“It was Allah who put it into our heads. Allah protecting the holy city where Mulai Idris lies buried.”
“That’s all very fine,” Captain Laguessière observed. “But then who lent Allah his copy of the Manual of Field Engineering?”
“Exactly,” Gerard agreed with a laugh. “I think we had better find that out. No Moor that ever I met with would take the time and trouble, even if he had the skill, to work out——” and the laugh died off his lips. He turned suddenly startled eyes upon his companion. “Laguessière!” he exclaimed, and again, in a lower key, “Yes, Laguessière! I was sure that I had never met you before.”
“Not until this expedition, my Commandant.”
“Yet your name was familiar to me. I did not think why. I was too busy to think why. But I remember now. You were in Fez two years ago. Yes, I remember now.”
His face darkened and hardened and grew very menacing as he sat with moody eyes fixed upon the ground and seeing visions of old and pleasant days leap into life and fade. “Volubilis, too!” he said in a low voice. “Yes, just below those olives.”
Strange that he should have seen the columns and broken arches yesterday and again this morning, and only thought of them with wonder as the far-flung monuments of the old untiring Rome! And never until this moment as things of great and immediate concern to him—signs perhaps for him to read and not neglect. For of all the pictures which he saw changing and flickering upon the ground, two came again and again. He saw Baumann and his friends riding in the springtime between clumps of asphodel towards those high pillars, and a horde of wild ragged men pouring out of the gates of this white-walled city, and Baumann shrinking back as a tall youth whirled with a grin a great staff about his head. Then he saw the same man, whirling the same staff, charge with Laguessière’s section in a street of Fez. A grim and sinister fancy flashed into his mind. He wondered whether he had been appointed by destiny to demand here and to-day an account for the betrayal of a great and sacred trust. He looked up the hill to where the big wooden gates stood open.
“Is that the only entrance into Mulai Idris?” he asked of the Basha.
“The only one.”
Gerard de Montignac turned to his subordinate.