The Mask of Fu-Manchu (22 page)

“By heavens! Sir Denis,” I cried. “It isn’t safe to leave just four men there tonight.”

“Why?” he snapped.

“You remember the meeting of dervishes reported by Enderby? Well—they are here—fifty or sixty strong!”

“Where?”

“Just this side of Mena House.”

“A rescue!” said the chief hoarsely. “They mean to rush the entrance! Fu-Manchu is hiding inside!”

I could see Nayland Smith pulling at the lobe of his ear.

“They began to gather about midnight,” said Hewlett. “It’s been reported.”

“Who are they?”

“Mostly men from outlying villages, and as Mr Greville says, members of various dervish orders.”

“I don’t like this,” rapped Nayland Smith. The Mahdi organised the dervishes, you know. What’s your opinion, Hewlett?”

“I haven’t one. I can’t make it out—unless, as Sir Lionel suggests, they are going to attempt to rush us… But, by jove! here they come!”

We had set out down the slope and nearly reached that point where Petrie and I had left the car. Now, we pulled up like one man.

Dimly visible in the darkness of the night, their marching feet crunching upon the sand, we saw a considerable company of Arabs approaching from the opposite direction.

“It might be dangerous,” Nayland Smith muttered, “if it weren’t for the fact that sixty armed men are still on duty.”

And as he spoke, that onward march ceased as if in response to some unspoken order. Vaguely, although at no great distance from where we stood, we could see that strangely silent company. The policeman who had stopped Petrie’s car suddenly appeared.

“What do I do about this, sir?” he asked, addressing Hewlett. “They look nasty to me.”

“Do nothing,” was the reply. “We have the situation well in hand.”

“Very good, sir.”

We were near enough now to the crowd on the edge of the plateau to be able to distinguish the colours of robes and turbans—white, black, green and red; a confused blurred mass, but divisible into units. And as I looked doubtingly in their direction, suddenly I saw a hundred arms upraised, and in a muted roar their many voices reached me:

“Mokanna!”

Whereupon, unanimous as worshippers in a cathedral, they dropped to their knees and bowed their heads in the sand!

“Good God! What’s this?”

Nayland Smith was the speaker.

We all turned together, looking back to the northern face of the Great Pyramid. And as we did so, I witnessed a spectacle as vivid in my mind tonight as it was on the occasion of its happening.

Perhaps two thirds of the way up the slope of the great building, but at a point which I knew to be inaccessible to any climber, a figure appeared... Even from where I stood, it was visible in great detail— for the reason that this figure was brilliantly lighted!

Many explanations occurred to us later of how this illumination might have been produced. We recalled the globular lamp in the King’s Chamber; several such lamps, masked from the viewpoint of the onlookers and placed one step below the figure, backed by reflectors, would, I think, have accounted for the phenomenon. But at the time, no solution offered.

Personally, I was conscious of nothing but stark amazement, For there, enshrined in the darkness,
I saw El Mokanna!

I saw a tall, majestic figure, wearing either a white or a very light green robe. The face was concealed by a golden mask and surmounted by a tall turban. Upraised in the right hand glittered a sword with a curved blade...

A weird chanting arose from the dervishes. I didn’t even glance back. I was staring—staring at that apparition on the Pyramid. Distant shouting reached me—orders, as I realised. But I knew, had known it all along, that no climber could reach that point.

Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the apparition vanished.

The lights had been extinguished or covered: such was the conclusion to which we came later. But at the time the effect was most uncanny. And as the figure vanished, again, from the dervishes, came a loud and now triumphant shout:

“Mokanna!”

In the dead silence which followed:

“Fu-Manchu has set us a problem,” said Nayland Smith. “Either he or some selected disciple has been posing as the reborn prophet, from Afghanistan right down to the border of Arabia. You understand the dervish gathering, now, Hewlett?”

A murmuring of excited conversation reached us. The assembly of Arabs, palpably come there as to a tryst, was dispersing and already returning down the slope.

“It was urgent,” Sir Denis went on; “hence the abduction of Rima. This was an
appointment
with the leaders of the
Senussi
and other fanatical orders. He had tricked them hitherto, but if the real relics had once been placed beyond his reach detection sooner or later was inevitable. This spark, Greville—” he turned to me in the darkness— “is going to light a bonfire. The Mokanna promises to be a greater problem that the Mahdi.”

Whereupon the chief began to laugh!

That laughter was so unexpected, and indeed so eerie in the circumstances, that I found in it some quality of horror.

“He’s tricked us, Smith!” he shouted. “He’s tricked us! But, by God, I’ve tricked
him
!”

T
he story of the second Masked Prophet, although extreme precautions were taken by the British secret service and by Sir Denis Nayland Smith, nevertheless leaked out and into the newspapers of Europe and America. It is well known today to everybody, so far as externals go.

Journalistic espionage triumphed even before the prophet appeared in Egypt. That ominous disturbance moving from Afghanistan down through Persia was paragraphed in the London
Daily Telegraph,
in the
Times of New York
and in Le Temps of Paris. The Indian papers had fairly long accounts.

When that strange rumour, hitherto unsupported by tangible evidence, reached Egypt, a special correspondent of the
Daily Mail
interviewed prominent Moslems. With one exception these denied all knowledge of the matter. The one—a learned imam whose name I have forgotten, but which may be found in the files of the newspaper in question—admitted that news of this movement had come to him. But, he informed his interviewer, it was confined to members of certain unorthodox sects; therefore he was not in a position to express any opinion regarding it.

This interview must have taken place, I suppose, at about the time that we reached Cairo. It was not prominently featured; but later came a column account by the same correspondent, of a second gathering of Wise Men, numbering not three, but according to his estimate, seventy; and a story of the apparition on the Great Pyramid which closely corresponded to the truth.

Since no other newspaper carried this story, I can only suppose that the correspondent of the
Daily Mail
was staying at Mena House.

Throughout these exacting days I lived in a state of unrelieved suspense. The watch on the Pyramid had had no results; the place was opened again to the public. Rima, who narrowly escaped a serious breakdown, was not fit to be moved for some time. Indeed, during the first forty-eight hours, Dr. Petrie was unable to conceal his anxiety.

The chief remained at Shepheard’s awaiting the return of Ali Mahmoud with the heavy baggage; but I had moved to the hotel by the Pyramids in order to be near Rima. She suffered from a strange delusion that I was dead, and my presence was frequently required to reassure her. Later, I learned the origin of this obsession, which at the time puzzled me, as it puzzled Petrie.

Acting partly, I think, upon that one memory which remained to me of the hiatus preceding Rima’s abduction, Sir Denis had proceeded in a Royal Air Force plane to Damascus.

The chief during this period was wrapped in one of his most impossible moods. A score of times I tried to discuss the mystery of Fu-Manchu’s disappearance; and:

“Your measurements were wrong, Greville,” was his invariable conclusion.

Characteristically, he did not question his own!

He referred, of course, to the investigation which we had carried out there, based upon his conviction that there were other chambers in the Great Pyramid. Sceptical as I had been at the time, I was disposed now to believe that Sir Lionel’s extraordinary imagination had not misguided him.

Failing the existence of other chambers, and, more astounding still, of another exit, the escape of Dr. Fu-Manchu was susceptible of no material explanation. The later apparition of the Masked Prophet at an inaccessible point on the northern slope, might have been accounted for by daring trickery.

But these were trying days indeed. Knowing, as everyone knows who has spent much time among Orientals, that news travels among them faster than radio can carry it, I killed many idle hours in the native quarter, listening to the talk of shopkeepers, peddlers and mendicants.

In this way, thanks to my knowledge of vernacular Arabic, I kept abreast of the Mokanna movement. Probably I knew, before Nayland Smith and the British intelligence service knew, that the threat of that uprising grew less day by day. It had proved abortive; something had gone wrong. I used to report to the chief such scraps of rumour as reached me. They seemed to afford him matter for amusement.

“We’ll sail in the next P. & O., Greville,” he said one night. “Rima should be fit enough by then. It’s high time we were out of Egypt. I’m only waiting for Ali Mahmoud…”

A
nd then at last came a day when Petrie announced to me privately that Rima was ready, was anxious, to be questioned; to tell her own story.

“Only you and I, Greville,” he stipulated. “It remains dangerous ground, and Barton is liable to prove an irritant…”

We had tea with her, Petrie and I, on the balcony of her room overlooking the Pyramids. It was Sunday. The tourist season now was in nearly full flower. Camels with grotesquely poor riders paced up the slope to that little plateau which contains two of the wonders of the world: the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. There were many cars. In the garden, smart Egyptians and their women occupied the best tables, regarding English, French, and American tourists with thinly veiled amusement.

Rima looked almost ethereal after her strange nervous illness, but so utterly desirable that I felt a savage urge to take her in my arms and stifle her with kisses. But, now that the fear phase had passed, I saw that she regarded me with a queer aloofness.

When her story was told, I understood...

“Of course, Shan, Dr. Petrie has made it all clear to me. You should be grateful to him, dear. I think he has saved me from…

“It was that night when you called for me at Shepheard’s—but of course, I’m forgetting; you know nothing about it! You see, Shan, after your disappearance on the evening of our arrival, I was simply in a frenzy. They kept it from me for a long time—Uncle and Sir Denis and the doctor. But at last they had to tell me, of course.

“I didn’t know what to do with myself. I began to think that my crazy behaviour was attracting attention—and I rushed up to my room. I hadn’t been there more than five minutes when one of the servants bought me a note—from
you
!”

“It was a forgery!” I cried. “It must have been!”

“Don’t interrupt, Greville,” said Petrie quietly. “These are the
facts.
Remember that they relate to a period during which your own evidence is not available.”

Good heavens! it was true. A great part of that night was a blank to me…

“It was from
you,”
Rima went on. “You asked me to tell no one, but to come out at once and join you… I couldn’t wait for the lift: I simply raced downstairs and out onto the terrace. An Egyptian chauffeur in a blue uniform met me and showed me where you were waiting—”

“I was waiting! Where?”

“Just opposite the hotel, beside a French landaulet. Of course, I ran across to you. Shan! you simply
hauled
me in! You were grim to the nth degree! But I was so utterly happy that at first I thought of nothing except that I had found you again.