Bedouin Love

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

As the carriage lurched and swayed along the embanked road, he turned in his seat to watch for his pursuers; but there was no sign of them. Yet this fact now brought no comfort to him. With returning sanity he realized clearly enough that escape was impossible. Were he to hide in the desert, the Ababdeh trackers, always employed by the police in these districts, would soon hunt him down. Were he to take refuge amongst the natives, his hiding-place would be revealed in a few hours in response to the official offer of a reward. And, anyway, to abandon Monimé, and to have no likely means of communicating with her, would make the smart of life unbearable.

There was no way out, and his present flight resolved itself into a wild attempt to obtain breathing space in which to prepare himself for the end, and, if possible, to see Monimé once again to bid her farewell. The jury at home would be bound to find him guilty: the evidence was too damning. Some tramp had murdered Dolly, and was now lost forever; or else, and more probably, Merrivall’s housekeeper had actually done it, but was now unalterably acquitted. It was certain that he would be hanged in the end, and it would therefore be far better to finish it this very night.

In these moments he drank the cup of bitterness to the dregs; and the comparative calmness which now succeeded his frenzy was the calmness of utter despair. Thus, when the driver pulled up his horses in the darkness before the towering pylons of the main gateway of the temple of Karnak, Jim paid him off and approached the ancient courts of Ammon, determined only to keep his pursuers at bay until he could make his confession to Monimé and die in the peace of her forgiveness.

The watchman at the gateway, being used to the eccentric ways of the foreigner, admitted him without comment, and left him to wander alone amongst the vast black ruins, which were massed around him in a silence broken only by the distant yelping of the jackals and the nearer hooting of the owls. Through the roofless Hypostyle Hall he went, a desolate little figure, dwarfed into insignificance by the stupendous pillars which mounted up about him into the stars; and here, presently, he stood for a while with arms outstretched and face upturned, in an agony of supplication.

“O Almighty You,” he prayed, “Who, under this name or under that, have ever been the God of the wretched, and the Father of the broken-hearted, look down upon this miserable little grub whom You have created, and whose brain You had filled with all those splendid dreams which now You have shattered and swept aside. Before I come to You, grant me this last request: give me a little time with the woman I love, so that I may make my peace with her and hear her words of forgiveness.”

He walked onwards, past the huge obelisk of Hatshepsut, and in amongst the mass of fallen blocks of stone which lie heaped before the Sanctuary; but now frenzy seized him again, and, furiously resolving to meet his fate, he swung round and retraced his steps back to the first court, breathing imprecations as he went. Somehow, by some means, he must see Monimé before the final production of the handcuffs gave him the signal for his suicide, which it was now too late to disguise as an accident.

“Blast them!” he muttered. “Blast them! Blast them! I’ll show them that they can’t go chasing innocent men across the world. I’ll shoot the lot of them, and then I’ll shoot myself.” He stumbled over a fallen column. “Damnation!” he cried. “Who the devil left that thing lying about?—the silly idiots!”

Suddenly voices at the gateway came to his ears, and, with hammering heart, he realized that he had been tracked and that his hour was come. Thereupon he ran headlong through the dark forecourt of the small temple of Rameses the Third which stands at the south side of the main courtyard, and concealed himself, panting, in the sanctuary at its far end, a place to which there was but the one entrance.

Here he stood in the darkness, fingering his revolver, while the squeaking bats darted in and out of the doorway like little flying goblins. Presently he could see figures lit by lanterns coming towards him, and could plainly hear their voices.