and afterwards another came and closed it. They could see that the cement was fresh and the stones slightly disarranged and that convinced them! Do you realize my predicament? My choice lay between confession that I had not guarded the cave faithfully, or saying nothing. I have said nothing. I continue to say nothing. Let Allah speak, or the spirit of Abraham, for I am dumb!”
“I find that you have been unwise,” said Grim after a minute’s pause; and for half a minute after that the Sheikh battled with his own priestly pride. For many and many a year he had been fault-finder-in-chief in Hebron, and the licensed critic of others seldom suffers judgment dociley. However, he swallowed the verdict, Grim watching him as if a chemical experiment were taking place in a test-tube.
“But not unfaithful,” Grim added, when the right second seemed to have come to drop that new ingredient into the mixture of emotions.
The Sheikh’s eyes that had been blazing grew as grateful as a dog’s.
“Moreover, I find that the wisdom of your subsequent silence offsets the former foolishness and I shall say so to Seyyid Omar when I go back to El-Kudz.”
”Istarfrallah! (I beg God’s pardon!)”
“In silence there is dignity, and out of dignity may come deliverance,” said Grim.
”Inshallah! (If God wills!)”
“Those seventeen thieves are not men of keen intellect, are they?” Grim asked him suddenly.
“Allah! They are rogues with the brains of foxes—no better and no less.”
“How should they have thought of such a scheme as this?”
”Shi ajib. (It is a strange thing.) Who can fathom it?”
“There must be a brain behind them.”
“Perhaps the brain of Satan! Who knows?”
“Think!” said Grim. “Is there any foreigner in Hebron who might have put them up to it?”
“I know of none.”
“Has there been no stranger here, who perhaps took a particular interest in the entrance to the cave?”
“Ah! There was one, yes—about a month ago. But he was a dervish out of Egypt—a mere fanatic—a fool who did tricks with coins and eggs to amuse folk and begged his living.”
“Where is he now?” asked Grim.
“They say he lives in a cave near Abraham’s Oak.”
“You say a mere mountebank?”
“No better.”
Grim proceeded to dismiss that subject as beneath consideration. If I had dared air my Arabic I would have urged him to follow it up further and by the look in Cohen’s eye he felt the same about it; but the most that either of us dared do was to sit still and call as little attention to ourselves as possible. Nothing but the fact that Grim had forced the Sheikh on the defensive from the start was preserving us from being questioned in a way that would have exposed me certainly, and Cohen probably.
“And this fire-gift—they are going to display it now?” asked Grim, as if he did not know.
“Aye, now. And I, who am Sheikh of this mosque, must eat humility and watch them. Truly are the ways of Allah past discerning. Verily dust is dust.”
“Amen!” said Grim. “But did you never see a vision? May the Sheikh of a mosque such as this not talk with spirits now and then?”
The Sheikh stared back at him with his jaw down. You could have put anything into his mouth that you cared to and he wouldn’t have known it; the suggestion had hit home.
“If seventeen thieves can see an angel,” Grim went on, as if propounding a conundrum, “how many can the Sheikh of this mosque see?”
“But the fire-gift? These men show a miracle. How to answer that?”
“With another.”
“But—but—I am no mountebank. I can do no tricks with fire.”
“New tricks would do no good without a prophecy,” said Grim. “In a matter of prophecy, whose word would be listened to, yours or theirs?”
”Inshallah, mine!”
“And which is wiser: to confound your adversary with his own arguments, or yours?”
“With his. Surely with his, for then he has no retort.”
“So then—these seventeen thieves say that the fire-gift came out of the tomb of Abraham. If you were to say that because they are thieves the fire-gift must return again; if you were to say that an angel had appeared to you and told you that, would not all Hebron listen?”
“It might be. But Ali Baba and his sixteen sons have preached a killing of the Jews. The swords of El-Kalil are sharpened. They are ready to begin.”
“Yes, and if they do begin all Hebron will say afterwards that the fire-gift and the prophecy were true. Ali Baba will be reckoned a true prophet and you will have a competitor on your hands.”
“Truly.”
“Therefore the massacre must not begin. Therefore you must stand up in the mosque now, and say you have seen a vision.”
“But if I tell them there must be no massacre they will hurry all the faster to begin it; for that is the way of the men of El-Kalil.”
“Not if you promise the chance of a greater miracle.”
“But what then? What shall I promise?”
“Say that the angel said to you, ‘These seventeen men are thieves and stole the fire-gift. Therefore there is a condition made. Not one Jew must be slain until the Jews shall have their chance to bring the fire-gift back. If they do bring it back, well; they are reprieved. They have one day and night in which to do it, and if a Jew is slain meanwhile there will be a vengeance on El-Kalil such as never yet befell—a vengeance of wrath and death and ruin. But if the Jews shall fail to bring it back, let them take the consequences!’”
“These are dark words,” said the Sheikh.
“They are wise words.”
”Inshallah, the plan can do no harm. If the Jews can make no miracle, at least I shall have taken something of the influence away from Ali Baba. This massacre is not good; delay might prevent it and avoid the punishment the British would mete out afterwards. Good. I will stand in the mosque and say I have seen a vision!”
“Better do it now,” said Grim. “It’s getting late.”
“Come ye, and sit in the mosque then, and listen!”
CHAPTER VI.
“Fortune favors the man who favors fortune.”
