“If I get safely away I shall owe my life to you,” she said, with intense gratitude, pressing my hand for an instant to her quivering lips. “I know this place, and ere two moons can have risen I can travel through the rocky defile and be at my father’s house in Idelès. Tell me thy name, so that my father may know who was his daughter’s liberator.”
I told her, and in the same hasty breath asked for some souvenir.
“Alas! I have nothing,” she answered; “nothing but a strange ornament which my father’s mother gave to me immediately before she died, an hour previous to the attack being made upon the village,” and placing her hand deep into the breast of her dress she drew forth a rough disc of copper, about the size of a crown piece, with a hole in it, as if it had been strung upon a thread.
“When she gave it to me she told me it had been in her possession for years, that it was a talisman against terror, and that some curious legend was attached to it, the nature of which I do not now recollect. There is strange writing upon it in some foreign tongue of the Roumis that no one has been able to decipher.”
I looked, but unable to detect anything in the darkness, I assured her that its possession would always remind me of her, and slipped it into the pocket of my gandoura.
Then together we crept along under the shadow of the wall, and, gaining the spot where the horse stood in readiness, I held her for a second while she kissed my hand, uttering a fervent word of thanks, and afterwards assisted her into the saddle. Then a moment later, with a whispered “Allah iselemeck!” she sped away, with her unbound hair flying behind her, and was instantly lost in the darkness.
On realising that she had gone I was seized with regret, but feeling that at least I had saved her from a horrible doom, I returned to my little shed and, wrapping myself in my burnouse, slept soundly until the sun had risen high in the heavens.
Opening my eyes, I at once remembered Khadidja’s quaint souvenir, and on examining it, was astonished to find both obverse and reverse of the roughly fashioned disc covered with an inscription in English crudely engraved, or rather scratched, apparently with the point of a knife. Investigating it closely I was enabled, after some difficulty, for I have only an elementary knowledge of the tongue of the Roumis, to read the following surprising words:—
“This record I leave for the person into whose hands it may fall, for I am starving. Whosoever reads this let him hasten to Zemnou, in the Zelaf Desert, two days from the well of El Ameïma, and from the Bab-el-Oued pace twenty steps westward outside the city wall, and under the second bastion let him dig. There will he be rewarded. John Edward Chatteris, held captive in the Kasbah of Borku by order of the Sultan ’Othmân, Sunday, June 13, 1843.”