Tales of Secret Egypt Part 21

"I perceive that I am not alone in my anxiety for the welfare of M.

Felix Breton."

"But why were you following him? I narrowly missed a.s.saulting you."

"Very narrowly," he agreed in his gentle manner; "but you ask me why I was following M. Breton. I was following him because I have seen so many of those who have crossed the path of the Black _Darwishes_ meet with violent and inexplicable deaths."

"Murder?" I whispered.

"Not murder--suicide. Therefore, observing, as I had antic.i.p.ated, a strangeness in your friend's behavior, I have watched him."

"The strangeness of his behavior is easily accounted for," I said.

And excitedly, for the horror of the episode in the studio was still strongly upon me, I told him of the whispering mummy.

"These are very dreadful things of which you speak, Kernaby Pasha," he admitted, "but I warned you that it was ill to incur the enmity of the Black _Darwishes_. That there is a scheme afoot to compa.s.s the self-destruction or insanity of your friend is now evident to me; and he has brought this calamity upon himself; for the words which he believed to be spoken by the spirit of the girl Yasmina would not have affected him so unpleasantly if his att.i.tude towards her had been marked by proper restraint and the affair confined within suitable limitations."

"Quite so. But although the Black _Darwishes_ may be both malignant and clever, that uncanny whispering is beyond the control of natural forces."

"Such is not my opinion," replied Ab Tabah. "A spirit does not mistake one person for another; and the whispering voice addressed itself to 'Felix' when Felix was not present. I believe, Kernaby Pasha, that you are the possessor of a pair of excellent opera-gla.s.ses? May I suggest that you return to Shepheard's and procure them."

V

The platform of the minaret seemed very cold to the touch of my stockinged feet; for I had left my shoes at the entrance to the mosque below in accordance with custom; and now, from the wooden balcony, I overlooked the neighboring roofs of Cairo, and Ab Tabah, beside me, pointed to where a vague patch of light broke the darkness beneath us to the left.

"The window of M. Felix Breton's studio," he said.

Raising the gla.s.ses to his eyes, he gazed in that direction, whilst I also peered thither and succeeded in making out the well of the courtyard and the roofs of the buildings to right and left of it.

It was not evident to me for what Ab Tabah was looking, and when presently he lowered the gla.s.ses and turned to me I expressed my doubts in words.

"It is surely evident," I said, speaking, as I now almost invariably did to the _imam_, in English, of which he had a perfect mastery, "that we have little chance of discovering anything from here, since nothing was visible from the studio window. Furthermore, who save Yasmina could have spoken in the manner which I have related and in broken French?"

"An eavesdropper," he replied, "might have profited by the lessons which Yasmina received from M. Breton; and all vocal characteristics are lost in a whisper. In the second place, Yasmina is not dead."

"What!" I cried.

Although, when Breton had informed me of her death, I myself had doubted him, for some reason the ghostly whisper had convinced me as it had convinced him.

"She has been kept a prisoner during the past week in a house belonging to one of the Black _Darwishes_," continued Ab Tabah; "but my agents succeeded in tracing her this morning. By my orders, however, she has not been allowed to return to her home."

"And what was the object of those orders?"

"That I might learn for what purpose she had been made to disappear,"

replied Ab Tabah; "and I have learned it to-night."

"Then you think that the whispering mummy----"

He suddenly clutched my arm.

"Quick! raise your gla.s.ses!" he said softly. "On the roof of the house to the left of the light. There is the whispering mummy!"

Strung up to a high pitch of excitement, I gazed through the gla.s.ses in the direction indicated by my companion. Without difficulty I discerned him--a man wearing a black turban--who crept like some ungainly cat along the flat roof, carrying in his hand what looked like one of those sugar canes which pa.s.s for a delicacy among the natives, but which to European eyes appear more suitable for curtain-poles than sweetmeats. Springing perilously across a yawning gulf, the wearer of the black turban gained the roof of the studio, crept along for some little distance further, and then, lying p.r.o.ne, began slowly to lower the bamboo rod in the direction of the lighted window.

I found that unconsciously I had suspended my respiration, and now, breathlessly, as the truth came home to me--

"It is a speaking-tube!" I cried, "I cannot see the end of it, but no doubt it is curved so as to protrude through the side of the lattice window. Do you look, Ab Tabah: _I_ propose to act."

Thrusting the gla.s.ses into the _imam's_ hand, I took my Colt repeater from my pocket, and, having peered for some seconds steadily in the direction of the dimly visible _Darwish_, I opened fire! I had fired five shots in the heat of my anger at that sinister crouching figure, ere Ab Tabah seized my wrist.

"Stop!" he cried; "do you forget where you stand?"

Truly I had forgotten in my indignation, or I should not have outraged his feelings by firing from the minaret of a mosque. But sufficient of my wrath remained to occasion me a thrill of satisfaction, when, peering through the dusk, I saw the _Darwish_ throw up his arms and disappear from view.

"There is blood in the courtyard," said Ab Tabah; "but Ahmad es-Kebir has fled. Therefore he still lives, and his anger will be not the less but the greater. Depart from Cairo, M. Breton: it is my counsel to you."

"But," cried Felix Breton, glaring wildly at the big canvas on the easel, "I must finish my picture. As Yasmina is alive, she must return, and I must finish my picture!"

"Yasmina cannot return," replied Ab Tabah, fixing his weird eyes upon the speaker. "I have caused her to be banished from Cairo." He raised his hand, checking Breton's hot words ere they were uttered.

"Recriminations are unavailing. Her presence disturbs the peace of the city, and the peace of the city it is my duty to maintain."

PART II

OTHER TALES

I

LORD OF THE JACKALS

In those days, of course (said the French agent, looking out across the sea of Yssuf Effendis which billowed up against the balcony to where, in the moonlight, the minarets of Cairo pointed the way to G.o.d), I did not occupy the position which I occupy to-day. No, I was younger, and more ambitious; I thought to carve in the annals of Egypt a name for myself such as that of De Lesseps.

I had a scheme--and there were those who believed in it--for extending the borders of Egypt. Ah! my friends, Egypt after all is but a double belt of mud following the Nile, and terminated east and west by the desert. The desert! It was the dream of my life to exterminate that desert, that hungry gray desert; it was my plan--a foolish plan as I know now--to link the fertile Faym to the Oases! How was this to be done? Ah!

Why should I dig up those buried skeletons? It was not done; it never could be done; therefore, let me not bore you with how I had proposed to do it. Suffice it that my ambitions took me far off the beaten tracks, far, even, from the caravan roads--far into the gray heart of the desert.

But I was ambitious, and only nineteen--or scarcely twenty. At nineteen, a man who comes from St. Remy fears no obstacle which Fate can place in his way, and looks upon the world as a grape-fruit to be sweetened with endeavor and sucked empty.

It was in those days, then, that I learned as your Rudyard Kipling has also learned that "East is East"; it was in those days that I came face to face with that "mystery of Egypt" about which so much is written, has always been written, and always will be written, but concerning which so few people, so very few people, know anything whatever.

Yes, I, Rene de Fla.s.sans, saw with my own eyes a thing that I knew to be magic, a thing whereat my reason rebelled--a thing which my poor European intelligence could not grapple, could not begin to explain.

It was this which you asked me to tell you, was it not? I will do so with pleasure, because I know that I speak to men of honor, and because it is good for me, now that I cannot count the gray hairs in my beard, to confess how poor a thing I was when I could count every hair upon my chin--and how grand a thing I thought myself.