The Truants

by A. E. W. Mason

Into this city of dark streets Warrisden came upon an evening of gloom. The night before he had camped on the slope of a hill by the village of Segota. Never had he seen a spot more beautiful. He had looked across the deep valley at his feet to the great buttress of Jebel Zarhon, on a dark shoulder of which mountain one small, round, white town was perched. A long, high range of grey hills--the last barrier between him and Fez--cleft at one point by the road, rose on the far side of the valley; and those hills and the fields beneath, and the solitary crumbling castle which stood in the bottom amongst the fields, were all magnified and made beautiful by the mists of evening. The stars had come out overhead, behind him the lights shone in his tent, and a cheerful fire crackled in the open near the door. He had come up quickly from Tangier, and without hindrance, in spite of warnings that the road was not safe. The next morning he would be in Fez. It had seemed to him, then, that fortune was on his side. He drew an augury of success from the clean briskness of the air. And that confidence had remained with him in the morning. He had crossed the valley early, and riding over the long pass on the other side, had seen at last the snow-crowned spur of the Atlas on the further side of the plain of Fez. He had descended into the plain, which perpetually rose and fell like the billows of an ocean; and in the afternoon, from the summit of one of these billows, he had suddenly seen, not an hour's journey off, the great city of Fez, with its crenelated walls and high minarets, a mass of grey and brown, with here and there a splash of white, and here and there a single palm-tree, straggling formlessly across the green plain. The sky had clouded over; the track was now thronged with caravans of camels, and mules, and donkeys, and wayfarers on foot going to and coming from the town; and before the Bab Sagma, the great gate looking towards Mikkes, was reached, the rain was falling.

Warrisden had sent on the soldier who had ridden with him from Tangier, to deliver a note to the Consul, and he waited with his animals and his men for the soldier's return. The man came towards dusk with word that a house had been secured in the town, and Warrisden passed through the gate and down between the high battlements of the Bugilud into the old town. And as he passed through the covered bazaars and the narrow streets, in the gloom of the evening, while the rain fell drearily from a sullen sky, his confidence of the morning departed from him, and a great depression chilled him to the heart. The high, cracked, bulging walls of the houses, towering up without a window, the shrouded figures of the passers-by, the falling light, the neglect as of a city of immemorial age crumbling in decay, made of Fez to him that night a place of gloom and forbidding mystery. He was in a mood to doubt whether ever he would look on Tony Stretton's face again.

In the narrowest of the alleys, where each of his stirrups touched a wall, his guide stopped. It was almost pitch-dark here. By throwing back his head, Warrisden could just see, far above him, a little slit of light. His guide groped his way down a passage on the right, and at the end opened with a key a ponderous black door. Warrisden stepped over the sill, and found himself in a tiled court of which the roof was open to the sky. On the first floor there was a gallery, and on each of the four sides a long, narrow room, lofty, and closed with great folding doors, opened on to the gallery. In one of these rooms Warrisden had his bed set up. He sat there trying to read by the light of a single candle, and listening to the drip of the rain.

When he left Tangier, he had twenty-one days before he need be at Roquebrune in answer to Pamela's summons. He had looked up the steamers before he started. Four of those days would be needed to carry them from Tangier to Roquebrune. He had reached Fez in five, and he thus had twelve days left. In other words, if Stretton came to Fez within a week, there should still be time, provided, of course, the road to the coast was not for the moment cut by rebellious tribes. That was the danger, as Warrisden's journey had told him. He discounted the timorous statements of his dragoman, Ibrahim, but one who knew had warned him at El Ksar. There was a risk.

The night was cold. Warrisden wrapped himself in a Moorish jellaba of fine, white wool, but he could not put on with it the Moorish patience and indifference. The rain dripped upon the tiles of the court. Where was Stretton, he wondered?

He went to bed, and waked up in the middle of the night. He had left the great doors of his bedroom open; the rain had stopped; and in the stillness of the night he heard one loud voice, of an exquisite beauty, vibrating over the roofs of the sleeping city, as though it spoke from heaven itself. Warrisden lay listening to it, and interpreting the words from the modulation of the voice which uttered them. Now it rang out imperious as a summons, dropping down through the open roofs to wake the sleepers in their beds. Now it rose, lyrical and glorious, in a high chant of praise. Now it became wistful, and trembled away pleading, yet with a passion of longing in the plea. Warrisden could look upwards from his bed through the open roof. The sky was clear again. Overhead were the bright stars, and this solitary voice, most musical and strange, ringing out through the silence.

It was the mueddhin on the tower of the Karueein Mosque. For five hours before the dawn the praises of Allah are sung from the summit of the mosque's minaret. There are ten mueddhins to whom the service is entrusted, and each sends out his chant above the sleeping city for half an hour. But in the voice of this, one of the ten whom Warrisden heard on the first night when he slept in Fez, there was a particular quality. He listened for it during the nights which followed; expected it, and welcomed its first note as one welcomes the coming of a friend. It seemed to him that all the East was in that cry.

It brought back to him sunsets when his camp was pitched by some little village of tents or thatched mud-houses surrounded by hedges of aloes and prickly pears--at Karia Ben Ouder, at Djouma--villages where there was no mosque at all, but whence none the less the voice of a priest dispersed its plaintive cry across the empty country of marigolds and asphodels, startling the white cow-birds and the storks.

Warrisden fell to thinking of Tony Stretton. He struck a match, and looked at his watch. It was close upon the hour of dawn. Perhaps, just at this moment, by some village in that wild, dark, mountain country to the south-east, Stretton stirred in his sleep, and waked to hear some such summons chanted about the village. Perhaps he was even now loading his mule, and setting forth by the glimmer of the starlight upon his dangerous road. Warrisden fell asleep again with that picture in his mind, and woke to find the sunlight pouring through the square opening of the roof. He drank his coffee, and mounting a little winding stairway of broken steps, came out into that other city of Fez, the city of the roof-tops.

Fez is built upon the slope of a hill, and upon some of the flat roofs Warrisden looked down and through the dark square holes of the openings; to the parapets of others he looked up. Upon some there were gardens planted--so, he thought, must have looked the hanging gardens of Babylon; on others, linen was strung out to dry as in some backyard of England; the minarets, here inlaid with white and green tiles, there built simply of bricks and brown plaster, rose high into the limpid air. And on the towers were the great nests of storks.