CHAPTER XXVIII

"_He made the pillars thereof of silver, the

bottom thereof of gold, the covering of it of

purple, the midst thereof being paved with

love . . ._"

SONG OF SOLOMON.

Accustomed to the flowing robes of the Arab, it is not as difficult as

it might be imagined to break a desert-trained horse to side-saddle;

but the mare, Pi-Kay, spoilt and sensitive, behaved like a very demon

whilst the _sayis_ exchanged the _ma'araka_, which is the native pad

without stirrups, for the lady's saddle. She was not really bad, not

she! She was simply a spoilt beauty and inclined to show off, so that

every time her big, beautiful eye caught the sheen of the girl's satin

cloak, she backed and reared and plunged, but more out of mischief than

wickedness. For many days she had been ridden alternately astride and

side by the _sayis_, who loved her better than his wife and almost as

much as his son; ridden from the Tents of Purple and Gold--and not

over-willingly did she go--to the Gate of To-morrow at sunset, to be

taken back at a tearing gallop to the Tents, without restraining or

guiding hand upon the reins, at sunrise.

It was not sunrise now, and she did not like the person in the

shimmering satin who had, in some miraculous way, swung to her back and

stayed there; but she was headed in the direction of home, and the

moonlight was having just as much effect upon her temperament as it has

on that of humans.

A moon-struck horse or a moon-struck camel in the desert is a weird

picture and it were wise, as they are for the moment absolutely fey, to

give them an extremely wide passage.

"Guide her not, lady," shouted the _sayis_ to Damaris, who answered to

the movement of the mare like a reed in the wind, but otherwise seemed

to take no notice of horse, or man, or moon, or untoward circumstance;

he hung on for a moment to the silken mane and stared up into the

girl's unseeing eyes; then, with a ringing shout, let go and jumped

nimbly to one side.

There was no backing, no rearing, or vagary of any sort now; the mare

started on her journey; broke into a canter; broke into a gallop; then,

silken mane and tail flying, thundered back at a terrific speed along

the path marked out by her own dainty hoofs, and the relentless feet of

that hound, Fate.

Damaris turned in the saddle and looked behind, and then to her right

and then to her left.

She was alone in the desert.

The sands, stretched like a silver carpet in front of her and like a

silver carpet with the black ribbon woven across it by the mare's feet

behind; to the east and west the sandy waste seemed to undulate in

great fawn and amethyst and grey-blue waves, so tremendous was the

beast's pace; the horizon looked as though draped in curtains

gossamer-light and opalescent; the heavens stretched, silvery and cold,

as merciless as a woman who has ceased to love.

And then, just as on the far horizon there showed a mound which might

have been a hillock of sand or a verdant patch, outcome of precious

water, or a slowly-moving caravan of heavily-laden camel, the mare

Pi-Kay increased her pace. You would not have noticed it, for it would

have seemed to you that she was already all out; but you would--as did

Damaris--if you knew anything about horses, have _felt_ it, had you

been riding her. It was that last grain of the last ounce by which

races are won; the supreme effort of the great sporting instinct, which

lies in all thoroughbreds, human or animal; and Damaris, thrilled to

the innermost part of her being as she sensed rather than felt the

quiver which passed through the mare, leant forward and touched the

satin neck.

That which distance had given the appearance of a mound grew more and

more distinct. It was no mound nor hillock, verdant patch nor

slowly-moving caravan of camel.

Three tents showed at last distinctly, and the following is the short

explanation of their origin.

As it is not good for the Oriental youth to stay under the same roof as

his mother, once he has come to man's estate--which is at any age after

eleven in the lands of intense sun--the building of the House 'an

Mahabbha near the Oasis of Khargegh had been begun within the first

year of the birth of Hugh Carden Ali.

Owing to the entreaties of his English mother, the boy had not been

affianced in extreme youth to a little maid of two or three or four

summers, upon whom he would not have set eyes until the night of the

marriage.

His mother had idolised him and he had worshipped her; he obeyed her,

he would willingly have died for her; later, at her request, he even

left his country of sunshine and vivid colouring for hers, so cold and

bleak; but before that and at the age when other high-caste youths of

Arabia settle down in their own house to contemplate seriously the

taking of the reins into their own despotic hands, he had absolutely

refused to go to the House 'an Mahabbha, built for him as his father's

first-born.

Perhaps also it was the English blood in his veins which at that age

filled him with the spirit of adventure.

A desire for solitude, a desire for something sterner than the everyday

existence of his luxurious life had driven him out into the desert,

where, bewitched, as it were of woman, he had followed the Spirit which

ever held out her long fine hand with beckoning finger.

A mere boy? Absurd! Ridiculous!

Not at all; for the high-caste boy of twelve in the Orient is oft-times

as much developed physically and mentally as the Occidental of over

twenty.

He had followed the Spirit where she had beckoned, and, an Arab through

the blood of his father, had caught her and crushed the body, slender

to gauntness, in his arms; had twined his fingers in the coarse, black

hair and pulled it back from the different-coloured eyes; had sought

the crimson mouth until his lips had rasped with the kisses a-grit with

sand; slept with his hands clutching her tattered robes of saffron,

purple and of gold; torn the misty veil from before her face and

dreamed with her cool breath, which is the wind of dawn, upon his face.

He loved her and to her had pitched his tents.

He prayed that he might be with her when he died, and, convinced that

his prayer would be answered, he had pitched him a funeral tent between

those of Purple and of Gold.

Bewitched of the desert, the colour of the tents resembled those in

which she decks herself in the passing of a day and a night.

Outwardly they were just ordinary Bedouin tents, the tan and brown of

camel-hide; flat-roofed and square, giving a full-grown man room in

which to move and stand to his full stature without the fear--as in the

peaked affair called bell--of bringing the whole thing down upon his

crown. They lifted at each side to allow the desert wind to enter at

any hour it listed; or the moon to pierce him with silvery spear; or

the stars to blaze like jewels before his eyes, as he waited for sleep

on a rug upon the sand.

The one in which he slept was hung inside with satin curtains of

deepest purple, with here and there a star of silver, which glittered

in the light of the cut-crystal lamp which hung from the cross-pole.

The Persian rug upon the floor was grey and old rose and faintest

yellow, and glistened like the skin of woman; of the ordinary

furnishings of an ordinary bedroom there was no sign--you would have to

go much farther afield to find the tent with all the paraphernalia of

the toilet. Just as you would have to go still farther and towards the

west, to where were pitched the stables, and the quarters of the

specially-chosen servants he took with him in his desert wanderings;

just enough--and they had their work cut out--to look after the dogs

and birds and horses. The camels, upon whom depended the supplies,

were right out of sight, and any one of the servants would have

preferred death by torture to approaching within a mile of his master's

tents until he heard his call.

In the other tent he ate his bread and dates and drank his coffee or

received the humblest of his passing brothers; those who, scorched with

heat, tortured with thirst or hunger, and blinded with flying sand, yet

would not exchange one minute of their own free desert life for an

eternity of soft couches and the most succulent effort of a _cordon

bleu_ in the cramped surroundings of a crowded city.

It was hung with orange satin; cushions of every hue were flung upon a

carpet of violent colours; the lamps of bronze with wicks floating in

crimson saucers, hanging from the crosspole, were rarely lit; the satin

curtains hid a smaller room behind filled with dates and coffee-beans,

sweetmeats, beads and other things which bring joy to the grateful

heart of the wandering Arab and his family.

The sand outside was marked and pressed, down with footprints of men

and women and little children.

They had not to ask in order to receive.

But no foot but his had ever trod the fine matting of the tent between

the other two.

Firmly convinced that his prayer would be granted and that in the

desert he would find the answer to the many questions which had

occurred to him to ask of life, he had sought for a covering under

which he could lie after death until naught but his bones should be

left for the wind of chance to play with.

He had all a Mohammedan's belief in the hand of destiny, but the

English blood in his veins filled him with horror at the thought of

being torn to pieces by vultures after death; his desert blood filled

him with an equal horror at the thought of being weighted down by the

regulation tomb of bricks and mortar.

And so it came to pass on this night of the full moon, when the girl he

loved was racing towards him and Fate was disentangling the threads she

had knotted so grievously, that he lay stretched upon the block of wood

which stood three feet high in the centre of this tent. He lay face

downwards, with chin in hand, looking out through the lifted flap in

the direction of Mecca, whilst the moon hung as a silver shield above

him, and the desert enfolded him on every side.

Outwardly the tent was as that of any Bedouin; tan and brown, the

colour of the camel's hide, of which it was made; square-roofed, with

one side only which lifted, the side which was towards Mecca.

Inside it was lined with a copy of the queen's funeral canopy of

softest leather; stretched square; to the touch as soft, supple and

fine as velvet.[1]

True, this copy had not taken year upon year to make, nor had scores

and scores of nimble fingers stitched and stitched for days and months

to finish it, as in the days of the XIXth dynasty. The panels in the

copy were of one piece of hide stitched finely by machinery, with the

emblems painted upon them after the stitching; in the original they are

made by the stitching together by hand of thousands and thousands of

pieces of gazelle-hide, each of which had been painted either pink or

blue or green or in various shades of yellow before the stitching.

Look up with Hugh Carden Ali as he lifts his head to gaze at something

far beyond the tent-roof.

You will see a copy of the central square which, divided into two,

rested upon the top of the shrine which covered the dead queen who died

about one hundred years after the siege of Troy. One side of the panel

is sprinkled with yellow and pink rosettes on a pale-blue ground; the

other side shows the vulture, the emblem of maternity, holding in its

claws the feather of justice; six there are in all.

That is the ceiling.

The tent walls are lined with a copy of the flaps which hung down on

each side of the shrine of the funeral-boat of the Egyptian queen who,

some thousand years before Christ, crossed the blue-green Nile,

followed by other boats filled with her priests and princes, her

officers, her mourning women. North and south, the flaps are of

chess-board pattern in squares of pink and green; behind one of which

was hidden the small room which held naught but a crystal pitcher and

crystal basin, filled to the brim with water for the ablutions at the

Hour of Nazam, which is the Hour of Prayer.

Near the top the sides show bands of colour, red, yellow, green and

blue, almost as bright in the original as on the day the paints were

mixed, one thousand years ago. Beneath the bands upon one side you

will see the signet-ring of the priest-King Pinotem--whose son Queen

Isi em Kheb espoused--; also the royal asps and the scarab, the emblem

of life out of death.

Upon the other wall you will see the lotus-flower, which opens at the

rising of the sun and closes at its setting; the enigmatic

double-headed ducklings and the picture of a gazelle, which is

doubtless the representation of the pet which, bound in mummy

trappings, was found beside its royal mistress in the tomb. Across the

lotus-flowers, like a silver shaft, there hung a light throwing-spear.

A very technical description, taken down in rough notes at the museum,

of a specimen of patchwork--even like the patchwork counterpanes of our

great-grandmothers--stitched together by dusky slender fingers in the

days of the great King Solomon.

And to Hugh Carden Ali as he lay in this tent, looking towards Mecca,

there came the sound, from a great distance, as of a horse running at

full speed.

[1]This is a description of the funeral-tent of Queen Isi em Kheb,

contemporary of the wise Solomon, mother-in-law of the Shishak who

besieged Jerusalem and "carried away also the shields of gold which

Solomon had made." (II Chron. 12.)

It served as a pall to cover the royal lady upon her last terrestrial

journey, when she crossed the Nile in the funeral boat from her palace

in Karnak (?) to her burial-chamber in Deir el-Bahari.