The Valley of the Kings. Marmaduke William Pickthall
scrambled down over rocks and fallen masonry to the sea-beach, whence he made his way home through the twilight. His mother had heard of his introducing his Emîr to the priest Mîtri, and blamed the folly of it, till she learnt how thereby he had redeemed the great umbrella. Even then she still declared it was a pity. It would put the missionaries in a perfect fury, since an Orthodox priest was the devil in their eyes; and was certain to rouse the cupidity of other people. Allah had blessed Iskender with the friendship of a mighty prince. She bade him keep the blessing to himself, not let it waste away in gifts to strangers.
Her words confirmed the counsel of the wise Abdullah. Iskender resolved to follow it to the letter. But when, presenting himself before his lord next morning, he announced the programme for the day, the Frank raised unforeseen objections. He would in no case visit the bath, he said, having heard that they used dirty water there. It was with difficulty that Iskender won him to view Abdullah's invitation with some favour.
Abdullah's house was in the town itself, hard by the shore. It stank in the approach, as the Frank was not slow to remark; but within all was swept and perfumed for the occasion. Borrowed mats strewed the floor. Two candles burned upon a little shelf, before a picture of the Blessed Virgin placed there in remembrance of the famous vision. And the host omitted no formula of politeness that had ever been used by a son of the Arabs to felicitate and set at ease an honoured guest. The Emîr, completely reassured, smiled graciously. The food, when it appeared, was tasty and abundant, and his Honour seemed to like it. But Iskender knew that it was of the cheapest: the whole feast had not cost his uncle ten piasters. When the Emîr, at taking leave, put two mejidis in Abdullah's hand, he bit his lip and cursed the old man's guile.
Thenceforth he determined to keep all English-speaking persons at a distance, since their whole endeavour seemed to be to cheat his loved Emîr. But it was not so easy to discard his old acquaintance.
That same evening, after parting from his patron, he ran right into the arms of a pair of merry fellows, who announced their playful purpose to detain him. Both wore their fezzes at a rakish angle, both had a rosary dangling fashionably from the left hand, both talked and laughed uproariously—secure in their employment by a foreign tourist agency from the disgust of the Muslim population, whose scowls shadowed them. Elias Abdul Messîh was one of them. The other, who boasted a very large hooked nose, like a parrot's beak, which reduced the rest of his face to insignificance, was Yuhanna Mahbûb, a famous bully.
"Now we have thee!" cried Elias, laughing loudly. "By Allah, it is rude in thee to shun thy friends."
"Is it true that the Emîr gives thee an English pound every day?" inquired Yuhanna.
"He is good enough to treat me as a brother, and has sworn, of his benevolence, to make my fortune," Iskender modestly admitted.
"Pshaw! Promises—I know them!" sneered Yuhanna. "Coined money is the only thing I put my faith in."
"We crave a boon of thee," pursued Elias coaxingly. "Bring the khawâjah to the house of Karlsberger to-morrow afternoon. We will make a feast in his honour and thine. Say yes, O my soul!"
"Aye, promise," snarled Yuhanna, "or we shall know thou hast a mind to slight us, and take steps accordingly."
Iskender promised, with intent to fail them, for the Emîr's protection made their threat quite harmless. He pursued his way down a sandy road through the orange-gardens, which looked black beneath the sunset—of unusual splendour owing to the presence in the sky of ragged clouds. A fellah who passed remarked that rain was coming.
"Art on the way to visit me?" A hand fell suddenly upon Iskender's shoulder. A tall black-clad form had overtaken him, unheard by reason of the muffling sand. It was the priest Mîtri. "Or dost thou fear to incur the anger of the English missionaries? By Allah, thou art wrong to fear them. Their religion is of man's devising; its aim is worldly comfort, which will fail them at the Last Day; whereas ours is the faith of Christ and the Holy Apostles, the same for which thy fathers suffered ages before the invention of the Brûtestânt heresy. It is the faith of the true Romans who reigned in the city of Costantîn, when Rome had reaped the reward of her heathen iniquity and lay in ruins, a haunt of brigands and wild beasts. Is it not a sin that, after the lapse of so many ages, people calling themselves Christians, people who have never suffered hardship for their faith as we do, come hither and wage war upon the Church in her bound and crippled state, seducing the feeble and the avaricious by the spectacle of their wealth and the prospect of foreign protection? These heretics—and the Muscovites, our co-religionists, alas! with them—conspire against the Sultan, who is our sole defender. With the Muslimin we have in common language, country, and the intercourse of daily life. Therefore, I say, a Muslim is less abominable before Allah than a Latin or a Brûtestânt."
The priest stopped speaking suddenly and embraced Iskender, kissing him repeatedly on both cheeks. At the same moment a little cavalcade went ambling by, which solved the riddle of his strange behaviour. Iskender caught a scowl of disapproval from the Sitt Carûlîn, a glance of agonised appeal from the Sitt Hilda, and then a malicious grin from old Costantîn, as he ran by on foot, prodding with his staff the hindmost jackass, on which the Sitt Jane sat up with face averted. The three ladies were clad in white with mushroom hats and fluttering face-veils. Their bodies bulged now here, now there, like sacks of grain, obedient to the motion of the trotting donkeys.
"There they go, mothers of all contention, shameless meddlers!" said Mîtri, peering after them in the twilight. "Ha, ha! I angered them, the praise to Allah. I made them tremble for their nursling!"
Iskender made no answer, feeling angry with the priest. At that reproachful glance of the Sitt Hilda, all his childhood had risen up and testified against him. His heart was stricken with profound compunction. He broke away from Mîtri as soon as possible, refusing an invitation to enter his house and argue with him, and sped on across the sandhills to his own home. There, in the little house, a lamp was lighted; his mother stood at the doorway looking out for him. Breathless, he informed her of his encounter with the Mission ladies, and the priest's vile trick to shame him.
"Aha," she laughed, "a famous joker is our father Mîtri. I would give much to have seen the faces of those harridans! Nevertheless, may his house be destroyed, for he has done me an ill-turn with his foolery. The ladies are certain to come here tomorrow, deafening me with the outcry of their poisonous spite. For thee, it recks not, thou hast thy Emîr. In sh' Allah thou wilt soon get money from him. Then thou canst laugh at the malevolence of these hypocrites!"
But Iskender was not to be so easily consoled. He lay awake that night, a prey to poignant self-disgust, remembering in turn his happy childhood at the Mission, his love for the Sitt Hilda, and his recent frowardness, each with a vividness that hurt his brain. Even the patronage of a great Emîr seemed nothing worth as compared with the affection of those who had brought him up. The Emîr spoke lightly of religion; he despised the missionaries; it might well be he was wicked, a servant of the Evil One, a creature of that outer darkness into which he (Iskender) had fallen through his own fault. Then he thought of the priest Mîtri, and of the beautiful child who for a moment had ensnared his fancy; and was overwhelmed with pity for himself. He belonged to nobody. The missionaries loved him so little that they were content to cast him off for small offences; while for the Orthodox he remained a Protestant, a filthy thing. In his thirst for comfort he was driven back on dreams of greatness, of buried treasure some day to be found, which would cause the English and the natives of the land alike to grovel in the dirt before him. Warmed by such thoughts he fell asleep at last.
When he awoke in the morning his mind was healed. He viewed the Mission with the old resentment, and placed his every hope in the Emîr. On his way to the hotel he saw the daughter of Mîtri throwing crumbs to the church pigeons, and blew a kiss to her with words of love, only to laugh loud when, picking up a stone, she cursed his father. At the entering-in of the town he was accosted by Elias, who sprang suddenly from the shade of a cactus-hedge. Yuhanna followed, yawning. It was clear that they had been lying in wait.
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