CHAPTER XI
Mainly about shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings.
Just about the time when Hector and his party were changing trains for the Northern frontier at Rawalpindi Junction, beset by a crowd of natives in every conceivable state of ruffianly raggedness and imploring in every known and some unknown dialects to be hired as porters, guides, dog boys, sweepers, grooms, butlers, cooks, and tailors, Sir James Rivet-Carnac sat facing Mr. Ezra W. Warburton and the latter's daughter in their suite at the Hotel Semiramis, busy with a small cup of coffee and a large glass of brandy, while the American was busy with a large cup of coffee and a small glass of brandy—thus both gentlemen somehow illustrating the divergent characteristics in matters bibulous of the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Sir James beamed. Sir James smiled. Sir James talked softly. Sir James waved pudgy, courteous hands.
For not only had the dinner been perfect, from turtle soup to an odorous Kashmere curry with fresh vegetable chutney, but, furthermore, he was a sensible man, who respected wealth, and knew that Mr. Warburton represented powerful Anglo-American financial interests.
“Of course, my dear sir,” he said. “There will be no trouble about passports for yourself and your daughter. No trouble either about the journey—anything my department can do to make the trip comfortable—anything at all—pray command me!”
He lit a fresh cigar.
“I have already said a word or two to the local agent of the Ameer of Afghanistan,” he went on, “and you will be passed straight through that country. On the other hand …”
He coughed, and was silent for a few seconds, collecting his thoughts.
He was in a quandary.
For he was a servant of that intricate and extremely complicated machinery for civilization, progress, and the blessed average decencies called the British Empire, that world-flung organization which spreads like a fine-mesh net over the whole globe and in which, through logical consequence, there are many currents and undercurrents, often one government department giving orders or recommendations completely at variance with those of another, every bit as important, department.
And, while he had received instructions from the India Office to put himself absolutely at the disposition of Mr. Warburton and to make that gentleman's trip to the North as easy and pleasant as possible, another department, closely connected with the Home Office in London, had asked him, quite sub rosa and quite decisively, to see to it that the American's journey to Tamerlanistan should be delayed at least two or three months.
Sir James did not know, could not know, that it was through the subterranean influence of an eccentric Cockney millionaire, Mr. Preserved Higgins, that the latter instructions had been sent him. But he did know that, unless he walked a delicate tight-rope between the two departments, his dearest wish would not be realized at the next royal birthday honors: namely, a change from Sir James, Kt., to Sir James, Bart.
Gently, therefore, he proceeded to hedge.
“Mr. Warburton,” he said, “I understand that Tamerlanistan is rather in an unsettled condition just now. The old Ameer died, you know …”
“Yes. I know.”
“Well—we have no consular representative there—it makes it rather awkward for me …”
“Don't worry,” rejoined the financier. “I have my own man up there—Babu Chandra.”
“A Bengali?"
“Yes.”
“Can you trust him? Not that I am trying to impeach the man's honesty, but …”
“I understand. Sir James. I know the sort of reputation the Babus have hereabouts. But my particular Babu is all right.”
“I am so glad,” murmured Sir James—and lied.
Presently, he tried a different method.
“Mr. Warburton,” he asked, “is your business in Tamerlanistan very pressing?"
The other was a cautious man.
“Why do you ask?” he countered, bluntly.
“Oh—please—do not misunderstand me. I am not trying to pry into your affairs. But, whatever they are, I would like to know if they are very pressing—if there is any great hurry about them.”
“A month or two makes no difference.”
“Good!” exclaimed Sir James and, when the American looked up with quick suspicion, he immediately proceeded to that operation which is vulgarly known as drawing a herring across one's trail.
“Mr. Warburton,” he purred, “you must forgive my—how shall I put it …?”
“Butting in—that's what we call it back home in America!” chimed in Jane, to her father's horror.
“Thank you, my dear lady.” Sir James was not at all embarrassed and, turning to her father:
“We feel rather responsible for you, don't you know.”
“Awfully kind of you.”
“Not at all, not at all. But—there you are. With prominent international men like yourself—the—oh—the responsibility …”
“What are you driving at?” demanded Mr. Warburton, again becoming suspicious.
“Only that this is the very worst season of the year to travel about India. Cholera outbreak in Lahore, you know, and the heat and the flies and all that. Wait till after the monsoon …”
“But—”
“This brittle heat,” the other went on, smiling at his own shrewdness and thinking that right here he was going to even his score with Miss Warburton, “is positively deadly to delicate complexions.”
“That settles it,” said Jane, serenely. “We'll wait till after the monsoons, shan't we, dad?”
Mr. Warburton agreed. After all, he decided, there was no hurry and it would be better for him to wait until he had word from the Babu Chandra, and he had found out that Hector had left his hotel and, presumably Calcutta, so that he needn't be nervous in regard to his daughter.
And so Sir James returned to attend to some late work at his office—where, a few days later, he frowned at a report telegraphed by one of his sub-agents stationed at Peshawar, near the border of Afghanistan, which said that no person resembling Mr. Hector Wade had crossed the border or tried to; only the bi-weekly caravans for Kabul and Kandahar that filed through the Khybar Pass, and some independent Afghan, Sart, and Hindki traders with proper passports. Furthermore, for a while to come, it would be impossible for said Hector Wade to get through the Khybar or any other of the minor Northwestern Province border stations as, because of some threatening trouble with the tribesmen, nobody would be allowed, until further orders, to travel out of Peshawar for the North, with the exception of the reigning princess of Tamerlanistan, to whom British, Afghans, and warring tribesmen had granted the courtesy of free conduct.
She was accompanied by her retinue and her cousin, the young prince Al Nakia.
By this time, the latter, alias Hector Wade, was becoming familiar with at least an inkling of what he was supposed to accomplish after he would have reached Tamerlanistan, though he was as ignorant as ever as to the special reasons why Fate, with Ali Yusuf Khan and an ancient blade playing Deputy-Fates, had chosen him as the instrument.
The princess party arrived in Peshawar on a Monday, early, just as morning came with the young sun gilding the carved struts of Kabul Gate, spiking a crimson diadem across the face of the lower Himalayas, shooting a glimmering, yellow wedge of light down the length of the Khybar Pass, straight into the stony entrails of Afghanistan.
They were evidently expected, for carriages met them at the station, and they drove rapidly, through that boisterous northern city which guards the gateway of India and seal's the southern end of the Khybar Pass that points straight, like a pistol, at the heart of Asia; through the whirling, choking dust that rose in clouds from the dirty streets; past crowds of ruffianly, swaggering border men, to the house of a wealthy Tamerlani tradesman who dealt in salt and hides and tea; and, shortly after their tiffin of mutton stewed in honey and seasoned with asafoetida, licorice water, sticky sweetmeats, and unripe melons had been served in their host's pavilion, trouble came with a bearded Tajik courier's official, peaked, black turban showing above the scraggly mellingtonia in the yard, and his throaty call: “A visitor! A visitor for the princess!”—and, a minute later, the visitor arrived, atop a smelly, furry camel, yelling, cursing, using the rawhide whip unmercifully, the animal trampling down flowers and shrubs and small trees in haste to reach the pavilion—where Aziza Nurmahal rose from her cushions and thrust the amber mouthpiece of her hubble-bubble which she was smoking into the hands of the nearest servant.
“Bismillah!” she exclaimed.
She was excited, expectant, her flaring, nervous nostrils quivering like those of a blooded mare.
To his dying day Hector Wade laughed at the memory of that scene.
For, when the visitor hove in sight, he saw that it was not a man, but a woman. Past the Biblical age she was, lean as a panther, haggard, berry brown. The cavernous mouth that shouted loud, guttural greetings of “Salaam Aleikhoom! Salaam Aleikhoom! Yah Sidi! Yah Bibi! Yah Moslima!” showed two lonely teeth crimson with betel juice; a few wisps of gray hair escaped from beneath the immense, mannish fur cap that tilted at a rakish angle over her left brow; her wizened body, clad in a robe of coquettish rose-madder silk sadly torn and mud blotched, was perched audaciously between the humps of the saturnine, Hebraic camel; on the hand that plied the raw-hide twinkled an immense off-color diamond in a hammered lead setting.
“Down! Down on thy knees, O lust-scabbed spawn of a hyena and a bloated she-devil!” she addressed her mount that gave a wicked, grunting snarl, turned its swanlike neck with the evident intention of biting its rider's scrawny hip, bent its forelegs suddenly double like a jack-knife, and shot the visitor neatly out of the saddle and directly at the feet of the princess who between laughter and tears, picked her up and hugged her to her breast.
The older woman broke into a hectic torrent of speech; a mad mixture of extravagant terms of endearment—“Little pink-and-blue sweetmeat!” she called the princess, “little melon seed of delight! Little ivory moon of much sweetness! O thou soul of my soul! Thou blood of my liver!”—and bewailings of that cruel, stony Fate which had forced her, a woman of respectable years, respectable life, respectable ancestry, and virginal innocence, to leave the “fat and warm security of the harem, to launch myself upon the bitter, bitter waters of adventure and fatigue and extremely bad food, to cross the chilly mountain peaks of Afghanistan, to have rough, swine-fed Kabuli dogs crack low jokes to the detriment of my nose, to wrestle the many, weary miles with a stinking dromedary whose father was a wart and whose mother a most improper smell!”
“Ahee—ahoo—ahai—and ten thousand first-class devils!” she shrilled, giving herself a violent blow across her flat, heaving chest. “And all because of that great and most evil grandson of a cockroach, Abderrahman Yahiah Khan, governor of the western marches!”
And she called the governor a name that reflected fully as much her own morality and upbringing as on the other's female relatives.
On she raced in a mad, lashing jumble of words, while the servants, who saw Hector's amused astonishment, told him that the woman was Aziza Nurmahal's old nurse, Ayesha Zemzem, a Bakhtiari hill woman from the western wilds; too, gave him a richly colored and extravagantly embroidered account of how the princess had raised her to the rank of regent, with the honorable title of Zil-i-Sultana, “Shadow of the Queen,” and had afterwards reduced her to her former, humble position, because she had been in favor of granting "concessions” to the saheb-log.
Hector whistled.
“Concessions! Is that the rub in Tamerlanistan?” he thought.
For he was familiar, through the number of Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Chinese he had known in London, with that phase of chronic misunderstanding between the Orient and the Occident. He rather sympathized with the former and had always held that it is not altogether altruistic to “carry the white man's burden” with the help of cheap, stout native labor, cheaper raw material, and one hundred per cent yearly profits on every pound sterling invested.
He was not a business-man. Eton and the army had spoiled him for that. But, beneath all his other, at times slightly erratic and unexpected characteristics, he had a great deal of plain, straight English commonsense, and he decided that if, as it seemed, he was going to have a voice in the affairs of Tamerlanistan, he would think twice before he advocated the granting of any “concessions.”
By this time Ayesha Zemzem had finished her tale, had been petted and scolded and wept and laughed over by her mistress, and was now squatting in a corner of the pavilion, puffing noisily at a large, soothing hubble-bubble; and the princess dismissed her servants, turned to Hector, and told him what had happened in Tamerlanistan—what had sent the old nurse hurrying across desert and mountains.
It appeared that Wahab al-Shaitan, the negro executioner who, with the title of Rawan-i-Sultana, “Killer for the Queen,” was regent during her absence, had done well, comparatively speaking. He had ruled with an iron hand and, at first, everybody had obeyed him.
Then, several weeks earlier, a spy had brought the news that Abderrahman Yahiah Khan, governor of the western marches, had again commenced intriguing with the Persian border ruffians whom he was supposed to keep in subjection. They were led by one Hajji Musa Al-Mutasim, a renegade Mecca Arab who had drifted east into Persia and was known, and unfavorably known, by the nickname of Al-Ghadir, “The Basin,” because of his enormous appetite and corresponding bulk, which latter did not prevent him, followed by his wild borderers, from being a genius at frontier warfare. He was here to-day and there to morrow, dancing out of the bush, striking swiftly and mercilessly, and always at the very place where he was not supposed to be; and when the villagers could not pay the tribute which he demanded, he gave their huts to the flames and carried off their women and children and cattle.
Too, he and his band were levying toll on the caravans that passed through the Darb-i~Sultani, “The King's Highway,” on which Tamerlanistan depended for a great deal of its foreign trade; and now it appeared that the governor, instead of using his soldiers and police against the raiders, was sharing in their enterprise, including the profits.
The regent had sent a summons to the governor to present himself immediately at the court of Tamerlanistan.
But Abderrahman Yahiah Khan, guessing, and rightly, that his arrival at court would be practically simultaneous with his beheading, had decided to do nothing of the kind, and had instead sent an insulting message, which said:
“I shall remain here and wax fat until thy mistress returns, O Wahab al-Shaitan.
"Then I shall proceed to the capital in state, followed by my armed men, and shall claim Aziza Nurmahal as my bride.
"For desire for her is in my nostrils. She is blooming and golden as the sun at dawn, with hair black as the midnight shades, with Paradise in her eyes, her bosom a white enchantment, her lips like the crimson asoka flower, and her lithe form swaying like the tamarisk when the soft wind blows sweetly, sweetly from the purple hills of Nijd.
“Let her be ready for my coming, and instruct Ayesha Zemzem, that toothless old hag, to have the bridal robe of emerald green—as the mantle of the blessed Prophet Mohammed, on whom Peace!
“For green is my favorite color, and in this, as in all other matters, I brook no master except my will.”
It was the calm insolence, the serene brutality of the message which brought Hector up standing.
Not that he was the least bit in love with Aziza Nurmahal; for he loved Jane Warburton, and his instincts were decidedly not polygamous. But he was one of those men in whom the rising tide of woman's demand for complete emancipation had not scotched that natural and decent impulse called chivalry—and let us say, in parenthesis, that this same instinct, when used by the wrong type of man, makes for licentiousness and domineering arrogance.
“Desire is in his nostrils, is it?” he exclaimed, “and he wants the bridal robe to be of green? Well”—he fingered the hilt of the ancient blade—“I'll see to it that there'l'l be another desire in his nostrils presently …”
“And he shall also long for another color!” shrilled the old nurse, coming out of her trance. “White! White! The calm white of the shroud when we stick his stinking corpse into an unhallowed grave! I like thee, Al Nakia! I like thee well, Son of the Swords!” and she jumped up and gave Hector a noisy smacking kiss.
The princess, too, was excited and happy.
“Thou art master henceforth, Al Nakia!” she said. “Thy orders shall be carried out.”
Hector inclined his head. Here at last was what he had been yearning for—a chance at actions and deeds.
“Good!” he said. “We'll start for Tamerlanistan at once.”
And, half an hour later, with the princess' servants forgetting for once their Oriental disregard of that vulgar western convention called Time, they were under way, after a short, vindictive, but decisive wrangle with the hairy, goatish-smelling Pathan guides over rupees, annas, and pice, out of Peshawar, and up through the defile of the Khybar Pass where, on every hill-top, behind every rock and tree, squatted diminutive Goorkha soldiers in rifle green, guarding the bottle-like entrance of Britain's eastern Dominion.
Afghanistan—the North—Central Asia!
With every mile of the jagged road, Hector felt that this remote northern land was claiming him, welcoming him, rising about him in a stony, enormous tide which was trying to wipe from his brain all memory of home, of England, of the rolling, yellow Sussex downs.
Through the velvety gloom of the nights, through the crass white sunlight of the days, through the gaunt shadows of the volcanic hills which flanked the road and which danced, exuberantly, like hobgoblins among the dwarf aloes and pines and acacias, through the rhythmic click-clacketty-click of their Mawari stallions' dainty feet, there sounded to him the clarion call of a greater, deeper, older duty, duty more compelling than the mere “chance” at a new life, a new career which he had longed for ever since that night when he had shouldered his first brother's guilt and disgrace, when he had been kicked from the company of decent men as a card-cheat.
His groping, subconscious mind seemed on the very threshold of one of those splendid moments when, suddenly, a great light flashes down the hidden, choked passages of the soul, and makes visible for a fleeting second the secret yearnings of past lives—lives dimly remembered.
All this land—this far, northern land—was part of him.
He felt it, knew it.
And he was keyed up to a sort of grimly happy expectancy when Kabul jumped away from the coiling fogs of the hills, like a thick slab of opaque jade set into the frame of the sugarloaf-shaped mountains and incrusted here and there with rose pink and creamy yellow and crimson where the transplanted damask roses of Isfahan were making a brave fight against the chilly North.
They did not linger at Kabul, though the servants clamored for the warmth, not to mention the gossip and opium, of the bazaars.
Ishkashim was a shimmering maze of flat, white roofs; and they pulled into Balkh, silvery as lepers with the dust of the road, traded their horses for lean racing camels, which had a profusion of blue ribbons plaited into their bridles as a protection against the djinns and ghouls of the desert, filled their saddle bags with slabs of grayish, wheaten bread and little hard, golden apricots, and were off again, crossing the Great River at the shock of dawn, the princess at the head of the cavalcade, by Hector's side.
On!
North—then West!
Toward Tamerlanistan!
And, in the dusty, whirling wake of their camels' padded feet drifted whisper, gossip, babble, information; not as scientifically transmitted as the information which zums along the copper telegraph wir es of the Occident, but quite as reliable and to the point.
It started with a word of admiration in the servants' hall of the Tamerlani merchant who had entertained Aziza Nurmahal in Peshawar:
“A most proper man is Al Nakia, the princess' cousin. Strong and quick and courageous as the male elephant whose cheeks are streaked with passion. There is talk of trouble and mutiny in the western marches of Tamerlanistan, and Al Nakia has sworn a great oath on his blade that he will make the rebel governor eat seventy-seven times seventy-seven pecks of dirt! Such were his exact words!”
That night, one of the merchant's grooms repeated it to a nautch girl of his acquaintance in an opium shop near the Kashmere Gate, adding:
“Al Nakia has been long away from his own country. He has been in Belait—in Europe—and has become a Frank in everything, even as to his language. For I attended to his Rorse, and when he saw that the saddle girth had rubbed the stallion's back raw, I heard him talk English under his breath. 'Damn' he said—twice”—and he continued, with a certain haughty negligence—“I also know the language of the saheb-log. 'Damn—Hell—jolly corkin'!' I know a great deal.”
All this the nautch girl retailed, an hour later, over a cup of brandy flavored with honey and rose water, to a Goorkha soldier who, the next morning, mounted guard in the Khybar Pass and told it to a friend of his, a rough Mahmoud tribesman with oily locks and a hawkish, predatory face.
Thus the tale took wings, spanning streams and forests, vaulting crumbling basalt ridges and twisted mountain peaks, until, finally overtaking the princess cavalcade and traveling well ahead of it, it reached the ear of Babu Bansi who, just then, was on the point of leaving Tamerlanistan and going to Bokhara to meet his eccentric employer, Mr. Preserved Higgins.
Bansi winked a large wink at nothing in particular.
“Al Nakia”—he said—“'The Expected' Says 'Damn!' Is strong and quick and courageous! By Kartikeya Chaurya-Vidya, God of the Golden Spears! But this is jolly rippin' interesting!”
Whereupon he sent a cabalistic telegram to a mysterious address in Bokhara—a telegram which was opened by a Cockney millionaire who turned to the young, nervous Englishman with him with the words: “Theres a whole lot o blinkin' trouble in the wind; we got to go South straight orf!” a telegram which caused the local manager of the Cable Company a fruitless and head-splitting searching through half-a-dozen cable code books—and told his body servant that he had changed his mind.
He was not going North, to Bokhara, but West, toward the Persian border.
“But, Babu-jee! expostulated the servant, “the raiders are out in force, cutting purses—also throats; and the governor of the western marches is said to be in league with them, and …”
“Peace, O son of loathly begetting!” purred Bansi. “I was not born yesterday. I can hear the grass grow and the fleas cough!”
And he mounted his horse and, followed by the trembling servant, was off at a spanking pace and, several days later, after many changes of horse, his fat body perspiring profusely, his eyes swollen and red with the dust of the road, but his brain as chillily cunning as ever, he pulled up at the headquarters of the governor of the western marches, who received him like a long-lost brother, just about the time that the princess and her party were drawing within sight of the capital of Tamerlanistan.
They had been riding hard; for, three times during the last days of the journey, messengers had come to them, sent by the executioner-regent, with words that the situation was growing worse, that even the capital was seething, with subterranean rumors of rebellion. He had taken the precaution of putting Koom Khan and Gulabian in jail, besides cutting off a number of less important heads. His staunchest support was Nedjif Hassan Khan, the governor of the eastern marches, doubtless for the simple reason that the governor of the western marches was his twin brother and worst enemy.
But there was danger. Let the princess hurry.
And they had hurried.
Hector's camel was ready to give up. Her head was bowed on her heaving, lathering chest, and she breathed with a deep, rattling noise. But he bent over her neck, lifting her with every stride, and keeping her nose straight to the road.
Then, late one afternoon, the princess reined in and pointed.
“Tamerlanistan!” she said.
And they rode on again, while the camels grunted and squealed, and while the dark mass that loomed up on the horizon was becoming more and more distinct with every minute, presently splitting into streets and houses; and a pleasant city it was beneath the rays of the dying sun; with carved, massive mosques and low, flat-roofed houses buried in flaunting gardens; with tall, keen-domed palaces, flushing scarlet and gold, gigantic water reservoirs, time-riven arches spanning crooked streets, square towers incrusted in high relief with figures of beast and man, and high above it all, descending in an avalanche of bold masonry, like a vision in a dream, the great palace of the Gengizkhani …
A noisy town. For, in the East, every one talks, and talks in extremes, either in a gloomy whisper or in a raucous scream, with the very voices of horse and camel and donkey seeming to be pitched in a soprano key; and high above the hubbub, just as the cavalcade passed through the East Gate, rose the melodious voice of a muezzin chanting the call to prayer from a minaret:
“Hie ye to devotion, O all ye faithful! Hie ye to salvation! God is most great!”—and the immediate, answering mutter, from balcony and shop, from coffee house and from the gutter itself:
“Here I am at Thy call, O Allah! Here I am at Thy call!”
“Here I am at Thy call!” echoed Aziza Nurmahal, softly, while Hector stared straight ahead.
“Tamerlanistan! The palace of the Gengizkhani!” he whispered, with an odd little catch in his throat; and something like a shudder passed through him, something that touched the fringe of a forgotten mystery, ancient, magnificent, transcendent.
He had reined in his mount with his left hand while, instinctively, as if searching for encouragement, his right felt for the hilt of the blade—the blade that was responsible for all this twisted, mad adventure.
Then he shook off the dim, whirling thoughts. He spurred the camel's lean flanks.
On! By the side of Aziza Nurmahal who was smilingly returning the throaty salutations of the Tamerlanis who came running down the streets, out of houses and mosques and bazaars, to meet her: tradesmen and peasants and artisans; too, sabre-rattling, hook-nosed, swaggering nobles. And Hector noticed that many of the latter gave churlish greetings, and that some of them even stalked past, straight backed, insolently looking the other way, without a sign of recognition for their sovereign princess.
They continued their way through the main road of the city, and up a steep, stone-paved ascent that led to the chowk, the outer courtyard of the palace.
There they dismounted and walked, past files of soldiers and servants and courtiers, through a huge gate studded with brass spikes, through another court yard crammed with human life, and into still another which was lifeless except for the whir and coo of hundreds of blue-winged pigeons.
The Princess drew a foot-long, skewer-like key from her waist shawl, opened the door, and motioned Hector to enter.
“Home!” she said, softly.
And, in the flash of an eyelid, the impression, rather the profound conviction, came to Hector that this strange, fantastic city was his Home indeed—his Home, every bit as much as the crumbling old Tudor Castle beyond the seas in smiling Sussex.
And he passed through the door, like a man sure of his way.