had clothed him he might likely have seemed naked still because of the outrageous insolence that owned him.
For minute after minute he stood gazing at the camp, with his stomach thrust out in an attitude of self-complacency and his arms folded across his chest. Then, as if the turban on his head were too much concession to the prejudice of other folk, he began to unwind the thing, coiling the yards of cloth around his arm.
“What did I tell you?” whispered Catesby. “Isn’t he a horror? Isn’t he a gruesome swine?”
“In my land there are millions with no more than a yard or two of rag apiece; but that thing there is an insult to the gods, and he should die!” declared Narayan Singh.
“Nevertheless, remember what I said. Don’t kill him,” Jim answered. “He thinks he knows something or he wouldn’t like himself so much. Let’s find out.”
The man began to posture on the hilltop, taking attitudes suggestive of the figures on Egyptian temple walls. He seemed conscious of the fact that the rising moon served to spotlight as well as background, for his movements were deliberately calculated to show up in silhouette. They were slow and strong and snakelike, but little by little the snake idea gained ascendancy until his whole body writhed in serpentine contortions.
Then he began to dance. You could not watch the man and tear yourself away or make a move against him. He had the faculty of stirring curiosity and holding it, so that each move was a fascinating prelude to the next and you had to wait to see.
The dance began with a rapid repetition of the Egyptian poses, so skillfully done that the infinitely tiny pause between each movement served to fix each posture in the watchers’ vision, and the whole became a motion picture in staccato time.
All that while he kept the turban draped about his arm and it looked like an excrescence—something or other horrible—sometimes as if he had three arms on his right side, two growing out of one. But all at once he began to whirl the thing about him like a lariat until it formed a Saturn ring, in the midst of which he spun like a top on tiptoe, dervish fashion.
Whoever on the countryside saw that would understand the meaning of it. The whirling turban was only an added stroke of genius to emphasize his eminence among his kind.
The dancing dervish claims that by spinning for a length of time on tiptoe he can rid himself of human limitations and see clearly into the infinite. The ordinary dervish apes an arrogant humility before he starts; this fellow was assuming to confer with spiritual essences with banner whirling in the breeze—that was the only difference. There might be Moslems after that who would question his claim to miraculous vision and sanctity, but not many of them, and they would be kept in order by the rest.
Suliman, with the creed of his ancestors half-learned and wholly in his veins, was quite convinced.
“That is truly an iblis,” he whispered with chattering teeth. “There is nothing for us to do but leave him, Jimgrim.”
But Jim was thinking then too busily to quiet the superstitious qualms of a small boy.
“Narayan Singh!”
The Sikh crept closer.
“Do you know the lie of the land here?”
“No, sahib. But I could crawl up close and rush the brute. If I may not slay, I could hold him until you come and bind him with the turban.”
“Catesby!”
The three laid their heads together.
“Is there any way of coming up behind him?”
“No. Not without making a circuit of more than a mile. This hill we’re on juts out from a ridge that leads in a curve to his hill. There’s a thirty- foot cliff of sand on this side of him, too steep to climb in the dark. If we follow the ridge he’d see us coming, unless we could get there before he stops spinning, and at that he has likely got a spy or two on the watch. To come up from behind him through the cactus would take twenty minutes.”
“Jimgrim, sahib!”
Narayan Singh laid a hand on Jim’s sleeve.
“If I steady this automatic on my forearm,” the Sikh continued, “resting my elbow on the ground—thus—in three or four shots I can hit him in the leg with certainty. Then he will limp, and we can catch him. Only say the word.”
“No.”
“The last time I saw him he came straight along the ridge and passed me after he’d finished the ballet,” whispered Catesby.
“Give him a chance to do it again.”
The iblis pirouetted interminably, gaining rather than losing speed, the ring of cloth spreading out around him in an ever widening circle. If he really was a leper, then the disease had made strangely little inroad on his stamina.
And for all that whoever watched grew giddy, the iblis himself retained full consciousness. For there came cloaked figures of men, who dodged in the shadows from bush to bush; and as they drew near he was aware of them and began to slow down gradually, letting the turban droop in ever narrowing curves, until he stood stock-still again, back to the moon, like a statue, glistening with sweat that made him shine now from head to foot instead of showing sliminess in patches.
After standing rigid for about two minutes he stretched out his right arm toward the camp, and suddenly his voice boomed like a tenor bell, cursing in Arabic, cursing in the name of Allah the Lord of Creatures, the Prince of the Day of Judgment, cursing man and beast and tent and mechanism—eye, hand, ear and brain.
“What do you make of him?” he whispered.
“I’ve seen his kind in the mosques of Mosul and Marash,” Catesby whispered. “I think he’s simply a dancing dervish from up north, driven away very likely because of his leprosy.”
But Jim, too, had been in Mosul and Marash and seen the dancing dervishes. He reserved judgment.
The iblis turned at last toward the hooded figures that were crouching near him; and now he stretched out both arms, but whether or not he blessed them was not clear, for he lowered his voice. However, after a minute or two it was quite plain that he urged them to a certain course, for he flung his right hand out like an emperor ordering armies, and his chin went up so imperiously high that he moonlight sheened on his fierce eyes.
The hooded figures vanished. They had come from different directions, but as far as one could judge in the uncertain light they were headed one way in single file when they disappeared into the cactus.
“—!” Jim muttered suddenly, and Narayan Singh crept close again.
“Yes, sahib? What is it?”
“Can’t you see? The iblis has gone too—and the wrong way for us, durn him!—toward the moon—due east. If we chase him now he’ll simply run.”
“I can stalk him, sahib. He will never see me.”
“No. The others are coming straight along the ridge in the shadows.”
“We can do better than that. Catesby?”
Once
