Chapter Six.
The Evil of the Thousand Eyes.
The camp fire was dying in the gloomy hour before the dawn. In the Great Desert the light comes early from the far-off Holy City, golden as the Prophet’s glory, to light our footsteps in those trackless waterless wastes which are shunned by man and forgotten by Allah. My tribesmen of the Azjar, still wrapped in their black veils, were sleeping soundly prior to the long march of the coming day, and all was quiet save the howling of a desert fox, and the shuffling tread of the sentries as they traversed the camp from end to end, silent and weird in their long black burnouses and veils. Alone, I was sitting gazing into the dying embers, deep in thought. I had been unable to sleep, for a strange premonition of danger oppressed me. We were in the country of the Taïtok, a tribe of pure Arabs, fierce in battle, who when united with the Kel-Rhela, their neighbours, were among our most formidable opponents. The Sheikhs of both tribes had made treaty with the French, and placed their country beneath the protection of the tricolour of the Infidels, therefore in our expedition, against their town of Azal, we knew that we must meet with considerable opposition.
We had exercised every caution in our advance, travelling by various ancient dried-up watercourses known only to us, “The Breath of the Wind,” approaching in secret the town we intended to loot and burn as a reprisal for an attack made upon us a month before. But the report of a spy, who had gone forward to Azal, was exceedingly discouraging. The French had occupied the Kasbah, the red-burnoused Spahis were swaggering about the streets and market-places, while the tricolour floated over the city gate, and the fierce fighting men of the Taïtok were now fearless of any invader. It was this report which caused me considerable uneasiness, and I was calmly reflecting whether to turn off to the east into the barren Ahaggar, or to push forward and measure our strength with our enemies, the Infidels, when suddenly my eyes, sharpened by a lifetime of desert wandering, detected a dark crouching figure moving in the gloom at a little distance from me. In an instant I snatched up my rifle and covered it. Unconscious of how near death was, the mysterious stranger still moved slowly across, lying upon his stomach and dragging himself along the sand in the direction of my tent. As I looked, a slight flash caught my eye. It was the gleam of the flickering flame upon burnished steel. The man held a knife, and at the door of my tent raised himself before entering, then disappeared within.
Quick as thought I jumped up, drew my keen double-edged jambiyah from my girdle, and noiselessly sped towards my tent, drawing aside the flap, and dashing in to capture the intruder.
The dark figure was bending over a portfolio wherein I keep certain writings belonging to the tribe, the compacts of friends and the threats of foes.
“Thou art my prisoner!” I cried fiercely, halting inside, casting aside my knife and raising my rifle.
The figure turned quickly with a slight scream, and by the feeble light of my hanging-lamp I was amazed to detect the features of a woman, young, beautiful, with a face almost as white as those of the Roumi women who sit at cafés in Algiers.
“Mercy, O Ahamadou!” she implored, next second casting herself upon her knees before me. “True, I have fallen prisoner into thine hands, but the Book of Everlasting Will declares that thou shalt neither hold in slavery nor kill those who art thy friends. I crave thy mercy, for indeed I am thy friend.”
“Yet thou seekest my life with that knife in thine hand!” I cried in anger. “Whence comest thou?” I demanded, for her Arabic was a dialect entirely strange to me.