A spirit of rebellion, of adventure, of recklessness, showed in Helen’s eyes as she questioned the little woman who had repeated all she had heard the night she had spied through the window and had so urgently counselled silence and watchfulness and patience.
“Yea! Excellency! she leads the men. The men and beasts laden with provision and water and ammunition wherewith to make a camp between this and the scene of the fighting have departed these many hours. Ah! she is as cunning as the jackal. She relies not upon chance. She has always a place of refuge to fall back on if the fight goes against her, or if the men are in need of food for themselves or their guns. How long she will be gone? I know not; maybe a few hours, a night, a week—who knows?”
“The Nubian, has he gone too?”
Namlah laughed shrilly.
“Ha! the knotter of shoe-strings, the eater of dust, behold he has gone these may days upon some secret journey. He held conclave of great length with the woman who rules us with a rod fashioned in the nethermost Jahannam. They sat under the starlight so that I could not approach, Excellency; they spoke softly so that I could not catch their words from the rock behind which I lay concealed.”
She smiled up into Helen’s face when, under the strain of the suspense in which she had lived for the last ten days, she took the servant by the shoulders and shook her none too gently.
“I can’t bear it much longer, Namlah!” she said in her pretty, broken Arabic. “I can’t bear the uncertainty, I can’t bear the silence, the waiting, with nothing to do to kill the terrible hours. I simply cannot bear it. For danger to myself I do not fear, I do not care. Cannot I find the way out so that I can escape? Can I not?”
There was no one in sight, there was certainly no one within hearing, up there in the eyrie so near the stars, but the little woman ran first to the right and then to the left and then into the room before she sidled up to Helen and whispered.
Is not intrigue as the breath of life in the East?
“Her Excellency must take exercise, must walk under the stars to-night whilst she is abroad.” She spread her fingers wide and down in the direction of the path leading across the quicksands. “Her Excellency must walk, even if it be amongst the rocks where the shadows lie blackest.”