The White Prophet, Volume II (of 2)

CHAPTER V

I

"KHARTOUM.

"MY DEAR, DEAR GORDON, – Gone! You are actually gone! I can hardly believe it. It must be like this to awaken from chloroform after losing one's right hand, only it must be something out of my heart in this instance, for though I have not shed a tear since you went away and do not intend to shed one, I have a wild sense of weeping in the desolate chambers of my soul.

"Writing to you? Certainly I am. Gordon, do you know what you have done for me? You have given me faith in your 'mystic senses,' and by virtue of certain of my own I am now sure that you are not dead, and that you are not going to die, so I am writing to you out of the chaos that envelops me, having no one here to speak to, literally no one, and being at present indifferent to the mystery of what is to become of my letter.

"It seems I fainted in the mosque after that wild riot of barbaric sounds, and did not come back to full consciousness until next morning, and then I found the Arab woman and the child attending on me in my room. Naturally I thought I might have been delirious and I was in terror lest I had betrayed myself, so I asked what I had been saying in my sleep, whereupon Zenoba protested that I had said nothing at all, but Ayesha, the sweet little darling, said I had been calling upon the great White Pasha (meaning General Gordon) whose picture (his statue) was by the Palace gates. What an escape!

"Of course my first impulse was to run away, but at the next moment I saw that to do so would be to defeat your own scheme in going, and that as surely as it had been your duty to go into Cairo, it was mine to remain in Khartoum. But all the same I felt myself to be a captive – as surely a captive as any white woman who was ever held in the Mahdi's camp – and it did not sweeten my captivity to remember that I had first become a prisoner of my own free will.

"If I am a captive I am under no cruel tyrant, though, and Ishmael's kindness is killing me. I was certainly wrong about him in Cairo, and his character is precisely the reverse of what I expected. Little Ayesha tells me that during the night I lay unconscious her father did not sleep at all, but kept coming into the guest-room every hour to ask for news of me, and now he knocks at my door a dozen times a day, asking if I am better, and saying 'To morrow, please God, you will be well.' It makes me wretched, and brings me dreadfully near to the edge of tears, remembering what I have done to him and how certainty his hopes will be destroyed.

"Naturally his people have taken his cue, and last night Black Zogal gathered up a crowd of half-crazy creatures like himself to say a prayer for me at the Saint's house which is just outside my window.

"'Thou knowest our White Lady, O Father Gabreel, that she is betrothed to our Master, and that his heart is low and his bread is bitter because she is sick. Make her well if it please God, O Father Gabreel!' Thus the simple-hearted children of the desert called down God's spirit to their circle of fire for me, and after loud cries of 'Allah! Allah!' going on for nearly an hour, they seemed to be content, for Zogal said —

"'Abu Gabreel hears, O my brothers, and to-morrow, please God, our sister will be well.'

"I had been reaching up in bed to look and listen, and when all was over I wanted to lay down my head and howl.

"The time has come for the people to start on their pilgrimage, but Ishmael insists upon postponing the journey until I have quite recovered. Meantime Zenoba is trying to make mischief, and to-day when the door of my room was ajar, I heard her hinting to Ishmael that the White Lady was not really ill but only pretending to be – a bit of treachery for which she got no thanks, being as sharply reproved as she was on the morning of your mother's letter.

"That woman makes a wild cat of me. I can't help it – I hate her! Of course I see through her, too. She is in love with Ishmael, and though I ought to pity her pangs of jealousy there are moments when I want to curse her religion and the dawn of the day of her birth and her mother and her grandmother.

"There! You see I have caught the contagion of the country; but I am really a little weak and out of heart to-night, dear, so perhaps I had better say good-night! Good-night, my dearest!"

II

"Oh dear! Oh dear! I could not bear to play the hypocrite any longer, so I got up to-day and told Ishmael I was well, and therefore he must not keep back his pilgrimage any longer. Such joy! Such rejoicing! It would break my heart, if I had any here, but having sent all I possess to Cairo I could do nothing but sit in the guest-room and look on at the last of the people's preparations for the desert journey – tents and beds being packed, and camels and horses and donkeys brought in to a continuous din of braying and grunting and neighing.

"We are to start away to-morrow morning, and this afternoon when that fact was announced to me I was so terrified by the idea of being dragged over the desert like a slave that I asked Ishmael to leave me behind. His face fell, but – would you believe it? – he agreed, saying I was not strong enough to travel and Zenoba should stay to nurse me. At that I speedily repented of my request and asked him to allow me to go, whereupon his face lightened like a child's, and with joy he agreed again, saying the Arab woman should go to take care of me, for Ayesha was a big girl now and needed a nurse no longer. This was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire, and I protested that I was quite able to look after myself; but, out of his anxiety for my health, Ishmael would not be gainsaid, and the Arab woman said, 'I'll watch over you like my eyes, my sister.' I am sure she will, the vixen!"

III

"We have left Khartoum and are now on the desert. The day had not yet dawned when we were awakened by a tattoo of pipes and native drums – surely the weirdest sound in the darkness that ever fell on mortal ear, creeping into the pores and getting under the very skin. Then came a din, a roar, a clamour – the grunting and gurgling and braying of five thousand animals and as much shouting and bellowing of human tongues as went to the building of the tower of Babel.

"The sun was rising, and there was a golden belt of cloud in the Eastern sky by the time we were ready to go. They had brought a litter on a dromedary for me, and I was almost the last to start. It was hard to part from the child, for though her sweet innocence had given me many a stab and I felt sometimes as if she had been created to torture me, I had grown to love her, and I think she loved me. She stood as we rode away, with a big tear ready to drop on to her golden cheek and looked after me with her gazelle-like eyes. Sweet little Ayesha, creature of the air and the desert, I shall see her no more!

"Crossing the Mahdi's open-air mosque at Omdurman, where we said morning prayers, we set our faces northward over the wild halfa grass and clumps of mimosa scrub, and as soon as we were out in the open desert with its vast sky I saw how gigantic was our caravan. The great mass of men and animals seemed to stretch for miles across the yellow sand, and looked like an enormous tortoise creeping slowly along.

"We camped at sunset in the Wadi Bishara, the signal for the bivouac being the blowing of a great elephant-horn which had a thrilling effect in that lonesome place. But more thrilling still was the effect of evening prayers, which began as soon as the camels and horses and donkeys had been unsaddled, and their gruntings and brayings and gurglings, as well as the various noises of humanity, had ceased.

"The afterglow was flaming along the flat sand, giving its yellow the look of bronze, when all knelt with their faces to the East – Ishmael in front with sixty or seventy rows of men behind him. It was really very moving and stately to see, and made me understand what was meant by somebody who said he could never look upon Mohammedans at prayers, and think of the millions of hearts which at the same hour were sending their great chorus of praise to God, without wishing to be a Moslem. I did not wish to be that, but with the odious Arab woman always watching me, I found myself fingering my rosary and pretending to be a good Muslemah, though in reality I was repeating the Lord's Prayer.

"It is dark night now, the fires at which the people baked their durah and cooked their asida are dying down, and half the camp is already asleep in this huge wild wilderness, under its big white stars.

"I must try to sleep too, so good-night, dearest, and God bless you! I don't know what is to be the end of all this, or where I am to dispatch my letter, or when you are to receive it, but I am sure you are alive and listening to me – and what should I do if I could not talk to you? HELENA."

CHAPTER VI

I

"SOUDAN DESERT (somewhere).

"It is ten days, my dear Gordon, since I wrote my last letter, and there has never been an hour between when I dared pretend to this abomination of Egypt (she is now snoring on the angerib by my side, sweetheart) that I must while away an hour by writing in my 'Journal.'

"Such a time! Boil and bubble, toil and trouble! Every morning before daybreak the wild peal of the elephant-horn, then the whole camp at prayers with the rising sun in our faces, then the striking of tents and the ruckling, roaring, gurgling and grunting of camels which resembles nothing so much as a styful of pigs in extremis; then twelve hours of trudging through a forlorn and lifeless solitude with only a rest for the midday meal; then the elephant-horn again and evening prayers, with the savage sun behind us, and then settling down to sleep in some blank and numb and soundless wilderness – such is our daily story.

"My goodness, Ishmael is a wonderful person! But all the same the 'divine' atmosphere that is gathering about him is positively frightening. I suspect Black Zogal of being the author and 'only begetter' of a good deal of this idolatry. He gallops on a horse in front of us, crying, 'There is no god but God,' and 'The Messenger of God is coming,' with the result that crowds of people are waiting for Ishmael at every village, with their houses swept, their straw mats laid down, and their carpets spread on the divans, all eager to entertain him, to open their secret granaries to feed his followers, or at least to kiss the hem of his caftan.

"Every day our numbers increase, and we go off from the greater towns to the beating of copper war-drums, the blowing of antelope horns, and sometimes to the cracking of rifles. It is all very crude in its half-savage magnificence, but it is almost terrifying, too, and the sight of this emotional creature, so liable to spasms of religious ecstasy, riding on his milk-white camel through these fiercely fanatical people like a god, makes one tremble to think of the time that will surely come when they find out, and he finds out, that after all he is nothing but a man.

"What sights, what scenes! The other day there was a fearful sand-storm, in which a fierce cloud came sweeping out of the horizon, big with flame and wrath, and fell on us like a mountain of hell. As long as it lasted the people lay flat on the sand or crouched under their kneeling camels, and when it was over they rose in the dead blankness with the red sand on their faces and sent up, as with one voice, a cry of lamentation and despair. But Ishmael only smiled and said, 'Let us thank God for this day, O my brothers,' and when the people asked him why, he answered, 'Because we can never know anything so bad again.'

"That simple word set every face shining, and as soon as we reached the next village – Black Zogal as usual having gone before us – lo, we heard a story of how Ishmael had commanded a sand-storm to pass over our heads without touching us – and it had!

"Another day we had stifling heat, in which the glare of the sand made our eyes to ache and the air to burn like the breath of a furnace. The water in the water-bottles became so hot that we dared not pour it on to the back of our hands, and even some of the camels dropped dead under the blazing eye of the sun.

"And when at length the sun sank beneath the horizon and left us in the cool dark night, the people could not sleep for want of water to bathe their swelling eyelids and to moisten their cracking throats, but Ishmael walked through their tents and comforted them, telling them it was never intended that man should always live well and comfortably, yet God, if He willed it, would bring them safely to their journey's end.

"After that the people lay down on the scorching sand as if their thirst had suddenly been quenched; and next day, on coming to the first village, we heard that in the middle of a valley of black and blistered hills, Ishmael smote with his staff a metallic rock that was twisted into the semblance of a knotted snake, and a well of ice-cold water sprung out of it, and everybody drank of it and then 'shook his fist at the sun.'

"Nearly all last week our people were in poor heart by reason of the mirages which mocked and misled them, showing an enchanted land on the margin of the sky, with beautiful blue lakes and rivers and green islands and shady groves of palm, and sweet long emerald grasses that quivered beneath a refreshing breeze; but when, from their monotonous track on the parched and naked desert, the poor souls would go in search of these phantoms, they would find nothing but a great lone land, in the fulness of a still deeper desolation.

"Then they would fling themselves down in despair and ask why they had been brought out into the wilderness to die, but Ishmael, with the same calm smile as before, would tell them that the life of this world was all a mirage, a troubled dream, a dream in a sleep, that the life to come was the awakening, and that he whose dream was most disturbed was nearest the gates of Paradise.

"Result – at the next town we came to, we were told that when we were in the middle of the wilderness Ishmael had made an oasis to spring up around us, with waving trees and rippling water and the air full of the songs of birds, the humming of bees, and the perfume of flowers, and we all fell asleep in it, and when we awoke in the morning we believed we had been in Heaven!

"Good-night, my dear – dear! Oh, to think that all this wilderness divides us! But ma'aleysh! In another hour I shall be asleep, and then – then I shall be in your arms."

II

"Oh my! Oh my! Two incidents have happened to-day, dearest, that can hardly fail of great results. Early in the morning we came upon the new convict settlement, a rough bastioned place built of sun-dried bricks in the middle of the Soudan desert. It contains the hundred and fifty Notables who were imprisoned by the Special Tribunal for assaults on the Army of Occupation when they were defending the house of your friend the Grand Cadi. How Ishmael discovered this I do not know, but what he did was like another manifestation of the 'mystic sense.'

"Stopping the caravan with an unexpected blast of the elephant-horn, he caused ten rows of men to be ranged around the prison, and after silence had been proclaimed, he called on them to say the first Surah: 'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures.'

"It had a weird effect in that lonesome place, as of a great monotonous wave breaking on a bar far out at sea, but what followed was still more eerie. After a breathless moment, in which everybody seemed to listen and hold his breath, there came the deadened and muffled sound of the same words repeated by the prisoners within the walls: 'Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures.'

"When this was over Ishmael cried, 'Peace, brothers! Patience! The day of your deliverance is near! The Redeemer is coming! All your wrongs will be righted, all your bruises will be healed! Peace!'

"And then there came from within the prison walls the muffled answer, 'Peace!'

"The second of the incidents occurred about midday. When crossing a lifeless waste of gloomy volcanic sand, we came upon a desert graveyard, with those rounded hillocks of clay which make one think that the dead beneath must be struggling in their sleep.

"At a word from Ishmael all the men of our company who belong to that country stepped out from the caravan and riding round and round the cemetery, shouted the names of their kindred who were buried there: 'Ali!' 'Abdul!' 'Mohammed!' 'Mahmud!' 'Said!'

"After that Ishmael himself rode forward, and addressing the dead as if they could hear, he cried, 'Peace to you, O people of the graves! Wait! Lie still! The night is passing! The daylight dawns!'

"It was thrilling! Strange, simple, primitive, crude in its faith perhaps, but such love and reverence for the dead contrasted only too painfully with the vandalism of our 'Christian' vultures (yclept Egyptologists), who rifle the graves of the old Egyptians for their jewels and mummy beads, and then leave their bones in tons to bleach on the bare sand – a condition that is sufficient of itself to account for Jacob's prayer, 'Bury me not, I pray thee, in the land of Egypt.'

"And so say all of us! But seriously, my dear Gordon, I quite expect to hear at the next stopping-place a story of how Ishmael recited the Fatihah and the walls of a prison fell down before him, and how he spoke to the dead and they replied."

III

"It has happened! I knew it would! I have seen it coming, and it has come – without any help from Black Zogal's crazy imagination, either. There was only one thing wanted to complete the faith of these people in Ishmael's 'divinity' – a miracle, and it has been performed!

"I suppose it really belongs to the order of things that happen according to natural law – magnetism, suggestion, God knows what – but my pen positively jibs at recording it, so surely will it seem as if I had copied it out of a Book I need not name.

"This afternoon our vast human tortoise was trudging along, and a halt was being called to enable stragglers to come up, when a funeral procession crossed our track on its way to a graveyard on the stony hillside opposite.

"The Sheikh of a neighbouring village had lost his only child, a girl twelve years of age, and behind the blind men chanting the Koran, the hired mourners with their plaintive wail and the body on a bare board, the old father walked in his trouble, rending his garments and tearing off his turban.

"It was a pitiful sight; and when the mourners came up to Ishmael and told him the Sheikh was a God-fearing man who had not deserved this sorrow, I could see that he was deeply moved, for he called on the procession to stop, and making his camel kneel, he got down and tried to comfort the old man, saying, 'May the name of God be upon thee!'

"Then thinking, as it seemed to me, to show sympathy with the poor father, he stepped up to the bier and took the little brown hand which, with its silver ring and bracelet, hung over the board, and held it for a few moments while he asked when the child had died and what she had died of, and he was told she had died this morning, and the sun had killed her.

"All at once I saw Ishmael's hand tremble and a strange contraction pass over his face, and at the next moment, in a quivering voice, he called on the bearers to put down the bier. They did so, and at his bidding they uncovered the body, and I saw the face. It was the face of the dead! Yes, the dead, as lifeless and as beautiful as a face of bronze.

"At the next instant Ishmael was on his knees beside the body of the girl, and asking the father for her name. It was Helimah.

"'Helimah! Your father is waiting for you! Come,' said Ishmael, touching the child's eyes and smoothing her forehead, and speaking in a soft, caressing voice.

"Gordon, as I am a truthful woman, I saw it happen. A slight fluttering of the eyelids, a faint heaving of the bosom, and then the eyes were open, and at the next moment the girl was standing on her feet!

"God! what a scene it was that followed. The Sheikh on his knees kissing the hem of Ishmael's caftan, the men prostrating themselves before him, and the women tearing away the black veils that covered their faces, and crying, 'Blessed be the woman that bore thee!'

"It has been what the Arabs call a red day, and at that moment the setting sun catching the clouds of dust raised by the camels made the whole world one brilliant, fiery red. What wonder if these poor, benighted people thought the Lord of Heaven Himself had just come down!

"We left the village loaded with blessings (Black Zogal galloping frantically in front), and when we came to the next town – Berber, with its miles of roofless mud-huts, telling of Dervish destruction – crowds came out to salute Ishmael as the 'Guided One,' 'The true Mahdi,' and 'The Deliverer,' bringing their sick and lame and blind for him to heal them, and praying of him to remain.

"Oh, my dear Gordon, it is terrifying! Ishmael is no longer the messenger, the forerunner; he is now the Redeemer he foretold! I really believe he is beginning to believe it! This is the pillar of fire that is henceforth to guide us on our way. Already our numbers are three times what they were when we left Khartoum. What is to happen when thirty thousand persons, following a leader they believe to be divine, arrive in Cairo and are confronted by five thousand British soldiers?

"No! It is not bloodshed I am afraid of – I know you will prevent that. But what of the awful undeceiving, the utter degradation, the crushing collapse?

"And I? Don't think me a coward, Gordon – it isn't everybody who was born brave like you – but when I think of what I have done to this man, and how surely it will be found out that I have betrayed him, I tell myself that the moment I touch the skirts of civilisation I must run away.

"But meanwhile our pilgrimage is moving on – to its death, as it seems to me – and I am moving on with it as a slave – the slave of my own actions. If this is Destiny, it is wickedly cruel, I will say that for it; and if it is God, I think He might be a jealous God without making the blundering impulse of one poor girl the means of wrecking the hopes of a whole race of helpless people. Of course it acts as a sop to my conscience to remember what you said about God never making mistakes, but I cannot help wishing that in His inscrutable wisdom He could have left me out.

"Oh, my dear-dear! Where are you now, I wonder? What are you doing? What is being done to you? Have you seen your father, the Princess, and the Grand Cadi? I suppose I must not expect news until we reach Assouan. You promised to write to me, and you will – I know you will. Good-night, dearest! My love, my love, my only love! But I must stop. We are to make a night journey. The camp is in movement, and my camel is waiting. Adieu!

"HELENA."