Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) (659 page)

The unhappy prisoners looked at each other in despair. The two Emirs stood gravely watching them.

“For my part,” said Cochrane, “I had as soon die now as be a slave in Khartoum!”

“What do you say, Norah?” asked Belmont.

“If we die together, John, I don’t think I shall be afraid.”

“It is absurd that I should die for that in which I have never had belief,” said Fardet. “And yet it is not possible for the honour of a Frenchman that he should be converted in this fashion.” He drew himself up, with his wounded wrist stuck into the front of his jacket, “
Je suis Chrétien. J’y reste,
” he cried, a gallant falsehood in each sentence.

“What do you say, Mr. Stephens?” asked Mansoor, in a beseeching voice. “If one of you would change, it might place them in a good humour. I implore you that you do what they ask.”

“No, I can’t,” said the lawyer, quietly.

“Well then, you, Miss Sadie? You, Miss Adams? It is only just to say it once, and you will be saved.”

“Oh, Auntie, do you think we might?” whimpered the frightened girl. “Would it be so very wrong if we said it?”

The old lady threw her arms round her.

“No, no, my own dear little Sadie,” she whispered. “You’ll be strong! You would just hate yourself for ever after. Keep your grip of me, dear, and pray if you find your strength is leaving you. Don’t forget that your old aunt Eliza has you all the time by the hand.”

For an instant they were heroic, this line of dishevelled, bedraggled pleasure-seekers. They were all looking Death in the face, and the closer they looked the less they feared him. They were conscious rather of a feeling of curiosity, together with the nervous tingling with which one approaches a dentist’s chair. The dragoman made a motion of his hands and shoulders, as one who has tried and failed. The Emir Abderrahman said something to a negro, who hurried away.

“What does he want a scissors for?” asked the Colonel.

“He is going to hurt the women,” said Mansoor, with the same gesture of impotence.

A cold chill fell upon them all. They stared about them in helpless horror. Death in the abstract was one thing, but these insufferable details were another. Each had been braced to endure any evil in his own person, but their hearts were still soft for each other. The women said nothing, but the men were all buzzing together.

“There’s the pistol, Miss Adams,” said Belmont.

“Give it here! We won’t be tortured! We won’t stand it!”

“Offer them money, Mansoor! Offer them anything!” cried Stephens. “Look. here, I’ll turn Mohammedan if they’ll promise to leave the women alone. After all, it isn’t binding — it’s under compulsion. But I can’t see the women hurt.”

“No, wait a bit, Stephens!” said the Colonel. “We mustn’t lose our heads. I think I see a way out. See here, dragoman! You tell that grey-bearded old devil that we know nothing about his cursed tinpot religion. Put it smooth when you translate it. Tell him that he cannot expect us to adopt it until we know what particular brand of rot it is that he wants us to believe. Tell him that if he will instruct us, we are perfectly willing to listen to his teaching, and you can add that any creed which turns out such beauties as him, and that other bounder with the black beard, must claim the attention of every one.”

With bows and suppliant sweepings of his hands the dragoman explained that the Christians were already full of doubt, and that it needed but a little more light of knowledge to guide them on to the path of Allah. The two Emirs stroked their beards and gazed suspiciously at them. Then Abderrahman spoke in his crisp, stern fashion to the dragoman, and the two strode away together. An instant later the bugle rang out as a signal to mount.

“What he says is this,” Mansoor explained, as he rode in the middle of the prisoners. “We shall reach the wells by mid-day, and there will be a rest. His own Moolah, a very good and learned man, will come to give you an hour of teaching. At the end of that time you will choose one way or the other. When you have chosen, it will be decided whether you are to go to Khartoum or to be put to death. That is his last word.”

“They won’t take ransom?”

“Wad Ibrahim would, but the Emir Abderrahman is a terrible man. I advise you to give in to him.”

“What have you done yourself? You are a Christian, too.”

Mansoor blushed as deeply as his complexion would allow.

“I was yesterday morning. Perhaps I will be to-morrow morning. I serve the Lord as long as what He ask seem reasonable; but this is very otherwise.”

He rode onwards amongst the guards with a freedom which showed that his change of faith had put him upon a very different footing to the other prisoners.

So they were to have a reprieve of a few hours, though they rode in that dark shadow of death which was closing in upon them.

What is there in life that we should cling to it so? It is not the pleasures, for those whose hours are one long pain shrink away screaming when they see merciful Death holding his soothing arms out for them. It is not the associations, for we will change all of them before we walk of our own free wills down that broad road which every son and daughter of man must tread. Is it the fear of losing the I, that dear, intimate I, which we think we know so well, although it is eternally doing things which surprise us? Is it that which makes the deliberate suicide cling madly to the bridge-pier as the river sweeps him by? Or is it that Nature is so afraid that all her weary workmen may suddenly throw down their tools and strike, that she has invented this fashion of keeping them constant to their present work? But there it is, and all these tired, harassed, humiliated folk rejoiced in the few more hours of suffering which were left to them.

CHAPTER VI
I

There was nothing to show them as they journeyed onwards that they were not on the very spot that they had passed at sunset upon the evening before. The region of fantastic black hills and orange sand which bordered the river had long been left behind, and everywhere now was the same brown, rolling, gravelly plain, the ground-swell with the shining rounded pebbles upon its surface, and the occasional little sprouts of sage-green camel-grass. Behind and before it extended, to where far away in front of them it sloped upwards towards a line of violet hills. The sun was not high enough yet to cause the tropical shimmer, and the wide landscape, brown with its violet edging, stood out with a hard clearness in that dry, pure air. The long caravan straggled along at the slow swing of the baggage-camels. Far out on the flanks rode the vedettes, halting at every rise, and peering backwards with their hands shading their eyes. In the distance their spears and rifles seemed to stick out of them, straight and thin, like needles in knitting.

“How far do you suppose we are from the Nile?” asked Cochrane. He rode with his chin on his shoulder and his eyes straining wistfully to the eastern sky-line.

“A good fifty miles,” Belmont answered.

“Not so much as that,” said the Colonel. “We could not have been moving more than fourteen or fifteen hours, and a camel seldom goes more than two and a half miles an hour unless he is trotting. That would give about forty miles, but still it is, I fear, rather far for a rescue. I don’t know that we are much the better for this postponement. What have we to hope for? We may just as well take our gruel.”

“Never say die!” cried the cheery Irishman. “There’s plenty of time between this and mid-day. Hamilton and Hedley of the Camel Corps are good boys, and they’ll be after us like a streak. They’ll have no baggage-camels to hold them back, you can lay your life on that! Little did I think, when I dined with them at mess that last night, and they were telling me all their precautions against a raid, that I should depend upon them for our lives.”

“Well, we’ll play the game out, but I’m not very hopeful,” said Cochrane. “Of course, we must keep the best face we can before the women. I see that Tippy Tilly is as good as his word, for those five niggers and the two brown Johnnies must be the men he speaks of. They all ride together and keep well up, but I can’t see how they are going to help us.”

“I’ve got my pistol back,” whispered Belmont, and his square chin and strong mouth set like granite. “If they try any games on the women, I mean to shoot them all three with my own hand, and then we’ll die with our minds easy.”

“Good man!” said Cochrane, and they rode on in silence. None of them spoke much. A curious, dreamy, irresponsible feeling crept over them. It was as if they had all taken some narcotic drug — the merciful anodyne which Nature uses when a great crisis has fretted the nerves too far. They thought of their friends and of their past lives in the comprehensive way in which one views that which is completed. A subtle sweetness mingled with the sadness of their fate. They were filled with the quiet serenity of despair.

“It’s devilish pretty,” said the Colonel, looking about him. “I always had an idea that I should like to die in a real, good, yellow London fog. You couldn’t change for the worse.”

“I should have liked to have died in my sleep,” said Sadie. “How beautiful to wake up and find yourself in the other world! There was a piece that Hetty Smith used to say at the college, ‘Say not good-night, but in some brighter world wish me good-morning.’”

The Puritan aunt shook her head at the idea. “It’s a terrible thing to go unprepared into the presence of your Maker,” said she.

“It’s the loneliness of death that is terrible,” said Mrs. Belmont. “If we and those whom we loved all passed over simultaneously, we should think no more of it than of changing our house.”

“If the worst comes to the worst, we won’t be lonely,” said her husband. “We’ll all go together, and we shall find Brown and Headingly and Stuart waiting on the other side.”

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. He had no belief in survival after death, but he envied the two Catholics the quiet way in which they took things for granted. He chuckled to think of what his friends in the Café Cubat would say if they learned that he had laid down his life for the Christian faith. Sometimes it amused and sometimes it maddened him, and he rode onwards with alternate gusts of laughter and of fury, nursing his wounded wrist all the time like a mother with a sick baby.

Across the brown of the hard, pebbly desert there had been visible for some time a single long, thin, yellow streak, extending north and south as far as they could see. It was a band of sand not more than a few hundred yards across, and rising at the highest to eight or ten feet. But the prisoners were astonished to observe that the Arabs pointed at this with an air of the utmost concern, and they halted when they came to the edge of it like men upon the brink of an unfordable river. It was very light, dusty sand, and every wandering breath of wind sent it dancing into the air like a whirl of midges. The Emir Abderrahman tried to force his camel into it, but the creature, after a step or two, stood still and shivered with terror.

The two chiefs talked for a little, and then the whole caravan trailed off with their heads for the north, and the streak of sand upon their left.

“What is it?” asked Belmont, who found the dragoman riding at his elbow. “Why are we going out of our course?”

“Drift sand,” Mansoor answered. “Every sometimes the wind bring it all in one long place like that. To-morrow, if a wind comes, perhaps there will not be one grain left, but all will be carried up into the air again. An Arab will sometimes have to go fifty or a hundred miles to go round a drift. Suppose he tries to cross, his camel breaks its legs, and he himself is sucked in and swallowed.”

“How long will this be?”

“No one can say.”

“Well, Cochrane, it’s all in our favour. The longer the chase the better chance for the fresh camels!” and for the hundredth time he looked back at the long, hard skyline behind them. There was the great, empty, dun-coloured desert, but where the glint of steel or the twinkle of white helmet for which he yearned?

And soon they cleared the obstacle in their front. It spindled away into nothing, as a streak of dust would which has been blown across an empty room. It was curious to see that when it was so narrow that one could almost jump it, the Arabs would still go for many hundreds of yards rather than risk the crossing. Then, with good, hard country before them once more, the tired beasts were whipped up, and they ambled on with a double-jointed jog-trot, which set the prisoners nodding and bowing in grotesque and ludicrous misery. It was fun at first, and they smiled at each other, but soon the fun had become tragedy as the terrible camel-ache seized them by spine and waist, with its deep, dull throb, which rises gradually to a splitting agony.

“I can’t stand it, Sadie,” cried Miss Adams, suddenly. “I’ve done my best. I’m going to fall.”

“No, no, Auntie, you’ll break your limbs if you do. Hold up, just a little, and maybe they’ll stop.”

“Lean back, and hold your saddle behind,” said the Colonel. “There, you’ll find that will ease the strain.” He took the puggaree from his hat, and, tying the ends together, he slung it over her front pommel. “Put your foot in the loop,” said he. “It will steady you like a stirrup.”

The relief was instant, so Stephens did the same for Sadie. But presently one of the weary doora camels came down with a crash, its limbs starred out as if it had split asunder, and the caravan had to come down to its old sober gait.

“Is this another belt of drift sand?” asked the Colonel, presently.

“No, it’s white,” said Belmont. “Here, Mansoor, what is that in front of us?”

But the dragoman shook his head.

“I don’t know what it is, sir. I never saw the same thing before.”

Right across the desert, from north to south, there was drawn a white line, as straight and clear as if it had been slashed with chalk across a brown table. It was very thin, but it extended without a break from horizon to horizon. Tippy Tilly said something to the dragoman.

“It’s the great caravan route,” said Mansoor.

“What makes it white, then?”

“The bones.”

It seemed incredible, and yet it was true, for as they drew nearer they saw that it was indeed a beaten track across the desert, hollowed out by long usage, and so covered with bones that they gave the impression of a continuous white ribbon. Long, snouty heads were scattered everywhere, and the lines of ribs were so continuous that it looked in places like the framework of a monstrous serpent. The endless road gleamed in the sun as if it were paved with ivory. For thousands of years this had been the highway over the desert, and during all that time no animal of all those countless caravans had died there without being preserved by the dry, antiseptic air. No wonder, then, that it was hardly possible to walk down it now without treading upon their skeletons.

“This must be the route I spoke of,” said Stephens. “I remember marking it upon the map I made for you, Miss Adams. Baedeker says that it has been disused on account of the cessation of all trade which followed the rise of the Dervishes, but that it used to be the main road by which the skins and gums of Darfur found their way down to Lower Egypt.”

They looked at it with a listless curiosity, for there was enough to engross them at present in their own fates. The caravan struck to the south along the old desert track, and this Golgotha of a road seemed to be a fitting avenue for that which awaited them at the end of it. Weary camels and weary riders dragged on together towards their miserable goal.

And now, as the critical moment approached which was to decide their fate, Colonel Cochrane, weighed down by his fears lest something terrible should befall the women, put his pride aside to the extent of asking the advice, of the renegade dragoman. The fellow was a villain and a coward, but at least he was an Oriental, and he understood the Arab point of view. His change of religion had brought him into closer contact with the Dervishes, and he had overheard their intimate talk. Cochrane’s stiff, aristocratic nature fought hard before he could bring himself to ask advice from such a man, and when he at last did so, it was in the gruffest and most unconciliatory voice.

“You know the rascals, and you have the same way of looking at things,” said he. “Our object is to keep things going for another twenty-four hours. After that it does not much matter what befalls us, for we shall be out of the reach of rescue. But how can we stave them off for another day?”

“You know my advice,” the dragoman answered; “I have already answered it to you. If you will all become as I have, you will certainly be carried to Khartoum alive. If you do not, you will never leave our next camping-place alive.”

The Colonel’s well-curved nose took a higher tilt, and an angry flush reddened his thin cheeks. He rode in silence for a little, for his Indian service had left him with a curried-prawn temper, which had had an extra touch of cayenne added to it by his recent experiences. It was some minutes before he could trust himself to reply.