Her women, half demented, danced around her. They tore their flesh with finger-nails, defiled their faces, and raised an endless chant, reviewing all the charms and virtues of the dear one, his mother’s love, the blackness of the world, each verse concluding with a shriek of “O calamity!” It was the triumph-song of death.
Robbed of the corpse, the funeral over, they thronged her chamber, keeping up the ghastly round, the death-chant, in the hope to give her tears. Her petrifaction filled them with dismay. To women who accept with rapture all life’s chances, whose custom is to celebrate each blow that strikes them and magnify it as a witness to the power of God, her stony apathy appeared uncanny. They increased their efforts, while Umm ed-Dahak poured into her ear a song of memory designed to loose the frozen fountain of despair.
“She was the fairest daughter of the seed of Adam. See her now! Her feet, her finger-tips dropped perfume. She had the grace of flowers, the voice of turtles. Now behold her! In a moment blind and deaf and dumb and paralyzed. And why? Alas, O thou who askest! it is because the sunshine of her life is fled. We saw her follow his dead body to the grave. As the cow pursues the calf that has been reft from her, so did she follow blindly with a noise of lowing. She has not even strength to beat her face. Her breath is painful, husky like the voice of doves; its sound is all the sobbing of the childless mother. Say, O beloved, what is in thy mind? Dost thou remember his tarbûsh, his yellow slippers, the loveliness of all that touched his body, which was perfumed amber? There was a little mole upon his breast well known to thee. O Allah, waken memory, or grief will slay her!”
Barakah saw and heard as in a trance. She thought herself in Hell, bound fast and gagged while devils taunted her. She was tortured by the memory of English winter evenings, of walking back from church in the long train of orphans, the patter of their feet resounding sadly. That dreariness appeared a state of bliss compared with this luxurious life enclosed in heat. She longed for a cold wind, with rain in it. Remembrance of a garden under sunset came to her; she saw once more a cool verandah with long windows open on an English drawing-room, and heard the earnest voice of Mrs. Cameron entreating her to stay and save her soul. This was God’s punishment. Her life from then till now had been all frowardness and self-indulgence. While basking in it she had been aware that it was baneful. A thousand awful faces rose to sneer, “We warned you!” The glimpses she had had of horrid depths, the scenes of bloodshed and the tales of cruelty, seemed now emphatic warnings of this end. She had sunk downward till she had no faith nor virtue more than beasts have. Her all was in her son, whom God had killed. Crushed, maimed, defrauded, she was flung upon the earth, the scorn of men and angels and the sport of fiends.
As by degrees her sense returned to her, she looked about her with strange eyes and tried to think. But every effort was a sword that pierced her heart. One morning, peering dully through her lattice, she saw a gay pavilion in the yard, and leading to it rows of masts with lanterns hung between. They were erected for the meytam, or reception for the dead. She had seen them often when she visited great houses; but now her mind attached no meaning to them. It was two hours later, in the middle of the function, that her sense returned. A mighty gust of grief, a cry of “O calamity!” swept through the crowd of black-clad women in her great reception-room. It roused her mind. She saw, and was alarmed. What was she doing? What was all this crowd of people? Were they human?
The great saloon was full of women. The ladies sat up on the dais with flourished handkerchiefs, beating their breasts, their faces, at each burst of woe. Dependants crouched upon the ground and rocked incessantly, with foaming lips. Some faces wore a hideous fixed grin; some mouthed continually. The hired performers stood and chanted with obscene contortions, or squatted on a mat and wailed in chorus. The words “O my calamity,” recurring in a sort of running chant without coherence, shook the assembly like a tempest-blast. And all the while dainties were being handed round by weeping servants, and accepted by the mourners as fresh cause for grief.
An ague of intense repugnance seized on Barakah. She felt that she must fly from this inferno, must keep the hope of flight before her resolutely, or her soul was lost. It was as if a hostile hand compressed her throat. She struggled, was determined to get free. Towards that end she battled with instinctive cunning.
After the meytam, when she seemed exhausted, her brain, enamoured of this hope, was planning madly.
“Take heart, O moon of moons,” the servants told her. “In sh´Allah thou shalt bring forth sons instead of him.”