Helen looked intently at the little woman, who gazed out of the doorway with an air of seraphic innocence.
“I could not find my way down there, Namlah! I should fall or get lost or——”
Namlah trotted to the door and stood with her hand shading her eyes, looking out towards the desert.
“Yet is there one, Excellency, who without eyes walketh safely amongst the rocks. One without eyes, but with much wisdom upon his tongue and goodness in his heart, who walketh ever without fear in the great darkness; one who yearneth to help those whose backs have suffered from the whip or whose hearts have suffered from the power wielded by that daughter of Shaitan!” She crept close to Helen and whispered in her ear: “One who likewise craveth to hurt, to wound, to kill, in revenge.”
Helen shivered at the hate in the little woman’s voice, but she understood. She had learned the history of the blind man from Namlah; once when, restless and unable to sleep through anxiety, she had walked out on to the platform she had seen him in the grey light of the dawn, standing midway on the steps, his face raised to her abode; once Namlah had lain a few flowers on the silken coverlet, had whispered, “patience brings victory to the blind and the prisoner,” and had retired to her pots and pans with finger on lips.
The body-woman walked to the edge of the platform and beckoned to the white girl she loved, and pointed to a silvery cloud of sand far out in the desert.
“Yonder she rides,” she whispered. “May the sand choke her! May the scorpion sting her heel! May....” She smiled up at Helen and shrugged her scarred shoulders in the expressive Eastern way. “But of the luck of such, Excellency, is it written, ‘throw him into the river and he will rise with a fish in his mouth.’ Yet will her turn come; the tide cannot remain at the full, the sun must set. Behold! I descend to the river, whilst the men and women make merry in her absence, to fetch water for her Excellency’s bath, leaving her alone, to walk amongst the rocks, in the protection of Allah!”
Helen watched the little woman descend the steep steps, balancing a great earthenware jar skilfully upon her head; noticed that she stopped for a moment near one gigantic boulder which lay to the right of the steps; listened to her singing as she made the rest of the descent down to the water, which looked like a ribbon of silver run through a purple velvet curtain, then entered the room, which was really a prison cell, pulled a sheet of dark blue silk from her bed, and ran out on to the ledge.
She did not hesitate.