Yet it was the differences rather than the samenesses, after all, that had been calling to him and more strongly during these days with Zeid ibn Hussein among the men of the Bedouin cavalry, calling him away from Christianity with its doctrine of sin and redemption through sorrow; its concept of being doomed to play everlastingly the part of the accused, with God for one’s judge, angry or gentle, but still one’s judge, through all eternity, burdened for ever with guilt in a sin-blasted world, for ever having to protest not innocence but repentance, with salvation or damnation hanging in the balance. In Islam, it seemed, a man could look forward in trust, if he had lived his earthly life worthily, to starting again in a new life somewhat like it, but immeasurably better. “Savouring the beauty of his days”, the days given to him by Allah the All Merciful, in whose hand he could rest without having to endlessly justify himself.
And yet not a soft faith, a faith edged and tempered as a sword blade, giving a certain pride, demanding a certain purity.
Again he was reined back to old ties, old loyalties. Again he wished Zeid had not pointed out the advantages of conversion to a career soldier. He might have known that far from encouraging him to change his faith, it would make it harder. He checked between one breath and the next. But of course Zeid had known perfectly well, and what had ease of choice to do with changing one’s faith? He had touched on a far worse temptation on the evening of the raid: “… of such things are the Brotherhood made. Of such things and others beside …”
Thomas looked at his own hand spread-fingered on the sun-purged stone of the great hand beside him, and cursed himself for a fool. ‘What am I tearing myself to pieces for? Over and over again, and all without need. When I am repatriated it will be over and done with, and presently I shall look back and all this will be like a dream.’
All this?
The joy of Bulbul that was sharper and sweeter even than the joy of Flambeau had been; mounted sabre practice in the cool of the morning; the scent of the desert after a heavy dew. Dark mobile faces around the evening fires, and voices telling stories of which as yet he could understand one word in three. Arabic lessons with Zeid over the endless cups of coffee. The comradeship, hamstrung still by the lack of a fully shared tongue, but which was not quite like any comradeship that ever he would know again. The voice of the muezzin five times a day, calling to prayer …
And permeating it all, lacing it into one, the desert itself. He had learned long ago, during boyhood talks with the seamen down at Leith docks, something of the hold the sea had over the men who lived by it, no easy affection, a personal and demanding relationship entering heart and mind and soul. You could love the sea or hate it, often both at the same time; but once it had laid hold of you, you were seldom free of it again. Something in that great emptiness, the power beyond the power of man, the aloneness that was perhaps an aloneness with God, was in the desert too. Was that what bound him to the men of the Bedouin Horse, as seamen are bound together?
He lifted his gaze from his own hand on the sun-baked stone, and looked about him, suddenly more acutely aware of his surroundings then ever he had been before. It was drawing on to sunset, the sky that had been deeply and fiercely blue, heavy with its weight of colour, when he sat down, fading to harebell in the east, beginning to glow with the reflection of far-off fires beyond the march of the great dunes westward. A little wind was rising as it often did towards sunset, raising a faint veil of blown sand along the surface of the ground, raising too from the blown particles the sound, only just within the compass of human hearing, that was the song of the dunes. The sun clung for a last moment to the wave-lift western skyline, and the shadows, dark bloomed as grapes, spilled over and came flowing down the slopes, though in the east the mountains still caught the light and stood up gold and tawny against that dim harebell sky. High overhead the hawk hung bivvering, his wing-tips touched with fire. And for one moment that seemed to be held in the heart of time, while not in itself having anything to do with time at all, Thomas felt the one-ness of the sunset and the singing dunes, the hawk and himself and the great quiet hand that cupped all things in the circle of its own quietude.
In that moment the ceaseless painful attempt to get things straight in his heart and head fell away. And in the sudden stillness within himself, not into his mind but into some more inward part of himself came a sense of enlightenment.
He had been trying and trying, bruising himself with the effort to think rationally about changing Gods, but there was only one God, his own and Zeid’s and the God behind the beast-headed gods of the men who had carved the great calm hand against which he rested. “Ours is the one true God,” men said and they were right. All men were right. Only one God, though men gave Him different names and attributes and prayed to him in different words with different forms of worship. But always the same God, and the names and the prayers and the forms of worship were man-made.
For a while, he never knew afterwards whether it was three heartbeats or an hour, for it was still outside normal time, the sense of one-ness, the certainty of a Truth behind all truth remained with him. Then a sound, beautiful in itself, but belonging to the world of men broke the circle of perfection. The soft beat of camel bells, a dark brown sound with a bloom to it in the evening stillness. He found he was on his feet, though he did not remember having risen. And the sun was gone; and along the crest of the long dune, against the lines of the sunset that now were staining the sky to the zenith, the dark shapes of the laden camels were strung out; one of the great caravans coming up from the south, pressing forward to reach the caravanserai at the oasis before darkness came upon them.
It was time he was getting back to duty.
When Thomas arrived back in camp he found signs of a new arrival, tired mounts being unsaddled and led off to the horse-lines, a handful of weary Turkish troopers standing about. And when he asked a passing trooper of his own squadron the who and wherefore of the newcomers, the man told him they were the escort of an army messenger who had just ridden in from Aswan.
There was no reason in the world why the arrival of a messenger from Aswan should have anything to do with him or his affairs, and yet, making his way up through the camp, Thomas, not yet quite returned to normality from the state of heightened awareness that had come upon him in the desert, felt a faint stirring within himself, a sense of impending changes.
In the shadowed entrance to the headquarters tent, Zeid stood talking with a Turkish officer. Thomas skirted them widely and went on to his own quarters. The lamp had been lit, and on his bed-rug lay a flat packet. He picked it up and held it to the light, seeing that it was addressed to him in a small meticulous hand. Presumably it was something that the messenger had brought. But who did he know in Aswan? He drew the small dagger from his bandoleer sheath, and cut the scarlet thread and folded back the rustling paper. He was holding a book much the same size as his copy of the Koran, and with the same kind of delicate gilded tracery on its black leather cover. He opened it at the title page and saw that it also was in French.
“Ali ibn abu Talib
The True Caliph
The Commander of the Faithful
The Sword of Allah”
he read, and guessed that it was from Colonel D’Esurier even before he turned his attention to the folded sheet of paper that had fluttered free as he opened the book:
“I rejoice that we shall shortly be meeting again at El Jizzan, where I am at present superintending the mounting of guns on both the river and the desert side of the defences.” Normally that would have pulled Thomas up with a jerk, but he seemed to have brought a great quiet with him out of the desert that evening; and it was with him still, and he merely registered the statement and read on: “But since I have always found reading, together with my pencil, to be a great lightener of the way on a journey, I send you another French translation, commissioned at the same time as the Koran, which you have already (and which I imagine, unless you have come by some other reading matter, you a
re able to recite almost off by heart!), hoping that the life of Ali ibn Talib, the Prophet’s son-in-law, may give interest to the noon-tide halts.” Thomas smiled within himself at the French colonel’s idea of travelling. In his own experience, when on the move, the noon-tide halts tended to be spent on picket duty or coping with various emergencies, or with one’s head cloth pulled across one’s face to keep out the sand, trying to catch up on the sleep one had lost the night before, when a jackal crying too near the camp had stampeded the camels. He read on. It was a pleasantly discursive letter; not the letter, somehow, that he would have expected from the somewhat sardonic Frenchman. All was going well with Donald MacLeod — that made good reading at all events — plague had appeared in the Delta as always at that time of the year; and between these two items, almost in passing, came the news that the peace negotiations between the British and Egyptian governments were almost completed, and the repatriation of British prisoners about to begin.
The quiet which Thomas had brought with him out of the desert did not disappear, but it changed its nature, became like the pause and long-drawn breath before action. The answer to the slight mystery of the gift and letter sent so near to the time when it seemed he and D’Esurier would be meeting again anyway clicked smoothly into place. They might not have much chance of speaking privately together, and wishing to give him the repatriation news as far in advance as possible, the colonel had taken this way of doing it. A letter sent for that one especial purpose, possibly to be opened and read by the wrong person, might be unwise, might take on too much importance altogether. But a gift, with a letter enclosed, giving the same news in passing, among other items, would seem very much less worthy of attention.
He laid the book back on his sleeping-rug, and stowed the letter in the folds of his waist-shawl. Outside it was too dark to tell a white thread from a black one; and the high wild-bird note of the call to prayer was wailing across the camp.
Thomas remained leaning against the tent pole until the praying was over and life moved forward again, then straightened himself, slung on his sabre, and went back to duty.
Far into that night, when late rounds were over, and the Turkish officer had departed to his own quarters, Thomas and his captain still faced each other across the sinking embers of the coffee hearth.
“So — I am thinking that in one way or another way, your time with the Bedouin Horse is drawing to a close,” Zeid said, leaning back against the camel saddle behind him and looking with narrowed eyes into the flame of the lamp.
“Why?” Thomas demanded, startled.
“See now — Ibrahim Pasha, the Viceroy’s elder son, is at this fine new fort at El Jizzan on a survey of the economic resources of Upper Egypt, which the Mameluke factions between them have torn to rags. It seems unlikely, he being but nineteen (a year younger than you, I think?), but if his reputation rings true, he is well up to the task. What it is to have an old head on young shoulders! And I am ordered to leave Abu Salan in command here — Allah the All Merciful grant I shall find we still have horses left when I return —and ride north almost to Aswan to report to him on the state of the frontier. There is nothing strange in that, but I am bidden to bring the Scotsman, Thomas Keith, with me as an officer of my escort. And that, Thomas, I can only think means that your time in seclusion is nearly over.”
Thomas was silent a long moment. The saluki stretched and sighed, her head on her master’s thigh. It was an hour and more since he had first heard the orders from El Jizzan which dovetailed so neatly with Colonel D’Esurier’s message. He wondered why he need no longer be kept secret from the Viceroy; maybe denying him his right to demand his repatriation with the rest had turned out to be too risky? He realised that in all probability he would never know.
All he did know was that his choosing, which had seemed to be an indefinite distance into the future, was here. He wondered if he should speak to Zeid now, even before the setting out, as to his natural desire to join the other British prisoners.
He drew a long breath to do so, and heard himself saying, as though it were the thing he had known all his life that he would say in this place and at this time, “Whether I return with you again to El Hamha, or whether I am sent elsewhere, I shall not forget these months with the Bedouin cavalry, nor yet the things that are for the making of the Brotherhood. And whether it be here or in another place, I shall be seeking a religious teacher.”
Zeid’s fingers checked in fondling the old bitch’s tasselled ears. “A religious teacher?”
“So-o.” Zeid’s fingers returned to their fondling, but his gaze held and returned Thomas’s. “I hoped that might be the way of it — one time or another time. My heart is glad within me.”
6
At dusk four days later, they rode into El Jizzan and after seeing the horses fed and watered and the men of the escort safely bestowed, Thomas made his way up to the room in the officers’ block, which he and Zeid were to share. The room was empty, Zeid having gone off to visit friends. The lamp had been lit, and shone down from its niche in the wall on to their few belongings, which had been brought in and stacked on the two rug-covered mattresses which, together with a tall water jug and a spare camel-saddle, were the room’s only furniture. A small room that might have been a monk’s cell save that there was no crucifix on the lime-washed wall. Bare thatch overhead, the small high-set window beyond which the dark was opaque as velvet. The centre of the floor had evidently been swept in their honour, but the sand-wreaths in the corners lay untouched. Sand seemed normal in a black goat-hair tent, but in the corners of a brick-built room it had an alien look. To Thomas, used for six months and more to the cluttered spaciousness of the long Bedu tent, one whole side looped back to the open air and the life of the camp going on beyond it, the small square room seemed airless and shut away.
Also he was gritty from head to foot, longing to wash off the sand of the three days’ ride. That would have to wait, he supposed, the jug in the corner was clearly only for drinking. Well at least he could get into a cleaner shirt. He took a gurgling pull at the water jug, and turned to get his saddle bag from the pile of belongings on the rug. As he did so a step sounded in the arcaded court outside, the door which he had left half-open behind him creaked on its hinges, and he spun round, his hand instinctively moving towards the pistol in his waist-shawl, to find Colonel D’Esurier standing in the doorway.
“Private Keith,” said the Frenchman, looking him up and down with a kind of detached interest spiced with amusement. “You begin already to carry the look of the desert about you.”
“I have only just come up from seeing to the men and horses,” Thomas said apologetically. “No time to shake the sand out of myself or put on a clean shirt.”
“Ah, I was not speaking of the sand,” D’Esurier swung the door lightly behind him and came further into the room. He set his hands on Thomas’s shoulders and embraced him on both cheeks. Thomas returned the embrace warmly. They had met only twice, they came of different worlds, and though gratitude had told him on the evening of the horse raid to whom he wished to give the Crusader sword, he had not known until that moment that he counted the French colonel not only as some kind of sponsor in a strange new world, but as a friend.
Now they were holding each other at arm’s length, smiling a little.
“They have been good, I think, these months in the desert?” D’Esurier said.
“Not at first. But after a while, yes, they have been good.”
D’Esurier glanced down at the two books lying in the tumbled folds of Thomas’s clean shirt, one black, one crimson, the delicate gilded arabesques glinting in the light of the palm-oil lamp. “You received my packet, I see.”
“And your letter. It was good to get so much news of the outside world.”
“I thought it might be,” D’Esurier said quietly. “You have come to a decision? At least considered a course of action?”
“I have.” Thomas hesitated. He knew that the thing must be told a
t once, but he was suddenly unsure as to how the Frenchman, despite his gifts, might take it. He nerved himself and said levelly, “I have to thank you also for the life of Ali ibn abu Talib. I read most of it four nights ago. That was the evening the Aswan messenger who brought it arrived, and I had told Zeid ibn Hussein that I wished to take instruction in the faith of Islam. I could not sleep for a long time that night, and it made good reading.”
The colonel’s brows quirked upwards: “So — farewell the streets of Edinburgh. That was quick decision-making.”
“I think I had already made the decision, though I did not know it before.” Thomas hesitated. “Yet it was not easy in the making.”
“That I can believe. And for that, do you know, I envy you, my friend.”
“Envy me?”
The colonel laughed a little harshly. “Because for me it would be easy. At your age I was an atheist; now, having grown less sure with age, I suppose that I am an agnostic. I say simply that I do not know. I have no faith to change … But now let us talk of other things. You have seen action, I hear, since our last meeting.”
Thomas remembered two things, and the first of them was his manners. His guest was still standing.
A few moments later, with D’Esurier seated on one of the mattresses, a camel-saddle at his back, he turned to the second thing, disentangling two long, narrow bundles wrapped in linen from the baggage pile. “Captain Zeid ibn Hussein will have told you that — But of course you cannot serve long on the frontier without meeting Bedouin raiders or the Mamelukes. There was one day tribesmen raided our horse-lines at dawn. We went after them, and he and I — having the best horses — caught up with their rear-guard ahead of the rest of our troop. It was warmish work for a while.” He pivoted on his haunches, and leaning forward, laid the longer of the two bundled objects in the Frenchman’s hands.
“One of the things I have learned during these past months is that it is discourteous to express thanks for a gift. The correct thing, if one desires to express gratitude, is a gift in return. This I had from one of the men I killed.”