Collected short fiction, p.145
Collected Short Fiction, page 145
“What’s that?”
“You can keep the jade tonight. I talked de Castro into letting you have her first. In the morning, you can turn her over to him.”
“I’ll do nothing of the kind.”
“Think it over,” Garth advised blandly. “If you don’t decide to be reasonable, we’ll take her. I’ll hate to part company with you, Durand. You’re a good man, and that’s what we need. But you can’t wreck the expedition. Think it over!”
8. “La Sitva Hu”
PRICE DURAND was not the kind who can surrender gracefully, even to overwhelming opposition. He had sometimes wished that he could give way meekly to circumstances as some men do; it would have made life, at times, much more convenient. But some obscure quirk, deep in his nature, made him a fighter. Resistance to his will had always roused in him a dogged determination not to yield.
Submission was left out of his nature. When opposed, it was impossible for him to do anything but fight, with every resource at his command. Nor was he given to weighing the consequences of defeat. His fatalistic faith in the Durand luck was supreme. And that luck had never failed—probably because invincible resourcefulness had never given it a chance.
When the men had gone, Price looked back into his tent. Aysa lay still upon the blankets, breathing quietly. Her oval face was half toward him, fresh, lovely, pomegranate lips a little parted. Long lashes lay on her cheeks, ruddy brown.
One glance was enough to steel his determination not to surrender her to the insidious Macanese. His blood boiled at thought of such sleeping loveliness despoiled by the swarthy Eurasian. No, he was not going to give her up. He had until morning to find some way to save her—unless Joao de Castro, in the meantime, found an opportunity to murder him.
The yellow moon, at the first quarter, hung near the zenith at dusk. Through the first half of the night, Price waited impatiently at his tent, near the slumbering, exhausted girl.
Sam Sorrows had cheerfully offered to remain on guard, in the tank. Price accepted gratefully, and gave him, as a dubious token of appreciation, the key to the chest of gold in the tank. Price had decided to leave the caravan, with the girl; that seemed the only course open except disgraceful submission: two men could not fight the whole expedition.
The camp slowly fell into sleep, until the only movement was that of the regular sentries, two whites and two Arabs, pacing along their beats beyond the kneeling camels, hailing one another occasionally.
Near midnight the reddened moon sank beyond undulating dunes, its brief glow faded; and Price was ready to put his plane into action.
With a whispered word to Sam Sorrows, he slipped noiselessly away into starlight darkness. Silently, he saddled his own camel, which was kneeling near, found two full skins of water and slung them to the high pommels, with a small bag of grain for the beast.
Returning to the tent, he packed his saddle-bags. Chocolate. Hard-tack. Dried meat. Rolls of the tough, dried apricot pulp which the Arabs call “mare’s hide.” Emergency medical kit. Binoculars. Extra ammunition for rifle and automatic.
When all was ready, he sat listening to the girl’s regular breathing, reluctant to disturb her. At last he dared delay no longer. Gently he roused her, cautioning her to silence.
In complete darkness—for a light would have alarmed the camp—he gave her food and water. Sometimes his moving hands met hers; he found the contact vaguely exciting.
“The men with me say that I must give you back to him from whom I took you,” he whispered. “I can not fight them all, so we are going away.”
“Where?”
“To Anz, perhaps? You were going there.”
“I was. But Anz is dead, a city of ghosts. No living man has even seen it.” Her soft whisper went husky. “I do not want you to die, my protector. Let me go alone.”
“No, I’m going along to look out for you. But don’t talk about dying. You can count on the Durand luck.”
“But my enemies are many—and strong. My own people will hunt me, to escape the wrath of the golden folk. And Malikar is seeking me upon the yellow tiger, pursuing me with . . . the shadow!”
“Let’s go,” said Price. Lifting the saddle-bags, he slipped from the tent. Aysa followed silently, clutching her golden dagger.
PRICE paused to bid Sam Sorrows a silent, grateful farewell, then guided the girl to his kneeling camel.
“Mount,” he whispered.
“Wait,” Aysa demurred. “Perhaps I can find my own animal. Listen!”
For minutes they stood still. The camp lay dark in the pallid light of the desert stars. Black tents looming here and there. Camels, kneeling or grotesquely sprawled. Dim forms of men sleeping in the open, wrapped only in their abbas.
A mysterious murmur of sound floated on the darkness. The breathing of men. The low, dismal groans of resting camels. The occasional tinkling of a camel-bell. The distant cries of the sentries. It all had a stranger undertone, for the dawn-wind had risen, and creeping sand whispered across the dunes beyond the camp, with a muted and eery sussuration.
Aysa moved suddenly, murmured, “The bell of my camel!”
Noiselessly she slipped away in the darkness, guided by the faint tinkle that Price had not even heard.
He started to follow, alarmed. Then he came back to his own mount, stood tense, listening, waiting. The subdued and slumberous noises of the camp drifted about him, and the faint dry sibilance of moving sand, as if the ghosts of this dead land had been wakened by the dawn-wind.
Price had not realized the hold that Aysa, in a few brief hours, had gained upon his feelings, until Nur’s harsh scream of alarm splintered the murmurous silence of the somnolent camp. The sound stabbed him like a blade. He felt weakness, almost physical sickness, of fear and despair. For a moment he was trembling, shaken with such a chill of fear for the girl’s sake as he had never felt for his own.
Then strength and determination flowed back into him. He leapt into the saddle of his camel, hastened it to its feet, snatched out his automatic.
The Arab Nur, he realized, must have been sleeping near his newly acquired camel, and had been roused as Aysa prepared to mount the animal.
Instantly the camp was in uproar. Men sprang up, shouting. Camels grumbled in alarm, leapt up and ran about, threelegged. Flashlight beams burst from the tents of the whites. Reports of wildly fired guns punctuated astonished curses in several European tongues, and impassioned appeals to Allah in the name of his prophet.
Through the confusion a white dromedary came dashing, Aysa clinging to it, flourishing the golden dagger with which she must have cut its hobbles.
“Aiee, Price Durand!” her voice pealed, and Price thought there was eager exultation in it.
Price swung his hejin in beside her own, racing toward the edge of the camp.
Shay tan el Kabir!” Nur shrieked behind them. “After them! My camel! Effendi Duran’ and the woman!”
Calm, reverberant, Jacob Garth’s voice rang out in a command to the sentries: “Muller! Mawson! Stop them!”
A bullet hummed close to Price’s ears, and he heard the shrill, excited screaming of Joao de Castro: “Catch heem! D’ thief!”
Price and Aysa plunged through the outskirts of the camp. The sentries, on foot, ran toward them, sought them with flashlight beams, fired wildly.
“Lean low,” Price called to the girl, “and ride!”
A little breathless laugh answered him. And her clear voice pealed out in a mocking farewell to her enemies, “Wa’salem!”
“Mount!” the old sheikh Fouad howled behind them. ”Bismillah! Pursue them.”
“I geef my rifle,” de Castro shouted, “to ’ooever bring back d’ bitch!”
Riding side by side, the two were well beyond the sentries. Before them lay mystic, starlit desert. They raced their camels for the temporary safety of the tawny darkness.
Behind came a confusion of shouts, the “Yahh! Yahh! [Go! Go!]” of men urging on the mounts, the swift thudding of many feet.
Price turned in his saddle. Faintly, by starlight, he could see the dark mass of the pursuers, only a few hundred yards behind. Half the camp was following, spreading out in a great fan.
His heart sank in despair. There was little chance of escape, he knew, with their followers so near. Even if they could evade capture until daylight, the Arabs, skilled in the art of asar, or enemytracking, would soon hunt them down.
Still running side by side, they topped the first dune. In the moment they were silhouetted against the stars, a scattered volley of shots crackled behind them.
As their mounts ran down the slope, Price did a thing that surprized himself. Leaning toward the girl, he called:
“Aysa of the golden land, I must tell you something now, because I’ll never have another chance. You are beautiful—and brave!”
The girl laughed. “They’ll never catch us. We have all the desert! They are dogs hunting eagles!”
Then he heard the bellow of the tank’s engine, as it burst into roaring life; the clangor of its metal treads as it thundered across the rocky plain; the clattering music of its guns.
Could the old Kansan be joining their pursuers? Of course not! Sam Sorrows was doing the one thing that could save them.
“Good old Sam!” Price cried. “Giving them something else to worry over.”
The Arabs, he knew, still held their deadly fear of the tank. Its lumbering charge into their midst would scatter them in frantic terror. And none of the whites yet rode well enough to be a serious menace.
Whine of motor, rattle of guns and outcry of men were faint behind when they topped the second long dune. Beyond the third, and the only sound was the dry rustle of creeping sand in the cool dawn-wind, ghost-murmurings of the dead world about them.
THE first red glow of Arabian day found the two alone, still riding side by side. Their weary camels were plodding slowly across a dead plain of alkali, leprously white, and crunched underfoot with a sound like crushed snow.
Ahead lay another drear range of bare, irregular red-sand dunes, bloody in the sunrise. Vast, terrible horizons surrounded them. Low, far black hills, granite skeletons of ancient mountains. Billowing miles of dead drift-sand. Lifeless salt-pans shimmering unreal like ghosts of the lakes they once had been.
Already the smoky horizons quivered in unending undulations of heat, and the silvery mock-lakes of the morning mirage flowed across the flickering, infernal plains, rippling in tantalizing promises of cool refreshment, fleeing away to merge into the bright sky.
The camp was many miles behind, and the rustling sands of the dawn-wind had already obscured their trail. They had lost even the caravan road that was marked with skulls. They were two alone, with the tawny and unconquerable wilderness, fighting the deadly, hostile loneliness of the Empty Abode.
“La Suva Hu,” Price murmured a name of the Arabs for the desert, which means “Where there is none but Him.”
9. The City of the Sands
ON THE evening of the third day they were toiling across an endless, billowing ocean of yellow-red sand. Camels near dead, water-skins almost empty, Price and Aysa rode on, in quest of ancient Anz. Their mouths were dry, and they did not often speak, for the parching air was like hot sand in the throat. But Price looked often at the girl, clinging to her hejin wearily but with invincible determination.
The oval face beneath her white kajiyeh was blistered, the full lips cracked and bleeding from sun and alkali dust, the tired violet eyes inflamed by the pressure of glaring light. But still Aysa was beautiful, and she smiled at him with courage on her weary face.
Cruel, those three days had been. Yet Price regretted them only for the hardship the girl had so stoically suffered. An odd contentment filled him; his old, bitter ennui was dead. Aysa’s companionship had become a precious thing, worth the living of a life.
She was the guide, finding the way by obscure landmarks that she knew by tradition alone. At sunset she turned to him, troubled.
“Anz should be before us,” she whispered, husky with thirst. “We should have seen it from the last ridge.”
“Don’t worry, little one!” He had tried to speak cheerfully, but his voice croaked false and hollow. “We’ll find it.”
“Anz should be right here,” she insisted. “My father taught me the signs, before he died, as his father taught him. It should be here.”
Perhaps, Price thought, the lost city was here. According to Aysa’s story, none of her people had seen it for a thousand years. It might be beneath them, completely buried! But he kept the thought to himself.
“Let’s ride on,” he said. And he pretended to discover with surprize the few drops of water in the goatskin—his own share, which he had saved when they last drank. After a single sparing sip, she suspected the heroic subterfuge, and would take no more.
They goaded the weary camels on, as the inflamed, sullen eye of the sun went out. And still they went on, in an eldritch world of pallid moonlight, sometimes walking and driving the exhausted animals, until they collapsed of thirst and fatigue and despair, to sleep fitfully. Dawn came and they saw Anz.
THE black walls, of Cyclopean basalt blocks, stood half a mile away. Driven sands of ages had scored in them deep furrows. Here and there they had tumbled into colossal ruin, like a breakwater broken by the yellow sea of sand. Tawny, billowing dunes were piled against them in crested waves, sometimes completely covering them. Shattered ruins rose within the walls, crumbling, half buried, darkly mysterious in the dawn, emerging grim and desolate from night’s shadows as if from the mists of centuries immemorial.
Price roused Aysa to point it out. But his hopes sank swiftly after the first thrill of discovery. Anz was truly a city of death, sand-shrouded, forgotten. Little chance, he thought, of finding in this dark necropolis the water for which every tissue of their bodies screamed.
Aysa was filled with new eagerness. “Then I was not lost,” she cried. “Let us enter the walls!”
They urged the unwilling camels to their feet, and toiled toward Anz.
Black walls breasted the conquering sand, massive, forbidding. The gates, mighty panels of patina-darkened bronze, were closed between their guarding towers, red sand banked so high against them that a thousand men could not have pushed them open.
Driving the staggering camels to the crest of a dune that had overflowed the wall, they saw the city within. A city strange as a dream. A dead city, buried in sand.
A ruined and leaning tower rose here above the red dust, like the end of a rotting bone. A shattered dome of white marble, there, like an age-bleached skull. Or a cupola of corroded metal, monument above some buried building.
Over the silent mounds of the sand-beleaguered city Price sensed a brooding spirit of slumberous antiquity, a clinging ghost of the forgotten past. One instant, in imagination, he saw the ruined buildings whole again, saw the broad streets cleared of sand, magnificent thoroughfares thronged with eon-dead multitudes. He saw Anz as it once had been, before dead Petra was carved from the rocks of Edom, before Babylon rose upon the Euphrates, before the first pharaohs reared their enduring mausoleums upon the Nile.
One moment he saw Anz living. Then its sand-conquered, time-shattered wreck smote him with a melancholy sense of death and dissolution.
Aysa sighed hopelessly.
“Then the prophecy is a jest,” she whispered. “Anz is truly dead. Iru could not be waiting here! ’Tis a city of the sands!”
“But we may find water.” Price tried to seem hopeful. “There must be wells, or reservoirs.”
They made the camels slide down the dune, into the old city, and began the weary and seemingly futile search of its forest of ruins.
It was near noon when they approached a huge pile of shattered marble, standing upon a vast platform of titanic basalt blocks, not yet completely covered by the sifting sand. The flagging camels refused to climb the yielding sand-slopes to the platform, and they left them, to explore the building in search of a well.
Price afterward cursed himself for not taking his rifle and the holster containing his automatic, which were slung to the pommels of his saddle. But he was almost too weary to stand. And Anz appeared so completely a city of the dead he had no thought of living enemies.
They clambered to the crumbling platform, and stood beneath a broken colonnade. Aysa studied a half-obliterated inscription on the architrave, turned to Price with weary eagerness, whispering:
“This is the palace of Iru! The king of the legend, who sleeps.”
They passed the columns, entered the arched gateway to the palace courtyard.
“Al Hamdu Lillab!” breathed Price, incredulous.
In the court, surrounded by high walls that the sand had not overwhelmed, their senses were struck by the cool green fragrance of a sunken garden. Within the inclosure was a tiny, bright oasis, a wondrous tropic garden in the heart of grimmest desolation, richly and blessedly green.
With sweetest music, crystal water trickled from a stone-rimmed fountain at the end of the court, to spread among a thick jungle of date-palms and fig-trees, of pomegranates and vines and fragrant-flowering shrubs.
The garden was wild, untended. For a thousand years, by Aysa’s story, no human being had seen it; these plants must have propagated themselves for generations.
For a moment Price was unbelieving. This wonder of greenery, this song of falling water, was impossible! Stuff of desert-fevered dreams.
Then with a hoarse, gasping cry, he took Aysa by the arm, and they ran down the crumbling granite steps, unused for a thousand years, to the floor of the hidden garden. Together, they fell on their knees at the fountain’s lip, rinsed bitter dust from their mouths, drank deep of sweet cool water.
To Price the next hour was a glad dream; a mad riot of delicious sensation, of drinking clear water, of laving the stinging desert grime from his drawn body, of filling himself with fresh, delightful fruits, of resting beside joyous, laughing Aysa in soothing green shade.
