Here in his favourite abode, Zebehr, says the doctor, was long 'a picturesque figure, tall, spare, excitable, with lions guarding his outer chamber, and his court filled with armed slaves—smart, dapper-looking fellows, supple as antelopes, fierce, unsparing, and the terror of Central Africa; while around him gathered in thousands infernal raiders, whose razzias have depopulated vast territories. Superstitious, too, was Zebehr, for in his campaign against Darfour, he melted down two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into bullets—for no charm can stay a silver bullet—and cruel as death itself! A word from him here raised the Soudan in revolt against Gordon in 1878; and it was only after some fierce righting that Gessi Pasha succeeded in breaking the back of the revolt. After hunting the slave raiders like wild beasts, he captured and shot eleven of their chiefs, including Suleiman, the son of Zebehr. Hence the blood-feud between Gordon and Zebehr which led the latter to refuse to accompany the former to Khartoum. The slave-dealers were slain in hundreds by natives whom they had plundered. Zebehr's letters were found, proving that he had ordered the revolt; but no action was taken against him, and he continued to live in luxurious detention at Cairo.'
When Baker Pasha was organizing his forces to relieve Tokar, he asked that Zebehr might go with him at the head of a Nubian division. Zebehr and Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil raised the blacks, but the Anti-Slavery Society protested against the employment of the former as improper and in the highest degree perilous. Sir Evelyn Baring pleaded for Zebehr and Moussa, but Lord Granville was inexorable. He wrote: 'The employment of Zebehr Pasha appears to her Majesty's Government inexpedient both politically and as regards the slave trade.'
Thus far some of the history of yesterday, which, nevertheless, may be new to the reader.
On his first entering the zereba Skene had returned the formal welcome or greeting of Sheikh Moussa—touching his forehead, lips, and breast—a symbolic action signifying that in thought, word, and heart he was his.
Pietro Girolamo, the Greek Islesman from Cerigo, was—we have said—the father-in-law (at least one of them) to Moussa Abu Hagil.
Malcolm Skene came to the knowledge of that connection through a stray copy of the now pretty well-known Arabic newspaper, the Mubashir, which he found in the zereba; and the columns of which contained a memoir of that enterprising Sheikh, and in retailing some startling incidents in his life gave a little light on certain habits of the dwellers in the desert.
Girolamo had been the skipper of one of his slave dhows, or armed brigs, in the Red Sea, during the palmy times, when as many as five thousand head of slaves were exposed annually in the market place of Shendy—a traffic in which Moussa, like his kinsmen, Zebehr Pasha, had grown enormously rich; and, for a suitable sum, he bought a daughter of Girolamo, a beautiful Greek girl. She became his third wife, and died in giving birth to a daughter, the inheritor of her pale and picturesque beauty, though shaded somewhat by the Arab mixture in her blood; but in her fourteenth year—a ripe age in those regions of the sun—her charms were said to surpass all that had seen before and had become the exaggerated theme of story-tellers and song-makers, even in the market places and the cafés of Damanhour and Cairo.
The girl was named Isha (or Elizabeth) after her mother, and educated in such accomplishments as were deemed necessary to the wife of a powerful and wealthy Emir, for such Moussa destined her to be, if not perhaps of his friend and leader the Mahdi Achmet when the time came; but the old brigand—for the slave dealer was little better in spirit or habit when not absent fighting, plundering, and raiding in search of djellabs—seemed never happy save when in the society of this daughter, his only one, his other children being sons, four of whom had fallen in battle against Hicks on the field of Kashgate.
Notwithstanding all the care with which the women of the East are secluded in the Kah'ah, or harem, Isha had a lover, a young Bedouin warrior named Khasim Jelalodeen, who, though he had no more hope of winning her to share his humble black tent than of obtaining the moon, loved her with all the wild passion of which his lawless Arab nature was capable.
To have whispered of this passion to the Sheikh Moussa, whom we have described as resembling a mummy of the Pharaohs' time resuscitated, would have ensured the destruction of Khasim, who had only his sword, his rifle, and a horse with all its trappings.