The Talbot Mundy Megapack. Talbot Mundy

tried him again in Arabic, but he answered without looking at me, in a dialect I had never heard before. So I offered him a gold-tipped cigarette, that being a universal language. He waved the offer aside with something between astonishment and disdain. He had lean, long-fingered hands, entirely unlike those of the desert fraternity, who live too hard and fight too frequently to have soft, uncalloused skin and unbroken finger-nails.

      He did not exactly fascinate me. His self-containment was annoying. It seemed intended to convey an intellectual and moral importance that I was not disposed to concede without knowing more about him. I suppose an Arab feels the same sensation when a Westerner lords it over him on highly moral grounds. At any rate, something or other in the way of pique urged me to stir him out of his self-complacency, just as one feels urged to prod a bull-frog to watch him jump.

      He seemed to understand my remarks, for he took no trouble to hide his amusement at my efforts with the language. But he only answered in monosyllables, and I could not understand those. So after about five minutes I gave it up, and crossed the room to ben Nazir, who seized the opportunity to show me my sleeping-quarters.

      It proved to be a room like a monastery cell, up one flight of stone steps, with two other rooms of about the same size on either side of it. At the end of the passage was a very heavy wooden door, with an iron lock and an enormous keyhole, which I suppose shut off the harem from the rest of the house; but as I never trespassed beyond it I don’t know. I only do know that a woman’s eye was watching me through that key-hole, and ben Nazir frowned impatiently at the sound of female giggling.

      “The Sheikh Anazeh will have the room on this side of you,” he said, “and the Sheikh Suliman ben Saoud the room on the other. So you will be between friends.”

      “Suliman ben Saoud seems a difficult person to make friends with,” I answered.

      Ben Nazir smiled like a prince out of a picture-book—beautiful white teeth and exquisite benignance.

      “Oh, you mustn’t mind him. These celebrities from the centre of Arabia give themselves great airs. To do that is considered evidence of piety and wisdom.”

      I sat on the bed—quite a civilized affair, spotlessly clean. Ben Nazir took the chair, I suppose, like the considerate host he was, to give me the sensation of receiving in my own room.

      “He wears the same sort of head-dress you do. What does it mean?” I asked.

      “I wear mine out of compliment to him—not that I have not always the right to wear it. It is the Ichwan head-dress. It is highly significant.”

      “Of what?”

      He hesitated for a moment, and then seemed to make up his mind that it did not much matter what he might divulge to an ignorant stranger soon to return to the United States.

      “It is difficult to explain. You Americans know so little of our politics. It is significant, I might say, of the New Arabia—Arabia for the Arabs. The great ben Saoud, who is a relative of this man, is an Arabian chieftain who has welded most of Arabia into one, and now challenges King Hussein of Mecca for the caliphate. Hussein is only kept on his throne by British gold, paid to him from India. Ben Saoud also receives a subsidy from the British, who must continue to pay it, because otherwise ben Saoud will attack Hussein and overwhelm him. That, it is believed, would mean a rising of all the Moslem world against their rulers—in Africa—Asia—India—Java—everywhere. It began as a religious movement. It is now political—although it is held together by religious zeal. You might say that the Ichwans are the modern Protestants of Islam. They are fanatical. The world has never seen such fanaticism, and the movement spreads day by day.”

      “You don’t look like a fanatic,” I said, and he laughed again.

      “I? God forbid! But I am a politician; and to succeed a politician must have friends among all parties. My one ambition is to see all Arabs united in an independent state reaching from this coast to the Persian Gulf. To that end I devote my energy. I use all means available—including money paid me by the French, who have no intention of permitting any such development if they can help it.”

      “And the British?”

      “For the present we must make use of them also. But their yoke must go, eventually.”

      “Then if America had accepted the Near East mandate, you would have used us in the same way?”

      “Certainly. That would have been the easiest way, because America understands little or nothing of our politics. America’s money—America’s schools and hospitals—America’s war munitions—and then good-bye. I am willing to use all means—all methods to the one end—Arabia for the Arabs. After that I am willing to retire into oblivion.”

      Nevertheless, ben Nazir did not convince me that he was an altruist who had no private ends to serve. There was an avaricious gleam in ben Nazir’s eyes.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      “D’you mind if I use you?”

      For all his care to seem hospitable before any other consideration, ben Nazir looked ill at ease. He led me down again to a dining-room hung with spears, shields, scimitars and ancient pistols, but furnished otherwise like an instalment-plan apartment. He watched while a man set food before me. It seemed that Anazeh had gone away somewhere to eat with his men.

      Ben Nazir’s restlessness became so obvious that I asked at last whether I was not detaining him. He jumped at the opening. With profound apologies he asked me to excuse him for the remainder of the afternoon.

      “You see,” he explained, “I came from Damascus to Jerusalem, so I was rather out of touch with what was going on here. This conference of notables was rather a surprise to me. It will not really take place until tomorrow, but there are important details to attend to in advance. If you could amuse yourself—”

      The man who could not do that in a crusader city, crammed with sons of Ishmael who looked as if they had stepped out of the pages of the Old Testament, would be difficult to please. I asked for Ahmed, to act as interpreter. Ben Nazir volunteered to provide me with two men in addition as a sort of bodyguard.

      “Because Ahmed is a person who is not respected.”

      It did not take ten minutes to produce Ahmed and the two men. The latter were six-foot, solemn veterans armed with rifles and long knives. With them at my heels I set out to explore El-Kerak.

      “There is nothing to see,” said Ahmed, who did not want to come. But Ahmed was a liar. There was everything to see. The only definite purpose I had in mind was to find Grim. It was possible I might recognize him even through his disguise. Failing that, he could not help but notice me if I walked about enough; if so, he would find his own means of establishing communication.

      But you might as well have hunted for one particular pebble on a beach as for a single individual in all that throng. Remembering Grim’s disguise when I first saw him, I naturally had that picture of him in mind. But all the Bedouins looked about as much alike as peas in a pod. They stared at me as if I were a curio on exhibition, but they did not like being stared back at.

      There was no hint of violence or interference, and no apparent resentment of an alien’s presence in their midst. The loud-lunged bodyguard shouted out to all and sundry to make way for the “Amerikani,” and way was made forthwith, although several times the bodyguard was stopped and questioned after I had passed, to make sure I was really American and not English. Ahmed assured me that if I had been English they would have “massacred” me. In view of what transpired he may have been right, though I doubt it. They might have held me as hostage.

      Not that they were in any kind of over-tolerant mood. There was a man’s dead body hanging by one foot from a great hook on a high wall, and the wall was splattered with blood and chipped by bullets. I asked Ahmed what kind of criminal he might be.

      “He did not agree with them. They are for war. He was in favor of peace, and he made a speech two hours ago. So they accused him of being a traitor, and he was tried and condemned.”

      “Who