Donovan Pasha And Some People Of Egypt, Complete - Gilbert Parker
"Sire, what greater proof could be had of the man's simplicity? His life
is in your hands, sire. Would he have risked it, had he not been the most
simpleminded of men? But you who read men's hearts, sire, as others read
a book, you know if I speak truth." Slatin bent his head in humility.
The flattery pleased the Khalifa.
"Summon Osman Wad Adam and the man to me," he said.
In the questioning that followed, Macnamara's Arabic and his
understanding of it was so bad that it was necessary for Slatin to ask
him questions in English. This was a test of Macnamara, for Slatin said
some things in English which were not for the Khalifa's knowing. If
Macnamara's face changed, if he started, Abdullah's suspicions, ever
ready, would have taken form.
But Macnamara's wits were not wool-gathering, and when Slatin said to
him, "If I escape, I will try to arrange yours," Macnamara replied, with
a respectful but placid stolidity: "Right, sir. Where does the old sinner
keep his spoof?"
It was now for Slatin to keep a hold on himself, for Macnamara's reply
was unexpected. Ruling his face to composure, however, he turned to the
Khalifa and said that up to this moment Macnamara had not been willing to
become a Mahommedan, but his veneration for the Mahdi's successor was so
great that he would embrace the true faith by the mercy of God and the
permission of the Khalifa. When the Khalifa replied that he would accept
the convert into the true faith at once, Slatin then said to Macnamara:
"Come now, my man, I've promised that you will become a Mahommedan--it's
your best chance of safety."
"I'll see him on the devil's pitchfork first," said Macnamara; but he did
not change countenance. "I'm a Protestant and I'll stand be me baptism."
"You'll lose your head, man," answered Slatin. "Don't be a fool."
"I'm keepin' to what me godfathers and godmothers swore for me," answered
Macnamara stubbornly. "You must pretend for a while, or you'll be dead in
an hour--and myself too."
"You--that's a different nose on me face," answered Macnamara. "But
suppose I buck when I get into the mosque--no, begobs, I'll not be doin'
it!"
"I'll say to him that you'll do it with tears of joy, if you can have a
month for preparation."
"Make it two an' I'm your man, seein' as you've lied for me, sir. But on
wan condition--where does he keep his coin?"
"If you try that on, you'll die bit by bit like the men in the
Beit-el-Mal to-day," answered Slatin quickly. "I'm carvin' me own mutton,
thank ye kindly, sir," answered Macnamara.
"I've heard that part of his treasure is under his own room," went on
Slatin quickly, for he saw that the Khalifa's eyes had a sinister
look-the conversation had been too long.
"Speak no more!" said Abdullah sharply. "What is it you say, my son?" he
added to Slatin.
"He has been telling me that he is without education even in his own
faith, and that he cannot learn things quickly. Also he does not
understand what to do in the mosque, or how to pray, and needs to be
taught. He then asked what was impossible, and I had to argue with him,
sire."
"What did he ask?" asked the Khalifa, his fierce gaze on Macnamara.
"He wished to be taught by yourself, sire. He said that if you taught him
he would understand. I said that you were the chosen Emperor of the
Faithful, the coming king of the world, but he replied that the prophets
of old taught their disciples with their own tongues."
It was a bold lie, but the Khalifa was flattered, and made a motion of
assent. Slatin, seeing his advantage, added:
"I told him that you could not spare the time to teach him, sire; but he
said that if you would talk to him for a little while every day for a
month, after he had studied Arabic for two months, he would be ready to
follow your majesty through life and death."
"Approach, my son," said the Khalifa to Macnamara suddenly. Macnamara
came near. He understood Arabic better than he had admitted, and he saw
in this three months' respite, if it were granted, the chance to carry
out a plan that was in his mind. The Khalifa held out a hand to him, and
Macnamara, boiling with rage inwardly and his face flushing--which the
Khalifa mistook for modesty--kissed it.
"You shall have two moons to learn Arabic of a good teacher every day,
and then for one moon I myself will instruct you in the truth," said
Abdullah. "You shall wait at my door and walk by my stirrup and teach my
horse as you have taught the English horse of Osman Wad Adam. Thy
faithful service I will reward, and thy unfaithfulness I will punish with
torture and death."
"I'll cut the price of the kiss on those dirty fingers from a dervish
joint," muttered Macnamara to himself, as he took his place that evening
at the Khalifa's door.
One thing Macnamara was determined on. He would never pray in a
Mahommedan mosque, he would never turn Mahommedan even for a day. The
time had come when he must make a break for liberty. He must have money.
With money Mahommed Nafar, who was now his teacher--Slatin had managed
that--would move for him.
Under the spur of his purpose Macnamara rapidly acquired Arabic, and
steadfastly tried to make Mahommed Nafar his friend, for he liked the
little man, and this same little man was the only Arab, save one, from
first to last, whom he would not have spitted on a bayonet. At first he
chafed under the hourly duplicity necessary in his service to the
Khalifa, then he took an interest in it, and at last he wept tears of joy
over his dangerous proficiency. Day after day Macnamara waited, in the
hope of making sure that the Khalifa's treasure was under the room where
he slept. Upon the chance of a successful haul, he had made fervid
promises, after the fashion of his race, to the shoemaker Mahommed Nafar.
At first the shoemaker would have nothing to do with it: helping
prisoners to escape meant torture and decapitation; but then he hated the
Khalifa, whose Baggaras had seized his property, and killed his wife and
children; and in the end Macnamara prevailed. Mahommed Nafar found some
friendly natives from the hills of Gilif, who hated the Khalifa and his
tyrannous governments, and at last they agreed to attempt the escape.
III
A month went by. Lust, robbery, and murder ruled in Omdurman. The river
thickened with its pollution, the trees within the walls sickened of its
poison, the bones of the unburied dead lay in the moat beyond the gates,
and, on the other side of the river, desolate Khartoum crumbled over the
streets and paths and gardens where Gordon had walked. The city was a pit
of infamy, where struggled, or wallowed, or died to the bellowing of the
Khalifa's drum and the hideous mirth of his Baggaras, the victims of
Abdullah. But out in the desert--the Bayuda desert--between Omdurman and
Old Dongola, there was only peace. Here and there was "a valley of dry
bones," but the sand had washed the bones clean, the vultures had had
their hour and flown away, the debris of deserted villages had been
covered by desert storms, and the clear blue sky and ardent sun were over
all, joyous and immaculate. Out in the desert there was only the
life-giving air, the opal sands, the plaintive evening sky, the eager
morning breeze, the desolated villages, and now and then in the vast
expanse, stretching hundreds and hundreds of miles south, an oasis as a
gem set in a cloth of faded gold.
It would have seemed to any natural man better to die in the desert than
to live in Omdurman. So thought a fugitive who fled day and night through
the Bayuda desert, into the sandy wastes, beyond whose utmost limits lay
Wady Halfa, where the English were.
Macnamara had conquered. He had watched his chance when two of the black
guard were asleep, and the Khalifa was in a stupor of opium in the harem,
had looted Abdullah's treasure, and carried the price of the camels and
the pay of the guides to Mahommed Nafar the shoemaker.
His great sprawling camel, the best that Mahommed Nafar could buy of Ebn
Haraf, the sheikh in the Gilif Hills, swung down the wind with a long,
reaching stride, to the point where the sheikh would meet him, and send
him on his way with a guide. If he reached the rendezvous safely, there
was a fair chance of final escape.
Moonlight, and the sand swishing from under the velvet hoofs of the
camel, the silence like a filmy cloak, sleep everywhere, save at the eyes
of the fugitive. Hour after hour they sprawled down the waste, and for
numberless hours they must go on and on, sleepless, tireless, alert, if
the man was to be saved at all. As morning broke he turned his eye here
and there, fearful of discovery and pursuit. Nothing. He was alone with
the sky and the desert and his fate. Another two hours and he would be at
the rendezvous, in the cover of the hills, where he would be safe for a
moment at least. But he must keep ahead of all pursuit, for if Abdullah's
people should get in front of him he would be cut off from all hope.
There is little chance to run the blockade of the desert where a man may
not hide, where there is neither water, nor feed, nor rest, once in a
hundred miles or more.
For an hour his eyes were fixed, now on the desert behind him, whence
pursuit should come, now on the golden-pink hills before him, where was
sanctuary for a moment, at least. . . . Nothing in all the vast space but
blue and grey-the sky and the sand, nothing that seemed of the world he
had left; nothing save the rank smell of the camel, and the Arab song he
sang to hasten the tired beast's footsteps. Mahommed Nafar had taught him
the song, saying that it was as good to him as another camel on a long
journey. His Arabic, touched off with the soft brogue of Erin, made a
little shrill by weariness and peril, was not the Arabic of Abdin Palace,
but yet, under the spell, the camel's head ceased swaying nervously, the
long neck stretched out bravely, and they came on together to the Gilif
Hills, comrades in distress, gallant and unafraid. . . . Now the rider
looked back less than before, for the hills were near, he was crossing a
ridge which would hide him from sight for a few miles, and he kept his
eyes on the opening in the range where a few domtrees marked the
rendezvous. His throat was dry, for before the night was half over he had
drunk the little water he carried; but the Arab song still came from his
lips:
"Doos ya lellee! Doos ya lellee!
Tread, O joy of my life, tread lightly!
Thy feet are the wings of a dove,
And thy heart is of fire. On thy wounds
I will pour the king's salve. I will hang
On thy neck the long chain of wrought gold,
When the gates of Bagdad are before us--
Doos ya lellee! Doos ya lellee!"
He did not cease singing it until the camel had staggered in beneath the
dom-trees where Ebn Mazar waited. Macnamara threw himself on the ground
beside the prostrate camel which had carried him so well, and gasped,
"Water!" He drank so long from Ebn Haraf's water-bag that the Arab took
it from him. Then he lay on the sands hugging the ground close like a
dog, till the sheikh roused him with the word that he must mount another
camel, this time with a guide, Mahmoud, a kinsman of his own, who must
risk his life-at a price. Half the price was paid by Macnamara to the
sheikh before they left the shade of the palm-trees, and, striking
through the hills, emerged again into the desert farther north.
In the open waste the strain and the peril began again, but Mahmoud,
though a boy in years, was a man in wisdom and a "brother of eagles" in
endurance: and he was the second Arab who won Macnamara's heart.
It was Mahmoud's voice now that quavered over the heads of the camels and
drove them on; it was his eye which watched the horizon. The hours went
by, and no living thing appeared in the desert, save a small cloud of
vultures, heavy from feasting on a camel dead in the waste, and a
dark-brown snake flitting across their path. Nothing all day save these,
and nothing all the sleepless night save a desert wolf stealing down the
sands. Macnamara's eyes burned in his head with weariness, his body
became numb, but Mahommed Mahmoud would allow no pause. They must get so
far ahead the first two days that Abdullah's pursuers might not overtake
them, he said. Beyond Dongola, at a place appointed, other camels would
await them, if Mahmoud's tribesmen there kept faith.
For two days and nights Macnamara had not slept, for forty-six hours he
had been constantly in the saddle, but Mahommed Mahmoud allowed him
neither sleep nor rest.
Dongola came at last, lying far away on their right. With Dongola, fresh
camels; and the desert flight began again. Hour after hour, and not a
living thing; and then, at last, a group of three Arabs on camels going
south, far over to their right. These suddenly turned and rode down on
them.
"We must fight," said Mahmoud; "for they see you are no Arab."
"I'll take the one with the jibbeh," said Macnamara coolly, with a pistol
in his left hand and a sword in his right. "I'll take him first. Here's
the tap off yer head, me darlin's!" he added as they turned and faced the
dervishes.
"We must kill them all, or be killed," said Mahmoud, as the dervishes
suddenly stopped, and the one with the jibbeh called to Mahmoud:
"Whither do you fly with the white Egyptian?"
"If you come and see you will know, by the mercy of God!" answered
Mahmoud.
The next instant the dervishes charged. Macnamara marked his man, and the
man with the jibbeh fell from his camel. Mahmoud fired his carbine,
missed, and closed with his enemy. Macnamara, late of the 7th Hussars,
swung his Arab sword as though it were the regulation blade and he in
sword practice at Aldershot, and catching the blade of his desert foe,
saved his own neck and gave the chance of a fair hand-to-hand combat.
He met the swift strokes of the dervish with a cool certainty. His
weariness passed from him; the joy of battle was on him. He was wounded
twice-in the shoulder and the head. Now he took the offensive. Once or
twice he circled slowly round the dervish, whose eyes blazed, whose mouth
was foaming with fury; then he came on him with all the knowledge and the
skill he had got in little Indian wars. He came on him, and the dervish
fell, his head cut through like a cheese.
Then Macnamara turned, to see Mahmoud and the third dervish on the
ground, struggling in each other's arms. He started forward, but before
he could reach the two, Mahmoud jumped to his feet with a reeking knife,
and waved it in the air.
"He was a kinsman, but he had to die," said Mahmoud as they mounted. He
turned towards the bodies, then looked at the camels flying down the
desert towards Dongola.
"It is as God wills now," he said. "Their tribesmen will follow when they
see the camels. See, my camel is wounded!" he added, with a gasp.
IV
Two days following, towards evening, two wounded men on foot trudged
through the desert haggard and bent. The feet of one--an Arab--had on a
pair of red slippers, the feet of the other were bare. Mahmoud and
Macnamara were in a bad way. They were in very truth "walking against
time." Their tongues were thick in their mouths, their feet were
lacerated and bleeding, they carried nothing now save their pistols and
their swords, and a small bag of dates hanging at Macnamara's belt.
Prepared for the worst, they trudged on with blind hope, eager to die
fighting if they must die, rather than to perish of hunger and thirst in
the desert. Another day, and they would be beyond the radius of the
Khalifa's power: but would they see another day?
They thought that question answered, when, out of the evening pink and
opal and the golden sand behind them, they saw three Arabs riding. The
friends of the slain dervishes were come to take revenge, it seemed.
The two men looked at each other, but they did not try to speak.
Macnamara took from his shirt a bag of gold and offered it to Mahmoud. It
was the balance of the payment promised to Ebn Mazar. Mahmoud salaamed
and shook his head, then in a thick voice: "It is my life and thy life.
If thou diest, I die. If thou livest, the gold is Ebn Haraf's. At Wady
Halfa I will claim it, if it be the will of God."
The words were thick and broken, but Macnamara understood him, and they
turned and faced their pursuers, ready for life or death, intent to
kill--and met the friends of Ebn Haraf, who had been hired to take them
on to Wady Halfa! Their rescuers had been pursued, and had made a detour
and forced march, thus coming on them before the time appointed. In three
days more they were at Wady Halfa.
Mahmoud lived to take back to Ebn Mazar the other hundred pounds of the
gold Macnamara had looted from the Khalifa; and he also took something
for himself from the British officers at Wady Halfa. For him nothing
remained of the desperate journey but a couple of scars.
It was different with Macnamara. He had to take a longer journey still.
He was not glad to do it, for he liked the look of the English faces
round him, and he liked what they said to him. Also, he was young enough
to "go a-roaming still," as he said to Henry Withers. Besides, it sorely
hurt his pride that no woman or child of his would be left behind to
lament him. Still, when Henry told him he had to go, he took it like a
man.
"'Ere, it ain't no use," said Henry to him the day he got to Wady Halfa.
"'Ere, old pal, it ain't no use. You 'ave to take your gruel, an' you
'ave to take it alone. What I want to tell yer quiet and friendly, old
pal, is that yer drawfted out--all the way out--for good."
"'Sh-did ye think I wasn't knowin' it, me b'y?" Macnamara's face clouded.
"Did ye think I wasn't knowin' it? Go an' lave me alone," he added
quickly.
Henry Withers went out pondering, for he was sure it was not mere dying
that fretted Macnamara.
The next day the end of it all came. Henry Withers had pondered, and his
mind was made up to do a certain thing. Towards evening he sat alone in
the room where Macnamara lay asleep--almost his very last sleep. All at
once Macnamara's eyes opened wide. "Kitty, Kitty, me darlin'," he
murmured vaguely. Then he saw Henry Withers.
"I'm dyin'," he said, breathing heavily. "Don't call anny one, Hinry," he
added brokenly. "Dyin's that aisy--aisy enough, but for wan thing."
"'Ere, speak out, Pete."
"Sure, there's no wan but you, Withers, not a wife nor a child av me own
to say, 'Poor Peter Macnamara, he is gone."'
"There's one," said Henry Withers firmly. "There's one, old pal."
"Who's that?" said Macnamara huskily. "Kitty."
"She's no wife," said Macnamara, shaking his head. "Though she'd ha' been
that, if it hadn't been for Mary Malone."
"She's mine, an' she 'as the marriage lines," said Henry Withers. "An'
there's a kid-wich ain't mine--born six months after! 'Oo says no kid
won't remark, 'Poor Peter Macnamara, 'ee is gone, wich'ee was my fader!"'
Macnamara trembled; the death-sweat dropped from his forehead as he
raised himself up.
"Kitty--a kid av mine--and she married to Hinry Withers--an' you saved
me, too!--" Macnamara's eyes were wild.
Henry Withers took his hand.
"'Ere, it's all right, old pal," he said cheerfully. "What's the kid's
name?" said Macnamara. "Peter--same as yours."
The voice was scarce above a breath. "Sure, I didn't know at all. An' you
forgive me, Hinry darlin', you forgive me?"
"I've nothing to forgive," said Henry Withers.
A smile lighted the blanched face of the dying man. "Give me love to the
b'y--to Peter Macnamara," he said, and fell back with a smile on his
face.
"I'd do it again. Wot's a lie so long as it does good?" said Henry
Withers afterwards to Holgate the engineer. "But tell 'er--tell Kitty--no
fear! I ain't no bloomin' fool. 'E's 'appy--that's enough. She'd cut me
'eart out, if she knowed I'd lied that lie."
THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS
I
Dimsdale's prospects had suddenly ceased by the productive marriage of a
rich uncle late in life; and then his career began. He went to Egypt at
the time when men who knew things had their chance to do things. His
information was general and discursive, but he had a real gift for
science: an inheritance from a grandfather who received a peerage for
abstruse political letters written to the Times and lectures before the
Royal Institution. Besides, he had known well and loved inadvertently the
Hon. Lucy Gray, who kept a kind of social kindergarten for confiding man,
whose wisdom was as accurate as her face was fair, her manners simple,
and her tongue demure and biting.
Egypt offered an opportunity for a man like Dimsdale, and he always said
that his going there was the one inspiration of his life. He did not know
that this inspiration came from Lucy Gray. She had purposely thrown him
in the way of General Duncan Pasha, who, making a reputation in Egypt,
had been rewarded by a good command in England and a K.C.B.
After a talk with the General, who had spent his Egyptian days in the
agreeable strife with native premiers and hesitating Khedives, Dimsdale
rose elated, with his mission in his hand. After the knock-down blow his
uncle had given him, he was in a fighting mood. General Duncan's tale had
come at the psychological moment, and hot with inspiration he had gone
straight off to Lucy Gray with his steamship ticket in his pocket, and
told her he was going to spend his life in the service of the pasha and
the fellah. When she asked him a little bitingly what form his
disciplined energy would take, he promptly answered: "Irrigation."
She laughed in his face softly. "What do you know about irrigation?" she
asked.
"I can learn it--it's the game to play out there, I'm sure of that," he
answered.
"It doesn't sound distinguished," she remarked drily. Because she smiled
satirically at him, and was unresponsive to his enthusiasm, and gave him
no chance to tell her of the nobility of the work in which he was going
to put his life; of the work of the Pharaohs in their day, the hope of
Napoleon in his, and the creed Mahomet Ali held and practised, that the
Nile was Egypt and Egypt was irrigation--because of this he became angry,
said unkind things, drew acid comments upon himself, and left her with a
last good-bye. He did not realise that he had played into the hands of
Lucy Gray in a very childish manner. For in scheming that he should go to
Egypt she had planned also that he should break with her; for she never
had any real intention of marrying him, and yet it was difficult to make
him turn his back on her, while at the same time she was too tender of
his feelings to turn her back on him. She held that anger was the least
injurious of all grounds for separation. In anger there was no
humiliation. There was something dignified and brave about a quarrel,
while a growing coolness which must end in what the world called
"jilting" was humiliating. Besides, people who quarrel and separate may
meet again and begin over again: impossible in the other circumstance.
II
In Egypt Dimsdale made a reputation; not at once, but he did make it. The
first two years of his stay he had plenty to do. At the end of the time
he could have drawn a map of the Nile from Uganda to the Barrages; he
knew the rains in each district from the region of the Sadds to the
Little Borillos; there was not a canal, from the small Bahr Shebin to the
big Rayeh Menoufieh or the majestic Ibrahimieh, whose slope, mean
velocity and discharge he did not know; and he carried in his mind every
drainage cut and contour from Tamis to Damanhur, from Cairo to Beltim. He
knew neither amusement nor society, for every waking hour was spent in
the study of the Nile and what the Nile might do.
After one of his journeys up the Nile, Imshi Pasha, the Minister of the
Interior, said to him: "Ah, my dear friend, with whom be peace and power,
what have you seen as you travel?"
"I saw a fellah yesterday who has worked nine months on the corvee--six
months for the Government and three for a Pasha, the friend of the
Government. He supplied his own spades and baskets; his lantern was at
the service of the Khedive; he got his own food as best he could. He had
one feddan of land in his own village, but he had no time to work it or
harvest it. Yet he had to pay a house-tax of five piastres, a war-tax of
five piastres, a camel-tax of five piastres, a palm-tax of five piastres,
a salt-tax of nine piastres, a poll-tax of thirty piastres, a land-tax of
ninety piastres. The canal for which he was taxed gave his feddan of land
no water, for the Pasha, the friend of the Government, took all the water
for his own land."
Prince Imshi stifled a yawn. "I have never seen so much at one breath, my
friend. And having seen, you feel now that Egypt must be saved--eh?"
This Pasha was an Egyptian of the Egyptians--a Turk of the Turks,
Oriental in mind with the polish of a Frenchman. He did not like
Dimsdale, but he did not say so. He knew it was better to let a man have
his fling and come a cropper over his own work than to have him
unoccupied, excited, and troublesome, especially when he was an
Englishman and knew about what he was talking. Imshi Pasha saw that
Dimsdale was a dangerous man, as all enthusiasts are, no matter how
right-headed; but it comforted him to think that many a reformer, from
Amenhotep down, had, as it were, cut his own throat in the Irrigation
Department. Some had tried to distribute water fairly, efficiently and
scientifically, but most of them had got lost in the underbush of
officialdom, and never got out of the wood again. This wood is called
Backsheesh. Reformers like Dimsdale had drawn straight lines of purpose
for the salvation of the country, and they had seen these straight lines
go crooked under their very eyes, with a devilish smoothness. Therefore
Imshi Pasha, being a wise man and a deep-dyed official who had never yet
seen the triumph of the reformer and the honest Aryan, took Dimsdale's
hands and said suddenly, with a sorrowful break in his voice: