Bedouin Love

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

He dismissed these useless ruminations. He was not going to die: life and the lure of the unattained were still before him.

Another and another spasm smote him, tore him asunder, and left him shaking upon the bed. With a trembling hand he mixed the brandy and chlorodyne, making little attempts to measure the dose. The candle spluttered on the floor near by, and strange insects buzzed around it, singed themselves, and fell kicking on their backs.

He opened his eyes and watched them as he lay on his side, his knees drawn up, and his hands gripping the edge of the bed. Their agonies, no doubt, were as great as his, but, being small, they did not matter. He, too, as Englishmen go, was not large; and it was very apparent that he did not much matter. He was of the lean and medium-sized variety of the race, and was of the swarthy type which is often to be found in the far south-west of England, where his family had had its origin. Some people might have termed him picturesque: others might have said, and most certainly just now would have said, that he looked a bit mad.

At length he slept for a few minutes; but his dreams were hideous, and full of faces, which came close to him, growing bigger and bigger, until, with strange and melancholy grimaces, they receded once more into infinite distance. Somebody grey, ponderous, and very fearful, counted endless numbers, now slowly and portentously, now with such increasing rapidity that his brain reeled.

In this manner the seemingly endless night passed on: a few moments of sleep, a disjointed procession of horrible fantasies, convulsions of pain, staggerings across the room, fallings back on the bed, brandy, and exhausted sleep again. But all the while he knew that he was growing weaker.

Presently the candle went out, and the darkness closed over his agony. The thought came to him that soon he would no longer have the power to dose himself, and with it came that human desire for aid which no animal instinct of segregation can wholly stifle in a heart weary with pain. It was now long past midnight, and from this time till sunrise he fought a terrible double battle, on the one hand with Death, on the other with Self. It would not be impossible, he knew, to crawl from the room into the silent desert outside, and a cry for help would possibly be heard by his men.

But what would happen? They would go into the town, doubtless carrying the infection with them, and would engage a boat in which they would row across the Nile to fetch Morgan, who had the reputation of being somewhat of a doctor. But Morgan had a wife and child in Wales, who were dependent on him: only last autumn that hairy giant had told him all about them as they sat drinking warm lager in the dusty garden by the river, one hot night, just before the mining party had set out for the distant works.

Thus, when at long last the sun rose and glared into the room, above and below the fluttering towel, he was still alone.

At nine o’clock, as the day’s heat and the onslaught of the flies began again to be intolerable, he gave up hope. Until that hour he had fought his fight with decency; but now convulsion on convulsion had dragged the strength out of him, and he was no longer able to crawl back on to the bedstead. The last drops of brandy in a tumbler by his side, he lay limply on the floor; and where he lay, there the spasms racked him, and there he fainted. With the hope for life went also the desire, and each time that he came to himself he prayed to God for the mercy of unconsciousness. The dying words of Anne Boleyn, which he had read years ago, recurred again and again to his mind: “O Death, rocke me aslepe; bringe me on quiet rest.” He kept saying them over to himself, not with his lips, for they were parched, but somewhere deep down in the nightmare of his wandering brain.

Presently a gust of blistering wind flicked the towel from its nail in the window, and with that the creaking shutter slammed back on its hinges, and the sun streamed full on to the white figure on the floor. Jim opened his eyes, bloodshot and wild, and stared out on to the rocks and sandy drifts. A few sparrows were hopping about languidly in the shade of a ruinous wall, their beaks open as though they were panting for breath. The sky was leaden, for the glare of the sun seemed to have sucked out the colour from all things, even from the yellow sand, which now had the neutral hue of Egyptian dust.