with draperies and hands and faces and hair wrought in sheet gold; and the cover of the chest was a wonderful piece of the goldsmith's art, showing snakes intercoiled. Within were porcelain jars containing black human hair and what I could not doubt were nail parings. To judge from their quantity, they had been saved from every clipping of the king's hair and beard, fingernails and toenails over a score or more of years. Great Pharaoh, did not the thrift begin after you conquered Egypt? I cannot imagine a desert ruler setting such store, lest his lean tribesmen laugh.

When we came to the door beyond, we did not question but that it led to the funeral chamber. Our Lights showed first four alabaster jars, whose covers bore human or animal heads. Within were cloth packets, only one of which I opened—revealing what I thought were human entrails, preserved with aromatic drugs. Against the west wall —and I had looked for it there, because of some instruction I had long ago forgotten—and occupying more than half the room, stood the sarcophagus, a block of gray quartz weighing many tons. The top had gold handles, but it did not seem possible that Jim's and my combined strength could move it. We found a stone idol that would do for a block and the pole of a chariot with which we could pry. Marble tablets recording the king's glories made excellent wedges, and within an hour the huge case was open.

Inside lay a bronze coffin, man-shaped, the upper half of its lid wrought to portray its inmate. The arms were molded as folded on the breast, the hands, apparently solid gold, holding what I took for a flail and a sickle; the face was a mask in sheet gold with crystal eyes. The asp and vulture emblem was shown in inlay on the forehead.

This lid opened readily to reveal an inner coffin, precisely like the first except for being slightly smaller and wrought in solid gold.

We raised its 400-pound lid. Our first find was a great quantity of linen cloth. Beneath lay a hard object, its shape suggestive of a body, swathed in cloth. As we cut the bands, a shrunken human form began to appear, still half-hidden under breastplates of gold. These, too, we removed, along with golden bracelets and necklaces and amulets and sandals of beaten gold and gold stalls on the fingers and toes; so at last we gazed upon the mummy of the king.

The torso and limbs had shriveled almost out of human resemblance; but the head was remarkably preserved. I was quite sure I could identify the face as the same as we saw in the fresco painting and which had appeared on the statues and the sheet-gold masks. The lips appeared thinner than in living faces, the nostrils somewhat drawn, the whole bony structure more visible; but many human faces, including my own, were as gaunt. Its type was of that I had seen in the Beni Amer, broad between the cheekbones, with the high Hamitic nose and pointed chin. The skin, like theirs, appeared reddish-brown. I could fancy him a great horseman and hunter, a born commander, brave, haughty, superbly intelligent, as sure of his destiny as was Alexander, and as without pity as Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, or Attila the Hun.

It came to me with a start that he had emulated none of these because he had lived and conquered before their time. Neither Herodotus nor any other Greek historian recorded a Nubian conqueror of Egypt later than 660 b.c. His name had once thundered through rich, populous Egypt; the princes and the priests trembled at it as they had never trembled at the name of Osiris. Now his name was forgotten and these leather-encased bones were the last of him and he had left his gold to me.

Jim and I came up to rest under tlie same thorn tree that yesterday had shaded Isabel and her Tuareg. We needed to obtain a calm something like theirs.

"Cap'n, how much gold do you reckon it all come to?" he asked when we had sat and smoked.

"What's your opinion? You used to guess a hghter cargo within a hundred weight."

" 'At coffin weigh a clean ton. De gold in de bronze coffin and de screen and de tlirone and de statue on top de leopard is a ton mo'. And 'at's not even half."

"It's close on it, though."

"If it was lead—and I can figure lead better 'n gold somehow—I'd say it would catch five. And wif 'em 'Gyptians caying de golden bowl, a good ton of silver."

"That's no trifle, either."

"Cap'n, you reckon that's as much as one of 'em English lawds has got?"

"Some of them have much more—in land and money—but some not as much."

"I heard 'em talk about a miUion dollars. I don't know what 'at is. Would de gold bring a million dollars?"

"Twice that much—maybe three or four times—when we can get it into a Christian port, but that part's not going to be easy. About twenty-five baggage camels could get it to the coast if we could stay clear of robbers; then it would have to be loaded on Arab dhows. A good many are pirates already, and almost all would turn pirate on a moment's notice. The nearest Christian port that can be reached from the Red Sea is Cape Town in South Africa—several weeks' sail."

"Then we got to move it on the sly, somehow. We got to make out like it's something else'n gold."

"When I was a boy, we painted copper pennies with quicksilver and tried to pass them as half-dollars. But we never fooled anyone."

Jim laughed at that—his deep-throated laugh that was one of the joys of my life, and my heart was suddenly Hght. Jim and I had found a king's treasure only yesterday. There might be a third as much gold as was fetched to King Solomon every year from the mines of Ophir—six hundred and some talents of fifty-eight pounds each—and quite possibly the gold-rich northern Sudan was itself Ophir, for some regions of it still bore the name of Aphar. If we let ourselves be saddened by the hard problem of transporting it to a Christian port, we had been ill-picked to find it. Fate, having dealt with us so terribly or splendidly since we were young, deserved better of us than this.

For a fortnight Jim and I worked happily underground, separating gold and silver from the wood or stone it had adorned and piling it up for removal. The riddle of its shipment remained opaque as ever. Then an incident of the camp cast the first beam of light.

Another patriarchal family of shepherds had paid us a visit, their band including a small Negro boy, probably a slave, whom they treated as one of their own blood. Apparently he had never seen an elephant tusk at close range, and on looking at one of our growing pile, he was surprised to find that it had a hollow end. This hollow became smaller throughout almost half of the tusk's length, but the tusk was a large one, and he was able to insert his whole arm. Still unable to hit bottom of the curious cavity, he dropped in a handful of stones.

As soon as our visitors had gone, 1 poured water into various tusks from a pot containing a half-gallon. The larger tusks took the whole amount and more, tusks as small as forty-pounders would hold a quart.

Gold was eighteen times heavier than water. Since a pint of water was a pound the world around, a quart of gold weighed thirty-six pounds. Ivory varied greatly in density and hardness: big tusks that looked about the same size often varied twenty pounds in weight. An ivory buyer would of course investigate a tusk unusually heavy for its size; a porter or a dock hand would curse and ask no questions.

I wondered where I could buy five hundred tusks of mature bulls.

On the following day Jim, Isabel, and I, with a few Tuareg who wished to go for entertainment, rode twenty miles across the plain to Takuba's kraals. We had not the shghtest compunction in leaving several tons of treasure in easy reach of Isabel's followers and clansmen; their well-tested loyalty to her was hardly more of a restraining force than their natural reluctance to go underground and, strange as it might seem, their diminished interest in the hoard now that the demons guarding it had met defeat. The Tuareg must either work hard or play hard or ride hard. They could not endure inactivity for very long.

Isabel addressed Takuba in their native tongue and gave me his reply.

"Takuba says that about three hundred miles south of here, where the Blue Nile joins the White Nile, the land juts out into the waters in the shape of an elephant's trunk, and thus it is called Khartoum, which means an elephant's trunk in the language of the people living in that country. Every year a great fair is held there. This year it will begin on a new moon following the next new moon, and will last for two moons. There will come down from his capital, Sennar, on the Blue Nile, Akbar, who is king of the Fung, the mightiest of the tribes, who trace their descent from the Juhayna Arabs. And since he is overlord of the Sudan, he takes a tax from all goods bought and sold, but also he keeps out robbers. It is at this fair that the lesser kings sell their stores of ivory as well as slaves, which are bought by traders coming up the river from Egypt, or down the Blue Nile from Ethiopia, or down the White Nile from the Country of the Naked People; these traders are not blacks but Arabs, some of them from Mombasa and some from Zanzibar. And there is one trader, whose name is Kamel Malik, who Lives in a tent as fine as Akbar's and will buy or sell a thousand slaves or ten thousand tusks without spitting once."

Far away in the camps of the Beni Kabir I had heard of Kamel Malik of Mombasa, the king of the traders.

"What money is used for this buying and selling?" I asked. "It can't be shells on a string!"

"Nor cows or sheep or camels," Isabel replied with some wonder when she had talked to Takuba, "but any silver money is good, as are also bars of silver to the weight of two hundred rupees, of which Kamel Malik keeps a great store."

Two hundred rupees equaled twenty English pounds—hence a bar of silver weighing about five pounds avoirdupois.

"Ask Takuba if any gold is used in buying and selling."

"Takuba says that gold is sometimes brought from the Beni Shangul, which is a land of mighty mountains far up the Blue Nile," Isabel reported shortly. "It comes in bars or in skin sacks of golden pebbles and dust, and it is told that men from afar will buy it at ten times its weight in silver, but this Takuba cannot believe."

This was good luck of no surprising sort, provided that Takuba had some of the silver bars in store and that he would lend me one. Being subject to Simba, king of the Beni Amer, he took care not to ask what I wanted of it or why I needed a pan or pot of cast iron. This article was not on the premises. I told Isabel of the stumbling block, for she liked to share in my small as well as big affairs here in Africa. She conversed with Takuba and quickly found the answer.

"The silversmiths of Agades melt silver, not in an iron pan, but in an earthen jug, Takuba thinks you need a round bowl, made of well-baked clay, which he can have made for you at the village. Around the top will run a band of wrought iron, from which three strong spikes stand out. With the bowl will come three strong pipes of wrought iron to fit over the spikes. Thereby the bowl may be lifted even if the milk you pour from it is as heavy as melted lead."

"Such a bowl would exactly fit my needs. Ask him also to buy a dozen ax heads of the hardest kind, and a dozen hammer heads as heavy as a man may swing, and if he can get us three or four anvils, they will be most welcome. All this will cost several bars of silver or a drove of cattle. Tell Takuba that I will repay him in due course, and that I am his protected."

Our next task was to build a blacksmith's forge, which did not tax us greatly, since we had an abundance of brick and the wherewithal to make a big pair of bellows. This we set up near camp, proposing to tell any innocent shepherds who came by that we used it for melting lead and casting bullets; in thickets near at hand we dug pits for quick concealment of more questionable gear. The obtaining of charcoal was an easy chore. The natives made it by leaving a vent in a stack of wood burned under a covering of moist earth. The product, if heated long enough, was almost pure carbon.

It took a deal of bellows pumping, patience, and a pile of charcoal to melt the thirty or more pounds of silver in the pot; but at last it looked like dirty quicksilver and gave forth a bluish light; with this we cast five silver bars hardly distinguishable from the one we had borrowed from Takuba. With a better arrangement of our fire bricks and a two-man bellows, I believed we could melt fifty pounds of silver or gold a day.

When the tools arrived, 1 had Zoan divide all his men into two work crews to labor on alternate days, the free day spent in hunting. While the white-veiled Tuareg made charcoal, pumped the bellows, or carried burdens, the haughty black-veiled nobles who had the duty hammered and hacked wonder works of gold and silver into pieces small enough to fit our pot. Avowed to war, pillage, and the chase, scorning labor of any sort, they surprised me by their ready assent to the task, working more cheerfully than Isabel could well explain. Apparently the demolishing of the beautiful objects appealed to them. Deep in their souls, perhaps, they were vandals. Perhaps that had to do with their being such good hunters and warriors—perhaps they hated civilization and all its works. But I guessed in the dark...

In six weeks' work, we had smelted a ton of silver into specie bars and five hundred pounds of gold into ingots similar to those brought from the mines of Shangul. Thus we had five hundred pieces in all, itself a treasure dizzying Jim's mind and mine, although the Tuareg regarded it with complete calm. These bars and ingots I distributed among the score of black-veiled Tuareg and ten of the white-veiled who would accompany Isabel and me to the great Khartoum fair.

The day came that we left Jim and some white-veiled Tuareg at our prosaic-looking camp and struck southeastward on our fleet riding camels into the bush. The beasts had put on fat in their long indolence and suffered throughout the first day's ride; after that they found their gait, and the Tuareg shouted verses in their praise and the long miles sped behind them. Every one of those miles brought forth wonders to see and hear and know. The greatest in the long run was the people following the grass with their cattle and sheep or dwelling in little villages in minute islands in the wilderness. They were at everlasting war with the lions and leopards and hyenas that preyed upon the flocks and herds; the elephants that raided their gardens and pushed down their huts; and the antelope and wild pigs that broke through their fences. Yet striving and surviving still, weeping or singing or laughing, they retold man's story, from its beginning in the swollen beUies of the young wives to its strange end in a new-dug grave. But we, ourselves men, short-sighted as our kind, looked with bigger eyes and quickened breath at lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, antelope, and wild pigs.

Good fortune rather than good sense—for the Tuareg were loath to yield the trail even to evil-tempered rhinos—saved us from fights, and we ate bountifully of various bucks, including the succulent eland, as big as an ox. Avoiding regions where robbers might Lie in wait, we took six days to gain the Blue Nile, then camped for the night on its eastern bank amid other caravans from the Tigre country. Before we crossed on the big dhows that served for ferries, I donned the full dress of a sheik of high rank, found in a bale from the Beni Kabir and once worn by Suliman on an official visit to Yussuf Pasha.

I wore it to please Isabel, for certain satisfactions and amusements of my own, and as a stroke of policy.

Accompanied by several black-veiled Tuareg, 1 paid a ceremonial visit to the king of Sennar, overlord of a vast territory. Instead of kneeling to him, I clapped hand to head and heart, a bold stand for an Arabic-speaking farengi to take. If I had resources to back it, I should get on well. If a penurious adventurer, I would more likely be impaled on a Fung spear. When I presented my tokens of respect to the monarch, he gave me a smile and the promise of his protection. They were five bars of silver and one small wedge of gold worth at least two thousand rupees or two hundred English pounds. No doubt Kamel Malik would hear of me before the day was out.

When I had changed ten silver bars for twenty skin bags, each containing a hundred silver rupees, our whole band went sight-seeing. There was no sight in Africa quite like the great fair at the interflowing Niles. A deserted promontory and a goat pasture had become and would remain for about two months the greatest city on the continent south of the Sahara.

Back from the bazaars rose the tents and the kraals of hundreds of native kings and chieftains with their attendants and trains. There were brown or reddish Hamites from north and east, coal-black Negroes from the steaming equatorial cornlands, and lean, storklike men, fully as black, with sharp noses and thin, cruel Ups who leaned on their nine foot spears and were the scourge of the peaceful cultivators. These bargained with Arabs in flowing robes, bearded Jews, Armenians, Persians, and no few turbaned Indians for beads, baubles, and finery, tools and weapons, parasols, rugs, cloth, and toys. One whole quarter of the bazaar was a food-and-drink market. Among the dried and salt meat, fruit, nuts, grains, locusts by the basketful next to homey beans and pumpkins, and Indian and Turkish sweets, I saw a cask of salted herring bearing the strange word "Boston," and how it had found its way over a thousand miles up the Nile was beyond my wit to guess.

There was a heavy traffic in ebony and ostrich feathers, both in demand in the great unguessed outside world, but when all was said and done, this was a slave and ivory fair. To judge from the pens that I saw—only a fraction of the total number—ten thousand men, women, and children were being offered for sale. Almost all belonged to the pure Negro tribes, mainly peaceful cultivators from the deep south; the lean nomads were too fierce to please the catchers' fancy. Only a few wept or wailed; some were desperate and must be confined; mainly they appeared stunned. I wished I could jBnish my business quickly and be gone.

It should not take long. Ivory was heaped like cordwood beside most of the larger pavilions; it filled a good many yards of the Arab merchants; and almost every peddler had a tusk or two in a store. Very little was new ivory, and I believed that less than half had been obtained by elephant hunting; the main had been found at the scene of some monster's death on the plains or in the bush. Hence, most were long-dried, and a great many the heavy tusks of old bulls. On the second day of my stay I visited the beast fairs, picking out with the Tuareg's help about two hundred baggage camels for later purchase. On the morning of the third day, alone except for Zoan in his most stately garb, I went to an immense pavilion, hardly second in richness to the Sennar king's, the abode of the king of the traders, Kamel Malik.

Zoan and I were immediately ushered into his gulphor. Kamel himself appeared in a moment or two, a notably handsome Arab of my own age, grave and dignified but far from austere, and employing stately Nahur Arabic instead of the Kalam wati, the vulgar tongue. By now I was used to the shocked first glance of those I met—a quickly hidden consternation in their faces—yet I did not expect to surprise it in the highly disciplined countenance of a notorious slave trader. It passed off, and his eyes narrowed slightly as I replied in the same language. He was wondering who in the devil I might be.

A slave brought coffee and sweetmeats. Thereafter Kamel and I spoke of hunting and war, but we did not mention the beauty of women and of verses because we had not broken bread or salt. Then there fell a little pause.

"Kamel Malik, I wish to buy ivory for export to Europe, and since I need a large quantity, I would like to buy from some merchant rather than the natives."

"That would save time, effendi," Kamel replied, smoothing his small, silky beard. "Also, the merchant who sells you a large quantity at the source of supply should be willing to deal at a modest profit. Would you state an approximation of your needs?"

"I am considering ten tons of large bull tusks, well seasoned."

"For such tusks, I am paying eighty rupees per ngoma. For ten tons of seasoned tusks, I would ask ninety rupees per ngoma."

"If I should double my purchase, how much less would you ask?"

"Two rupees less—eighty-eight rupees."

"If I should triple it?"

"If you buy thirty tons of large dry tusks, to be assembled in my yard within five days, my price would be eighty-six rupees, eight annas."

"Because of the civil wars in Egypt, I'm afraid to ship ivory down the Nile and wish to take it to Suakin on the Red Sea. That means a dangerous journey overland. If I buy from you, what help can you give me in safeguarding my purchase?"

"I can stamp each tusk with a certain seal respected by all and feared by a great many."

"I've heard of that seal. From Suakin I expect to ship my ivory in dhows to Cape Town, whence it can be trans-shipped to England. Such dhows are often untrustworthy, and those seas are infested with Arab pirates. Is there anything you can do to lessen the danger?"

"For a price, yes. Every year I ship goods worth many lakhs of rupees with almost no loss by theft. The Emir of the Hadarib, who owns the mainland at Suakin, is an old friend and a distant kinsman. The greatest fleet of dhows operating on the Red Sea and along the western shores of the Indian Ocean belong to my associate Saad ibn Hassan; all bear a crescent moon in a square of stars painted in white on the bow. His charge for transporting ivory from Suakin to Cape Town will not exceed four hundred rupees per ton. This is at the shipper's risk. No one in Africa can insure you against shipwreck, which Allah forbid, but I, Kamel, have ways of protecting my own and associates' shipments from pirates and robbers. May I ask if you read Arabic as well as you speak it?"

"Not as well, but I can read it."

"If you will pay me ninety rupees per ngoma for thirty tons of heavy tusks, one and one-half ngomas and up, I'll give you my testament, sworn before a cadi, Allah bearing witness, to recompense you half the amount of your loss from robbers or pirates sustained from the border of the Emir of Hadarib's domains to the dock at Cape Town."

"I've already acquired some ivory by hunting. Although it won't be covered in the insurance, will you instruct your agents and representatives to see that it has the same care?"

"All the ivory that you ship would have the same care."

"Thirty tons would come to—"

I expected Kamel to reach for the paper and inkhorn on his desk— instead he answered instantly. "One hundred and twenty thousand rupees."

Smiling over his feat, he handed me pen and paper. Since a ngoma was seven and one-half kilabs of six pounds avoirdupois, my patient figuring arrived at the same sum. The amount was twelve thousand English pounds and close on to sixty thousand Yankee dollars.

"If I deliver the ivory to Saad ibn Hassan's docks in Suakin after ninety days, and before one hundred and twenty days, need I wait long for shipment?"

"Not more than two weeks."

"I would like to pay half the sum in three hundred silver bars of two hundred rupees each, and the other half in thirty ingots of gold of two thousand rupees each."

"That will be quite satisfactory, effendi." Kamel beckoned to a slave to fill our coffee cups.

Living up to Isabel's graphic tribute to him, he had not spat even once. But I, too, had dealt largely with speed and aplomb and, unless I missed my guess, without going far wrong. Considering my lack of practice, I had every right to pride as well as hope.

CHAPTER 21 Rendezvous

Our return journey was no fine six-day dash through the bush. Besides our riding beasts, we had nearly two hundred baggage camels, each to be watered, fed, loaded with upwards of three hundred pounds of ivory, marched a score or more miles daily, unloaded, picketed, and protected from lions—all by one hundred and fifty black Swahili tribesmen whose labor we had hired from Kamel Malik. The Swahili and the white-veiled Tuareg did most of the daytime tasks, while the black-veiled Tuareg and I stood the night watches. By taking turns at catnaps, we were able to keep our eyes open and our rifles primed beside the watch fires.

When I came off watch at midnight at our second day out from Khartoum fair, Isabel was awake to give me supper and to enjoy a cheroot with me beside our cooking fire. The small red blaze could be scorned or circumvented by a bold prowler, but a radiant moon, our old well-loved companion, illumined the barren ground for a comforting distance about our bivouac, and we listened to the night sounds with no sharp apprehension. Hyenas wailed or sobbed or broke into horrid laughter; elephants trumpeted far away; lions uttered rhythmic grunts as they paced the plain, and one, balked and hungry, silenced all other sound by his furious roars.

"His name among the Arab traders is Simba," Isabel said thoughtfully. "In Tamashek his name is Zaki. What is his name in the speech of Frankistan?"

"Lion," I answered.

"When my son is born, I'll name him Lion for your sake."

"That's a good name. But what if the babe be a girl?"

"I don't think it will be so. At the moment he was conceived a dog-jackal—his voice is deeper than a bitch's—barked on the desert. But if it is so, I'll name her Gazelle, for my sake."

"Either one would suit me well."

"Omar, what was your name in the speech of Frankistan? You told me, but I forget."

"Homer Whitman."

"Omar?"

"Breathe into Omar as you say it, and slur it a little."

"Will you return to that name when you go to Frankistan?"

"Not for a long time and perhaps never. I can do my work better under another name."

"There's no one there who would keep the secret? Some old woman who loved you, or a child who's grown up since you went away?"

"I have no one in my homeland any more—but I have everyone."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I couldn't tell you very well."

"What name are you going to take?"

"Holgar Blackburn."

"What does his name mean in your speech?"

"I don't know what Holgar means. In Scotland 'blackburn' can refer to a dark stream or it can mean something burned black."

"Is he dead?"

"Yes, with no one left to mourn him. Also, he's as long from home and forgotten as I am. But I promised to do well by him there, in payment for the use of his name."

"Did Holgar look like you?"

"Not especially, but that won't matter after all these years. I have some marks he didn't have—"

I stopped, remembering he had a mark that I had not, fixed on him before he left home. It looked like an X and had been burned into the back of his hand for stealing a meat pie from the kitchen of the workhouse master. I recalled his face as he told me.

"I know every one of your marks," Isabel said, looking away.

"Perhaps I should get one more." I told her about the burn.

"Do you think anyone would remember it after all these years?"

"No, and Holgar's bones have been picked eleven years, and I've been marked enough."

We lay down and began to drift into sleep. One of the last sounds I heard was the cough of a leopard not far off in the bush—a grating sound like that of a saw on a rough board. He had been attracted by the smell of meat, but he dared not come into camp to snatch and make way with it—the smell and sound of man, and occasionally his shadow, and the dying coals of the fire balked his desire. If driven to white-hot fury, he would have charged a whole body of spearmen, but he was only vicious-tempered now. Isabel, lying in the hollow of my arm, did not speak or rouse, only lay a little closer to my side.

At bright noonday on the ninth day of our journey, only a few miles from its end, I heard a similar sound. It, too, was in near-by thorn; again it was an expression of rancor, and on this occasion it was caused by our caravan approaching close to the beast's lair. I was so sure that he would slink away, scowling, into the long grass that I hardly tried to get a glimpse of him; and instead I gazed back to a scene of moonlight. Its only connection with this scene was a leopard's cough, but for some reason I did not yet know, it returned with a living vividness. I saw again the open moonlit ground before the tent, the dark bush beyond, the dying fire, and, close beside mine, Isabel's beautiful face lovely in surrender to sleep and dreams. From thence I remembered our leaving the fire, and before that, our low-voiced talk. Touching on the future and the past, it had sorrowed both of us a little; but suddenly it seemed to have some importance that I had failed to perceive. I did not know what it was— I wished I did know. . . . Something had been said that must be well weighed. ... It was as though the gods had listened. . . .

The gods! If there were no gods in the sense I meant, there was a mystery of Hfe and fate that only fools deny.

This swift train of memories and thought had interfered with my taking an accustomed action—swinging out a short distance from the thorn where I had heard the leopard. Also, I failed to consider that the sound rose downwind from our course, so if he stood his ground instead of slinking off, my camel would not know it and warn me by her alarm. I had led the caravan on about fifty yards, when, again, once more, I encountered death.

He came rushing forth from the thicket in a different and diminished form from his awful aspect among the mimosa trees. He ran low to the ground and at stunning speed. So far he did not show beautiful and bright in leopard kind, for he burst through the shadows of the thorn, and yellow and brown grass obscured his adornments. Nor did he come straight to me like my beloved. I rode high upon a camel out of his easy reach. Also, he let pass one of the white-veiled Tuareg on a belled mare close behind mine.

The next in file was a coal-black Swahili, naked except for a waist-cloth, leading a refractory baggage camel. I did not know his name, but I called him Kongoni because when he was wonder-struck at anything, he had a foolish look that reminded me of a somewhat absurd-looking buck common on these plains, known to the blacks by this name. Far from a fool, he got along well with our beasts, perhaps because he was as gentle with them as with his milk cows in his native village. Altogether, he was one of the most useful men we had hired from Kamel Malik.

It was this man on whom the leopard rushed. I did not see them meet because my camel caught sight of the beast and whirled in panic. Unable to aim—knowing it was useless to try—I slid off her back, my rifle in my hand. Only a second or two had gone by since my last view of the scene, but the issue I had instantly divined was now made clear to all beholders, and the stage had been set for the drama about to unfold.

The Swahili and the leopard whom he called Tui waged no ancestral war. If he had his way, the black man would be dwelling peacefully in his village on the thickly peopled coasts, raising millet and lentils and pumpkins and groundnuts. When the leopard attacked him, he knew terror, but no fury to change almost to glory in the blaze of battle. Unless someone saved him, he would die.

Meanwhile some deep-seated instinct made him shield himself the best he could. Knowing Tui's way of hanging to his victim's shoulders with his front claws while he scooped out his guts with his rear, he dropped to his knees so the beast stood on his hind legs before him. Bowing his head, he hid his face in his arms. Although the leopard raked his back and shoulders and bit his arms, he had not yet attacked his vitals. If Kongoni would be patient, help might come, and death would pass him by.

I saw red stripes instantly appear on the glistening black back in the wake of Tui's claws. I saw the leopard shine like living gold. But I could not shoot without great danger of killing my kinsman, and in running near for a clear shot, the beast saw me.

In a sudden great revival of his pride and power, he left his inert prey and rushed at me. Not half my height as he ran, weighing about the same, he was no larger than a half-grown hon, smaller even than a lioness, but he remembered now how he slew cattle and buffalo, even the heavy-homed bulls. When he saw my arms come up and one of them extend long and gleam in the sunlight, he knew me for his mortal foe. Perhaps he smelled my purpose as plain as I saw and heard his.

There seemed hardly time to aim and pull the trigger, and I did both too fast. He appeared to stumble and roll over, but instantly was up again and rushing on, his speed and fury undiminished because one forefoot hung useless. The sudden, miraclelike sharpening of every sense that comes in battle let me see it plain. I saw it in great joy. It seemed a small impairment of my enemy's powers, but it served to increase my already great physical prowess, perhaps to match him or to win. I recognized it as my mainstay in the coming storm.

I knew all this without thought. It was in my heart and every motion that I made. I dropped my gun, but there was no time to reach for my knife; my hands must meet the upspringing beast. He came up from the ground in a long bound, straight for my shoulders, but he did not succeed in getting the deadly clutch upon me that he intended. The claws of one front foot drove deep and caught in my shoulder, but the broken foot balked his intent, and before he could sink his teeth in my neck or face or rake my belly with his rear claws, I broke his hold and flung him to the ground.

His recoil seemed instantaneous. It was a terrible thing to find him back this soon, again clinging with one set of claws to my shoulder, flapping his broken foot back and forth in frantic fury, his snarls right there in my ears, his fangs so near my throat. I caught him by the leg and jerked out its hook from my flesh, but I did not hurl away the beautiful blazing beast to leap on me again. Enduring the horror of it, I fell with him.

Somehow he turned as we pitched down, so that he landed with his back feet under him, but his upper body sideways under mine. An upward heave of his loins broke my hold on his sound leg, and in a furious upward sweep, the claws raked my face. But by letting go of the broken leg I forced my left elbow into his neck, pinning down his head. With my right hand I gained a grip on his unbroken leg. He tried to break it by violent throes, but it was like iron.

At once he rolled his lower body on its side, so he could rake with his hind claws. I pinioned them with my limbs, and for the time being, he was helpless. But I was making a great expenditure of strength. It was being tested beyond any test it had ever stood.

Moving my knee forward, I pressed it into the beast's short ribs. His snarls turned into furious growls as the pressure increased, then into a sound very like a scream. There was a low sound, then a softness. The rib had broken. Glory swept through me as I continued and even increased the pressure, by what strength I did not know.

A shadow moved at the corner of my eye, and, turning my head, I caught sight of Isabel and a black-veiled Tuareg running up, the latter with his blade bright in the sunlight. They had not been tardy in coming to my help—the time seemed long since Tui and I had first embraced; but the count of seconds was still few, and some of these they had wasted in breaking through the press of panic-stricken camels. The Tuareg warrior saw the quick shake of my head and instantly understood—far better than I—my need to kill him by naked power. Isabel stopped with a gasp. I wish that I had cast away my visions and looked into her face. They were far and terrible visions of Death.

Isabel moved her foot, and a stone lying about eight feet away rolled close to my side. I remembered my flight with Jim from the Sepulcher of Wet Bones, another who would keep me from my goal if I let him live, and my picking up a stone. I could not pick this one up as yet, because my right hand pinioned the beast's sound leg, and my left elbow was jammed into his neck to hold down his head. Even so, I had a better chance to get it than my knife, far out of reach and under the weight and tension of my loins upon the leopard's loins.

I worked my right arm until its elbow pinned down the leg I held, then, without relieving the pressure, forced it sideways against the joint. Under these conditions I could not get a good purchase on it and must try the utter and ultimate strength of my forearm. It was a tremendous trial. Blood gushed from my nostrils and a weak tooth crumbled in my jaw and it seemed my brain would burst. But the spotted leg slowly bent until I heard it crack.

Still holding down the gaily spotted head, I reached and got the stone. As though he perceived my intention, the leopard's eyes fixed on mine in absolute defiance and infinite hate, and I knew now that he was death in gorgeous masquerade, and in the green depths of his eyes I saw hell.

I pounded the rounded dome above the eyes until it was soft and blood oozed up through the fur. The last tension passed from the hot body beneath mine. Then I rose, staggered about, retched, and sobbed; no proud black-veiled Tuareg dared put forth his hand to help me, lest the gods strike him blind or witless, and Isabel stood as though carved with a sword in stone. At last I braced myself and wiped some of the blood from my face and felt the deep scratches there and traced with my finger the track of one deep-driven claw, like a groove cut, full across my cheek.

Then I turned to my woman and held her eyes with mine and spoke.

"Isabel Gazelle, I said to you some nights ago before our cooking fire that I had enough marks already and wouldn't bear any more."

"I remember well."

"I rebelled against fate and have been taught a lesson. As soon as I'm well enough, we'll make a Little cross out of gold, like the letter we call X, and fix it on the end of an iron rod and heat it red hot. Then you shall brand me with it on the back of my right hand, the same brand worn by Holgar Blackburn. I promised to do well by him in Tavistock, and no one must suspect I'm not he. Also, I have other tasks better done in his name."

"I knew you had weakened that night, but could not bring myself to tell you so. I'll put a black burn on your hand, as is meet."

CHAPTER 22 Desert Farewell

The fangs and claws of lions, leopards, and hyenas bear deadly poison from their putrid kills. Wounds therefrom must be treated as soon as possible; and almost always when they are severe, and often when they are slight, no treatment can save the victim from mortification of the flesh and swiftly ensuing death.

Wherever Kongoni's skin was broken, the Tuareg rubbed in salt. The gashes and deep clawings on his back and shaven head were packed full of salt and sealed with melted tallow. He did not utter a sound during the treatment—watching his face, I could not detect the slightest sign of pain—so I could be glad for my own stone face when my turn came. Isabel had me stripped naked and treated in the presence not only of the Tuareg, but of the Swahili tribesmen. She wanted everyone to bear witness that a farengi, whose life was in her womb, could bear pain as well as a native son.

Then the men made crude but reasonably comfortable litters to bear Kongoni and me into camp. In three days my scratches had healed and my deeper cuts were mending well. But a raging fever came upon Kongoni, and many of his wounds bubbled and frothed with putrid gas. One of his tribesmen made medicine for him by walking about shaking dry seeds in a gourd, and that night all his tribesmen ringed his pallet to chant or shout or wail or strangely gesticulate while the watch fires leaped and the hyenas howled on the plain and little jackals barked in frenzy, but when the sun came up at last, Kongoni's life was gone like the flame of the fire that had become ashes, where they knew not, no more than I. What remained they carried far enough on the plain that I would not hear the merrymakers, and left it there. They had hardly turned their backs when the first king-vulture glided down, lighted, and hopped wildly.

It seemed that I wrote down his name in some book of my heart.

I made certain gifts to the Swahili and they returned to Kamel's compounds. The Tuareg and I went to work to melt gold and hide it in the tortuous hollows of the tusks. As I had foreseen, the process of pouring in a little at a time, letting it cool, and adding more was expedited by our setting up two or three score tusks; with the black-veiled Tuareg taking daily turns at demolishing the wonder works and the white-veiled Tuareg helping with the smelting, we stored away about half a ton a week. I was not content to leave the precious lading unsealed, lest a piece unfused with the rest should fall out on a boatman suspicious of a tusk's weight seek to explore its hollow, or a smuggler of jewels or rare drugs use it as a hiding place.

Remembering that the Beni Kabir used some sort of glue that became stone hard, I asked the Tuareg if they had knowledge of its like. They assured me promptly that they did—with horse or camel hooves and lime they could make a viscid mass which hardened to resemble bone. Enough hooves of this sort would be hard to find; would the great horny nail of elephants serve instead? If so, they could collect all that a man could carry from one kill.

Experiment proved that the substance was better than horses' hooves for my purpose; the glue when hardened was a dirty white and had the feel and, according to the Tuareg, the smell of ivory. The compound required careful mixing and preparation, but half a pound poured on top of the gold sealed it as though the fiber of the tusk had grown around it. The danger of its being discovered was cut in half.

In nine weeks we could boast of a great piece of dentistry—putting gold fillings in four hundred and twenty-five teeth—but the joke was not worth cracking to the Tuareg, who knew naught of dentists and whose glimmering teeth wore down, but never rotted out. Before demolishing Pharaoh's inner coffin of massy gold, Jim repaired the bed found standing on end in the outer treasure chamber, the gold decoration of which had long since gone to our pot. Softening it with the linen found in the sarcophagus, he politely, if not reverently, laid therein the Pharaoh's mummy. Beside it he put the alabaster jars that contained the viscera and a beautiful enameled vase into which we had poured his store of hair-cuttings and nail-parings.

We poured the molten gold of the coffin into a hundred and forty tusks, almost aU we had left that were not split or unsuited to the purpose. Counting what we had spent at Khartoum, our total harvest was about one ton of silver and only a couple of hundredweight short of six tons of gold.

I had thought to save a little gold for branding my hand, but without any reason within my mental reach, I decided to use iron. Jim chiseled off a little from a horse's bit, heated it in the fire, and hammered it into an X, each leg of which was about an inch and a quarter long. This he fixed to a bronze rod that had carried a hawk head for some ceremonial use; and alone with him and Isabel, I heated it in the coals of our cooking fire. When it was dull-red hot, I laid my right hand, palm down, on a piece of firewood.

"Isabel, will you put the mark on the back of my hand? The pain will be sharp, but nothing like as long as I'll give you a few months from now."

"You mean the pain of homing our babe? You won't give me that pain. The babe himself will give it to me, in his desire to come forth. He kicks me even now in his impatience."

"He's a lusty babe."

"It's a good thing there are new ones to fill the emptiness when the old ones go away. If it weren't for him, I couldn't burn your hand with the red iron, the sign of your parting with me and taking a new name in a distant land."

"The iron's ready now."

"That's for me to decide. Omar, do you remember what my husband Suliman said when he appointed one of his men to shoot a horse whose leg was broken?"

"Yes, he asked if the man would bungle it. If so, he would do it himself. Then his clansman answered. If I bungle it, O Sheik, I ask that the next bullet be mine.'"

"Omar, my beloved, if I bungle the hard task appointed me, I ask that you burn me in the face."

"It's for me to decide your punishment."

Isabel dried the back of my hand with a cloth. Then she fanned the coals until the iron was not dull red but bright red. Then in one smooth movement she took it from the fije and touched it firmly but quickly to the back of my hand. The pain of the flesh was severe, but the worst of it quickly passed. In my soul was travail that must be very like the unseen agony of those who die in sleep.

The day came that I returned to Takuba aU our borrowings except a final one, thirty bondsmen for camel drovers and baggage wallahs on our journey to Suakin on the Red Sea. They would not come back empty-handed. Besides the wage I paid them, they would bring to Takuba as a parting gift—the only one he would accept—two hundred baggage camels I had bought at the Khartoum fair.

Then with our long file of laden camels and their tenders, the Tuareg and Isabel and Jim and I made north and east until we struck the great caravan road running between Berber and Suakin, on which travel countless Mohammedans from the great bend of the Nile back and forth to Mecca. The moon that was old when we began was again a silver bow when we came into the cut that the Khor Baraka—the River of the Blessings—makes through the mountain ranges flanking the sea. On our last day we traveled a narrow sandy wasteland running north, to pitch our camp below a large sand dune close beside the town.

Within the town, thronged with Arabs and white-robed Bejas of many tribes, merchants and pilgrims, I sought out Kamel Mahk's factor and was courteously greeted. He brought me to the Suakin agent of Saad ibn Hassan, who said he was expecting me and that two of his master's best dhows would hove into port before the moon came full.

In our days of waiting, all our party except the borrowed baggage handlers sat long hours in the sun, silent until one of us remembered an incident, thrilling or strange or funny, to tell in a rush of words. We lived again our flight from the Sepulcher of Wet Bones, the great battle with Tembu Emir, and my embrace with Tui, whose claw had left an indelible track across my cheek.

But in the swift-sped nights, Isabel and I dreamed, not of these scenes of violence, but of incidents of little moment and passages between us that we thought we had forgotten. And often, it seemed, we would both dream of being lost from each other, on lonely roads that would never meet again, and we would waken and hold each other close and kiss, rejoicing that the hour of parting had not yet struck.

It would strike soon. The two ships came into port and discharged their cargoes. On the day that my ivory was to be stowed twenty black-veiled Tuareg went down to Saad's wharf and formed a line from the yard where our camels were unloaded to each vessel's hold in turn, their camel whips in their hands; and with my telling the dock master that they were savages from the Great Thirst who would flay alive any stevedore who dropped or broke one of my tusks, there was no doubt that my ivory would be handled with care. I saw the whole lot brought aboard without a single mishap. The trouble that fate, or fortune, whatever name fitted her best, could have caused me did not develop. Because Kamel's purse would be lightened if any of the ivory were stolen, it was put under stout guard.

"My porters declare your tusks the heaviest for their size that they ever stowed aboard a vessel," the dock master told me when he came up for his backsheesh.

"They come from a mountain district where the soil is heavy with iron, and I chose them for a special use," I replied with premeditated cunning. "But here is a sack of rupees, half of them for you, and half divided equally among the porters, with which to buy balm for lame backs, or bhang for weary spirits."

The drovers we had hired returned to Takuba's kraals with the baggage camels. The ships would sail on the morrow's sunrise, taking advantage of the offshore wind and a rising tide that would help to lift the ship through the perilous two-mile passage between the harbor and the open sea. There was no getting out of Jim traveling on one ship and I on the other, in the way of a merchant and his factor when his goods required two bottoms—otherwise our seeming carelessness might lead the unwatched crew into temptation. Isabel Gazelle decided not to come to the dock among the polyglot throngs, but to bid me farewell at the desert rim; and of course her Tuareg would stay with her.

Tonight we feasted, sitting in a ring, and as the moon climbed Isabel related in Tamashek, an Arab-speaking Tuareg whispering its translation in my ear, the great desert love story of Zoan and Zara. Why did she not recite it in Arabic? Her followers knew it fully and by heart, I, only its gist. The answer eluded me, but I sensed the propriety of the act, its high-mindedness and what I could only call royalness. Isabel Gazelle was never anything less than a princess.

When the story was over, Zoan, namesake of its hero, rose and spoke to me, Isabel herself translating.

"Omar, you have a little band of horsehair, with brass ends, that you greatly prize."

"Yes, I do. The hair was plucked from the mane of a great stallion."

"We have made a bracelet for your wrist out of hairs from the tail of Tembu Emir, whom you slew in battle in the thorn. Fear not that in wearing this you will anger the soul of Tembu and it will cast its great shadow upon your soul. Tembu's soul will be proud that you so honor the great fight he made. Also, we have drawn forth the claw of Tui that made the long mark on your face and set it in a little silver that you and Jim Effendi overlooked, and hammered out a small silver ring which we fastened to the setting, so you may wear it on a chain. Fear not that the soul of Tui will make war against your soul. It, too, will be proud that you so honor his ferocity and his bravery, whereby in his last breath he gazed into your eyes in implacable defiance!"

"I will wear both with pride. And I wish I had a gift for you of the same fitness."

"Omar, we have taken as our gift something that you cast away. It is the chains that we chiseled from your limbs. We will take them with us on our journeys on the desert, and hang them in our camps, and when we look at them, we'll remember the slave who rode with us into freedom, and who loved our princess and gave to her his seed. Thus always we'll rejoice at our own freedom, and fight to the death to defend it, and never again buy or seU or hold any man or woman or child in slavery."

"My heart swells at the tidings, Zoan, and my soul exults, and I cannot hide my tears."

"There's no reason for you to hide them, brother. Now we of the Black Veil and our kinsmen of the White Veil go into the desert to pass the night. You have only to call loudly or wave your hand in the firelight, and we'll return. But if you do not do so, we'll not see your face or hear your voice again except in dreams. Farewell, Omar."

"Farewell, Zoan."

With his left hand he touched me on the face. With his right he drew aside his veil so I could see his face. When he had turned away, another Tuareg made me the same salutation of farewell. All the others followed, these tall dark men of the desert with high-bred faces and equestrians' hands and forms and graceful movement—the black-veiled Tuareg and then the white-veiled Tuareg, their eyes bright with tears.

When they had gone, Jim gave me his slow, heart-warming smile.

"Cap'n, I've had mighty lively times with 'em Tuareg mens, and I reckon I'll spend the night amongst 'em, talking it over."

"If you like."

"When de mom start coming up across de bay, I'll sing out."

"Aye, aye."

"Isabel Gazelle, I might not see you no mo'. I'm mighty thankful for all you done for Cap'n and me, and for de love you gave him in his loneliness, and I'll pray de Lawd for you to be happy when us gone."

"I'll pray to Messiner to take good care of you." Her throat was suddenly full.

I led Isabel back to her seat before the fire. After a moment or two I asked, "Why did the Tuareg leave the camp tonight?"

"Do you remember the night we left camp, intending to spend it on the Stairway of the Jinns?"

"Yes."

"We didn't do so, because it came about for me to marry Suliman. I told the Tuareg of it, and of how we were parted. Tomorrow we'll again be parted, forever. The wheel of our fates had made another complete turn, and they thought that the night of solitude we lost should be restored to us before you went away."

"Did they tell you so?"

"No, but I, too, am Tuareg. Besides this, they thought that if I must weep aloud, it would come easier if they weren't here."

"I wish I could pay my debt to the Tuareg."

"You have paid it, in full, by leaving me with child. They had great admiration for you before they met you—I'd told them enough that they considered you a true chief—and it's greatly increased since Tembu tried your horsemanship and Tui your strength. They think that if I bring forth a boy, he'll have great strength and become a great rider. That, with his courage, which is as much a part of every Tuareg as his flesh and bone, will fit him to become a chief of the Sons of the Spear. If I bring forth a girl, they think your fearful visage will cause her to turn toward beauty as a flower to the sun, and she'll become greatly beautiful, to bring joy to our whole clan. And although they'll miss you and mourn you more than you know, they think the prospect of these things coming true is much better if the baby begins life as a Tuareg, and knows no other life, and isn't touched by the ways of the farengi."

"Now that's a strange thing, but I don't deny it's a true thing."

"In what way is it strange, Omar?"

"There are those in Frankistan who would condemn me past forgiveness for leaving my woman with a child I'll never see, to be brought up as a desert nomad."

"Such folk are blind or mad. It's not the babe who needs care—it's you. Beside the pain of parting from you, I can hardly bear to have you go back to your cruel world now that you're no longer young. The life of the Tuareg is a life of peril, but no matter how few his days, those days have been full. He has journeyed far and ridden hard and hunted and fought and loved women and seen the desert in the moonlight as well as in the dust storm, and known the beauty of poems and of stars. Our daughters are freeborn and can't become chattels to any man's hate. So think of him with joy. If he's dead, he'll have laughed much, and been well-loved, and won many victories before he died. If he's alive, he'll be growing tall and strong, brave and proud, a rider and warrior and hunter and a lover of our maidens, or if she is alive, she'll be growing tall and strong and beautiful, worthy to mate with and to mother a rider and warrior and hunter. We trace through the distaff. So do not doubt your babe will be a Son or Daughter of the Spear!"

"I'll never doubt it, Isabel Gazelle."

"But how can I think of you except with terror and pity, as you dwell in the great city shadowed with hate and fear? So I'll tell you my farewell wish. Gratify it if you can, for the sake of the love we bore each other, and will bear each other to the last. When you've built the great cairn of stones over those you loved who were lost— when you've done what you must do, according to the bond—go back to the life you lived when you were young and which you so greatly loved. Sail the tall ships. Do battle with the sea and make him serve you. Ride the horse-of-tree."

"I'll do it if I can. It will be my heart's desire. Have you any other heart's desire to tell me? The hour grows late, and I want you in my arms."

"I want you in my arms, my beloved. Although I'D wed again, some youth with light in his eyes and laughter in his mouth, my arms will yearn for you still. Yes, I have a heart's desire I've not yet told you, but its fulfillment will be on the lap of fate. I want you to marry some woman of Frankistan who'll remind you of me."

"There must be one, and when the time comes, I'll try to find her."

Then we went into our tent and left the door open to the moonlight. Once more I knew the fullness of her beauty and the victory of her love in the reuniting of her flesh with mine, and then the strange dream of love and the vision of immortality that it wakes as I gazed into her face as she lay in childlike slumber in my arms. Sometimes I drowsed, but mainly I kept vigil over her while the moon sailed westward down the sky. Long after midnight I fell into deep sleep, and it seemed that I was sinking into death when Isabel wakened me with a long kiss. The joy it gave me flowed through me in a great, sunlit wave, and it did not die away because the dawn had not cracked, and we could have each other one more hour.

It seemed an hour out of the world. At its end I knew that our so-brief mating, to be followed now by forever parting, was not a defeat but a victory to enrich our stay on earth, the price of which was heartbreak. When I had heard Jim call, and a few minutes later he asked me a question, low-toned, standing beside the ashes of our fire in the chill dawn with his eyes on mine, I knew the answer.

"Cap'n Whitman, is it needful 'at we go?"

"Aye, it is, James Porter."

I returned to Isabel, who stood in the doorway of the tent, and once more the jagged flint of my face was aglow with her beauty, redeemed by her kisses, and wet with her tears. She was still standing there as Jim and I started down into the town, and as I touched my hand to head and heart, she replied with the same gesture. On the dock Jim and I shook hands before we went aboard, and just before sunrise, the two white-bearded captains ordered the hoisting of the lateen sails. As the dhows moved out from the dock, jerkily and yet uncertain of their bright-red wings, but slowly gaining headway, the sun heaved up and glimmered on the bay.

It cast a reflected glow in the west. Against that glow 1 made out the shape of a sand dune, alone in that part of the coast, and on its top a minute figure. I could not doubt that it was Isabel, if only by the tallness and straightness of her posture. Standing on the deckhouse, I waved my arm.

It came to me that she waved in reply. Long after distance hid her from my sight, I was sure she watched our bright-red sail on the blue sea. But at last it also dimmed, grew small, and began to drop below the horizon. With her eyes I saw it fade. It was as though I had died.

Instead of death, Isabel, you brought me life and freedom. Now there comes upon me a greater strength of will and purpose than I ever had before, and I buckle on the sword that you gave me, the strange, strong sword of gold. If you could know its wielding in the days to come, you would not be ashamed of me. I will not flinch from its use in behalf of those I loved, or in fear of my foes.

I will be true to you, Isabel Gazelle. In memory of you, I will be a captain worthy of the name.