The Golden Silence Part 33

In the morning he was still brooding over the message; and as they travelled through the black desert on the way to Ghardaia and the hidden cities of the M'Zab, he fell into long silences. Then, abruptly, he would rouse himself to gaiety and animation, telling old legends or new tales, strange dramas of the desert, very seldom comedies; for there are few comedies in the Sahara, except for the children.

Sometimes he was in danger of speaking out words which said themselves over and over in his head. "If I 'wait too long, I may wait for ever.'

Then, by Allah, I will not wait." But he kept his tongue in control, though his brain was hot as if he wore no turban, under the blaze of the sun. "I will leave things as they are while we are in this black Gehenna," he determined. "What is written is written. Yet who has seen the book of the writing? And there is a curse on all this country, till the M'Zab is pa.s.sed."

After Bou-Saada, he had gradually forgotten, or almost forgotten, his fears. He had been happy in the consciousness of power that came to him from the desert, where he was at home, and Europeans were helpless strangers. But now, M'Barka's warnings had brought the fears back, like flapping ravens. He had planned the little play of the sand-divining, and at first it had pleased him. M'Barka's vision of the dark man who was not of Victoria's country could not have been better; and because he knew that his cousin believed in the sand, he was superst.i.tiously impressed by her prophecy and advice. In the end, he had forced her to go on when she would have stopped, yet he was angry with her for putting doubts into his mind, doubts of his own wisdom and the way to succeed. With a girl of his own people, or indeed with any girl, if he had not loved too much, he would have had no doubts. But he did not know how it was best to treat Victoria. His love for her was so strong, that it was like fear, and in trying to understand her, he changed his mind a dozen times a day. He was not used to this uncertainty, and hated to think that he could be weak. Would she turn from him, if he broke the tacit compact of loyal friends.h.i.+p which had made her trust him as a guide? He could not tell; though an Arab girl would scorn him for keeping it. "Perhaps at heart all women are alike," he thought. "And if, now that I am warned, I should risk waiting, I would be no man." At last, the only question left in his mind was, "When?"

For two days they journeyed through desolation, in a burnt-out world where nothing had colour except the sad violet sky which at evening flamed with terrible sunsets, cruelly beautiful as funeral pyres. The fierce glow set fire to the black rocks which pointed up like dragons'

teeth, and turned them to glittering copper; polis.h.i.+ng the dead white chalk of the chebka to the dull gleam of dirty silver. Far away there were always purple hills, behind which it seemed that hope and beauty might come to life again; but travelling from morning to night they never appeared any nearer. The evil magic of the black desert, which Maeddine called accursed because of the M'Zabites, made the beautiful hills recede always, leaving only the ugly brown waves of hardened earth, which were disheartening to climb, painful to descend.

At last, in the midst of black squalor, they came to an oasis like a bright jewel fallen in the trough of swine. It was Berryan, the first town of the M'Zabites, people older than the Arabs, and hated by them with a hatred more bitter than their loathing for Jews.

Maeddine would not pa.s.s through the town, since it could be avoided, because in his eyes the Beni-M'Zab were dogs, and in their eyes he, though heir to an agha, would be as carrion.

Sons of ancient Phoenicians, merchants of Tyre and Carthage, there never had been, never would be, any l.u.s.t for battle in the hearts of the M'Zabites. Their warfare had been waged by cunning, and through mercenaries. They had fled before Arab warriors, driven from place to place by brave, scornful enemies, and now, safely established in their seven holy cities, protected by vast distances and the barrier of the black desert, they revenged their wrongs with their wits, being rich, and great usurers. Though Mussulmans in these days, the schisms with which they desecrated the true religion were worse in the eyes of Maeddine than the foolish faith of Christians, who, at least, were not backsliders. He would not even point out to Victoria the strange minaret of the Abadite mosque at Berryan, which tapered like a brown obelisk against the s.h.i.+mmering sky, for to him its very existence was a disgrace.

"Do not speak of it; do not even look at it," he said to her, when she exclaimed at the great Cleopatra Needle. But she did look, having none of his prejudices, and he dared not bid her let down the curtains of her ba.s.sour, as he would if she had been a girl of his own blood.

The extraordinary city, whose crowded, queerly-built houses were blocks of gold in the sunlight, seemed beautiful to Victoria, coming in sight of it suddenly after days in the black desert. The other six cities, called holy by the Beni-M'Zab, were far away still. She knew this, because Maeddine had told her they would not descend into the Wady M'Zab till next day. Berryan and Guerrara were on the upper plateau; and Victoria could hardly bear to pa.s.s by, for Berryan was by far the most Eastern-seeming place she had seen. She wondered if, should she ask him as a favour, Maeddine would rest there that night, instead of camping somewhere farther on, in the hideous desert; for already it was late afternoon. But she would ask nothing of him now, for he was no longer quite the trusty friend she had persuaded herself to think him. One night, since the sand-divining, she had had a fearful dream concerning Maeddine. Outside her tent she had heard a soft padding sound, and peeping from under the flap, she had seen a splendid, tawny tiger, who looked at her with brilliant topaz eyes which fascinated her so that she could not turn away. But she knew that the animal was Maeddine; that each night he changed himself into a tiger; and that as a tiger he was more his real self than when by day he appeared as a man.

They filed past Berryan; the meharis, the white stallion, the pack-camel, and the mule, in slow procession, along a rough road which wound close to the green oasis. And from among the palm trees men and women and little children, gorgeous as great tropical birds, in their robes of scarlet, ochre-yellow, and emerald, peered at the little caravan with cynical curiosity. Victoria looked back longingly, for she knew that the way from Berryan to the Wady M'Zab would be grim and toilsome under the burning sun. Hill after hill, they mounted and descended; hills stony yet sandy, always the same dull colour, and so shapeless as to daze the brain with their monotony. But towards evening, when the animals had climbed to the crest of a hill like a dingy wave, suddenly a white obelisk shot up, pale and stiff as a dead man's finger.

Tops of tall palms were like the dark plumes on the heads of ten thousand dancing women of the Sahara, and as a steep descent began, there glittered the five hidden cities, like a strange fairyland lost in the desert. The whole Wady M'Zab lay under the eyes of the travellers, as if they looked down over the rim of an immense cup. Here, some who were left of the sons of Tyre and Carthage dwelt safe and snug, crouching in the protection of the valley they had found and reclaimed from the abomination of desolation.

It seemed to Victoria that she looked on one of the great sights of the world: the five cities, gleaming white, and glowing bronze, closely built on their five conical hills, which rose steeply from the flat bottom of the gold-lined cup--Ghardaia, Beni-Isguen, Bou-Noura, Melika, and El-Ateuf. The top of each hill was prolonged to a point by the tapering minaret of one of those Abadite mosques which the girl thought the most Eastern of all things imported from the East. The oasis which gave wealth to the M'Zabites surged round the towns like a green sea at ebb tide, sucked back from a strand of gold; and as the caravan wound down the wonderful road with which the Beni-M'Zab had traced the sheer side of their enchanted cup, the groaning of hundreds of well-chains came plaintively up on the wind.

The well-stones had the obelisk shape of the minarets, in miniature; and Negroes--freed slaves of the rich M'Zabites--running back and forth in pairs, to draw the water, were mere struggling black ants, seen from the cup's rim. The houses of the five towns were like bleached skeletons, and the arches that spanned the dark, narrow streets were their ribs.

Arrived at the bottom of the cup, it was necessary to pa.s.s through the longest and only modern street of Ghardaia, the capital of the M'Zab. A wind had sprung up, to lift the sand which sprinkled the hard-trodden ground with thick powder of gold dust, and whirl it westward against the fire of sunset, red as a blowing spray of blood. "It is a sign of trouble when the sand of the desert turns to blood," muttered Fafann to her mistress, quoting a Bedouin proverb.

The men of the M'Zab do not willingly give lodging to strangers, least of all to Arabs; and at Beni-Isguen, holy city and scene of strange mysteries, no stranger may rest for the night. But Maeddine, respected by the ruling power, as by his own people, had a friend or two at every Bureau Arabe and military station. A French officer stationed at Ghardaia had married a beautiful Arab girl of good family distantly related to the Agha of the Ouled-Serrin, and being at Algiers on official business, his wife away at her father's tent, he had promised to lend his house, a few miles out of the town, to Si Maeddine. It was a long, low building of toub, the sun-dried sand-blocks of which most houses are made in the ksour, or Sahara villages, but it had been whitewashed, and named the Pearl.

There they slept, in the cool shadow of the oasis, and early next morning went on.

As soon as they had pa.s.sed out of this hidden valley, where a whole race of men had gathered for refuge and wealth-building, Victoria felt, rather than saw, a change in Maeddine. She hardly knew how to express it to herself, unless it was that he had become more Arab. His courtesies suggested less the modern polish learned from the French (in which he could excel when he chose) than the almost royal hospitality of some young Bey escorting a foreign princess through his dominions.

Always "_tres-male_," as Frenchwomen p.r.o.nounced him admiringly, Si Maeddine began to seem masculine in an untamed, tigerish way. He was restless, and would not always be contented to ride El Biod, beside the tall, white mehari, but would gallop far ahead, and then race back to rejoin the little caravan, rus.h.i.+ng straight at the animals as if he must collide with them, then, at the last instant, when Victoria's heart bounded, reining in his horse, so that El Biod's forefeet--shod Arab-fas.h.i.+on--pawed the air, and the animal sat upon his haunches, muscles straining and rippling under the creamlike skin.

Or, sometimes, Maeddine would spring from the white stallion's back, letting El Biod go free, while his master marched beside Guelbi, with that panther walk that the older races, untrammelled by the civilization of towns, have kept unspoiled.

The Arab's eyes were more brilliant, never dreamy now, and he looked at Victoria often, with disconcerting steadiness, instead of lowering his eyelids as men of Islam, accustomed to the mystery of the veil, unconsciously do with European women whom they respect, though they do not understand.

So they went on, travelling the immeasurable desert; and Victoria had not asked again, since Maeddine's refusal, the name of the place to which they were bound. M'Barka seemed brighter, as if she looked forward to something, each day closer at hand; and her courage would have given Victoria confidence, even if the girl had been inclined to forebodings. They were going somewhere, Lella M'Barka knew where, and looked forward joyously to arriving. The girl fancied that their destination was the same, though at first she had not thought so. Words that M'Barka let drop inadvertently now and then, built up this impression in her mind.

The "habitude du Sud," as Maeddine called it, when occasionally they talked French together, was gradually taking hold of the girl. Sometimes she resented it, fearing that by this time it must have altogether enslaved Saidee, and dreading the insidious fascination for herself; sometimes she found pleasure and peace in it; but in every mood the influence was hard to throw off.

"The desert has taken hold of thee," Maeddine said one day, when he had watched her in silence for a while, and seen the rapt look in her eyes.

"I knew the time would come, sooner or later. It has come now."

"No," Victoria answered. "I do not belong to the desert."

"If not to-day, then to-morrow," he finished, as if he had not heard.

They were going on towards Ouargla. So much he had told her, though he had quickly added, "But we shall not stop there." He was waiting still, though they were out of the black desert and the accursed land of the renegades. He was not afraid of anything or anyone here, in this vastness, where a European did not pa.s.s once a year, and few Arabs, only the Spahis, carrying mails from one Bureau Arabe to another, or tired soldiers changing stations. The beautiful country of the golden dunes, with its horizon like a stormy sea, was the place of which he said in his thoughts, "It shall happen there."

On the other side of Ghardaia, even when Victoria had ceased to be actually impatient for her meeting with Saidee, she had longed to know the number of days, that she might count them. But now she had drunk so deep of the colour and the silence that, in spite of herself, she was pa.s.sing beyond that phase. What were a few days more, after so many years? She wondered how she could have longed to go flying across the desert in Nevill Caird's big motor-car; nevertheless, she never ceased to wish for Stephen Knight. Her thoughts of him and of the desert were inextricably and inexplicably mingled, more than ever since the night when she had danced in the Agha's tent, and Stephen's face had come before her eyes, as if in answer to her call. Constantly she called him now. When there was some fleeting, beautiful effect of light or shadow, she said, "How I wish he were here to see that!" She never named him in her mind. He was "he": that was name enough. Yet it did not occur to her that she was "in love" with Knight. She had never had time to think about falling in love. There had always been Saidee, and dancing; and to Victoria, the desire to make money enough to start out and find her sister, had taken the place which ideas of love and marriage fill in most girls' heads. Therefore she did not know what to make of her feeling for Stephen. But when a question floated into her brain, she answered it simply by explaining that he was different from any other man she had met; and that, though she had known him only a few days, from the first he had seemed more a friend than Si Maeddine, or any one else whom she knew much better than Stephen.

As they travelled, she had many thoughts which pleased her--thoughts which could have come to her nowhere else except in the desert, and often she talked to herself, because M'Barka could not understand her feelings, and she did not wish to make Maeddine understand.

"Burning, burning," was the adjective which she repeated oftenest, in an almost awestruck whisper, as her eyes travelled over immense s.p.a.ces; for she thought that the desert might have dropped out of the sun. The colour of sand and sky was colour on fire, blazing. The whole Sahara throbbed with the unimaginable fire of creative cosmic force, deep, vital orange, needed by the primitive peoples of the earth who had not risen high enough yet to deserve or desire the finer vibrations.

As she leaned out of the ba.s.sour, the heat of the sun pressed on her lightly veiled head, like the golden lid of a golden box. She could feel it as an actual weight; and invisible behind it a living power which could crush her in an instant, as the paw of a lion might crush a flower petal.

Africa itself was this savage power, fierce as fire, ever smouldering, sometimes flaming with the revolt of Islam against other creeds; but the heart of the fire was the desert. Only the shady seguias in the oasis towns cooled it, like children's fingers on a madman's forehead; or the sound of a boy's flute in a river bed, playing the music of Pan, changeless, monotonous yet thrilling, as the music of earth and all Nature.

There were tracts in the desert which colour-blind people might have hated; but Victoria grew to think the dreariest stretches beautiful; and even the occasional plagues of flies which irritated M'Barka beyond endurance, only made Victoria laugh.

Sometimes came caravans, in this billowing immensity between the M'Zab and Ouargla--city of Solomon, whither the Queen of Sheba rode on her mehari: caravans blazing red and yellow, which swept like slow lines of flame across the desert, going east towards the sunrise, or west where the sunset spreads over the sky like a purple fan opening, or the tail of a celestial peac.o.c.k.

What Victoria had once imagined the desert to be of vast emptiness, and what she found it to be of teeming life, was like the difference between a gold-bright autumn leaf seen by the naked eye, and the same leaf swarming under a powerful microscope.

The girl never tired of following with her eyes the vague tracks of caravans that she could see dimly sketched upon the sand, vanis.h.i.+ng in the distance, like lines traced on the water by a s.h.i.+p. She would be gazing at an empty horizon when suddenly from over the waves of the dunes would appear a dark fleet; a procession of laden camels like a flotilla of boats in a desolate sea.

They were very effective, as they approached across the desert, these silent, solemn beasts, but Victoria pitied them, because they were made to work till they fell, and left to die in the s.h.i.+fting sand, when no longer useful to their unloving masters.

"My poor dears, this is only one phase," she would say to them as they plodded past, their feet splas.h.i.+ng softly down on the sand like big wet sponges, leaving heart-shaped marks behind, which looked like violets as the hollows filled up with shadow. "Wait till your next chance on earth.

I'm sure it will make up for everything."

But Maeddine told her there was no need to be sorry for the sufferings of camels, since all were deserved. Once, he said, they had been men--a haughty tribe who believed themselves better than the rest of the world.

They broke off from the true religion, and lest their schism spread, Allah turned the renegades into camels. He compelled them to bear the weight of their sins in the shape of humps, and also to carry on their backs the goods of the Faithful, whose beliefs they had trampled under foot. While keeping their stubbornness of spirit they must kneel to receive their loads, and rise at the word of command. Remembering their past, they never failed to protest with roarings, against these indignities, nor did their faces ever lose the old look of sullen pride.

But, in common with the once human storks, they had one consolation.

Their sins expiated, they would reincarnate as men; and some other rebellious tribe would take their place as camels.

Five days' journeying from Ghardaia brought the travellers to a desert world full of movement and interest. There were many caravans going northward. Pretty girls smiled at them from swaying red ba.s.sourahs, sitting among pots and pans, and bundles of finery. Little children in nests of scarlet rags, on loaded camels, clasped squawking c.o.c.ks and hens, tied by the leg. Splendid Negroes with bare throats like columns of black marble sang strange, chanting songs as they strode along.

White-clad Arabs whose green turbans told that they had been to Mecca, walked beside their young wives' camels. Withered crones in yellow smocks trudged after the procession, driving donkeys weighed down with sheepskins full of oil. Baby camels with waggling, tufted humps followed their mothers. Slim grey sloughis and Kabyle dogs quarrelled with each other, among flocks of black and white goats; and at night, the sky pulsed with the fires of desert encampments, rosy as northern lights.

Just before the walled city of Ouargla, Victoria saw her first mirage, clear as a dream between waking and sleeping. It was a salt lake, in which Guelbi and the other animals appeared to wade knee-deep in azure waves, though there was no water; and the vast, distant oasis hovered so close that the girl almost believed she had only to stretch out her hand and touch the trunks of the crowding palm trees.

M'Barka was tired, and they rested for two days in the strange Ghuara town, the "City of Roses," founded (according to legend), by Solomon, King of Jerusalem, and built for him by djenoum and angels in a single night. They lived as usual in the house of the Cad, whose beautiful twin daughters told Victoria many things about the customs of the Ghuara people, descendants of the ancient Garamantes. How much happier and freer they were than Arab girls, how much purer though gayer was the life at Ouargla, Queen of the Oases, than at any other less enlightened desert city; how marvellous was the moulet-el-ra.s.s, the dance cure for headache and diseases of the brain; how wonderful were the women soothsayers; and what a splendid thing it was to see the bridal processions pa.s.sing through the streets, on the one day of the year when there is marrying and giving in marriage in Ouargla.

The name of the prettier twin was Zorah, and she had black curls which fell straight down over her brilliant eyes, under a scarlet head-dress.

"Dost thou love Si Maeddine?" she asked the Roumia, with a kind of innocent boldness.

"As a friend who has been very kind," Victoria answered.

"Not as a lover, oh Roumia?" Zorah, like all girls of Ouargla, was proud of her knowledge of Arabic.

"No. Not as a lover."

"Is there then one of thine own people whom thou lovest as a lover, Rose of the West?"