CONTENTS

PAGE
PREFACE[ 5]
I
THE GATES OF GOLD[ 17]
II
THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD[ 27]
III
A DESERT CITY[ 37]
IV
THE OTHER SIDE[ 53]
V
THE SILENT ROMANCE[ 73]
VI
THE COURT OF THE KING[ 85]
VII
THE GOLDEN DAHABEAH[ 101]
VIII
THE UNSEEN WORLD[ 125]
IX
FROM THE BANK OF THE RIVER[ 135]

THE GATES OF GOLD

I
THE GATES OF GOLD

The favourite game with Noah’s Ark was to make the nursery table an Island of Delight. The Delight must have centred in the looking-glasses, which, with frames discreetly hidden in moss, mirrored in their unruffled surfaces forms of numerous ducks and geese and other less decided species of birds. Certainly the other furnishings of the Island were not particularly delightful, for it was thickly populated with wild beasts of horrid aspect and defective limbs, and specimens of that strange pinkish animal of which Noah is so fond, and which may be classified with equal probability as a Dingo or a Wild Boar.

My earliest ideas of an Oasis were combined of this Island of Delight and of the description of Elim. The Oasis would be round as the nursery table; it would be covered with lush green grass like a water-meadow. It would have about seventy palm-trees standing at fairly regular intervals, and between the palm-trees there would be (instead of the looking-glasses) bubbling springs of water crystal-clear.

When at last I saw an Oasis it was unlike my vision—my Vision of Delight. There was no grass, but there were more palm-trees; there were no crystal fountains, but trickles of brown water in sandy channels. It came up to my ideal in one point only—there was none of that indefiniteness of outline which is so repulsive to the simple mind. Even as you can stand on the bridge above Mentone, and see a milestone with France on one side and a milestone with Italy on the other, so here you could take your stand and say “That on my right hand is Desert, and that on my left is Oasis.”

We had been travelling all day over the sandy, dusty plains of North Africa; we had found little to eat at the shed-like stations except blue cheese and musty bread; and towards evening we entered a rocky defile. At the end of this defile they said were the Gates of Gold. There was not much to see and the train loitered on.

Suddenly we saw at the end of the valley two great escarpments of reddish rock; at their foot leaned one palm-tree, behind was a glimpse of blue hills. The evening sunlight fell golden on the Golden Gates as we passed through and suddenly cried out, for everywhere below us spread a sea of waving palm-trees. This was the Oasis.

The Oasis lay on a plain so flat that the horizon to the south curved like the horizon of the sea; and like little clouds resting on the ocean here and there an oasis showed greyish green in the distance. To the north lay a range of hills, which guarded the enchanted place from the world of men. The flatness drew the soul with a strange attraction, until one longed to go out over it farther than eye could reach, anywhere or nowhere. The desert was in sandy ridges like a badly ploughed field; isolated tufts of a heath-like plant grew here and there; often there lay on the ground, as if spilled from a cart, yellow apples, reddening invitingly. Evil fruits these are, full of dust and bitterness, and even the camel will not eat them.

But within the Oasis were golden oranges, juicy, like no oranges you eat here, for they ripen on the dark, glossy trees; there were gardens of purple fig and yellow citrons large as the head of an Arab child; and the dates were sweet and large, and half transparent in their candied clusters.

But the enchanted time was when the moon was high, its silver light was faintly tinged with rose; then one walked under the palm-trees, and light and shadow lay like silver and ebony across the path, interlacing and waving if some faint breeze stirred them, and the strange, sweet odours of the East lay warm and thick, and the tinkle of Arab sounds were in our ears, and the slim brown figures moved across the path; and we went back to dream of silver lights and waving, ebon shadows.

And one morning we went away from the Oasis, and passed through the Gates of Gold, and back into the world of men, to find we had been but two days away.

THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD

II
THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD

There were other such enchanted places in this land, and one could step aside from the high-road of life into a place of fantasy and sweet illusion. The dawdling, leisured train set us down one day at a wayside station. No houses were in sight, but behind a clump of trees a cloud of steam rose into the air, as if all the world was a-washing. The train dawdled away across the plain and we went towards the trees to find ourselves in face of a shining, misty waterfall. The white stone was streaked with grey and pink; the water boiled up in little cauldrons and fell down in a cloud of steam; at the bottom of the dazzling rocks oleanders bent over the warm streams, maiden-hair fringed the banks; hoary olives with twisted trunks rose above the oleanders.

While we still waited there came up from the side of the steaming river a splendid figure—a woman all in scarlet hung about with silvery chains. “That,” said the guide, “is the washer-woman.” We climbed up behind the waterfall, where it sprang in its strange excitement out of the earth, and found a stone courtyard, built round with little empty houses, one of these prepared for us.

While we paused at the door a moment, I saw between the stones a tiny plant—a plant to conjure with. It is like clover, splashed with crimson. A poet who wore the Red Cap has said that this crimson is the blood of Spring, and, to him, a drop of his own heart’s blood.

A French family were living here in a clean, empty house with airy guest-rooms; and while they regaled us with wild-boar’s flesh they talked of the topics of their day: how the jackals howled about the courtyard in winter; how the rugged way to the Roman City was not yet open; how the locusts came down ten years ago, swarm upon swarm, till you could hear the sound of the eating of their hosts by night; how they devoured fruit and leaf and bark like the “army” in Joel, and then melted like snow under the sun.

In this strange, quiet land we slept well, and went out next day over the pleasant undulating plain, watered by warm streams with their bordering of oleander and fern, and sheltered by olive and carob.

At last we came to a place where a grassy bank swept round us in a half circle. “Fourteen years ago,” said the guide “the shepherds feeding their flocks close by heard a great noise, and running hither saw the earth had fallen in,” and he pointed as he spoke to a crack in the side of the bank, just such a rent as a great tree makes when it falls, tearing its roots out of the ground. “Into that,” he said, “you must go.”

So we went towards it in faith, and found when we got there a man could easily pass in. As we descended into the hot twilight inside the ground a bat flew out. We went down-hill until the guide stopped us, where there seemed to lie at our feet a little blue dust over the stones, for this was the still blue water of a lake that stretched away into deep and deeper darkness. As we stood we heard out of the darkness the splash of oars, a light shone on the water, and round the sheer wall of rock on the right came a boat with a lantern at its prow.

Into this we stepped, and it moved on into the deep shadows. Out of the dark water rose great stalagmites like columns, and stalactites dropped to meet them like heavy pendants from some vaulted roof. We moved round rocky chambers where the lantern shone on the walls, and through halls whose boundaries were unrevealed; all sense of direction and of time was lost till a flash of lightning seemed to fall on the water. It was only the reflected light of a grey day, filtered through the rent in the earth down which we had come, but after that great darkness it seemed dazzling.

So we went up again to the light of day, and back through that pleasant land. But when we came away, I brought with me a leaf of the crimson-splashed clover “to witness if I lie.”

A DESERT CITY

III
A DESERT CITY

“He seems as one whose footsteps halt

Toiling in immeasurable sand

And o’er a weary sultry land

Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill

The city sparkles like a grain of salt.”

In the desert not twenty miles from Cairo there has sprung up the mushroom growth of a wonder-working Health Resort. It possesses several hotels, an “Establishment,” a golf links, and everything which a really desirable Health Resort must possess.[1] But at the time when I first knew that tract of sand on which it stands the case was far otherwise. If one must have summarized the attractions of the place they would have run:—

Fifteen pyramids Distant
One palm-tree Distant
Several ill-smelling streams Quite close
Flat sandy desert Near and distant
A perfectly bare range of low hills beginning half
a mile away and reaching to Arabia.

An English advertisement of foreign appearance bore witness to these charms and ended with a striking appeal to leave for desert air “the filthy, stinking city,” as it characterized Grand Cairo.

We responded to the appeal, and went to stay in a hotel of large corridors and wide balconies which looked out upon the fifteen pyramids. Opposite was a small, bare house called Villa Mon Bijou. The town was planted on a desert so flat that it seemed a German toy town set upon a table; only there were no trees with curly green foliage to be seen, because no one might plant a living thing unless by order from Government.[2] Neat little pavements with new little gas lamps traversed it rectangularly, and came every way to an abrupt stop in heavy desert sand. There was a tiny English church, in which the few English Christians staying in the place assembled. Little flat-roofed villas like coloured cardboard boxes stood back from the pavement with strange ornaments above the gate; here a stone eagle with knees turned outwards, there a stuffed fox. Backwards and forwards we went under noontide sun to the baths, and were told to rest in the Khedive’s sitting-room, upholstered with yellow satin.

One would have thought that nothing so brand-new could have been found in sight of the pyramid of Unas and the cemetery of Sakkara. Even death seemed glaringly recent. One day we drove in the desert and searched the horizon for objects of interest. “What is that?” we said, pointing to a small building on the outskirts of the town. “That,” replied Saïd with pride, “is the new slaughter-house.” “And this enclosure?” “The English cemetery.” “And that yonder?” “The Italian mortuary.” “What is that which looks like a village on the hill?” “That is the Mahommedan burying-place.” “And that beyond?” “Another graveyard.” Then he drove us through a valley of Hinnom, where we marked, among other things, a dead camel and a dead calf; and as we passed between the windmill and the ill-smelling stream we saw three coffins lie, brand-new, unguarded and alone.

But towards evening a certain magic fell upon the place. We had gone one day towards the single palm-tree in the desert. Miles and miles of sand and air, unstirred by any slightest sound, seemed to lie between us and that solitary tree, and when we reached it nothing could be seen but the slot of beasts around it.

Then as we turned the light began to change. Behind the fifteen pyramids the sky glowed scarlet till it tinged the water of the Nile with blood. Far up in the blue hung an ethereal arc of crimson light; the heaven deepened to indigo where it met night; kindled into indescribable sapphire where it touched the dying day; the conflagration grew till at last earth glowed its answer to the sky with a purple flood rising and deluging sand-hills and valley.

As we neared the toy town with its twinkling lights the glow had died away, and there gloomed before us dimly a knoll round which knelt the camels of the Bedawîn; the figures which moved beside them with dark, fine profile and the white cloths round their heads seemed like Magi come to greet the Royal Child.

Again we went up the hills which, like a low rampart, bordered the plain to the east. At the foot they were carved into quarries of a stone so white that it seemed like wedges cut in a great cream cheese. The hills were barren, but for a few straggling plants and grasses about; like a raised map or the skeleton of the world. Yet as we went on we still found always in front, like the marks on the carriage drive, a curving, trodden road, winding up vanishing out of sight.

While we stood looking at the loneliness there came daintily stepping, with embroidered shoes and black silk mantles round them, a party of women to meet us; in front a man carried a child. I cannot but think that they vanished into thin air when they had passed us.

Or again one might descend towards the river, on the road between the fields. There as the sky lights its fires towards evening the men would leave their work and stand with dripping feet on their coarse outer garment by the water’s edge to say the evening prayer. Near the town stood a sycamore, under which, on a raised platform, some men prayed loud and lustily five times a day. “God likit them very much,” said the donkey-boy; but with cynical estimation of the importance of this fact he added, “If I bray, where is my business?”

A brougham on the road as we returned: Europe is at one side. But within sat a woman golden haired, with her veil pushed back and a cigarette between her teeth. That one passing, demure and dignified, with an attendant wrinkled and stately, is a Princess walking for her health. Here two in a victoria, with transparent veils and Paris bonnets, show Turkish emancipation; and the shut and blinded brougham with a Sudanese on the box gives sign of Arab propriety.

And now as the town is reached we begin to see the meaning of this modern city; those high walls are not merely meant to hide a garden of flowers, nor does the lattice serve only to keep the sunlight from fading Eastern fabrics. But behind the pierced work of that window peers some Scheherazade at her story-weaving, wondering what life means, “half sick of shadows.” There is the Pasha’s house, and the whisper goes that these are slaves.

A strange, pathetic figure trod this road daily, a man of aquiline face, brown skin, and pointed beard, dressed in a fine embroidered garment of scarlet with white cloth falling on his shoulders.

Evening by evening he left the town, and squatting by one of the sulphur streams looked out with level eyes towards the farthest horizon of the south, his beads held idly in his hands. That man, we learned, was the Pasha’s gatekeeper and came from the Sudan.

One day a crowd ran and digged by the side of this stream. “What are they doing?” we asked, and the answer was that they were making a garden. It will surely blossom like the rose—but not on those flowers will the gatekeeper gaze.

In the evening when the moon has risen, and a great star close to her tip hangs the banner of the Moslems in heaven, the magic is most potent. Then the flat-roofed houses become palaces of marble, and among the dark figures stealing through the street you look for Mesrour on his secret errands, that he may show you the mysteries of life and death behind veil and wall and lattice. Then one may well believe that over at Sakkara under the sand-hills the dead are sitting in their carven chambers, to play their games and cast their spells and eat and drink.

And yet in Europe they talk of freeing Egypt, and speak of the “patriot” dervish; and at Gordon’s death-place, where the gatekeeper was born and from which he was stolen, they entertain the Pasha with the honours of a burgess.

Who wakes? who dreams? Surely the Western eye sees clear, which looks on the place in the searching noonday light; for it is the hand of the Western that planted Villa Mon Bijou and raised the gas lamps.

Leave it then with its neat realities and its fancied magic; draw away over the sand towards the Great River and the dwellings of the dead; and as one might see across the great ocean a line of reef built up by tiny busy insects, so look back once to see over “immeasurable sand,” “the city sparkle like a grain of salt.”

THE OTHER SIDE

IV
THE OTHER SIDE

When Alice went through the Looking-glass, she sprang down into a world where a change had passed on all familiar things; so that she must walk away from the things she wanted to arrive at, and time ran backwards and stopped. When a merman brought a girl through the translucent mirror of the water to be his wife in the great caves below the sea, she heard but dimly the church bell and the sounds of the world above, and saw but seldom its sights when she rose through the bay. And when Tom slipped into the stream he found himself in a great empty world below the water; and it was not for some time that he was able even to see the crowds of merry water-babies with which it was peopled.

We had often looked into the looking-glass from a little village on the bank of a great river. Sometimes this river was only a river of muddy water; sometimes towards evening, when no wind ruffled its surface, it was a mirror of burnished metal, reflecting the fires of the west; sometimes a river of molten gold. Sometimes, when the sky was bright above, it was a stretch of sapphire, edged with gold and set in emerald, for beyond the sandy shore of the river lay a great sea of green corn—few trees were there, but the waving corn, and animals pasturing in luxuriant vetch; and beyond this again began the sandy desert, which stretched away to the bases of the hills.

So the River ran, dividing the country, and the two sides of it have been called since the beginning of history the two lands. The River was broad, and so deep that the reptiles of the one side have never been able to cross to the other, and the lizards of the two lands are of quite different kinds.

But just at the edge of the desert you begin to see traces of quite a different kind of life, the giant images of people long dead, and their temples; behind in the cliff you may see, even from across the river, the doors of rock-hewn chambers which are called the Eternal Habitations. That side of the river is called the City of the Dead.

Now the people of the village opposite used to speak of going over to the “Other Side.” They crossed the river, and rode through the fields of waving corn, and the men and women who moved among the fields, who tethered the beasts to pasture, the little children who drove oxen in the creaking sakhieh seemed like figures of a picture to them; and when they reached the City of the Dead, the desert places of the Eternal Habitations, the Silent Citizens were unperceived by them, their voices were unheard; or they seemed to see but rude stone figures of an earlier age, dead bodies, unskilful paintings on the wall. Before they could recognize the living men they had turned back and recrossed the river, and never knew that they had been so near the mysteries of the “Other Side.”

But when you came to live in the country on the Other Side the aspect of it was altogether different. At the back, the country was walled in by precipices of rock, a great golden wall from which spurs ran down on to the desert. If you climbed up the first ridge to get a farther view you saw ridge on ridge of the same barren hills, with golden rocky defiles, reflecting back and back again the eastern sunlight. At certain hours of the day a stream of people, like small ants, poured up one valley, over a hill and back again across the river; otherwise there was never a sign of human life, except that, from peak to peak, at far distances, you might see a little rock-built shelter, and the solitary figure of a watchman who guarded the chambers of the dead.

Between the hills and the cultivated lands are lower hills, half rock, half sand, with sandy slopes. In the sand there gaped holes about the paths as you rode or walked, and looking down you might peer into a chamber, sculptured with images of men and women sitting at feasts; or higher up in the hill you would see a squared doorway of stone facing sometimes a great courtyard, and entering, you might find a pillared chamber, gold vessels and jewelled boats painted on the wall; here a picture of a man propelling his bark through marshy groves populous with birds, there one driving the plough, and a woman sowing corn; here a kingly child on his nurse’s knee; there the antelope caught by the dogs and dripping blood from the hunter’s arrow. The longer one lived here the more one began to see of these doors in the hillside and holes in the ground, until it seemed that the whole mountain was honeycombed with the rock-hewn chambers. Sometimes you might cross a courtyard where the eastern slope of a hill lay in cool shadow; pass through one painted room after another, chapel and shrine, shrine and chapel, and so come out on the other side of the hill still golden in the light of the setting sun.[3]

Down below these rocks, clustering round the doorways of the lowest slopes, are brown houses that a day’s rain can bring to ruin, villages like a child’s building in sand; open yards, sheds thatched with straw, erections in mud like gigantic mushrooms with upturned brim; and for the more permanent part of the habitation these childish builders have borrowed the rocky chambers.

For the truth is that two races of people inhabit this country. The one race are like merry, selfish children, though a mystery of simplicity hangs about them like the mystery of the hidden life of a child. In their villages ring sounds of men and animals all day and all night; voices are hoarse with talking and singing; it seems like a great orchestra of the inhabitants. Up to the middle of the night donkeys chant their canon, cocks blow their clarion; all day you hear the groaning of camels, the agitated voices of kids and lambs, the lamentable cries of their mothers; towards evening the lowing of kine as they return from the sakhieh, the fury of the dogs, the provocative cry of the jackal, and sometimes as night falls the long, weird howling of the wolf. Then when the moon is full the children sing in chorus, apeing the elder boys at their work; the workers of the day are the feasters of the night, and drum and song help on the fantasia. Here is merriment and noise, complaint, vociferous demand, swift anger, cheerfulness again; the ragged children and young animals race and play from simple excess of vitality.

Yet all this noise is like the chattering of a brook in a quiet place, though it beats loud upon the ear it is as powerless against the great quiet of the desert as lapping waves against a rocky shore.

For the other race that lives here is silent, yet their words have gone out into the ends of the world. You leave the villages and mount the hill, and the noise comes fainter from below. You pass through the chambers and see these greater people live their lives and learn from the writing on the wall what “he saith.” You go towards evening up some valley of golden rocks, where the sunlight reflected from the sand shines on the shadowed cliff like the shining of a hidden lake, and find in a fold of the hill a little empty temple of old time; or descending rocky steps pass into a chamber where the walls present great deeds of state, ambassadors clad in fine embroidered dresses bring foreign tribute of nations long perished, precious things of gold and gem, strange beasts from far countries. Or when clouds are chasing through a moonlit sky you pass up a road between sand-hills towards a temple of these silent races; its white pillars and colonnades now flash out silver in a sudden gleam of light; and now the shadow of a cloud passing with purple bloom over the hill above annihilates courts and terraces, until it seems a magician’s wand is at work, destroying and re-creating this ghostly building.

Or at evening you ride through the place of tombs; the sun has sunk, and a glow, orange and red, gives a sharp outline to the hills. Out of the holes in the ground come an army of little shadows, sweeping faster than the eye can follow them over the unlevel ground; and from the rocks on the left peers out a sharp nose and ears, and the jackal runs with heavy drooping tail across the path, and dodges behind a big stone to peer out with insatiable curiosity as you pass; or in the night one hears the cry of a wild cat caught and torn by the dogs.

There are no merry flocks of birds here as in the cultivated land below, and but little sound of their voices. The sparrow indeed, who holds nothing sacred, chatters his minute affairs in the great silence; the discreet wagtail runs about the ledges of the rocks, the black and white chat bows on a stone. But the most part are seen on the wing; the soft grey martin, with its atmosphere of domestic peace, hovers about the Eternal Habitations, thinking to rear its young in the chambers of the dead; the swallows made wild by their long flight, and loosed from the restraints of the North, build their nests on the cliff, and sweep at sunset, with musical screams, up and down the face of the rock; great kites circle above in the hot noonday, let fall sometimes their weird whistling cry, circling on and on till the vast blue engulfs them; and once, high in the sky towards evening, there came a flight of cranes, who wheeled, split, and recrossed, then gathered decision and moved stately in black and white northwards.

All luxuriance of life had vanished. Even as time seemed to have stood still, and the people learnt their arts and crafts from those who died six thousand years ago, so growth seemed to have vanished from the visible world. Now and then as you wandered up a valley a single blade of barley shone like a gem half hidden by a stone; or some plant, desert-coloured, spread, dry greyish tufts, where the ground retained invisible moisture. But life hung suspended, and the longer you dwelt in the country the more you perceived that you were living in the City of the Dead. Sometimes one forgot how days and weeks were passing, and again a thousand years were but as yesterday, a watch in the night. The noises of the outside world came but faintly: once, we heard the sound of a nation weeping and the nations of the earth sorrowing with it, and again the sober welcome to one who came to take upon him the burden of the State.

So they sorrowed four thousand years ago—not without hope. “A hawk has soared—the follower of the god met his maker.” So the officers of State welcomed the son who should take its cares upon him. And on that very night when with grief and praise the nation laid to rest a Queen and mother in the fullness of her age, our eyes looked on, resting untouched, deep in the recesses of the rock, among the mystic symbols of his faith, the body of a king swathed still and garlanded who died three thousand years before that Queen was born.

The sounds of war came dimly, for the pictures of far earlier wars might meet the eyes day by day; and when we came on the bodies of those men who warred and taught and lived and enjoyed, alert in the chase, quiescent in the cool breath of their gardens, they lay quiet with their ornaments perhaps upon them, a garland round their neck, a book between their feet.

But when at last returning we came down to the fields, we saw that time indeed had passed. The corn which was but sprouting when we came, was full in the ear, and the barley was yellowing to harvest; the bean-flower had opened, spread its fragrance and passed; the purple vetch still lingered; the poppy raised an imperial head. Clouds of gay, thieving sparrows rose as we passed; the crested lark ran before us, sprang and hovered with a few notes of liquid song; tiny birds hung on the barley blades; the whistle of the quail came from the deep green where it hid. The river spread before us like a highway paved with sapphire; so we passed along it to the north and the voices of the world we belonged to rung out clearer as we moved; and behind us there faded like a dream that world whose present is four thousand years of time with the insistence of its silent voices, the permanence of the dead, the fleeting brightness of the living.

THE SILENT ROMANCE

V
THE SILENT ROMANCE

The cock has been defying Achmet Bukdadi again to-day.

It is a very little cock, hardly larger than a bantam; its plumage betokens a fine disregard of race; if you were pressed you might suggest a remote relationship to a game-cock. The cries of Achmet Bukdadi drew me to the window to see the cock, feathers raised, parading angrily and scornfully in front of him. Achmet’s cries attracted two or three other children, and they ran about on our terrace trying to hustle the cock off the edge of it. Finally one courageous boy lifted him by the wings, and put him on the back of another, whence he descended with feathers and dignity ruffled to the ground, while the children dispersed shrieking and laughing.

Achmet had a more prompt ally two days ago, when the cock was doing sentry-go before their front yard gate and would not let Achmet go home. His cries called his mother to his aid, and she came evidently prepared for the crisis, for she straightway threw the wand which was in her hand with unerring aim, and the cock fled vanquished down the village rubbish-heap.

Achmet’s mother is the most silent and most graceful woman in the village. She is the youngest of Bukdadi’s two wives; the other must be the mother of the sullen looking boy who lounges after our water-donkey up and down the hill, for she is grey haired, while Achmet’s mother has thick black plaits under her blue head veil. She is not indifferent to matters of dress, for her outer wrapping is edged with crimson. She seems far more active than the other woman, and all her movements, in the most menial occupation, show an unconscious grace which tempts one to the full use of unusual advantages of observation. Her grace is not the tender quality often so-called, but a robust deftness and certainty of action. She had to drive a lame donkey to the water the other day, and in the strokes of her staff there was no more pity for the little beast, halting and hurrying between two diverse pains, than for her own burdened womanhood. The donkey must drink; she herself would bring water for the household in the great earthenware pot balanced on her head. Hesitation for the animal was as much out of the question as help for her from the stepson who lounged past her with his stick held behind his shoulders.

So she urged the animal to the pool beneath the tamarisks, and I doubt not mounted the hill again with all the speed that nature would allow.

It is well, perhaps, that she is taciturn in a yard so populous—the other wife, the two sons, Bukdadi himself, seldom seen, a girl, daughter or slave, and the little Achmet, not to speak of the animals—the white camel in the corner nearest the gate, the neat black water-donkey next him, for the invalid one occupies the innermost corner, the bullocks who move with deference at her bidding, besides Achmet’s enemy the cock with his harîm, and the pigeons. I cannot be sure that the brown sheep belong to this yard; they are always being driven out, it is true, but whenever they are not being driven out they are going in; and it appeared that the black goat with two kids was preparing to spend the night in the hollow stem of the mud fungus, on the family platform. What makes conclusions less certain, however, is that the grey kid now dances up and down hill with the boy in the yellow-striped dress, and that the sheep have more than once called on us in our dining-room.

Among all these Achmet’s mother moves, sober, taciturn, efficient. One wonders when the transition comes from the laughing children to the serious, burdened woman. Marriage is not the turning-point, for little Saïda, with her round face and dark eyes and blue-patterned little chin, is married, though she still prefers to live with her father and be an occasional visitor at her husband’s house. And what there is of demureness in Saïda compared to the ragged Ahm Ibrahim in wild neglected gaiety is produced evidently not by her marriage but by her blue dress and her red dress, her necklace and her earrings.

The burden of the household, but above all the care of the children, must work the change, and the trace of tenderness that there is about Achmet’s mother seems all for Achmet. She exercises no repressive influence on him, for Achmet, with his grubby black dress, his thin, merry, ugly little face with even rows of little white teeth as he lisps his greeting—Achmet, whether cantering about on a dhurra stalk, or pretending to be a man carrying stones with his grandfather, or climbing over his neighbours’ walls, is always gay.

He takes the unexpected gift without that deliberate anticipation of favours to come which is the first acquirement of the Arab baby; and in his pleasures and his woes alike Achmet flies to his mother, conveys to her his bakshîsh of sugar-cane; wails to her when the cock is warlike and threatening.

She had him with her one evening in the great mud chalice which forms larder, barn, and summer chamber of the Arab house.

The sun had gone down, but a certain unreal glow lay on the hill behind the village; night was purpling the sky; her figure rose out of the shadowy cup powerful and graceful, with the child crouched at her feet; the work of the day was over, her heart’s desire was with her.

To-day she could not come to the child when he called, for but two nights ago there was a movement and whispering at midnight in the yard of Bukdadi, and the wail arose of a voice smaller and younger than that of little Achmet. So the mother rests.

THE COURT OF THE KING

VI
THE COURT OF THE KING

“Sealed within the iron hills.”