A Desert Drama by Arthur Conan Doyle (debian ebook reader .txt) 📕

“He is,” said a voice behind them, and they found that the Birmingham clergyman had joined the party. His tied hands clutched on to his Makloofa saddle, and his fat body swayed dangerously from side to side with every stride of the camel. His wounded leg was oozing with blood and clotted with flies, and the burning desert sun beat down upon his bare head, for he had lost both hat and umbrella in the scuffle. A rising fever flecked his large, white cheeks with a touch of colour, and brought a light into his brown ox-eyes. He had always seemed a somewhat gross and vulgar person to his fellow-travellers. Now, this bitter healing draught of sorrow had transformed him. He was purified, spiritualised, exalted. He had become so calmly strong that he made the others feel stronger as they looked upon him. He spoke of life and of death, of the present, and their hopes of the future; and the black cloud of their misery began to show a golden rift or two. Cecil Brown shrugged his shoulders, for he could not change in an hour the convictions of his life; but the others, even Fardet, the Frenchman, were touched and strengthened. They all took off their hats when he prayed. Then the Colonel made a turban out of his red silk cummerbund, and insisted that Mr. Stuart should wear it. With his homely dress and gorgeous head-gear, he looked like a man who has dressed up to amuse the children.

And now the dull, ceaseless, insufferable torment of thirst was added to the aching weariness which came from the motion of the camels. The sun glared down upon them, and then up again from the yellow sand, and the great plain shimmered and glowed until they felt as if they were riding over a cooling sheet of molten metal. Their lips were parched and dried, and their tongues like tags of leather. They lisped curiously in their speech, for it was only the vowel sounds which would come without an effort. Miss Adams's chin had dropped upon her chest, and her great hat concealed her face.

“Auntie will faint if she does not get water,” said Sadie. “Oh, Mr. Stephens, is there nothing we could do?”

The Dervishes riding near were all Baggara with the exception of one negro,—an uncouth fellow with a face pitted with smallpox. His expression seemed good-natured when compared with that of his Arab comrades, and Stephens ventured to touch his elbow and to point to his water-skin, and then to the exhausted lady. The negro shook his head brusquely, but at the same time he glanced significantly towards the Arabs, as if to say that, if it were not for them, he might act differently. Then he laid his black forefinger upon the breast of his jibbeh.

“Tippy Tilly,” said he.

“What's that?” asked Colonel Cochrane.

“Tippy Tilly,” repeated the negro, sinking his voice as if he wished only the prisoners to hear him.

The Colonel shook his head.

“My Arabic won't bear much strain. I don't know what he is saying,” said he.

“Tippy Tilly. Hicks Pasha,” the negro repeated.

“I believe the fellow is friendly to us, but I can't quite make him out,” said Cochrane to Belmont. “Do you think that he means that his name is Tippy Tilly, and that he killed Hicks Pasha?”

The negro showed his great white teeth at hearing his own words coming back to him. “Aiwa!” said he. “Tippy Tilly—Bimbashi Mormer—Bourn!”

“By Jove, I got it!” cried Belmont.

“He's trying to speak English. Tippy Tilly is as near as he can get to Egyptian Artillery. He has served in the Egyptian Artillery under Bimbashi Mortimer. He was taken prisoner when Hicks Pasha was destroyed, and had to turn Dervish to save his skin. How's that?”

The Colonel said a few words of Arabic and received a reply, but two of the Arabs closed up, and the negro quickened his pace and left them.

“You are quite right,” said the Colonel. “The fellow is friendly to us, and would rather fight for the Khedive than for the Khalifa. I don't know that he can do us any good, but I've been in worse holes than this, and come out right side up. After all, we are not out of reach of pursuit, and won't be for another forty-eight hours.”

Belmont calculated the matter out in his slow, deliberate fashion.

“It was about twelve that we were on the rock,” said he. “They would become alarmed aboard the steamer if we did not appear at two.”

“Yes,” the Colonel interrupted, “that was to be our lunch hour. I remember saying that when I came back I would have——Oh, Lord, it's best not to think about it!”

“The reis was a sleepy old crock,” Belmont continued; “but I have absolute confidence in the promptness and decision of my wife. She would insist upon an immediate alarm being given. Suppose they started back at two-thirty, they should be at Haifa by three, since the journey is down stream. How long did they say that it took to turn out the Camel Corps?”

“Give them an hour.”

“And another hour to get them across the river. They would be at the Abousir Rock and pick up the tracks by six o'clock. After that it is a clear race. We are only four hours ahead, and some of these beasts are very spent. We may be saved yet, Cochrane!”

“Some of us may. I don't expect to see the padre alive to-morrow, nor Miss Adams either. They are not made for this sort of thing, either of them. Then, again, we must not forget that these people have a trick of murdering their prisoners when they think that there is a chance of a rescue. See here, Belmont, in case you get back and I don't, there's a matter of a mortgage that I want you to set right for me.” They rode on with their shoulders inclined to each other, deep in the details of business.

The friendly negro who had talked of himself as Tippy Tilly had managed to slip a piece of cloth soaked in water into the hand of Mr. Stephens, and Miss Adams had moistened her lips with it. Even the few drops had given her renewed strength, and, now that the first crushing shock was over, her wiry, elastic, Yankee nature began to reassert itself.

“These people don't look as if they would harm us, Mr. Stephens,” said she. “I guess they have a working religion of their own, such as it is, and that what's wrong to us is wrong to them.”

Stephens shook his head in silence. He had seen the death of the donkey-boys, and she had not.

“Maybe we are sent to guide them into a better path,” said the old lady. “Maybe we are specially singled out for a good work among them.”

If it were not for her niece her energetic and enterprising temperament was capable of glorying in the chance of evangelising Khartoum, and turning Omdurman into a little well-drained, broad-avenued replica of a New England town.

“Do you know what I am thinking of all the time?” said Sadie. “You remember that temple that we saw,—when was it? Why, it was this morning.”

They gave an exclamation of surprise, all three of them. Yes, it had been this morning; and it seemed away and away in some dim past experience of their lives, so vast was the change, so new and so overpowering the thoughts which had come between them. They rode in silence, full of this strange expansion of time, until at last Stephens reminded Sadie that she had left her remark unfinished.

“Oh, yes; it was the wall picture on that temple that I was thinking of. Do you remember the poor string of prisoners who are being dragged along to the feet of the great king,—how dejected they looked among the warriors who led them? Who could,—who could have thought that within three hours the same fate should be our own? And Mr. Headingly——,” she turned her face away and began to cry.

“Don't take on, Sadie,” said her aunt; “remember what the minister said just now, that we are all right there in the hollow of God's hand. Where do you think we are going, Mr. Stephens?”

The red edge of his Baedeker still projected from the lawyer's pocket, for it had not been worth their captor's while to take it. He glanced down at it.

“If they will only leave me this, I will look up a few references when we halt. I have a general idea of the country, for I drew a small map of it the other day. The river runs from south to north, so we must be travelling almost due west. I suppose they feared pursuit if they kept too near the Nile bank. There is a caravan route, I remember, which runs parallel to the river, about seventy miles inland. If we continue in this direction for a day we ought to come to it. There is a line of wells through which it passes. It comes out at Assiout, if I remember right, upon the Egyptian side. On the other side, it leads away into the Dervish country,—so, perhaps——”

His words were interrupted by a high, eager voice which broke suddenly into a torrent of jostling words, words without meaning, pouring strenuously out in angry assertions and foolish repetitions. The pink had deepened to scarlet upon Mr. Stuart's cheeks, his eyes were vacant but brilliant, and he gabbled, gabbled, gabbled as he rode. Kindly mother Nature! she will not let her children be mishandled too far. “This is too much,” she says; “this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable.” And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its home-coming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, kindly face behind.

The Arab guards looked askance at this sudden outbreak of the clergyman, for it verged upon lunacy, and lunacy is to them a fearsome and supernatural thing. One of them rode forward and spoke with the Emir. When he returned he said something to his comrades, one of whom closed in upon each side of the minister's camel, so as to prevent him from falling. The friendly negro sidled his beast up to the Colonel, and whispered to him.

“We are going to halt presently, Belmont,” said Cochrane.

“Thank God! They may give us some water. We can't go on like this.”

“I told Tippy Tilly that, if he could help us, we would turn him into a Bimbashi when we got him back into Egypt. I think he's willing enough if he only had the power. By Jove, Belmont, do look back at the river.”

Their route, which had lain through sand-strewn khors with jagged, black edges,—places up which one would hardly think it possible that a camel could climb,—opened out now on to a hard, rolling plain, covered thickly with rounded pebbles, dipping and rising to the violet hills upon the horizon. So regular were the long, brown pebble-strewn curves, that they looked like the dark rollers of some monstrous ground-swell. Here and there a little straggling sage-green tuft of camel-grass sprouted up between the stones. Brown plains and violet hills,—nothing else in front of them! Behind lay the black jagged rocks through which they had passed with orange slopes of sand, and then far away a thin line of green to mark the course of the river. How cool and beautiful that green looked in the stark, abominable