It Happened in Egypt

by C. N. Williamson; A. M. Williamson

"Thieves!" he cried in Arabic. "Thieves break in at the windows!"

He was making the best of a bad business, I guessed, and hoped somehow to justify himself to the police. But though he was gray with fright, he forgot to look surprised.

My Arabic was not equal to the strain of catching all the gabble that followed: the old man protesting that it was right to close the house to-day; that if it were the police and not thieves who broke in, it was unjust, it was cruel, and his son Mansoor, the caretaker, would appeal to all the Powers. Before he had come to the end of his first breath, he was hushed and handcuffed, and hustled away; and another man sprang forward from behind the angle of a screen-wall inside the entrance. He was young, and looked strong and fierce as an angry giant, but at sight of Allen and the rest of us, he stopped as if we had shot him. Perhaps he had not expected so many. In any case, he saw that there was nothing he could hope to gain by violence or bluster. All he could do was to protest as his father had done, that this visit was a violation of his right to close the house on a holiday.

"Don't be a fool, Mansoor," said Allen, who evidently knew him. "You understand very well that isn't why we are here. You've jot a hasheesh den upstairs, above the public show rooms. A nice trick you thought you'd played us, but you see you didn't bring it off."

By this time we were inside the house, having thrust the caretaker in again, and passing the three tortuous screen walls of the entrance, into a courtyard. Several young Arabs dressed as servants stood there, large-eyed, and stricken at sight of their giant master held by four policemen. But there was not a sign of our men who had crawled through the window, and I was impatient to go where they had gone.

There was no sound of scuffling, no sound at all, except the crying of some startled doves, and Mansoor's voice, swearing by the Prophet's sacred beard that if anything were wrong he was not the one to blame. There were those above him who must be obeyed or he and all that were his would be put out of life; but I cared too little for him, or what might become of him and his, to listen much. I looked up and saw at the left of the courtyard, with its several closed doors, a short flight of steps with a mounting-block, and a doorway leading to a winding staircase. Round the court went a gallery, supported with old marble pillars, and underneath on one side was a large recess, the takhtabosh, raised slightly above the level of the courtyard, and having a row of wooden benches round its three walls. Here the caretaker and his male relatives and friends had evidently been smoking their nargilehs and drinking coffee; our arrival had disturbed them in the midst.

Suddenly, into the frightened mourning of the doves, broke a sharp sound of cracking wood. "Come along!" cried Allen. "They'll be past the barrier in a minute!" And leaving Mansoor and the others to be dealt with by subordinates, he led the way up the steep stairs, at a run.

We did not stop at the first story, the "show" part of the House of the Crocodile; but catching a glimpse of a latticed balcony off the landing, all lovely mushrbiyeh work, and a great room of Persian tiled walls and coloured marble floor, beyond, we dashed up another flight of stairs to the story above. These stairs were of common wood, and somewhat out of repair. At the top was a door of carved cedarwood like those below, but rough in execution, faded, and with here and there a starpoint or triangle of the pattern missing, leaving a hole in the thick wood. On this door was nailed a large card with the notice in English, French, and Arabic, "Forbidden to the Public."

"What a grand idea to install a hasheesh den here!" I could not help thinking as I followed at Allen's heels to the head of the stairs, where two of his men worked with crowbars to prize open that theatrically dilapidated door. Behind the pair who worked were the others who had entered by the window below; and hardly had we taken our places in the strange queue, when with a loud groan the door gave way. The couple in front almost fell into a dark passage on the other side, and my heart leaped, for I half expected to see them driven back upon us by an attack with knives or pistols. But the dim vista seemed to hold only silence and emptiness as I peered over men's shoulders; and as we crowded in, Allen pushing ahead to take the lead, nothing stirred.

The passage was but a gallery, like that below, but instead of being open, it was closed in with lattice of mushrbiyeh work, so that, though those within could look through, it was as secret for those outside as if it had been enclosed by a solid wall.