you believe in portents? I do. Whenever in the East the first two statements that a man has made in my presence, and that I have a chance to test, prove accurate, I go ahead and bet on all the rest. I don’t mean by that that because a man has told the truth twice he won’t lie on the third and fourth occasion; for the East is like the West in that respect, and usually seeks to turn its virtue into capital. But in a land where, as old King Solomon, who knew his crowd, remarked, “All men are liars,” you must have some sort of weathervane by which to guide your national optimism, so I settled on that one long ago.
Ali Baba had said there was a bad stink in the camel stables. A natural expert in hyperbole, he had not exaggerated in the least. And he had said that they were good camels; it was true. You did not need to be a camel expert to know those great long-legged Syrian beasts for winners. They looked like the first pick of a whole country-side, as he maintained they were —twenty-five of them in one string, representing an investment at after-war prices of the equivalent of five or six thousand U.S. dollars.
“Who has been looted to pay for these?” asked Grim.
“Allah! You have put an end to our proper business, Jimgrim. What could we do? We took our money and bought these camels, thinking to take a hand in the caravan trade.”
Grim looked into the old rogue’s eyes and laughed.
“In the land I come from,” he said, “a capitalist with your predatory instincts would pay a lawyer by the year to tell him just how far he could safely go!”
“A wakil?” sneered Ali Baba. “The wakils are all scoundrels. May Allah grind their bones! No honest man can have the advantage of such people.”
Grim looked the loads over, but there was nothing that anyone could teach that gang about desert work. The goat-skin water-bags were newly patched and moist; the gear was all in good shape, none new, but all well-tested; and there was food enough in double sacks for twenty men for a month. Mujrim, Ali Baba’s giant oldest son, picked up the loads and turned them over for Grim to examine with about as much apparent effort as if he were tossing pillows.
Presently Grim laughed again, and looked at the line of fifteen other sons and grandsons, all squatting in the shadow of the wall watching us.
“Which is the chief Lothario?” he asked; only he used a much more expressive word than that, because the East is frank where the West deals in innuendo, and vice versa.
“They are all grown men,” said Ali Baba.
“There’s a woman named Ayisha—a Badawi (Bedouin)—who has lately come from El-Maan with a caravan of wheat merchants.”
“How did you know that, Jimgrim?”
“I’m told she has been buying things in the suk* that no Badawi could have use for, and has sent to Jerusalem for goods that could not be obtained here. I want to speak with her. Has any of your”—he smiled at the line of placidly contented sons again—“fathers of immorality made her acquaintance by some chance?”
Every one of the sixteen sons instantly assumed an expression of far-away meditation. Ali Baba looked shocked.
“I see!” said Grim. “Um-m-m! Well—none of my business. But one of you go fetch her to the governorate. You may tell her she’s not in trouble, but an officer wants first-hand information about El-Maan.”
“Shall my sons be seen dragging a woman through the streets?” asked Ali Baba.
“Let’s hope not. But I don’t care to send the police. I don’t want to put her to indignity, you understand. Suppose you arrange it for me, eh?”
“Listen, Jimgrim; that woman is a strange one! Men have spoken evil of her, but none can prove it. I have heard it said she has a devil. ‘Trust in God, but tie your camel!’ says the Book.* The wisest among wise men would be he who let that woman alone!”
“I suppose I’ll have to get Captain de Crespigny to arrange it for me.”
“Tfu!* There is no need for a man like you to appeal to the governor. Taib. It shall be done. Have no doubt of it.”
“All right. Send her up to the governorate—and no delays, mind! We start tonight at sundown.”
On our way back we met Narayan Singh returning from the sukwith parcels under his arm. That in itself was a sure sign of the lapse of contact with law and order; in Jerusalem he would have had an Arab carry them, because dignity is part of a Sikh’s uniform. You realized without a word said that the uniform would be discarded presently. He looked me up and down as the quartermaster eyes a new recruit, and nodded in that exasperating way that makes you feel as if you had been ticketed and numbered. If Grim had not told me that the Sikh had been first to suggest taking me to Petra I would have insulted him painstakingly there and then; but you learn a certain amount of self-restraint, I suppose, before such a man as Narayan Singh ever approves of you for any purpose.
He undid the parcels on the dining-room table in the governorate, and the next half-hour was spent in rigging me up as an ascetic-looking Indian Moslem, with the aid of a white turban wound over a cone-shaped cap, great horn-rimmed spectacles, and the comfortable, baggy garments that the un-modernized hakim wears over narrow cotton pantaloons.
Over it all they put a loose, brown Bedouin cloak of camel-hair such as any man expecting to travel across deserts might invest in, whatever his nationality; it was hotter than Tophet, but, as the Arabs say, what keeps the heat in will also keep it out. It gives you a feeling of carrying your home around with you on your back, the way a snail totes its shell, and there are worse sensations.
“Now consider yourself a while in the mirror, sahib,” said Narayan Singh. “When a man knows how he looks he begins to act accordingly.”
Have you ever stopped to think how true that is? There was a full-length mirror upstairs in de Crespigny’s bedroom, left behind by a German missionary’s wife when the Turks and their friends stampeded, and Narayan Singh watched while I posed in front of it. Before many minutes, without any deliberately conscious effort on my part, gesture and attitude were molding themselves to fit the costume, in somewhat the same way, I suppose, that a farm-hand from Montenegro shapes himself into a new American store suit.
“But it is necessary to remember!” warned Narayan Singh. “We should have done this sooner. There should be a photograph to carry with you, because a man forgets his own appearance where there are no mirrors and none others resembling himself. Henceforward, sahib, sleeping or waking, be a hakim! There is a chest of medicines downstairs.”
By the time I had got down Grim had already changed into Bedouin dress —stepped simply out of one world into another. All he does is to stain his eyebrows dark, put on the clothes, and cease to resemble anything on earth except a desert-born Arab. I don’t know how long he was learning to make the transformation, but no man could learn the trick in twenty years unless he loved the desert and the sinewy men who live in it.
He looked me over again narrowly, and then decided I must return upstairs and shave my head. “The only chance you’ve got of not being pulled apart between four camels, or pushed over a precipice, is to look like darwaish. Have Narayan Singh stain the back of your neck with henna—not too much of it—just a little—you’re from Lahore, you know— a university product.”
By the time I had carried out that order I could not even recognize
