He lifted the saddle a few inches and let it fall back and shifted his slender hands; lifted it higher and higher until it rested for a second upon his bent knees; then, to the sound of the men’s mighty shouting, made one superhuman effort and, just as the sands touched his feet, with a great swing of the shoulders flung the saddle and the senseless rider to safety upon the narrow path.
CHAPTER XIV
“A greater liar than Moseylama.”—Arabic Proverb.
Three weeks passed, in which the Arabian nursed Ralph Trenchard until the fever, brought on by exhaustion, thirst and terrific heat, had left him, and left him very sane and not unduly weak, and very full of gratitude to the beautiful girl whom he seemed to have seen at his bedside day and night, and who seemed to have changed her dress a hundred times, if she had changed it once.
The nerve-racking jangle of her bracelets and anklets and the overwhelming strength of her perfume drove him wellnigh crazy at times, but, remembering what he would learn from her upon his complete recovery, he stuffed the ends of the silk sheets into his ears and held his nostrils forcibly between thumb and finger under cover of the same luxurious bed-spread.
Truly once or twice he grievously feared for his reason.
He wakened one night to see a remarkably handsome and muscular man, clad in naught but a loin-cloth, sitting motionless in the middle of the floor with what looked like a woman’s sandal pressed to his heart; and right strange and idiotic did he look, too, when he placed the sandal upon the floor and proceeded to press his forehead upon it. Then, two or three, or maybe more, nights following—for he had completely lost all sense of time—he wakened to see nothing less than a lion rolling blithely upon its back not two yards from him, which, having rolled awhile, proceeded to gambol playfully about the room, then slouched to the doorway, through which it disappeared for good. When he turned slowly upon his bed to see what else might be in store for him, he saw the face of the beautiful girl looking down upon him from a spot ’twixt floor and ceiling as though suspended in mid-air.
He laughed when, the delirium passed, these strange occurrences were explained to him by Zarah, who, just because he felt too uncertain for the moment about past events to question her about Helen, allowed herself to be deluded into the belief that he had forgotten the tale Al-Asad had told when he visited the Bedouin camp disguised as a holy man. Then this evening he sent the youth who waited upon him to ask her to come to him.