“Make a way for yon black dog!”
Zarah’s voice, high pitched in fury, rose above the men’s. They pushed each other back as the gigantic negress came running lightly, and smote her playfully upon her broad shoulders as she passed amongst them, up to where her mistress and the Nubian stood. Almost as tall as Al-Asad, she made a superb picture as she stood, thoroughbred and perfect in form, beside the two half-castes. Arrogant in her breeding, aware of the rebellion seething in the camp, she eyed them insolently as she revenged herself for the blows her mistress had rained upon her since she had been bought in the slave market.
“Thy prisoners have escaped, O Zarah!” she said slowly, contemptuously. “The white man has fled with the white woman. Black stallion with black mare, white stallion with white mare, and Allah’s curse upon the foal of different colouring.”
She turned her back upon the Arabian, and walked away with the insolent gait of the thoroughbred negro.
Speechless with rage, Zarah raised her spear, then, in a flash, realized that she no longer had the power to move her men to the madness of hate or to the lust of battle. They stood between her and the negress, but she kept her spear raised as she made a mighty effort to regain her hold over them. She stepped back and shouted the battle-cry with which she had been wont to gather the men for a foray into the desert or about her in battle. The words were echoed a thousand times from the mountains, but not from one throat of the men about her; she called aloud her promise of horses, gold or women as a reward for the capture of the prisoners; she drove a way between the men until she stood upon the outer edge of the throng, then once more she shouted the battle-cry, until the women, who had been watching, ran and hid amongst the rocks and some of the younger men felt stealthily for their knives.
“Is there not one among you who dare face the white man?”
A voice from the centre of the throng quoted an Arab proverb, a voice with a mocking note in its clear tones:
“‘It is written upon the cucumber leaf,’ O Zarah, ‘that from a house from which thou eatest thou shalt not pray for its destruction.’”
The Patriarch, with Bowlegs at his side, pushed his way to the front. “The white man, my daughter, we will not for master,” he said, “but for his patience and his strength, yea! and his love for his own woman, we love him as a brother. Behold has he lived and eaten like a dog in yon hut and worked amongst us, to teach us his tricks of skill, with no word of complaint upon his lips. Nay! let him be, with his own woman. Their ways are not our ways, and their lives are in the keeping of Allah the one and only God. Likewise let the friend of thy father with his dumb friend be gone upon their own business. They irk the Sanctuary with their infirmities, as does the busy Namlah with her wailings for her lost son.”
But Zarah had long since passed the stage of sane reasoning. She was white with fury as she faced these men, who would not move hand or foot to help her in her need and looked at her with laughter in the depths of their mocking eyes.