“The amulet, yea, that will I not keep, for fear I rob the white woman of her birthright of happiness; but the chain, of what use is it to her? It is thin and broken....” She twined it round her wrist, looking at it with longing eyes, then, with a little sigh, unwound it and slipped it round the girl’s neck and, knotting the broken ends, hid the locket under the silken garment and ran out quickly on to the platform.
She sat just outside the door, indifferently watching the starlit sky with twinkling eyes in a wry face.
“Behold, I love thee,” she whispered, “and would bring thee back to health. Not alone because of my love for thee, but for that within me which tells me that ‘the time approaches when a camel will crouch down on the place of another camel.’” She rubbed her work-worn hands as she quoted the proverb and pondered upon the happy day when the reigning tyrant should be dethroned and someone with bowels of compassion should be elected in her stead. She turned her sleek head and looked once again at the girl, and fingered her brass bracelets and smiled, as she quoted another proverb, until her perfect teeth flashed in the dusk. “‘He who cannot reach to the bunch of grapes says of it, it is sour.’ Behold, I think the golden chain would not have become my beauty.” She rose as she spoke, laughing, with the childlike happiness of the Eastern who is pleased, and crossed to a small recess, where she made great clatter amongst many brass pots in the process of concocting a strong and savoury broth.
She stood for a moment watching Helen, who had wakened at the noise and lay looking out through the cleft in the mountains to the desert.
For three weeks, so far as she could judge, she had lain ’twixt fever and stupor in the strange room, tended by a middle-aged native who put her finger to her lips when questioned.
Three weeks of agonizing uncertainty as to the fate of those she loved, in which in her delirium she had fought maddened men and beasts or sobbed her heart out in the native’s arms. Twice she had crawled to the platform and tried to descend the steps to reach her grandfather, whom she thought to see standing upon the river bank. Not once had she been aware of Zarah standing behind her as she lay on the bed, with a mocking smile on the beautiful, cruel mouth and a look of uncertainty in the yellow eyes.
She had questioned the native woman, imploring her to give her news of the caravan, promising her her heart’s desire if she could but obtain authentic information about the man she loved. She had begged for her clothes, and when they had been refused had tried to rise from her bed, only to fall back, weak and exhausted from the fever which had resulted from the horror and shock of the battle and the terrible ride, during which, at the last, she had mercifully lost consciousness.
“Am I in the hands of Zarah, the mysterious woman of the desert?” she had whispered to the native the first day her senses had come back to her. “Has a white man been also taken prisoner? Is there any help for us?”
Namlah had looked furtively over her shoulder and had put her finger upon her lips as she had whispered back: