Rahmeh was delighted. She rode her own little donkey, Jeida, and carried a pocketful of dates and bread. Jeida was chubby and serious; like his mistress, he went unshod, and, like her, he wore gorgeous raiment, for his saddlebags were hung with tassels of orange and crimson and blue. He had, too, a necklace of large blue beads, and a silver and blue ornament was hung over his shaggy forelock for luck.
Ismail led the flock; and Rahmeh, mounted on Jeida, rounded up the straying sheep from behind. Wherever she saw a clump of thorns thick with Dead Sea apples, she slid from Jeida’s back and gingerly plucked them from the prickly mass. They looked like great beads of amber. But they were filled with pith, and, strung on a long strand of wool, would make a magnificent necklace for Nib on his return. There was not a tree in sight—only the pale sagebrush and the tangle of thorns and a great waste of sandy hills dipping down to the Dead Sea, which lay in its bowl of blue hills, a quiet, sunshiny lake with hardly a ripple. Along the roadside, patches of salt cropped to the surface and lay on the brown earth as white as hoar frost.
Ismail led the flock back into the hills away from the Dead Sea. He separated the little lambs from the rest of the flock and left them behind with Rahmeh in a hidden ravine, which ran like a streak of life across the immense gray wilderness. Rahmeh sat tossing and counting her lapful of Dead Sea apples, wondering whether father and Yussef had yet reached Jerusalem, that great walled city nearly four thousand feet above her, which to her imagination seemed to touch the sky. Was the ground up there covered with that white mysterious thing called snow, which never came to them in the Jordan Valley?
Suddenly over the edge of the ravine the wind swept a flock of small quail, all whirring and chirping, and dropped them into the warm hollow. There they lay, fluttering and bewildered, but so tame that Rahmeh could easily have caught them. She looked up at the sky. The wind must be blowing up there, she thought, and then she heard Ismail calling. He was coming over the top of the hill carrying three little long-legged black lambs, and behind him trooped the rest of the flock, black, white, and brown, tinkling and bleating and nibbling at the shrubs as they passed.
‘Rahmeh,’ said Ismail, ‘there’s a storm coming. You had better start ahead on Jeida and take these three little fellows who are too weak to walk. I can bring in the rest.’ Ismail dropped two of the lambs into the bags attached to Jeida’s saddle and gave the third one to Rahmeh to carry across her lap. ‘Take the Dead Sea road,’ he called after her.
Jeida chose a sheep track to the top of the ravine and from there a stony way, like the bed of a torrent, which ran down into the valley. He dropped nimbly from boulder to boulder until they came down to the sand-dunes which lie about the end of the Dead Sea, now dark as slate between its rocky shores.
The sky was heavy with gray clouds. As they came over a hill that was like a great bare dune, Rahmeh felt Jeida suddenly quiver under her; then snorting with terror he plunged down the hill, and, not stopping to pick his way, made straight for the valley road. Casting a swift glance backward, Rahmeh saw what seemed to be a large fierce dog just over the brow of the next sand-dune. He was following them in a crooked, skulking way, his head down, but his evil yellow eyes turned upward. He was striped with bands of yellow across his shoulders. A mane of coarse, bristling hair stood upright.
Rahmeh’s heart gave a great thump of fright, for she realized that this was a hyena and that he was after the lambs; after Jeida, too, perhaps; for though hyenas are great cowards, they do sometimes attack donkeys and other animals that cannot fight. Jeida, sweating and trembling and galloping wildly toward the valley road, was not more frightened than Rahmeh. All the dark stories she had ever heard about hyenas came back to her—that they stole lambs from the fold and babies from the cradle; that they even stole your mind, until you were forced to follow wherever they went. Rahmeh tightened her hold on the lamb in her lap until its little round head pressed tightly against her chest, and leaning over caught Jeida’s neckband with both hands. It is probable that if she had not been an Arab child she would not have held on at all. Of course if she had dropped the lamb on the road the hyena would have stopped following, in order to devour it; but Rahmeh was too good a shepherdess even to think of such a thing. Her one idea was to protect and save the lamb.
Until now Jeida had kept ahead, but he was winded and trembling, and suddenly stumbling, he came down on his knees, almost throwing Rahmeh over his head.
At the same time the hyena, leaving the shelter of the sand-dunes, circled about to head them off. He was very near now, humping his shoulders in an ugly fashion, and showing his fangs. The lambs bleated with terror.