“My lady Khân, this is the song of ’Abdu’l ’Azîz ibn er Rashîd.”
He sang of a prince great and powerful, patron of poets, leader of raids, and recently overwhelmed and slain in battle; but old or new, the songs were all pages out of the same chronicle, the undated chronicle of the nomad. The thin melancholy music rose up into the blackness of the vault; across the opening at the end of the hall, where the wall had fallen in part away, was spread the deep still night and the unchanging beauty of the stars.
“My lady Khân,” said Ghânim, “I will sing you the song of Ukheiḍir.”
But I said, “Listen to the verse of Ukheiḍir”—
“We wither away but they wane not, the stars that above us rise;
The mountains remain after us, and the strong towers when we are gone.”
“Allah!” murmured Ma’ashî, as he swept noiselessly round the circle with the coffee cups, and once again Labîd’s noble couplet held the company, as it had held those who sat in the banqueting-hall of the khalif.
One night I was provided with a different entertainment. I had worked from sunrise till dark and was too tired to sleep. The desert was as still as death; infinitely mysterious, it stretched away from my camp and I lay watching the empty sands as one who watches for a pageant. Suddenly a bullet whizzed over the tent and the crack of a rifle broke the silence. All my men jumped up; a couple more shots rang out, and Fattûḥ hastily disposed the muleteers round the tents and hurried off to join a band of Arabs who had streamed from the castle gate. I picked up a revolver and went out to see them go. In a minute or two they had vanished under the uncertain light of the moon, which seems so clear and yet discloses so little. A zaptieh joined me and we stood still listening. Far out in the desert the red flash of rifles cut through the white moonlight; again the quick flare and then again silence. At last through the night drifted the sound of a wild song, faint and far away, rhythmic, elemental as the night and the desert. I waited in complete uncertainty as to what was approaching, and it was not until they were close upon us that we recognized our own Arabs and Fattûḥ in their midst. They came on, still singing, with their rifles over their shoulders; their white garments gleamed under the moon; they wore no kerchiefs upon their heads, and their black hair fell in curls about their faces.
“Ma’ashî,” I cried, “what happened?”
Ma’ashî shook his hair out of his eyes.
“There is nothing, my lady Khân. ’Alî saw some men lurking in the desert at the ’aṣr” (the hour of afternoon prayer), “and we watched after dark from the walls.”