CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XX

"I was never less alone than when by myself."

      GIBBON.

Next morning, with her chaperon's energetic daughters, Damaris found herself one of the herd foregathered on the Nile bank preparatory to the excursion to the Valley of the Kings, and later in the afternoon by mountain path over the ridge to that marvel of antiquity the Terrace-Temple of Deir el-Bahari.

"I don't want to go, Janie dear," she said, the preceding night, whilst the devoted maid wielded strong-bristled brushes on the burnished short-cropped hair.

"Better go, dearie. One must be polite, even if the heart breaks."

Jane Coop's literary plane swung between a three-penny weekly entitled "Real Stories from High Life" and Ouida's novels, which latter she had bought second-hand in the Charing Cross Road and kept sandwiched between her Bible and "Grandmother's Herb Recipes."

"But I don't want to go. I hate crowds, and I can't take Wellington. Every native flies from him since he got behind the Musical Colossus and growled. You remember? They thought it was the statue speaking, and the dear old darling was only trying to catch a lizard."

The bulldog loathed Egypt.

He was always either in disgrace or being talked to in baby language. He had seen next to nothing of his beloved mistress, and his digestion had been almost ruined by the amount of chocolates he had eaten out of pure boredom.

"Take me," he said, every time his beloved went out, as plainly as could be by means of his beautiful face and down-cast tail. But excursions had grown rarer and rarer and his slender middle more and more defined through grief.

"My heart isn't breaking, Janie!" Damaris declared, sitting up in bed.

"I know it isn't, dearie. There's nothing to break it over, I'm sure. I was just repeating from 'Her Scarlet Sin', where the beautiful heroine is torn between two stools as it were."

Jane Coop had no use for knights who left the field of combat; and as for the tales which were duly carried to her of an Arabian chief who followed her young mistress in the desert and sent her bunches of flowers and such-like trash, well! it was all you could expect if you left your own country for heathen parts!

To Jane Coop, rides in the desert in Egypt were just as much a part of the day's programme as rides on donkeys at holiday-time had been in Margate, before interfering people began to make a fuss about the rider's weight.

"You mind your own hedges, Maria Hobson, and see that your own cattle don't go a-straying, with their monkey tricks," she had said tartly and not over-lucidly, to her grace's maid, who had heard from someone who had heard from someone else that Miss Hethencourt was out at all hours of the night, here, there and everywhere. "I know what time she comes in and where she has been, and who with, and that's quite enough for me. Thank you, I can shepherd my own flock!"

She was not exactly within the confines of truth in her statement, but having learned in her youth to diagnose the hurt of dumb animals, she felt she was fully qualified to treat her beloved child's unrest without any verbal aid from outsiders.

Yet something, a warning from the future, maybe, had prompted her to speak this night as she stood beside the bed, looking down upon the beauty of the child to whom she seemed, more than anyone else, to stand in the position of sponsor.

"Will you promise me one thing, dearie?"

She stroked the red head lovingly as it leant against the motherly bosom upon which had so often rested errant lambs and stricken pullets.

"Yes, Janie darling. I would promise you anything!"

"I know things are going crosswise a bit with you, dearie, as they always do in an unknown country; but I don't worry about that, because at the crossways there is always a signpost. But now that we are in this heathen land, I want your promise that you will always tell me where you are going to when you go out--always. If it's out for a ride in the desert or over amongst them mummy-tombs, or out to a tennis-party or dance. Will you, dearie? Always?"

The insistence in the demand made the girl look up into the homely face and she did not smile as she made a little cross above her heart in the manner of children.

"I promise, Janie--cross heart. And I'm starting out early-early to-morrow morning on an excursion to the Tombs of the Kings. We are taking lunch with us--paper-bags and remnants of sandwiches amongst Egypt's dead--tea at the Rest House and------"

She stopped for a minute, then continued slowly:

"------and if I don't come back with the rest, Janie dear, don't worry. It's full moon, and I may stay to see the Temple by moonlight."

A moment's silence; then said practical Jane:

"And as you can't take Wellington, dearie, will you promise to take your revolver? You know, they say lions have been seen in------"

Damaris laughed.

"They've left, Janie! They're all at Assouan, waiting to be shot by Mr. Kelham and Miss Sidmouth."

Jane Coop sniffed as she tucked in the bed-clothes and kissed her child good-night.

She had got to the door when Damaris spoke.

"Janie, you know all about birds, don't you?"

"Hens, dearie."

"Well!" The girl's voice came muffled, as though she had drawn the sheet about her face. "Supposing a hawk------"

"Hawks aren't hens, dearie."

"Well--hens! Supposing you had a breed of hens that were all--all--oh! any colour------"

"White Leghorns," said Jane Coop, who was beginning to get interested in this subject so near her heart.

"Yes. Well, supposing you found that one, when it had all its feathers, had some speckled ones under its wings----"

"But it couldn't, dearie, if it was pure-bred!"

"Yes, but just supposing it had, what would be the meaning of it?"

Jane Coop hesitated, and re-tied her apron-strings. Descriptive analysis was not her strong forte.

"Well, dearie, I should say that the male bird was a--a--oh! a Plymouth Rock, or something like that. The speckled bird would be a good one, but if it was mixed it would have to be turned out of the run if you had a fancy for showing and prizes. I remember a black---- But there now! what made you start your old Nannie talking about hens? Just you turn over and go to sleep, dearie. You have to be up and away early to-morrow, you know!"

She closed the door gently and left the girl alone.

"I don't understand," she said softly, and slipped out of bed to stand at the open window, with all the glory of an Egyptian night before her.

"I don't understand the meaning of the story," she repeated, as she watched the figure of a fellah wrapped in a big cloak which shone snow-white under the moon, trudging patiently across the grounds to the servants' quarters. Then, as the huge dog flung himself against her, she struck her hands together. The sudden impact sent her mind flying back to the first time she had seen Hugh Carden Ali, in English riding-kit and Mohammedan tarbusch in the bazaar; then in her memory she saw him dining as an Englishman; saw him riding with falcon upon fist--a very Eastern, saw him as an Arab of Arabia in the desert; again as an Englishman, save for the Mohammedan tarbusch, holding in the bay mare as she thundered past him on the stallion Sooltan.

In a flash she understood the tragic story of the Hawk of Egypt.

"The pity of it!" she whispered. "Oh! the cruel pity of it!" and crept back to bed.

 *     *     *     *     *     *

Wide-eyed and quiet, she stood very early next morning with the jostling, laughing crowd, waiting to be ferried across the Nile on the excursion to the Tombs of the Kings, which to most of the crowd ranked on a level with Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, with the difference that in the valley of desolation you could leave the remnants of your lunch anywhere, which is a habit strictly forbidden in the Marylebone Road.

Mounting the diminutive donkeys caused peals of laughter; the hamlets of Naza'er-Rizkeh and Naza'el Ba'irait rang with the cries of the cavalcade, and Damaris blindly followed Lady Thistleton's energetic offspring, as with note-book and pencil they followed the guide in and out of the regulation tombs of Biban el-Muluk, the history of which he repeated with parrot-like monotony.

Lucy Jones, lighthearted tourist, thought the lunch awfully jolly in the shade of the tomb, in fact, she made it a riotous feast, with the help of others as young and non-temperamental as herself.

After all, what did it matter?

As Lucy said, "The dead had been such a jolly long time dead," and the desolation of the valley made such a splendid contrast to the golden sunshine and violent blue of the sky.

The zig-zag path down to Deir el-Bahari occasioned more laughter and little screams and offers of help from the sterner male, who, under an extreme insouciance, tried to hide the insecurity of his perch on the back of the humble, scrambling quadruped.

When the laughing, jostling and somewhat dishevelled crowd streamed back down the second incline and across the Central Terrace, en route for the donkeys, it left Damaris standing with dancing eyes, and laughing mouth under the blue and star-strewn ceiling of the Shrine.

And when the last sound of laughter, and clattering stone under nimble hoof had melted away; when the sky had turned the marble temple mauve and pink and deepest red, and back to pink, to mauve, to softest white; when the first star had fastened the robe of day to the cloak of night, and silence had fallen like balm upon the wound caused by raucous voices, Damaris tip-toed down the steps and out into the Colonnade of Punt.

She was quite alone.

CHAPTER XXI

"No time so dark but through its woof there run Some blessed threads of gold."

      C. P. CRANACH.

It is difficult--no, it is impossible to describe the wonder of Deir el-Bahari under the moon, just as it is impossible to describe "the light that never was, on land or sea," or the Taj Mahal, or a mother's love.

To our eyes it is the picture of desolation. Just as it must have been a picture of grandeur to those of the woman who built it, Queen Hatshepu, sister, wife and queen of Totmes III.

It is built in terraces to which you climb by gentle incline; it is surrounded and crossed by colonnades; there are ruined chapels and vestibules and recesses; an altar upon which offerings had once been made to the great gods; broken steps and closed and open doors, behind which the ghosts of dead kings and queens, priests, priestesses and nobles sit in ghostly council; through which they beckon you--if you belong.

There has surely come to each of us, in this short span we term life, the moment when, just introduced, we look into another's face and say or think, "We have met before."

May it not have been that we once met to burn incense together before the dread god Anubis, or to make offerings upon the altar erected to the great god Ra Hamarkhis; or was it perchance that you, if you are a woman, once waited at the temple gates to see him pass upon his return from the great expedition to the land of Punt, which we call Somaliland to-day?

Had the man with hawk-face who offers you a muffin or cup of tea to-day once brought you gifts of ivory, or incense, or skin of panther from the wonderland? Did he sweep the seething crowd with piercing eye to find the face beloved, and pass on to the rolling of drums, the crash of cymbals, the blaring of trumpets, to make obeisance to his monarch and return thanks to the mighty gods?

Perchance!

But Damaris had no thought of the past as she stood amongst the pillars of the colonnade which commemorate the great expedition; she was enthralled with the hour, the solitude, the silence, as she hesitated, wondering which way to go. Then, even as she hesitated, the silence was broken by the distant throbbing of a drum.

It came from one of the villages far down the hill and, caught by the evening breeze, was carried to the temple, to be multiplied a hundredfold in the echoing roof.

All other sounds may cease way out in the East; birds may nest and humans sleep; but the sound of the drum faileth never.

It is a message, a love-song, a lament, a prayer, and you hear it in the desert as in the jungle, in the temple as in the courtyard behind the hovel.

It is not a wise thing to listen to its call, for it can lead you off the beaten track, or over the precipice or out into the desert to die.

It caught the girl's feet in the witchery of its rhythm and set them moving upon the sand-covered floor of the Temple. Yet there was no smile on her lips as, moved by whatever it is that causes us to do strange things in the East, she danced like a wraith or a sylph, or a leaf in the wind, in and out of the columns and out into the light of the moon, and through the granite door onto the terrace where once had been planted the incense trees which had come with the spoil from Punt to perfume the air to the glory of Ra Hamarkhis.

The rolling of the drum stopped short, and Damaris came to herself with a start as she stood under the moon, then clasped her hands upon her thudding heart as she watched a man with two great shaggy dogs walk across the terrace towards her.

Save for the Mohammedan head-covering he was an Englishman, and he spoke in his mother's tongue to the girl he loved and whom he had watched since her arrival with the jostling, laughing crowd.

"The gods of the temple are good to me," he said simply. "I prayed that I might watch you dance upon the incense terrace of their house; they have answered my prayer. Come."

As they passed across the terrace to the hall of columns which is the vestibule of the chapel of the god of Death, he told her how he had watched and waited, meaning no discourtesy, until she should visit the temple amongst the limestone hills.

"Where are we going?"

Damaris spoke more to break the spell which seemed to hold her than to know the end of the walk across the sand. Bewitched by the moon and the terrific power of old Egypt, she would have followed the man blindly, fearing no hurt, even into the inner-most sanctuary which, hewn out of the rock itself, lies at the extreme end of the temple.

"To the Shrine of Anubis the god of Death, where I would show you the Hawk of Northern Egypt upon the wall."

They passed between the great columns and up the flight of steps to the doorway beyond which lie the chambers of the Shrine, and there Hugh Carden Ali took the girl's hand as he called her name aloud, until the walls or the spirits of the gods thundered back the echo.

"The gods introduced the kings of Egypt to the sanctuary. Anubis god of Death, as you will see by the painting upon the wall, led the great queen to the door," he said in reply to a whispered question from Damaris. "I would not that the shadow of death touched the hem of your raiment. I called your name aloud so that the gods might hear. . . . Do I believe in such strange things? How can one say, I believe, or do not believe, in this land which is in the grip of a dead past which is not dead?"

And they passed in through the door and stood looking up at the Hawk of Horus painted in the XVIII dynasty upon the wall.

Brilliant in colouring, green and white, with red-tipped wings, it spreads them above the place where once was seen the painted picture of the queen who reigned and suffered and died, thousands of years ago.

"Ah!" said Damaris, as she looked up to the corner. "It is your--your crest--your------"

"It is a fantasy of mine. We trace my father's house right back without a break to the days of the Pharaohs--so, I believe, does Mohammed Ali, vendor of slippers in the bazaar." He paused, then added abruptly, with a frown and a movement of the shoulders as though he were trying to shift a burden, "If you will come with me to the inner chamber, if you are not afraid, I will interpret the Story of the Hawk to you in the shadows where it belongs."

Damaris put out her hand as though to speak, then passed into the inner room, across the threshold of which the dogs of Billi laid themselves down.

"Death is around us," said Hugh Carden Ali. "Do you believe in omens?--No? Nor I. I wish there was a seat, so that you could rest whilst I tell you------"

Damaris laid her hand gently upon his arm, and he looked down into the face shining dead-white in the reflection of the moon which had silted in through a hole in the roof.

"You know?"

Damaris looked up and smiled.

"Yes! I know. And, being the son of such splendid people, I cannot understand why------"

The gates of pain and love and sacrifice were opened and the girl shrank back against the wall as the tide of pent-up bitterness swept around her in the ruined shrine. The man's face was white, his eyes blazed in the agony of his hurt, whilst the dogs lifted their heads and growled.

". . . You do not understand! You do not understand that I love you! And, loving you, I stand a prisoner behind the bars wrought for me by the love of my parents. That I love you as surely you never have been, never will be loved, and that I dare not, can not ask you to be my wife,--even if you loved me--which you do not. . . What? You do not see why I should not marry into my mother's race even as my father did? I will tell you why." He gripped her wrists and pulled her to him. "Because I am the outcome of their union. My father is an Arab, my mother an Englishwoman. I--I am a half-caste. I am nearer white, truly, than my father, but--but my son, although he might be white or dark,--a--a native, as you say in England--would only be a half-caste lying on your white breast, if you were my wife."

The moonbeams lengthened as the man talked on, whilst Damaris learned of one of love's bitterest mistakes.

"Oh, forgive me!" he ended. "Why did I bring you here to hurt you, to make you cry for a pain which is not yours? Why are you left alone? It is so dangerous in this land of my fathers. Your godmother deserts you whilst she goes to my mother, who is afraid for me--ah! did you not know? The man who loves you has left you to the wind of chance: my friend, Big Ben Kelham--O gods of ancient Egypt, how you must laugh!--my friend! Shall we meet again, I wonder?----"

Surely Anubis the god of death, Anubis the jackal-headed--who leads the soul of the departed through the underworld into the presence of the great Osiris--surely he moved upon the wall and turned to look after those two as they passed out of the inner chamber to stand beneath the Hawk upon the wall.

Or was it the shifting of the moon amongst the shadows?

"Will you"--there was no trace of the man's anguish in his voice: the Mohammedan's resignation to the inevitable may seem a weak way out to one who will kick and worry until he drops from exhaustion, but it saves a great deal of pain to others--"will you--you must surely marry some day, so beautiful, so sweet you are--will you let me give you this as a wedding-present, and will you think of me, a prisoner, when you fasten it in your wedding-gown?" He held out a jewel in the shape of the Hawk which spread its wings upon the wall above them. "It was found here, in this sanctuary--a priestly ornament? a pilgrim's offering? Who knows? Will you?--I have no right to it, for beneath my wings is the plumage of another race. I am not a pure-bred son of Northern Egypt."

"Will you pin it in?"

The girl's voice shook as she tilted back her chin so that her mouth was on a level with the man's as he bent to fasten the jewel in the silk.

"Will you promise me one thing? Yes!--you are good to the prisoner. Allah! how I love you, and surely, if I may not be your master I may serve you. If you should be in trouble--ever--in this land of Egypt, the very soil of which is drenched with the blood of those who have fought, and loved, and won, and lost thousands of years before the coming of the gentle prophet who said that in the sight of the great God, anyway, we are brethren--yes, if trouble should come to you, will you send me a messenger--to the Tents of Purple and of Gold? I am doing you a great wrong in lingering where I can catch glimpses of you. I love you--love you--but that is no excuse for causing you harm through the wagging of evil tongues."

Tears dropped one by one upon the jewel which glittered on her breast.

"And if I were in trouble--great trouble--if I were to come to you myself, how----?"

"My boat waits at the landing-stage from sundown to sunrise, the swiftest mare in all Egypt, as the fortune-teller foretold you, the snow-white mare Pi-Kay waits from the setting until the rising of the sun at the Gate of To-morrow, which is a ruined portal on the road of the Colossi. From there the way lies west. And fear not." He pointed to an inscription on the wall and translated it in the Egyptian tongue. "'I have come full of joy because of my love to thee; my hands are full of all life and purity. I am protecting thee among all gods.'"

Followed by the dogs, they walked slowly down the incline to a mound of rubbish flung up and left by an excavating party many years back; behind it they found the stallion Sooltan in the care of his sayis, also the one donkey which had wandered off in search of grass and got lost, and whose absence in the cavalcade had not been noticed on account of the disorder of the descent.

"Kismet!" had said Jobad the guide when he had made the discovery at the water's edge.

If the white folk could not keep count of themselves he was not going to draw their attention to the fact that one of the party was missing; he had not the slightest intention of providing an evening meal for the lion by offering to go in search of the pair. "Kismet!--Allah would watch over them!"

Hugh Carden Ali leapt to the saddle without touching the stirrups, then swung the girl as lightly as a leaf up into his arms.

Heedless of the extra burden of the slip of a girl who had mastered him in the desert and who lay so quietly against his master's heart, the magnificent black beast stood stock-still, then suddenly shivered violently, just as the dogs of Billi, belly to ground, eyes blazing, ruffs on end, growled softly.

Hugh Carden pressed Damaris back against his shoulder and turned and looked in the direction whence had come that sound, paralysing if you do not happen to be armed.

From somewhere amongst the rocky wilderness of the hills, carried by the night-breeze, had come the hoarse coughing of a lion.

"Listen," he said.

And as it came again, with shrieks of "Sab�! sab�!" the pea-green sayis leapt on the back of the terrified donkey, which, spurred by fear, disappeared like a streak down the hill just as the stallion, sweating with pure terror, reared and wheeled, then backed, with great eyes rolling and hoofs striking sparks from the stones.

Up he reared, until it seemed impossible that he should not fall backwards, crushing to death or hideously maiming the man who, encumbered with the girl upon his arm, could do little to calm the frightened beast, And well for them was it that Hugh Carden Ali, with his love and understanding of horses, knew that only to the sagacity of the animal could the safe negotiation of the dangerous descent down the hillside be left. He gave Sooltan his head.

There is no danger in it, goodness knows, when you bestride a diminutive donkey whose dainty little feet know every pebble on the route, but there is danger when an animal like Sooltan takes the Avenue of Sphinxes at a mad rush and slips and slithers and slides, under the impetus of his own weight, pace and terror, the rest of the way, even if he is as sure-footed as a goat.

 *     *     *     *     *     *

Later, when her beloved child wakened the night-porter, Jane Coop, blue with anxiety and cold, most unhygienically closed the window and thankfully padded off to her comfortable bed.