Lion of Petra (Unabridged). Talbot Mundy
Higg; and seeing it’s about as easy to get money out of that gentleman as cream cheese out of the moon, he’s willing to part with a hundred pounds for either of two things—the rape of Ayisha or the death of Ali Higg. On those terms he vows he’d die contented.”
“If he finds out that Ayisha goes with you tonight he’ll try to corrupt old Ali Baba or one of his sons,” said de Crespigny.
“Yes, and he probably will find it out. But corrupting Ali Baba would take time and a lot of money; and none of his sons dares do a thing without the old man’s approval. I feel fairly sure of the gang. Point is, do you know of any other gang that the wool-merchant could hire right now to attack us somewhere on the road?”
“There’s none in Hebron that would dare. Plenty outside in the villages.”
“The lady Ayisha has probably told that she’s going tonight,” said Grim. “Old Woolly-wits might not find it out until too late, but I suspect his wives get all the gossip that’s going. Then he’ll have to work fast, because we shall move fast. What villages does he trade with chiefly?”
“The Beni-Assan and the Beni-Khor.”
“Small crowds, both of them. Counting her four fanatics, we’ll be four- and-twenty armed men, and tough in the bargain. Is there any outlying sheikh who owes old Rafiki money? Who are his wives, for instance?”
“Now you’re on the track,” said de Crespigny. “One of his wives— the third, I think—is the daughter of Abbas Mahommed of the Beni-Yussuf tribe. Abbas Mahommed is always in debt to him.”
“Where’s his place?”
“Down near the lower end of the Dead Sea. Right near where you’ll want to pitch your first camp. Abbas Mahommed sells him camel wool and hides, and goes in debt in advance regularly. This spring, for some reason, he delivered very little, and is still heavily in debt to Rafiki.”
“How many men has he?”
“Might turn out fifty strong.”
“That’s where we’re due for our first trouble, then,” said Grim. “We’ll have to put one over on him. I know one way of spoiling friend Rafiki’s game; old Woolly-wits’ll fall sure. Suppose you go and see him, ‘Crep, or send for him, and ask him straight out to provide camels for the lady Ayisha. He’ll send his own men along with them, of course, and give them private instructions. Let’s see—four men and a woman plus provisions, and he’ll probably send five men with them—twelve camels, eh? Who else can raise seven good camels in this place?”
“Easy. I know where to get ‘em.”
“Good. Hire them then. Tie them in two strings and send them out with two policemen to wait for us ten miles along the road. Be sure they start ahead of us. Soon as we overtake them I’ll dismiss Rafiki’s men, who’ll be nothing but his spies, swap the princess and her four men and their loads on to the fresh beasts, and leave the police to chase Rafiki’s experts home again. Will you do that?”
It was getting well along toward sunset, and de Crespigny had to hurry; but one of the advantages of being short-handed as administrator of a district is that you have to keep in intimate personal touch with all essentials, and there was not much that young de Crespigny did not know about getting what he wanted done in quick time. Within half an hour seven pretty good camels were sauntering southward out of Hebron, with a couple of phlegmatic Arab policemen perched on the two leaders, and the noses of the others tied to the empty saddles of the beasts ahead. They were neither as big nor in as good condition as old Ali Baba’s wonderful string, but very likely better than any that the wool-merchant would provide, and by that much less likely to reduce our speed after we should make the change.
“You see how easy it is,” said Grim, “for a rascal like Ali Higg to upset a whole country-side. Here we are getting the crime of Palestine running in grooves, as it were, so’s to regulate it first and then reduce it to reasonable proportions, and all that beast needs do is steal a woman and start civil war.”
But I did not see that the wool-merchant’s private plans for vengeance amounted to civil war, and said so.
“Hah! Wait and see!” said Grim. “Woolly-wits goes after vengeance. Somebody gets killed. That means a blood-feud. All the relatives of the slain man—whether it’s Ali Higg or one of his retainers doesn’t matter —take up arms; and all the relatives of Woolly-wits do ditto. For each man killed in the war that follows the other side is out for the equivalent in life or goods. Village after village gets drawn in.
“Suppose that sheikh at the south end of the Dead Sea who’s in debt to Woolly-wits jumps at the chance to loot our caravan and bag the lady, we’ll be lucky if one or two of our men don’t get scuppered. That means a blood-feud between that village and all old Ali Baba’s clan.
“But that isn’t nearly all, nor nearly the worst of it. Ali Higg learns next that the Dead Sea outfit have tried to waylay his wife; so he takes the warpath. And instead of that making a three-cornered fight of it, it might mean an offensive alliance between Ali Higg and Ali Baba’s gang.
“Civil war would be a very mild name for that. There’d be brains brought to bear on it. The administration might have to spend twenty or thirty thousand pounds and jail a lot of estimable Arabs. The thing to do is to stop that kind of thing before it happens.”
“By corraling Ali Higg, I suppose?” said I.
“Can’t very well do that. He’s a free man. Of course he’s got no right to cross our border and steal women, but, on the other hand, he’s made himself boss of a district that no other government pretends to control.
“If we can catch him our side of the line he’s our meat; but that’s reciprocal; if he can catch us on his side there’s no law to prevent his doing what he likes with us. We’ve got to use our heads with Master Ali Higg.”
I think that was the first time it really dawned on me that this venture was going to be dangerous. Even so, the calmness with which Grim considered leaving law and all the means of its enforcement behind and crossing deserts with a gang of known thieves for accomplices took most of the edge off it.
You simply couldn’t feel scared when that fellow smiled and exposed the risks in detail, even with dark coming on and the sound of camels being made to kneel outside the window. For Ali Baba had become convinced at last that Grim really intended to start that night, and, making a virtue of necessity, was better than punctual. The camels were groaning and swearing, as they always do at the prospect of a night’s work.
“As I see it, any tribe out there has as much right to elect Ali Higg leader as you and I have to elect a president,” said Grim. “I don’t suppose they did elect him, but they’ll claim they did. The point is, he’s got himself elected somehow. We’ve no veto. I don’t hold with murder; it sets a bad example and turns loose a horde of individual trouble-makers who were under something like control before. It might be easy to have him murdered; you see how easy old Woolly-wits thought it might be. Murder has always been the solution of politics in the Old World right down to date; and look where they’re at in consequence!”
“You must have some idea to go on,” I suggested.
“What’s your plan?”
“They say I look a bit like Ali Higg.”
“But what then? Haven’t you a plan—nothing you mean to try first?”
“Oh yes. Chercher la femme.”
“So there’s a woman in it?”
“You bet! Ali Higg’s no born statesman. His brains live in a black tent, and he keeps ‘em encouraged with French and English books bought in Jerusalem —silk stockings—gramophones—all kinds of things.”
“What is she—a Turk? I’ve heard some of them are educated nowadays.”
“No. And she never was a Turk. She was born in Bulgaria of Greco-Russo- Bulgar parents, educated