The White Prophet, Volume II (of 2)

"I must try to sleep too, so good-night, dearest, and God bless you! I don't know what is to be the end of all this, or where I am to dispatch my letter, or when you are to receive it, but I am sure you are alive and listening to me – and what should I do if I could not talk to you? HELENA."

CHAPTER VI

I

"SOUDAN DESERT (somewhere).

"It is ten days, my dear Gordon, since I wrote my last letter, and there has never been an hour between when I dared pretend to this abomination of Egypt (she is now snoring on the angerib by my side, sweetheart) that I must while away an hour by writing in my 'Journal.'

"Such a time! Boil and bubble, toil and trouble! Every morning before daybreak the wild peal of the elephant-horn, then the whole camp at prayers with the rising sun in our faces, then the striking of tents and the ruckling, roaring, gurgling and grunting of camels which resembles nothing so much as a styful of pigs in extremis; then twelve hours of trudging through a forlorn and lifeless solitude with only a rest for the midday meal; then the elephant-horn again and evening prayers, with the savage sun behind us, and then settling down to sleep in some blank and numb and soundless wilderness – such is our daily story.

"My goodness, Ishmael is a wonderful person! But all the same the 'divine' atmosphere that is gathering about him is positively frightening. I suspect Black Zogal of being the author and 'only begetter' of a good deal of this idolatry. He gallops on a horse in front of us, crying, 'There is no god but God,' and 'The Messenger of God is coming,' with the result that crowds of people are waiting for Ishmael at every village, with their houses swept, their straw mats laid down, and their carpets spread on the divans, all eager to entertain him, to open their secret granaries to feed his followers, or at least to kiss the hem of his caftan.

"Every day our numbers increase, and we go off from the greater towns to the beating of copper war-drums, the blowing of antelope horns, and sometimes to the cracking of rifles. It is all very crude in its half-savage magnificence, but it is almost terrifying, too, and the sight of this emotional creature, so liable to spasms of religious ecstasy, riding on his milk-white camel through these fiercely fanatical people like a god, makes one tremble to think of the time that will surely come when they find out, and he finds out, that after all he is nothing but a man.

"What sights, what scenes! The other day there was a fearful sand-storm, in which a fierce cloud came sweeping out of the horizon, big with flame and wrath, and fell on us like a mountain of hell. As long as it lasted the people lay flat on the sand or crouched under their kneeling camels, and when it was over they rose in the dead blankness with the red sand on their faces and sent up, as with one voice, a cry of lamentation and despair. But Ishmael only smiled and said, 'Let us thank God for this day, O my brothers,' and when the people asked him why, he answered, 'Because we can never know anything so bad again.'

"That simple word set every face shining, and as soon as we reached the next village – Black Zogal as usual having gone before us – lo, we heard a story of how Ishmael had commanded a sand-storm to pass over our heads without touching us – and it had!

"Another day we had stifling heat, in which the glare of the sand made our eyes to ache and the air to burn like the breath of a furnace. The water in the water-bottles became so hot that we dared not pour it on to the back of our hands, and even some of the camels dropped dead under the blazing eye of the sun.

"And when at length the sun sank beneath the horizon and left us in the cool dark night, the people could not sleep for want of water to bathe their swelling eyelids and to moisten their cracking throats, but Ishmael walked through their tents and comforted them, telling them it was never intended that man should always live well and comfortably, yet God, if He willed it, would bring them safely to their journey's end.

"After that the people lay down on the scorching sand as if their thirst had suddenly been quenched; and next day, on coming to the first village, we heard that in the middle of a valley of black and blistered hills, Ishmael smote with his staff a metallic rock that was twisted into the semblance of a knotted snake, and a well of ice-cold water sprung out of it, and everybody drank of it and then 'shook his fist at the sun.'

"Nearly all last week our people were in poor heart by reason of the mirages which mocked and misled them, showing an enchanted land on the margin of the sky, with beautiful blue lakes and rivers and green islands and shady groves of palm, and sweet long emerald grasses that quivered beneath a refreshing breeze; but when, from their monotonous track on the parched and naked desert, the poor souls would go in search of these phantoms, they would find nothing but a great lone land, in the fulness of a still deeper desolation.

"Then they would fling themselves down in despair and ask why they had been brought out into the wilderness to die, but Ishmael, with the same calm smile as before, would tell them that the life of this world was all a mirage, a troubled dream, a dream in a sleep, that the life to come was the awakening, and that he whose dream was most disturbed was nearest the gates of Paradise.

"Result – at the next town we came to, we were told that when we were in the middle of the wilderness Ishmael had made an oasis to spring up around us, with waving trees and rippling water and the air full of the songs of birds, the humming of bees, and the perfume of flowers, and we all fell asleep in it, and when we awoke in the morning we believed we had been in Heaven!

"Good-night, my dear – dear! Oh, to think that all this wilderness divides us! But ma'aleysh! In another hour I shall be asleep, and then – then I shall be in your arms."

II

"Oh my! Oh my! Two incidents have happened to-day, dearest, that can hardly fail of great results. Early in the morning we came upon the new convict settlement, a rough bastioned place built of sun-dried bricks in the middle of the Soudan desert. It contains the hundred and fifty Notables who were imprisoned by the Special Tribunal for assaults on the Army of Occupation when they were defending the house of your friend the Grand Cadi. How Ishmael discovered this I do not know, but what he did was like another manifestation of the 'mystic sense.'

"Stopping the caravan with an unexpected blast of the elephant-horn, he caused ten rows of men to be ranged around the prison, and after silence had been proclaimed, he called on them to say the first Surah: 'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures.'

"It had a weird effect in that lonesome place, as of a great monotonous wave breaking on a bar far out at sea, but what followed was still more eerie. After a breathless moment, in which everybody seemed to listen and hold his breath, there came the deadened and muffled sound of the same words repeated by the prisoners within the walls: 'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures.'

"When this was over Ishmael cried, 'Peace, brothers! Patience! The day of your deliverance is near! The Redeemer is coming! All your wrongs will be righted, all your bruises will be healed! Peace!'

"And then there came from within the prison walls the muffled answer, 'Peace!'

"The second of the incidents occurred about midday. When crossing a lifeless waste of gloomy volcanic sand, we came upon a desert graveyard, with those rounded hillocks of clay which make one think that the dead beneath must be struggling in their sleep.

"At a word from Ishmael all the men of our company who belong to that country stepped out from the caravan and riding round and round the cemetery, shouted the names of their kindred who were buried there: 'Ali!' 'Abdul!' 'Mohammed!' 'Mahmud!' 'Said!'

"After that Ishmael himself rode forward, and addressing the dead as if they could hear, he cried, 'Peace to you, O people of the graves! Wait! Lie still! The night is passing! The daylight dawns!'

"It was thrilling! Strange, simple, primitive, crude in its faith perhaps, but such love and reverence for the dead contrasted only too painfully with the vandalism of our 'Christian' vultures (yclept Egyptologists), who rifle the graves of the old Egyptians for their jewels and mummy beads, and then leave their bones in tons to bleach on the bare sand – a condition that is sufficient of itself to account for Jacob's prayer, 'Bury me not, I pray thee, in the land of Egypt.'

"And so say all of us! But seriously, my dear Gordon, I quite expect to hear at the next stopping-place a story of how Ishmael recited the Fatihah and the walls of a prison fell down before him, and how he spoke to the dead and they replied."

III

"It has happened! I knew it would! I have seen it coming, and it has come – without any help from Black Zogal's crazy imagination, either. There was only one thing wanted to complete the faith of these people in Ishmael's 'divinity' – a miracle, and it has been performed!

"I suppose it really belongs to the order of things that happen according to natural law – magnetism, suggestion, God knows what – but my pen positively jibs at recording it, so surely will it seem as if I had copied it out of a Book I need not name.

"This afternoon our vast human tortoise was trudging along, and a halt was being called to enable stragglers to come up, when a funeral procession crossed our track on its way to a graveyard on the stony hillside opposite.

"The Sheikh of a neighbouring village had lost his only child, a girl twelve years of age, and behind the blind men chanting the Koran, the hired mourners with their plaintive wail and the body on a bare board, the old father walked in his trouble, rending his garments and tearing off his turban.

"It was a pitiful sight; and when the mourners came up to Ishmael and told him the Sheikh was a God-fearing man who had not deserved this sorrow, I could see that he was deeply moved, for he called on the procession to stop, and making his camel kneel, he got down and tried to comfort the old man, saying, 'May the name of God be upon thee!'

"Then thinking, as it seemed to me, to show sympathy with the poor father, he stepped up to the bier and took the little brown hand which, with its silver ring and bracelet, hung over the board, and held it for a few moments while he asked when the child had died and what she had died of, and he was told she had died this morning, and the sun had killed her.

"All at once I saw Ishmael's hand tremble and a strange contraction pass over his face, and at the next moment, in a quivering voice, he called on the bearers to put down the bier. They did so, and at his bidding they uncovered the body, and I saw the face. It was the face of the dead! Yes, the dead, as lifeless and as beautiful as a face of bronze.

"At the next instant Ishmael was on his knees beside the body of the girl, and asking the father for her name. It was Helimah.

"'Helimah! Your father is waiting for you! Come,' said Ishmael, touching the child's eyes and smoothing her forehead, and speaking in a soft, caressing voice.

"Gordon, as I am a truthful woman, I saw it happen. A slight fluttering of the eyelids, a faint heaving of the bosom, and then the eyes were open, and at the next moment the girl was standing on her feet!

"God! what a scene it was that followed. The Sheikh on his knees kissing the hem of Ishmael's caftan, the men prostrating themselves before him, and the women tearing away the black veils that covered their faces, and crying, 'Blessed be the woman that bore thee!'

"It has been what the Arabs call a red day, and at that moment the setting sun catching the clouds of dust raised by the camels made the whole world one brilliant, fiery red. What wonder if these poor, benighted people thought the Lord of Heaven Himself had just come down!

"We left the village loaded with blessings (Black Zogal galloping frantically in front), and when we came to the next town – Berber, with its miles of roofless mud-huts, telling of Dervish destruction – crowds came out to salute Ishmael as the 'Guided One,' 'The true Mahdi,' and 'The Deliverer,' bringing their sick and lame and blind for him to heal them, and praying of him to remain.

"Oh, my dear Gordon, it is terrifying! Ishmael is no longer the messenger, the forerunner; he is now the Redeemer he foretold! I really believe he is beginning to believe it! This is the pillar of fire that is henceforth to guide us on our way. Already our numbers are three times what they were when we left Khartoum. What is to happen when thirty thousand persons, following a leader they believe to be divine, arrive in Cairo and are confronted by five thousand British soldiers?

"No! It is not bloodshed I am afraid of – I know you will prevent that. But what of the awful undeceiving, the utter degradation, the crushing collapse?

"And I? Don't think me a coward, Gordon – it isn't everybody who was born brave like you – but when I think of what I have done to this man, and how surely it will be found out that I have betrayed him, I tell myself that the moment I touch the skirts of civilisation I must run away.

"But meanwhile our pilgrimage is moving on – to its death, as it seems to me – and I am moving on with it as a slave – the slave of my own actions. If this is Destiny, it is wickedly cruel, I will say that for it; and if it is God, I think He might be a jealous God without making the blundering impulse of one poor girl the means of wrecking the hopes of a whole race of helpless people. Of course it acts as a sop to my conscience to remember what you said about God never making mistakes, but I cannot help wishing that in His inscrutable wisdom He could have left me out.

"Oh, my dear-dear! Where are you now, I wonder? What are you doing? What is being done to you? Have you seen your father, the Princess, and the Grand Cadi? I suppose I must not expect news until we reach Assouan. You promised to write to me, and you will – I know you will. Good-night, dearest! My love, my love, my only love! But I must stop. We are to make a night journey. The camp is in movement, and my camel is waiting. Adieu!

"HELENA."

CHAPTER VII

"SERAI FUM EL KHALIG,

"CAIRO.

"Salaam aleykoum! Ten days have passed, my dear Helena, since I wrote my last letter, and during that time I have learned all that is going on here, having in my assumed character of Ishmael in disguise interviewed nearly the whole of the Ulema, including that double-dyed dastard, the Grand Cadi.

"Under the wing – the rather fluttered one – of the good old Chancellor of El Azhar I saw the oily reprobate in his own house, and in his honeyed voice he made pretence of receiving me with boundless courtesy. I was his 'beloved friend in God,' 'the reformer of Islam,' called to the task of bringing men back to the Holy Koran, to the Prophet, and to eternal happiness. On the other hand, my father was 'the slave of power,' the 'evil-doer,' the 'adventurer,' and the 'great assassin,' who was led away by worldly things, and warring against God.

"More than once my hands itched to take the hypocrite from behind by the ample folds of his Turkish garments and fling him like vermin down the stairs, but I was there to hear what he was doing, so I smothered a few strong expressions which only the recording angel knows anything about, and was compelled to sit and listen.

"My dear Helena, it is even worse than I expected. Some of the double-dealing Egyptian Ministers, backed by certain of the diplomatic corps, but inspired by this Chief Judge in Islam, have armed a considerable part of the native populace, in the hope that the night when England, in the persons of her chief officials, is merry-making on the island of Ghezirah, and the greater part of the British force is away in the provinces quelling disturbances and keeping peace, the people may rise, the Egyptian army may mutiny, and Ishmael's followers may take possession of the city.

"All this and more, with many suave words about the 'enlightening help of God,' and the certainty of 'a bloodless victory,' in which the Almighty would make me glorious and the English would be driven out of Egypt, the crafty scoundrel did not hesitate to propound as a means whereby the 'true faith might be established all over Europe, Rome and London!'

"Since my interview with the Grand Cadi I have learned of a certainty, what I had already surmised, that the Consul-General has been made aware of the whole plot, and is taking his own measures to defeat it. Undoubtedly the first duty of a Government is to preserve order and to establish authority, and I know my father well enough to be sure that at any cost he will set himself to do both. But what will happen?

"Mark my word, the British army will be ordered back to the Capital – perhaps on the eve of the festival – and as surely as it enters the city on the night of the King's Birthday there will be massacre in the streets, for the Egyptian soldiers will rebel, and the people who have been provided with arms from the Secret Service money of England's enemies will rise, thinking the object of the Government is to prevent the entrance of Ishmael and his followers.

"Result – a holy war; and as that is the only kind of war that was ever yet worth waging, it will put Egypt in the right and England in the wrong.

"Does Ishmael expect this? No; he thinks he is to make a peaceful entry into Cairo when he comes to establish his World State, his millennium of universal faith and empire. Do the Ulema expect it? No; they think the Army of Occupation will be far away when their crazy scheme is carried into effect. Does my father expect it? Not for one moment, so sure is he – I know it perfectly, I have heard him say it a score of times – that the Egyptian soldier will not fight alone, and that Egyptian civilians can be scattered by a water-hose.

"Heaven help him! If ever a man was preparing to draw a sword from its scabbard it is my father at this moment, but it is only because he is played upon and deceived by this son and successor of Caiaphas the damned. I'll go and open his eyes to the Grand Cadi's duplicity. I'll say, 'Bring your oily scoundrel face to face with me, and see what I will say. If he denies it, you must choose for yourself which of us you will believe – your own son, who has nothing to gain by coming back to warn you, or this reptile who is fighting for the life of his rotten old class.'

"The thing is hateful to me, and if there were any other possible way of stopping the wretched slaughter I should not go, for I know it will end in the Consul-General handing me over to the military authorities to be court-martialled for my former offences, and, as you may say, it is horrible to put a father, with a high sense of duty, into the position of being compelled to cut off his own son.

"Meanwhile I am conscious that the police continue to watch me, and I am just as much a prisoner as if I were already within the walls of a jail. For their own purposes they are leaving me at liberty, and I believe they will go on doing so until after the night of the King's Birthday. After that, God knows what will happen.

"I am writing late, and I must turn in soon, so good-night, and God bless and preserve you, my own darling – mine, mine, mine, and nobody else's, remember that! Hafiz continues to protest that the Prophet has a love for you, and will bring out everything for the best. I think so too – I really do, so you must not be frightened about anything I have said in this letter.

"There is only one thing frightens me, and that is the damnable trick memory plays me when it rakes up all you told me of the terms of your betrothal to Ishmael. I can bear it pretty well during the day, but in that dead grey hour of the early morning, when the moonlight slinks into the dawn, before the sparrows begin to chop the air and the Arabs to rend it, I find myself thinking that though Ishmael, when he proposed marriage to you, may have been thinking of nothing but how to protect your good name, being a pure-minded man who had consecrated his life to a spiritual mission, yet the constant presence of a beautiful woman by his side must sooner or later sweep away his pledge.

"He wouldn't be a man if it didn't, and, the prophet notwithstanding, Ishmael is that to his finger-tips. But heaven help me! I daren't let my mind dwell on this subject, or I should have to fly back to you and leave my task here unfulfilled. So as often as I shut my eyes and see you trudging through the desert in Ishmael's caravan, I tell myself that Providence has something for you to do there – must have – though what the deuce it is, I don't yet see.

"No matter! D.V. I'll know some day, and meantime I'll nail my colours to the mast of your strength and courage, knowing that the bravest girl in the world belongs to me, and wherever she is, she is mine, and always will be. GORDON.

"P.S.– I am now dispatching my two letters to Assouan by Hamid Ibrahim – the second of the two Sheikhs who went with me to Alexandria – and if you find you can send me an answer, for God's sake, do! I am hungering and thirsting and starving and perishing for a letter from you – a line, a word, a syllable, the scratch of your pen on a piece of paper. Send it, for heaven's sake!

"I hear that hundreds of native boats are going up to Assouan to bring you down the Nile, so look out for my next letter when you get to Luxor – I may have something to tell you by that time."

CHAPTER VIII

I

"NUBIAN DESERT (anywhere).

"O MY GORDON, – Such startling developments! Ishmael's character has made a new manifestation. It concerns me, and I hardly know whether I ought to speak of it. Yet I must – I cannot help myself.

"I find there is something distinctly masculine in his interest in me! In Khartoum (in spite of certain evidences to the contrary) I was always fool enough to suppose that it was without sex – what milksops call Platonic – as if any such relation between a man and a woman ever was or ever will be!

"Oh, I know what you are saying! 'That foolish young woman thinks Ishmael is falling in love with her.' But wait, sir, only wait and listen.

"We left Berber at night, and rode for four hours in the moonlight. Goodness! What ghosts the desert is full of – ghosts of pyramids that loom large and then fade away. Such mysterious lights! Such spectral watch-towers standing on spectral heights! It was what the Arabs call 'a white night,' and besides the moon in its splendour there was a vast star-strewn sky. Sometimes we heard the hyena's cry, sometimes the jackal's ululation, and through the silver shimmering haze we could see the wild creatures scuttling away from us.

"Thus on and on went our weary caravan – the camels like great swans with their steady upturned heads, slithering as if in slippers along the noiseless sand, and many of the tired people asleep on them. But I could not sleep, and Ishmael, who was very much awake, rode by my side and talked to me.

"It was about love, and included one pretty story of a daughter of the Bedawee who married a Sultan – how she scorned the silken clothes he gave her and would not live in his palace – saying she was no fellaha to sleep in houses – and made him come out into the desert with her and dwell in a tent. I thought there was a certain self-reference in the story, but that was not all by any means.

"At midnight we halted by a group of wells, and while our vast army of animals was being watered my tent was set up outside the camp, so that I might rest without noise. I suppose I had been looking faint and pale, for just as I was listening to the monotonous voice of a boy who, at a fire not far away, was singing both himself and me to sleep, Ishmael came with a dish of medida, saying, 'Drink this, it will do you good.'

"Then he sat down, and, with that paralysing plainness of speech which the Easterns have, began to talk of love again, especially in relation to the duty of renunciation, quoting in that connection 'the lord of the Christians,' who had said, 'There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake.'

"It was more than embarrassing from the beginning, but it became startling and almost shocking when he went on to talk about Jesus in relation to Mary Magdalene (whom he supposed to be the sister of Martha), and of the home at Bethany as the only place in which He found the solace of female society, and how He had to turn His back on the love of woman for His work's sake.