The Talbot Mundy Megapack. Talbot Mundy

of the cave now to the narrow path that wound along the face of the cliff to a point where it met a flight of ancient steps something like a mile long. The ancients who carved Petra out of sandstone evidently didn’t mind a toilsome climb to church, for there was a place of sacrifice at the top of the hill. We sat down beside Ali Baba in a row with his men, overlooking the Roman amplitheater, whose tiers and tiers of stone seats glittered in the sun.

      The valley two hundred feet beneath us, inside the amphitheater and all about it, was black with goat-hair Bedouin tents, in which the wives and daughters of Ali Higg’s army were busy with their morning work of doing nothing, leisurely. There were eagles soaring above us, whose shadows raced on the dazzling rock below, and innumerable kites were circling on about a level with our eyes. You could sometimes catch the bronze sheen on their backs and watch the play of their wing-tips as they swerved. Along a ledge on the opposite cliff sat a row of vultures in fair imitation of us.

      The colors of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado are about the same as those of Petra—the raw, real color out of which the paint for the universe was mixed, with the hard light from a polished turquoise sky to judge it all by, provided your brain will work in front of any such kaleidoscope. But we weren’t there for the view.

      “We’ll give Jael Higg a chance to talk her old man round,” said Grim in English; and Ali Baba caught the gist of it.

      He knew enough English in the old days to rob tourists when the Turks weren’t looking, and enough Turkish to cheat the police over the commission afterward.

      “Whatever talking a woman does—and especially that woman—is the woof of trouble, Jimgrim,” he said warningly.

      But I saw other trouble coming, and laughed aloud, for which I cursed myself a moment afterward. A laugh is pretty easily misunderstood in that land.

      The cliff bulged outward on our left beyond the opening of Ali Higg’s cave, and around the bend there was another cave that we hadn’t investigated; but judging by the chatter of female voices it was the headquarters of Ali Higg’s harem. He evidently overrode the rule about providing a separate establishment for each additional wife.

      * * * *

      Around that corner now Ayisha came—Ayisha the divorced—with all her belongings done up in a huge blue bundle, and the whole lot balanced on her head. The wives of a polygamist are not, I believe, noted for lying down together like the leopard and the kid of prophecy, and a chorus of mocking laughter followed her.

      Seeing and hearing me cough out that unconsidered “Aha!” she naturally supposed me to be mocking her too, and we were mortal enemies from that minute. At least, she was my mortal enemy, and I haven’t learned yet how to keep an affair like that strictly one-sided.

      I once knew a man who kept a female panther for a pet; he used to say the dear thing only needed humoring, but I remember attending his funeral, because there wasn’t any parson and I had to read the service. I kept the panther’s hide for a souvenir—with a neat round hole between the eyes to show how she and I made friends at last. You couldn’t help thinking of a panther when you saw Ayisha angry.

      Balancing the enormous bundle—full of the loot of villages, no doubt—with the grace that is born in the Bedouin women, she made as if to pass us, and I think she would have done so if Grim hadn’t spoken, for she was proud.

      “Ya Sit Ayisha [O Lady Ayisha], what have I done that you should treat me scornfully?” he asked.

      “Have a care!” groaned Ali Baba.

      Having raised sixteen sons and grandsons, he posed as an authority on women.

      She turned to face Grim, her body quivering like a fine Damascus blade as she balanced the load. He smiled up at her, and she seemed to waver between liking for him and disgust at me. Then with the sudden swiftness of a female panther making up her mind, she answered his smile with melting eyes and flashing teeth, and opened the war with me by dumping the bundle into my lap.

      It would have damaged a smaller man, for it weighed more than a hundredweight and there were brass bowls in it, and knives and things like that; but I caught it on knees and shins, and, although I didn’t plan to, kicked it forward so that it rolled over the edge of the path and fell two hundred feet on to the ruined roof of an ancient tomb below.

      You know how a panther lays his ears back? She expressed anger just as effectually, even if you couldn’t say exactly how she did it. It wasn’t any use apologizing. I sat rubbing my shins, with both eyes watching for the dagger I felt sure would come my way in a second. But she passed the buck to Grim.

      “Kill that fool for me,” she commanded him, and he laughed at me whimsically sidewise.

      “But I need the man,” he said. “He is the hakim. He has the chest of medicines. Who else shall physic us?”

      “Bah!” she exclaimed. “I would bastinado such a fool. He is the son of sixty dogs who gave me baby’s pap instead of poison for the Lion in there. Thanks to that fool I am divorced instead of a widow. Throw him down after my baggage!”

      “We can recover most of it, and what has been broken shall be replaced,” Grim answered. “What are your plans, O Lady Ayisha?”

      “I go to find my people.”

      “Where are they?”

      “Only Allah knows.”

      You see, the desert hasn’t changed much. Hagar did the same thing once, going out alone into the waste of sand and rock, in search of a tiny wandering tribe whose tents are here today and gone tomorrow; and thousands since have done the same thing, without enough acquaintance with the angels to get water whenever they need it.

      “Be seated,” said Grim, and she took him at his word, thrusting herself down between him and me, giving me the point of her elbow.

      I shifted along close to Ali Baba so as to allow her a full six feet of clearance, still bearing that possible dagger in mind.

      “And now,” growled Ali Baba in my ear, “the bint [girl, in a pejorative sense] believes she has him. He has bidden her sit beside him before witnesses, and has promised her a new outfit. Once before she called herself his wife, on half the provocation; and now who shall deny her?”

      “He will,” I answered. “Jimgrim is no Arab. We don’t do things that way in the West.”

      “This is the East,” he retorted, “and she will do things her way. Inshallah [If God wills], Jimgrim may prove clever enough to foil her, but I doubt it.”

      But more than cleverness was going to enter into Grim’s dealings with that young woman. He was smiling, and a hint of worry underlay the smile. Nobody but a born fool would think of applying Western standards to judge her conduct by, and though she had meant to poison Ali Higg there wasn’t a doubt she had lots of provocation. It was true we hadn’t invited her to poison him; but she had made the attempt on Grim’s account none the less, and we had taken full advantage of it.

      If Grim had been disposed to leave her at a loose end I wouldn’t have agreed to that; and even the wild Lothario, Narayan Singh, I think, would have objected. But Grim would be the last man to leave her unprovided for; I have seen him spend his scant spare hours befriending murderers whom he has landed in the jail.

      “We go south to deal with Saoud, who calls himself the Avenger,” Grim said to her. “Will you come with us?”

      “I go where my lord wishes,” she answered in the sort of voice that Ruth may have used to Boaz in the Bible story. Ruth came from that desert country too.

      She must have known that Grim was an American, but I really think she meant what she said. Out in the sunlight there he was a lot better-looking than Ali Higg, because his face wasn’t seamed by vice and anger; and she had grown so used to being owned by a man who resembled Grim superficially that it wouldn’t be much of a task to transfer her affections. Grim for one thing had no other wife, and did not bastinado people.

      “Until you find your people or