in the morning. If he asks what we have been speaking about so long, tell him I brought you the compliments of Mustapha Kemal.”
“I will tell him to go to jahannam!”
“Better be civil to him. His hour comes tomorrow.”
The sheikh led the way along one side of the inner of three concentric parts into which the mosque is divided by rows of marble columns, until we came to a cavernous opening in the floor, where steps hewn in the naked rock led downward into a cave that underlies the spot on which tradition says Abraham made ready to sacrifice his son.
It was very dark below. Only one little oil lamp was burning, on a rock shaped like an altar in one corner. It cast leaping shadows that looked like ghosts on the smooth, uneven walls. The whole place was hardly more than twenty feet wide each way. There was no furniture, not even the usual mats—nothing but naked rock to lie or sit on, polished smooth as glass by centuries of naked feet.
I was going to sit in a corner, but Grim seized my arm and pointed to the centre of the floor, stamping with his foot to show the exact place I should take. It rang vaguely hollow under the impact, and Suliman, already frightened by the shadows, seized my hand in a paroxysm of terror.
“You’ve got to prove you’re a man tonight and stick it out!” Grim said to him in English; and with that, rather than argue the point and risk a scene, he followed the sheikh up the steps and disappeared. Grim’s methods with Suliman were a strange mixture of understanding sympathy and downright indifference to sentiment that got him severely criticized by the know-it-all party, who always, everywhere condemn. But he certainly got results.
A legion of biblical and Koranic devils owned Suliman. They were the child’s religion. When he dared, he spat at the name of Christianity. Whenever Grim whipped him, which he had to do now and again, for theft or for filthy language, he used to curse Grim’s religion, although Grim’s religion was a well-kept secret, known to none but himself. But the kid was loyal to Grim with a courage and persistence past belief, and Grim knew how to worm the truth out of him and make him keep his word, which is more than some of the professional reformers know how to do with their proteges. I believe that Suliman would rather have earned Grim’s curt praise than all the fabulous delights of even a Moslem paradise.
But the kid was in torment. His idea of manliness precluded any exhibition of fear in front of me, if he could possibly restrain himself. He would not have minded breaking down in front of Grim, for he knew that Grim knew him inside out. On the contrary, he looked down on me, as a mere amateur at the game, who had never starved at the Jaffa Gate, nor eaten candle-ends, or gambled for milliemes[26] with cab-drivers’ sons while picking up odds and ends of gossip for a government that hardly knew of his existence. In front of me he proposed to act the man—guide— showman—mentor. He considered himself my boss.
But it was stem work. If there had been a little noise to make the shadows less ghostly; if Suliman had not been full of half-digested superstition; or if he had not overheard enough to be aware that a prodigious, secret plot was in some way connected with that cavern, he could have kept his courage up by swaggering in front of me.
He nearly fell asleep, with his head in my lap, at the end of half-an-hour. But when there was a sound at last he almost screamed. I had to clap my hand over his mouth; whereat he promptly bit my finger, resentful because he knew then that I knew he was afraid.
It proved to be approaching footsteps—the sheikh of the mosque again, leading the man from Trichinopoli and a party of three friends. Their rear was brought up by Noureddin; Ali’s spy, anxious about me, but pretending to want to overhear the sheikh’s account of things.
The sheikh reeled it all off in a cultured voice accustomed to using the exact amount of energy required, but even so his words boomed in the cavern like the forethought of thunder. You couldn’t help wondering whether a man of his intelligence believed quite all he said, however much impressed the man from Trichinopoli might be.
“We are now beneath the very rock on which Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. This rock is the centre of the world. Jacob anointed it. King Solomon built his temple over it. The Prophet of God, the Prince Mahommed, on whose head be blessings! said of this place that it is next in order of holiness after Mecca, and that one prayer said here is worth ten elsewhere. Here, in this place, is where King Solomon used to kneel in prayer, and where God appeared to him. This corner is where David prayed. Here prayed Mahommed.
“Look up. This hollow in the roof is over the spot where the Prophet Mahommed slept. When he arose there was not room for him to stand upright, so the Rock receded, and the hollow place remains to this day in proof of it. Beneath us is the Bir-el-Arwah, the well of souls, where those who have died come to pray twice weekly. Listen!”
He stamped three times with his foot on the spot about two feet in front of where I sat, and a faint, hollow boom answered the impact.
“You hear? The Rock speaks! It spoke in plain words when the Prophet prayed here, and was translated instantly to heaven on his horse El-Burak. Here, deep in the Rock, is the print of the hand of the angel, who restrained the Rock from following the Prophet on his way to Paradise. Here, in this niche, is where Abraham used to pray; here, Elijah. On the last day the Kaaba of Mecca must come to this place. For it is here, in this cave, that the blast of the trumpet will sound, announcing the day of judgment. Then God’s throne will be planted on the Rock above us. Be humble in the presence of these marvels.”
He turned on his pompous heel and led the way out again without as much as a sidewise glance at me. The spy was satisfied; he followed the party up the rock-hewn steps, and as a matter of fact went to sleep on a mat near the north door, for so I found him later on.
The silence shut down again. Suliman went fast asleep, snoring with the even cadence of a clock’s tick, using my knees for a pillow with a perfect sense of ownership. He was there to keep care of me, not I of him. The sleep suggestion very soon took hold of me, too, for there was nothing whatever to do but sit and watch the shadows move, trying to liken them to something real as they changed shape in answer to the flickering of the tiny, naked flame. Thereafter, the vigil resolved itself into a battle with sleep, and an effort to keep my wits sufficiently alert for sudden use.
I had no watch. There was nothing to give the least notion of how much time had passed. I even counted the boy’s snores for a while, and watched one lonely louse moving along the wall—so many snores to the minute—so many snores to an inch of crawling; but the louse changed what little mind he had and did not walk straight, and I gave up trying to calculate the distance he traveled in zigzags and curves, although it would have been an interesting problem for a navigator. Finally, Suliman’s snoring grew so loud that that in itself kept me awake; it was like listening to a hair-trombone; each blast of it rasped your nerves.
You could not hear anything in the mosque above, although there were only eleven steps and the opening was close at hand; for the floor above was thickly carpeted, and if there were any sounds they were swallowed by that and the great, domed roof. When I guessed it might be midnight I listened for the voice of the muezzin; but if he did call the more-than-usually faithful to wake up and pray, he did it from a minaret outside, and no faint echo of his voice reached me. I was closed in a tomb in the womb of living rock, to all intents and purposes.
But it must have been somewhere about midnight when I heard a sound that set every vein in my body tingling. At first it was like the sort of sound that a rat makes gnawing; but there couldn’t be rats eating their way through that solid stone. I thought I heard it a second time, but Suliman’s snoring made it impossible to listen properly. I shook him violently, and he sat up.
“Keep still! Listen!”
Between
