Jimgrim and Allah's Peace (Spy Thriller). Talbot Mundy
off up’ill again. I sits where ‘e’d knocked me on to a stone pile, wishin’ like ’ell for a drink. It was full moonlight, an’ you could see for miles. After about fifteen minutes, me still meditatin’ murder an’ considerin’ my thirst I seen ’em fetch a camel out o’ the khan at the Inn o’ the Good Samaritan; an’ next thing you know, ’e’s out o’ sight. Thinks I, that’s the last of ‘im, an’ good riddance! But not a bit of it!
“The men what fetched the camel for ‘im comes down to me an’ says the sheikh ‘as left word I’m to be fed an’ looked after. They fixes me up at the inn with a cot an’ blankets an’ a supper o’ sorts, an’ I lies awake listenin’ to ’em talkin’ Arabic, understandin’ maybe one word out of six or seven. From what I can make o’ their conjecturin’, they think ’e ain’t no sheikh at all, but a bloomin’ British officer in disguise!
“Soon as morning comes I jump a passing commissariat lorry. As soon as I gets to Jerusalem I reports that sheikh for arson, theft, felo de se, busting a gov’ment car, usin’ ’is fists when by right ‘e should ha’ knifed me, an’ every other crime I could think of. An’ all I gets is laughed at! What d’you make of it? Think ’e was a Harab?”
I wondered whether he was Jimgrim, but did not say so. Grim had not appeared to me like a man who would use his fists at all readily; but he was such an unusual individual that it was useless trying to outline what he might or might not do. It was also quite likely that the chauffeur had omitted mention of, say, nine-tenths of the provocation he gave his passenger. What interested me most was the thought that, if that really was Jimgrim, he must have been in a prodigious hurry about something; and that most likely meant excitement, if not danger across the Dead Sea.
We caught sight of the Dead Sea presently, bowling past the Inn of the Good Samaritan and beginning to descend into the valley, twelve hundred feet below sea level, that separates Palestine from Moab. The moon shone full on the water, and it looked more wan and wild than an illustration out of Dante’s Inferno. There was no doubt how the legends sprang up about birds falling dead as they flew across it. It was difficult to believe that anything could be there and not die. It was a vision of the land of death made beautiful.
But the one-eyed Arab on the rear seat began to sing. To him that view meant “home, sweet home.” His song was all about his village and how he loved it—what a pearl it was—how sweeter than all cities.
“’Ark at ’im!” The driver stopped the car to fill his pipe. “You’d think ’e lived in ‘eaven! I’ve fought over every hinch o’ this perishin’ country, an’ tyke it from me, guv’nor, there ain’t a village in it but what’s composed of ‘ovels wi’ thatched roofs, an’ ‘eaps o’ dung so you can’t walk between ’em! Any one as wants my share o’ Palestine can ’ave it!”
We bumped on again down a road so lonely that it would have felt good to see a wild beast, or an armed man lurking in wait for us. But the British had accomplished the impossible: They had so laid the fear of law along those roads that, though there might be murders to the right and left of them, the passer-by who kept to the road was safe, for the first time since the Romans now and then imposed a temporary peace.
At last, like two yellow streams glistening in moonlight, the road forked—one way toward Jericho. The other way appeared to run more or less parallel with the Dead Sea. At that point the one-eyed Arab left off singing at last and clutched the driver’s shoulder.
“All right! All right!” he answered impatiently, and stopped. “Out you get, then!”
He did not expect the tip I gave him. He seemed to think it placed him under obligation to wait there and talk for a few minutes. But my one-eyed guide waved him away disgustedly with the hand that did not hold my bag, and we stood in the road watching until he vanished up-hill out of sight. Then the guide plucked my sleeve and I followed him along the righthand road. We walked half a mile as fast as he could set foot to the ground.
At last we reached a pretense of a village—a little cluster of half-a-dozen thatched stone huts enclosed within one fence of thorn and cactus. Everything showed up as clearly in the moonlight as if painted with phosphorus. The heavy shadows only made the high lights seem more luminous. A man and two donkeys were waiting for us outside the thorn hedge. The man made no remark. My guide and I mounted and rode on.
Presently we turned down a track toward the Dead Sea, riding among huge shadows cast by the hills on our right hand. The little jackals they call foxes crossed our path at intervals. Owls the size of a robin, only vastly fluffier, screamed from the rocks as we passed them. Otherwise, it was like a soul’s last journey, eerie, lonely and awful, down toward River Styx.
Long before we caught sight of the water again, through a ragged gap between high limestone rocks, I could smell a village. The guide approached it cautiously, stopping every minute or so to listen. When we came on it at last it was down below us in abysmal darkness, one light shining through a window two feet square in proof we were not hesitating on the verge of the infinite pit.
The donkeys knew the way. They trod daintily, like little ladies, along a circling track that goats made and men had certainly done nothing to improve. We made an almost complete ellipse around and down, and rode at last over dry dung at the bottom, into which the donkeys’ feet sank as into a three-pile carpet. You could see the stars overhead, but nothing, where we were, except that window and a shaft of yellow light with hundreds of moths dazzled in it.
We must have made some noise in spite of the donkeys’ vetvet foot-fall. As we crossed the shaft of light a door opened within six feet of the window. A man in Arab deshabille with a red tarboosh awry, thrust out his head and drew it in again quickly.
“Is that the American?” he asked. He held the door so that he could slam it in our faces if required.
The guide made no answer. I gave my name. The man opened the door wider.
“Lailtak sa’idi, effendi! Hishkur Allah! Come in, mister!” The guide led the donkeys away to some invisible place. I crossed the threshold, my host holding his tin lantern carefully to show the two steps leading down to a flag-stone floor. He bolted the door the moment I was inside. He seemed in a great state of excitement, and afraid to make any noise. Even when he shot the bolt he did it silently.
It was a square room, moderately clean, furnished only with a table and two chairs. There were other rooms leading off it, but the stone partitions did not reach as high as the thatch and I could hear rustling, and some one snoring. I sat on one of the chairs at his invitation, and rather hoped for supper, having had none. But supper was not in his mind; it seemed he had too much else to worry him. He looked like a man who worried easily, and likely enough with good reason, for his long nose and narrow eyes did not suggest honesty.
“There was to be an escort to meet me here,” I said.
“Yes, yes. Thank God, mister, you have come at last. If you had only come at sunset! Ali has gone to bring them now.”
“Who is Ali?”
“He with one eye. He who brought you. Your escort came at sunset. Because I am Christian they would not listen to me or wait for you in my house. There are twenty of them, led by Anazeh, who is a bad rascal. They have gone to raid the villages. There has been trouble. I have heard two shots fired. Now they will come back to my house, and if the Sikh patrol is after them they will be caught here, and I shall be accused of helping them. May the fires of their lying Prophet’s Eblis burn Anazeh and his men forever and ever, Amen! May God curse their religion!”
That was a nice state of affairs. I did not want to be caught there by a lot of truculent Sikhs under one of those jocularly incredulous young British subalterns that Sikhs adore. In the first place, I had nothing whatever in writing to prove my innocence. The least that was likely to happen would be an ignominious return to Jerusalem, after a night in a guard-house, should there be a guard-house; failing that, a night in the open within easy reach of Sikh’s bayonets. In Jerusalem, no doubt, Sir Louis would order me released immediately. But it began to look as if the whole mystery after all was nothing but a well-staged decoy,