“TUM, tum, tump!” sang the new storyteller’s drum. “TUMPTY, tum, tum, tup!”
And Ali ben Hassan, the beggar boy, who sometimes claimed his true name was Ali Baksheesh, the boy Ali who was—it was sometimes reported—more thief than beggar, turned to look. The new recounter of old tales was young and handsome, his beard as brown as a chestnut; there was a pistol of Fez (which is where they make the best ones) in his sash and a smile on his lips.
Ali ceased to pester a camel driver and dashed past the potter’s stall to squat beside the storyteller and extend cupped hands. “Baksheesh!” Ali whined. “Most noble lord, sultan of story! Ailaho A’alam! I have nothing—nothing!”
“What!” exclaimed the storyteller, continuing to tap his little drum with his fingers. “You say you have nothing, but first beg the indulgence of Allah for telling lies? You won’t get fat like that.”
“But, prince of parable, I desire to see those gardens of lasting delight which Allah—the Creator! the Ever Beneficent!—reserves for the faithful. How am I to do so if I tell lies?”
“By lying to Allah, I suppose.”
“Master of mystery!” protested Ali. “Master of history! Far be it from you to say such a thing. I did not hear it.”
“Nor did I hear your importunate demand for baksheesh,” the storyteller replied calmly, still tapping his drum.
“Do not all good Moslems give alms?” Ali raised his voice.
“Ailaho A’alam! I have nothing!”
“It is truly written that none shall starve,” replied the storyteller. “Tell me what it is you have, and possibly I may give you something—though it will not be money.”
“I have three things,” Ali answered eagerly. “Harken, O raja of romance, and I shall enumerate them—no, four! By the Beard! Four! For I have this clout, which conceals my private parts—”
“Which may remain so.”
“My turban, my lice, and you! Is it not written that food mete to each shall be appointed to him? You—”
“No,” interrupted the storyteller. “It is not.”
“—have surely been appointed by the Most Compassionate to feed me. Are you a scholar? And so young?”
“I’d a good master,” the storyteller said. “Mullah Ibrahim the Wise, that holy man.”
“To teach you to tell stories in the bazaar? What are you going to give me?” “A story, of course. I’ve one to give, and you’ve ears in which to receive it. And perhaps if I tell you a story, others will come to listen as well.”
The Tale of the Rose and the Nightingale
Long, long ago (so the storyteller began) there bloomed in the pasha’s garden a lovely white rose, the most beautiful flower ever seen. Her waist was a date palm in the wind, her breasts twin white doves, her hips the saddle of a milk-white dromedary without flaw, her face the moon; the perfume of her limbs filled the whole garden, and her flesh shone like silver.
Ali nodded, knowing that in a story a flower might readily be a woman.
A little brown nightingale wandered into the garden (so the storyteller continued) in search of a mate. He beheld the white rose and fell hopelessly in love with her. He began to build a palace for her in the mulberry tree, and each night he serenaded her from its lowest limb, songs filled with passion and parting, songs sorrowful, and songs that wept with so much joy that the stars bent to listen. “I love you—you—you!” he sang. “Only you! Oh, be my bride!”
And the rose nodded on her stem, and smiled, and at last sent a message by a moth: “Come closer, O my dearest love,” it ran. “But come not too near.”
The little nightingale was mad with delight. So beat his heart in his tiny bosom that it seemed it must soon burst. She loves me! he thought; and he sang, “You love me! You love me! You love me!” Fools may believe it was but the soft wind that caressed the garden, but the nightingale knew better, and so do I. The rose nodded on her stem, and he fluttered for joy.
A stranger had come into the bazaar, an old man whose eyes were always shut, who felt out his path with a long white stick. The boy, Ali, had been too intent on the story to notice him at first; but he caught sight of him as the storyteller said joy, for this old man was feeling his way past the potter’s stall, tapping each pot with his stick.
“Here, venerable one,” quickly cried the potter, fearful his wares might be broken. “Permit a wretched man of day to guide you.” He took the old man by the elbow. “Where do you desire to go, venerable one?”
“I heard a story told,” answered the old man. “Or rather, I heard the speech of a storyteller, for now I hear it no more. Once, O my brother, it was my only pleasure to read that which is sacred, heeding nought else, and I did so till I had learned every verse as no man since. Observing that I had no more need for them, the All Seeing One put out my eyes. Now I mumble his verses in the dark—but hear storytellers, sometimes.”
“What wisdom!” cried the potter, “Hear him, O you sons of the Moslems! Here’s the storyteller, venerable one. Please to be seated.”
“Thank you, my brother,” replied the old man. “Thump your day gently.”
The nightingale flew to a honeysuckle bush near the rose and sang again, and when he had finished his song, a crystal drop of dew fell from the rose.
“Why do you weep, lovely one?” inquired the nightingale. “Was my song so sad?”
“Because I am to be uprooted tomorrow,” answered the rose. “Because I am not red. Today, O my lover, while you slept, I heard the pasha instructing our gardener. A red rose of Isfahan is to take my place, for the pasha does not like white roses.”
At this the little nightingale wept too, and for the rest of the night his songs were the saddest he knew, filled with love unrequited and lovers sundered by death.
As dawn came he said to the rose, “I would save you if I could; but I no more than you can prevail against the might of the pasha. May I have one kiss? I shall count it most sacred for the remainder of my time upon earth.”
The rose shook her dew-weighed head as she stared at the ground. “You are certain to tear yourself on my thorns,” she said.
But the nightingale cared not a copper for that. At once he flew to the rose’s stem and pressed his lips to hers; and as he drew away, his bright eyes noticed a single fleck of scarlet on one of the rose’s outermost petals.
“Oh, look!” he cried. “See this! My kiss has left a red spot there. If we were to kiss a thousand times, dearest Rose, you would be a red rose, and so might live.”
“That dot of scarlet is your own heart’s blood,” the rose told him. “It is there because you tore your wing on my thorns, just as I feared.”
“One drop is nothing,” cried the little nightingale, for he knew then what he must do. Taking wing and flying to a dizzying height, he plunged into the rosebush, where he was torn like one who suffers the Death of a Thousand Cuts.
Bleeding everywhere, he fluttered above the rose.
“That’s a very sad story,” said Ali, who was approaching that age at which young men desire women and so come to ruin. “But a beautiful one too. I’ll remember it for a long time.”
“There’s more,” the old man whispered. “I’ve heard this tale before—we must discover what became of them both.”
In the hour that follows the morning prayer (continued the storyteller) the gardener came into the garden with his spade; he set its blade to the root of the rosebush, paying no heed at all to the dead bird lying there. But before he had dug deep, he noticed that one single white rose was splattered and dotted everywhere with scarlet.
“How odd!” he said to himself. And then, “But how lovely! By the Jannat al-Na’im! For the honor of all gardeners, such a bush must not be destroyed. What am I to do?” And so when he had thought upon the matter for a time, he dug up the rosebush indeed, and planted a red rose of Isfahan in its place as his master had ordered him. But he carried the bush that bore the rose the little nightingale had loved to a part of the garden where few ever came, and dug a goodly hole for its roots there. Into this hole, he cast the body of the dead bird he had found in his garden, and he replanted the rosebush on top of it.
Since that day, most of its blossoms have been crimson—the hue of old blood. But once in each year, always at the full of the last moon of summer, the bush bears a white rose spotted and dotted everywhere with scarlet; and it is said that he who picks that rose may choose any love he wishes for so long as the rose remains unwithered, and hold her forever.
After this, the storyteller recounted many another strange tale, such as that of Yunus the Scribe and Walid bin Sahl, that of Gharib and his brother Ajib, that of the City of Brass, and that of the Four Accused. Listeners came and went, idlers and porters, sherbet vendors, shopkeepers, soldiers, and the boatmen of the Nile. But always Ali and the old man remained where they were, and though they put nothing in the storyteller’s bowl, he did not complain of them.
At length the hour drew near when the gates are shut, and there was no one left to listen but Ali and the old man. Then Ali said, “O master of myth, you have given me far more than I expected. What gold is like your words! I shall ask no more—but if I were to ask more, I would ask that you tell your tale of the Rose and the Nightingale again before we go to our beds.”
The storyteller feigned to make a salaam. “I will indeed tell it yet again,” he said, “though upon some other day. And I am happy to hear you liked it so well, for to my own mind it possesses every merit a tale requires, of which fantasy, color, and pathos are the chief.”
The old man combed his white beard with his fingers. “It has another,” said he, “one you have not touched upon: that of truth. For it is indeed written that such a bush grows in the pasha’s garden.”
“What!” exclaimed the boy Ali. “Why, I’d give my life to see it!”
The blind old man nodded. “And so would I, boy. So would I. It does indeed.”
“I wouldn’t,” said the storyteller. “For I have found that I’m able to net loves enough without magic. And as for holding them forever, who but a madman would wish it? Yet I too would like to see a magic rose if I could.”
Ali shook his head. “I’m afraid you can’t, O lord of long words. They say there’s a high wall around the pasha’s garden, so his wives and the other ladies of his harem can walk there.”
The old man laid a dry hand upon Ali’s thigh. “Nor can I, ever. Yet you might, boy—for I know a means by which one such as yourself may be admitted to that garden.”
Then the boy Ali’s mouth opened wide, for he could scarcely believe his good fortune. And at last he said, “Might it be, O monarch of muezzins, that the rose blooms tonight?”
And the old man answered, “That rose opened today, for last night saw the final full moon of summer.”
“Then tell me how I can get into the pasha’s garden!”
The old man shook his head. “That I may not do, boy, for it is a secret that may never be spoken; but if you will guide me there, I will instruct you in the method.”
“This very night, my master, if you can walk so far.”
“I cannot,” the old man told him. “But a donkey can trot any distance one wishes.”
Then the storyteller exclaimed, “By the prophet! I must go with you. I’ll see the pasha’s garden myself, if it be the will of Allah, and I’ll hire a donkey too.”
“O my masters,” said the boy Ali, for he knew that though they might ride he must walk, “if you’re both going there’s no need. Let’s hire a boat instead. I know a rais—a captain, my masters—who has a good one, small, fleet, and cheap. A boat does not jolt, and it will cool tonight upon the river.”
“Wisely spoken, boy,” said the old man, preparing to rise. “If this storyteller and I combine our purses, it should not be too much. But you must guide me to this boat.”
“And I,” said the storyteller. “For I’m newly come from Baghdad.”
“Then come,” said Ali, “and I’ll show you everything on the way.” And he took the sleeve of the old man’s robe and led them down one crooked street after another.
“Here’s the water buffalo that turns the well-pump for the whole quarter. His name’s Kubbar. See, he lets me put my hand on his horn. Now go through yonder door, my masters, and we’ll save ourselves much walking.”
They did as he bid, entering a high-walled building through a narrow hall that soon opened into a wide court.
“This is our slave market. The auction’s over for today. Never fear, my masters, there’s another door on the other side just like the one we came in through. Over there are the sick slaves—you can get one for next to nothing if you want to feed the crows. Here are the well ones. The dark ones are Nubians—they’re the best. The yellow-skins are Abyssinians. People say they’re too smart to make good slaves. The women are in those booths.”
A light-skinned Abyssinian girl with a great deal of brass jewelry thrust her head through the curtains of one to smile at the storyteller, then put out her tongue.
“She wants to show you that she’s not sick,” Ali explained.
“She thinks you’re rich because you’re dressed so well. She’d like a rich handsome young master. Most storytellers dress in rags.”
“As did I. But while I was in Baghdad, I told my tale of the Rose and the Nightingale to the Caliph, who filled my mouth with gold.”
“Ah,” said Ali. “I wondered about that. Then you could buy her, for she could be had for silver. There’s Circassians too, and Galla girls—they have cool flesh for the hot nights—and some Franks, I think, but you have to beat the Franks every day, or they’ll murder their masters.”
“What’s that?” inquired the storyteller as they came out the second door.
“That shaft of stone? The idol of an infidel queen. It ought to be pulled down, only it’s so tall it would take the houses of believers with it.”
“Ah!” The old man nodded, smiling to himself. “That’s an obelisk, boy. Cleopatra erected that to the honor of her son by Julius Caesar.”
“And right over there’s the Women’s Bath, my masters,” Ali announced. “Our eunuchs used to wash there too, but some young men learned to draw their stones up into their bodies and pass for eunuchs, so now they won’t let them.”
Another street, wider but as contorted as the rest, led to the docks, where lounging sailors were jostled by the impatient travelers of half a dozen nations: Bedouins, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, a proud Turk with a small black boy to carry his pipe, and angry janissary with a cocked fusil in one hand and a letter in the other.
“Way!” shrilled Ali. “Way for the holy one! Way, make way for the Caliph’s favorite!”
No one paid him the least attention, and they had to push through the crowd as best they could. At the very end of a long wharf three nearly naked Arabs lounged in a small canjiah. “Up the river to the palace at once!” Ali called to them. “And with all speed!”
The rais, whose turban was a trifle larger than the others, yawned and rose. “You wish us to wait for you, sir?” he asked the storyteller. “You will return to the city with us? Fifty piasters.”
After some reasoned discussion in which the storyteller and the old man frequently swore they would prefer to walk, and the rais declared that it had been his intention to sink his vessel at once and so escape the tax collectors, thirty-one was agreed upon, fifteen to be paid on the spot, and the remaining sixteen on their return; the storyteller counted out the money, the rais shouted to his crew, the crew climbed the stubby masts and freed the enormous rust-colored sails from the long, slanting lateen yards, and as quickly as a man lights his chibouque, the little canjiah was cracking up the river with white water boiling at her bow.
“Our Nile is the most wonderful river in the whole world,” Ali explained happily. “It runs—behold, my masters—to the Great Sea in the north. The wind blows toward the cataracts of the south—”
“Except when it doesn’t,” the rais put in softly.
“And so a man may sail up and come down with the current all his life and never wet an oar.”
The old man grunted as he made himself comfortable in the stern. “It’s a long time since I’ve been on this river. I had my eyes then. You’ll have to tell me what we’re passing, boy, so I know where we are.”
“Then hear, most holy one,” said Ali, who was even more respectful in the presence of the rais and the crew, “that on my right hand stand the mighty tombs of the infidel kings, black as pitch against the setting of the sun and peaked like so many tents, though each is loftier than many a mountain. Opposite are mountains indeed, carved by Allah and not by infidels, the Mountains of Moqattam, my master, where your servant has never set his foot. Behind our craft, the great, the beautiful city lights the lamps no man can count, which fade with distance, my master, even as the host of heaven brightens. Before us rise the famous cliffs.” Ali looked about for something with which to cover himself, for the night air was indeed chill upon the Nile.
“You grope for your robe, boy,” said the old man. “But you’re sitting on it.”
At that, the storyteller laughed.
It was so, though the boy Ali had never in his life owned a robe. When he stretched his hand toward the wooden seat, it was not wood his fingers encountered but cotton cloth. He stood and held it up, and it was indeed just such a robe as someone of his size might wear, of white striped with a darker color.
“Ten thousand blessings, my master!” exclaimed Ali. Then he muttered to himself, “I wish I had a light.”
The old man said, “The stripes are brown, boy. Now put it on.”
When the robe was settled in place, so that Ali was covered from his shoulders to his ankles, he said, “O my master, holiest wazir of all wisdom, I had thought you blind.”
And the old man answered, “Now that night has come, I see more clearly.”
The storyteller touched Ali’s arm and pointed. “What are those dark openings in the cliffs?”
“Tombs, my master. The tombs of infidels of long ago.”
“Some are lit from within. Their lights are faint, but I see them. Look there.”
“Those are ghûl lights, my master,” Ali told him. “Ghûls dwell in the tombs.”
The old man said, “Tell him of them.”
“It is unlucky to speak of them, my master,” Ali said, and he looked to one side.
“Speak nevertheless,” said the storyteller, “and may your ill luck fall upon me.”
“Have they no ghûls in Baghdad?”
The storyteller nodded. “Evil things that claw at graves by night and sometimes kill the watchmen.”
“So are they here,” said Ali. “They devour the sere bodies of infidels long dead, and eat the funeral meats left with them. They don their jewels too, and hold an evil carouse, dancing to a music that would drive a true believer mad. When day comes, they hide the jewels, so that honest men cannot find them.”
The storyteller thought upon this for a time, and at last he said, “What of the kings’ tombs we saw? Are there greater ghûls in those?”
The boy Ali shook his head. “There’s a guardian set there by the kings, with a man’s face and a lion’s feet. Should any ghûl approach those tombs, he would rise and tear it to pieces. If its face were a lion’s, my master, it would flee, for all beasts fear them greatly. If its hands were a ’man’s, it could do nothing, for the hands of men are weak against ghuls. Thus it is as it is, and they fear it and do not come. Now let us speak no more of these evil things.”
“Boy,” said the old man, “take up my stick.”
Ali picked it up—a long slender rod of heavy wood, topped with a knob of bone.
“I can’t see which tombs show a light,” the old man said.
“But you can. Stand up, boy! Are you standing up?”
Ali rose again. “Yes, my master. I stand.”
“Then point my stick at a tomb that shows a light, boy. At the nearest.”
They were abreast such a tomb as he spoke. A faint blue ghûl-light played about its mouth, at times weakly, at others more strongly. “I have done so, my master,” whispered Ali.
Slowly, though not feebly, the old man’s hand reached for his staff, a dark serpent that tested the distance between one branch and the next. After what seemed to Ali a very long time indeed, the strong brown fingers touched the white wood.
And the radiance at the tomb’s entrance brightened, as if a balefire had been kindled within, and a great voice boomed forth from the narrow stone doorway. All the horrors of death were in it: the stench of corpses, and the dust and the dirt that follow that stench. As the hyena gives tongue though its mouth chokes on putrescence, it howled, “Hail to thee, Mullah Ibrahim! Peace be, between thee and me!”
Ali returned the old man’s stick to the place at his side where it had lain. And thereafter he sat with his head in his hands, and said nothing of cliff or mountain, ruined temple or mosque of faith, or of anything else that the boat passed. For he recalled that the storyteller had told him that his teacher had been the Mullah Ibrahim; and he knew that the two, although they might feign to have met first that day in the bazaar, were in reality pupil and master, and that they had snared him for a purpose he could not guess.
At last the storyteller took him by the shoulder and said, “Come!”
Ali raised his head and saw they were at the landing of the pasha’s palace. He saw too that dawn had come, or nearly, for it was almost the hour at which a man can distinguish between a fine white thread and a black one, which in Ramadan signals the beginning of the fast.
He rose as he was bid and mounted the slippery stone steps, the storyteller following him with his hand still gripping Ali’s shoulder, and the old man walking before them, tapping each step with his stick.
Sandalwood gates studded with iron stood at the top of the stair. A janissary dozed before them, his back to a pillar, his hand folded across the muzzle of his long, ivory-inlaid musket.
“Hush,” commanded the old man. “He will not wake, but should we make too much noise, he may lift his head and speak.” He brushed the grey stones of the wall with one hand and held his stick before him with the other.
Ali nodded, though he wanted to shout.
For a thousand steps and more they crept in the shadow of those grey stones, until the wall curved away from the river. The storyteller said, “Now we must make haste. Night is nearly flown.”
“Not for me,” the old man told him.
Before them stood a cracked ashlar from which the unholy glyphs of infidel times were almost weathered away, the refuse of the pasha’s garden on the other side of the wall. Here the old man seated himself, saying, “Take off your robe, boy, and cast it at my feet.”
Ali did not wish to do so, but the storyteller cuffed him until he thought it better to obey.
But while they scuffled and Ali wept, the old man paid them no heed. His blind eyes were upturned to the dimming stars, his crooked legs crossed under him, the palms of his hands flattened upon the glyphs. He neither moved nor spoke.
“O my master, what is he doing?” Ali ventured when he had tossed his robe at the base of the rose-hued ashlar.
Fingering his beard, the storyteller said, “He sends his soul to Jinnistan, the Land of Sorcery.”
“Is it near?” Ali inquired.
“As close as the ground under our feet,” the storyteller told him. “And as distant as Mount Kaf.”
Then Ali opened his mouth to frame another question; and though he did not speak, it remained thus open for some time after, for he saw his robe stir as though there were a serpent beneath it.
“Now,” said the storyteller, speaking softly and quickly.
“Hear me. I’ll instruct you only once, and if you should fail it’s your life. In the garden, find the great fountain. From it lead half a dozen paths. Follow the narrowest, the path of pink stones. A woman waits at the end, beside the bush I told you of. She’ll indicate the correct rose to you. Bring it to me, and you’ll be restored to your proper shape. You’ll be well rewarded, and all will be well for you.”
Poor Ali did not nod, nor did he express his understanding in any other way; and although he heard the storyteller’s words, he scarcely knew they had been spoken. For the robe the old man had given him danced like a pot on the fire, waved its arms, and lifted into the air, filled out in a fashion that showed plainly that another wore it, though that other was not to be seen.
The storyteller pinned Ali’s arms to his sides. “Cease your squirming,” he hissed. “Move or cry out, and I’ll break both your legs and throw you into the river.”
And the robe settled over poor Ali’s head, blinding him.
Then he could see once more, though the world appeared to his eyes a larger and a far stranger place than he would ever have believed it could. The storyteller had released him; but the robe held both his arms to his sides still, for they were not in its sleeves. Rather, the empty sleeves now flapped and fluttered as if a gale blew for them alone, though the body of the robe was quiet.
The wall of the pasha’s garden rose higher than the sky, and though the grey light of dawn was all the light there was, everything Ali saw seemed brighter and newer than he had ever seen anything before. The stars were amethysts and jacinths, sapphires and hyacinths; the Nile a rich mocha sea, a crocodile on a distant mudbank a living emerald. He wished both to sing and to fly, and very much to his own astonishment he did both at once, rising on wings that seemed to fan the air without effort, and trilling like such a music box as ears have never heard.
The pasha’s wall, which had appeared an impassible barrier, was no more than a rope of stones trailed over the ground. He had crossed it before he could decide whether to cross or not, and a country of silver fish ponds and gay flower beds stretched beneath him, like the most gorgeous of carpets in the faraway palace of the sultan. In a wink he saw the great fountain and the path of pink stones, which soon vanished, however, beneath stately palms and lush fruit trees.
I’m a bird, he thought; and if I wish to be a boy again I must follow that path. But do I really wish it? What is this thing they call the soul, that flies to Jinnistan or Paradise, but a bird that sleeps in the body until it is time to quit the nest? Thus I have died, very likely, already. Why should I die twice?
Besides, when I was a boy I had to beg my bread. As a bird I can eat bugs—there are more than enough to feed all the birds that Allah’s hatched since the beginning of the world. As a boy I had lice, which could not be checked without coppers for the bath. As a bird I have mites, which can be checked with a bath of dust. As a boy I played with my fellow boys. But as a bird, shall I not sing all day with my fellow birds? There passes one now, my comrade in the air.
At this thought, the bird Ali glanced to his right, where a wild duck winged its way toward the marshes of the Faiyum. Just as he looked, a falcon stooped for it like a thunderbolt; the unfortunate duck gave an eerie, despairing cry and plummeted to earth.
As did the bird Ali, diving under the shelter of a friendly orange tree and whizzing down the path of pink stones like an arrow.
Through a grotto it wound, past lesser fountains and over a bridge not much larger than a table. At last it ended in a cul-de-sac closed by a large rosebush. A young woman waited there, unveiled, her dainty feet upon a slab of pink stone; but though any man would have called her lovely, she seemed a giantess to the terrified Ali, with hands that could break his bones as a squirrel cracks nuts. And though she whistled most plaintively to him, he was careful to perch well out of her reach.
“Are you the bird?” she inquired of him.
Her voice was gunfire and thunder to poor Ali, and yet he understood her words. He struggled to speak, but his lips were stiff, and he sang instead.
“Then there’s no reason to delay,” said the young woman,
“for that fat Omar will soon discover I’m absent from my bed.” With that, she drew scissors from the waist of her embroidered trousers and cut a dappled rose from the bush.
Ali the bird fluttered to the rosebush and clamped his beak on the rose. But no sooner had it shut than the face of the sun peeped over the garden wall. Its first rays struck the little nightingale in the rosebush; at once his feathers were the brown stripes of a cotton robe, and Ali the boy who wore that robe.
And as he staggered from the rosebush, his robe torn and his arms and cheeks scratched and bleeding, still too dazed to speak, the young woman caught him in such an embrace as he had never felt since the day his mother died.
“I love you!” cried the young woman. “I love you, I love you, I love no one but you! You and you only are the pearl of the firmament to me, and shall be forever!”
Ali took the rose from his mouth and discovered that the young woman was scarcely taller than he; and now that he was a boy once more (and nearly a man) he learned too how lovely she was, her flesh silver and her face the moon.
“Will you tell me your name?” she asked, suddenly shy.
“I’m Ali,” he told her. “And you are … ?”
“Zandra,” she said, and they kissed. As their lips met, the dappled rose she had cut for him withered and dropped from his fingers to the ground.
And though he was a trifle the smaller, Ali knew that he was taller than the sky. What had Rustam, what had Akbar-Khan, that he had not? A horse? A sword? A banner and a thousand ragged rascals to follow it? They were trivialities and would be his as soon as he wanted them.
“You’re unlucky, Zandra,” he whispered. “The spell of the rose has made you love a beggar boy; but though he will not be a boy always, nor a beggar always, he will be your slave always.”
“I am unluckier than you know, O my heart,” she replied.
“For this is the pasha’s garden, and I am the pasha’s. Should Omar the Chief Eunuch, or any of the others, find us here, he will slay you and hew my quivering body into four quarters.”
“Then they must not find us. Tell me quickly—why did the storyteller send me for the rose?”
“A storyteller?” inquired Zandra. “Describe him to me!”
“He’s tall and straight, and very fine looking,” said Ali, recalling the man to his mind’s eye. “He has a beautiful brown beard, and a masterful gaze. His turban is silk, his vest is green kid, and he wears a pistol from Fez in a red sash. With him is a blind old man, a little taller even than he but stooped, Mullah Ibrahim the Wise.”
“I know nothing of such an old man,” Zandra told him. “But the young one is no storyteller but Prince Abdullah al Hazik. A month past, he was my master’s guest in this palace. He met me in this garden, where no stranger is to be.”
“And are you the pasha’s most favored wife?”
Sadly, Zandra shook her head. “Only his concubine. There are more than a hundred of us.”
“How did you come to meet my storyteller here? Was it by chance?”
“No,” she said. She drew away from him by half a step, and her eyes found the pink stone at her feet.
“Tell me!” demanded Ali. “It might save our lives. Do you think it really matters to me that another has seen my beloved’s face? I, who love you, and have worn others’ rags all my life?”
“We danced for him,” confessed poor Zandra. “I and all the youngest of the pasha’s concubines. Our elders played for us on their lutes and zithers, and on the flute and the little woman’s drum. I had cymbals for my fingers, and gold bells on my wrists and ankles, and I played my tambourine. We had danced like that before, but never for a guest so young and handsome. O my heart, you should have heard the music, as fierce and sweet as the wind from sea!”
She whirled, hands above her head and fingers snapping; and her hips were the tossing billows of the wild Aegean from which she came, and her little feet thumped the path of pink stones in the rhythm of her dance.
And though every fool in the bazaar would have said that there was no music, yet Ali heard it plainly, the shrilling of the shabbäbi and the thudding of the darabukka.
Abruptly, she stopped. “And he looked at me, beloved, and I at him, and I knew he would meet me in the garden, beneath the moon. We went there to cool ourselves when we had danced, and I hid till all the rest had gone. Since that time old Rashsha has carried many messages for us.” Her eyes filled with tears.
“I understand,” said Ali, who had once or twice assisted in the transmission of such messages himself. “But why did he want the rose?”
Zandra wiped her eyes. “Because of the inscription on a certain stone that lies beyond our wall. I’ve never seen it, and I couldn’t read it anyway. But he says it says, ‘Here is the treasure of Osiris.’ That was a king of the infidels, I think. ‘I open to love alone.’ Prince Abdullah said it would open to the bearer of the rose. Where is it?”
“I dropped it,” Ali confessed.
“Here it is—on the stone. But how fast it faded!”
Zandra bent to pick it up, and Ali was seized with shame to think that he had made this lovely child weep, and that she, the pasha’s concubine, should wait upon him, a pauper and a beggar. “No, no!” he protested. “Let me get it for you, my lady!”
Their hands met upon the pink stone. It lifted at once as if hinged, and the rose slid from it to lie at the foot of the bush where it lies still. Before them opened a murky and narrow shaft which a flight of steep stone steps descended, as it seemed, forever.
“Caught!” exclaimed a reedy voice behind them.
They turned as one, and Zandra cried, “Omar! Omar, please, we—”
“Silence, I say!” Twice Ali’s height, the eunuch lumbered toward them, penning them in the cul-de-sac; his belly preceded his advance as a battering ram leads a storming party, and he held a heavy scimitar at the ready. “I fear that you must die, my children. I … what is this?”
“The secret road to a great treasure, sir,” said Ali, whose wits had been honed on many a dinnerless day. “Jewels and gold beyond counting. Look here.” Quickly he pointed to the glyphs carved on the underside of the stone: a bent object that might be a whip, a human leg and foot, a shallow cup, and a crocodile.
“It’s plain enough, surely,” continued Ali, who had heard that eunuchs hunger after money and respect as whole men lust for power and women, though he could not read even plain Arabic. “The lash and the foot mean that anyone who walks here without permission will be beaten. The cup shows that this is where the drinking vessels are, and the crocodile that they belong to the king of the river.”
Zandra whispered, “Oh, what a pity you must kill us, Omar! My screams and our blood, still more the hacked limbs of our dismembered bodies, will attract a great deal of attention to this spot. You’ll be lucky to get so much as a single goblet before the janissaries take charge of everything.”
“But if you were to spare us,” Ali added quickly, “we could assist you. And since it would be our lives to reveal a word of this, we would reveal nothing, ever.”
“Never!” confirmed Zandra.
“Hmm,” said the eunuch. With his left hand he stroked his chin, which was smoother than Ali’s. He looked from one to the other with the clever little eyes of a pig. “I could take you elsewhere, however. Indeed it seems a capital idea. You, of course, will flee, young man—” Sudden as a cobra’s strike, his left hand seized Ali’s arm and clamped it like a vise. “And I should have the greatest difficulty catching you. I suppose you might even scale the wall—no doubt that’s how you got in. It would be best if you did not. Our Zandra may fly if she likes. She won’t get over the wall so easily, I think, and I shall hunt her down. Come, my children.”
He swung Ali about, and Zandra followed weeping.
With a crash like a thunderclap, the stone slammed closed behind them. The eunuch spun around to stare at it. “How did you get that open?”
“We just touched it,” Zandra told him.
Ali cleared his throat. “There’s another pink stone on the other side of the wall, sir. It’s all rather complicated—”
The eunuch set his foot upon the stone; nothing happened. “Why, I’ve touched this myself a score of times,” he muttered.
“What’s this about another stone outside?”
“And into that stone,” Ali continued in his most impressive voice, “are carved the following words: ‘I reveal the treasure to true love only.’ There’s also a man—a most evil man, sir—a certain Prince Abdullah of Baghdad—”
“I know him well,” put in the eunuch. “A true son of the prophet and a most generous, nobly spirited gentleman.”
“Who’s hot on the trail of this very treasure, sir, aided by his old tutor, Mullah Ibrahim. Prince Abdullah, however—”
“Still your chatter,” ordered the eunuch. “You two touched it, you say, and it opened?”
Ali and Zandra nodded.
“Then touch it again, at once!”
Zandra said softly, “Our hands were together, Omar. We touched it together.”
“Then do so again. The boy may use his free hand.”
Ali and Zandra joined hands and looked at each other for a moment before they touched the pink stone, which sprang up as if thrown wide by the jinn.
The eunuch nodded to himself. “You are quite correct, I must spare you. Serve me well, and by my honor you both shall live. His Excellency will hear nothing of this.”
“We will!” cried Ali, and “Oh, we will!” Zandra.
“And that scoundrel Prince Abdullah wishes to seize my treasure, you say?”
Ali nodded. “But he thinks it’s underneath the pink stone outside. So did I, until we opened this a moment ago. Mullah Ibrahim must have read the writing on the stone for him, but the mullah’s blind. Either he read it by feeling the carvings, or Abdullah described them to him. He couldn’t see the stone; if he had, he probably would have guessed it wasn’t where it had been in the days of the infidels. I suppose the masons wanted it to build the wall—but it cracked, and they threw it away.”
“And this unworthy prince is still seeking to discover how it may be opened?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I’m far ahead of the rogue. And now, children, we must see what I have found. You will go ahead of me, I think. I wouldn’t want that stone to shut with myself inside.”
Ali went first, biting his lips, for the darkness and the dank smell of the place frightened him. Zandra followed close behind him, trembling and gulping down sobs. The eunuch brought up the rear with his big scimitar in his hand and a little smile of complacency on his face.
When the three had descended a hundred steps and were far beneath the ground, the stair ended in mud. Had it been night in the pasha’s garden above, or even afternoon, the cavern in which they found themselves would have been as black as the pit. As it was, the morning sun shot its rays down the long straight stair after them, tracing a rectangle of tarnished gold at the bottom that seemed to their eyes almost blinding and lent some faint illumination to the whole.
It was not a very prepossessing whole, and scarcely looked like a treasure house—a wide, low cave in which mud mixed with rock and gravel sloped toward an underground pool of dark water. In places, slabs had fallen from the ceiling and lay level with the mud, forming paths of stepping stones that led nowhere. In others, long stalactites nearly touched the floor, or touched it to form pillars; and in still others, delicate white curtains of stone had been drawn before small and secret chambers. Poor Ali shivered, feeling he breathed the chill air of a bygone time, of the age that had ended on the day the Nile turned to blood. Its unclean idols gathered invisibly about him, half-human figures having the heads and horns and tusks of beasts.
The eunuch hurried into the cavern to search for treasure, forgetful of his captives. Ali would have fled up the stair if it could have been done without abandoning Zandra, who clung to his arm.
“No cups here,” the eunuch grumbled. “Mere emptiness—dark—dampness—and nothing more. This tomb was rifled long ago, and the miserable grave robbers took everything.”
Zandra whispered, “I’m not sure it’s a tomb at all, or that it ever was.”
“All the worse for us, then,” said the eunuch, returning to them. “I ought to slay you both on the spot. It’s my duty, in fact—one I’ve neglected too long already.”
“I think the treasure might be under the water, Omar. I saw a gleam of gold there, I think.”
“So did I,” said Ali.
And as he spoke the still water was roiled, boiling and rippling with the movements of something beneath the surface.
“Did you?” muttered the eunuch. “Well, I’ll have a look.”
And the snout of a huge crocodile appeared, but the eunuch seemed not to see it.
“Watch out, Omar!” Zandra called. “The bubbles!”
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Look out? For what?”
Only the eyes and nostrils of the crocodile appeared above the water, but they raced toward him, trailing a sharp wake like a small, swift boat’s upon the river.
“Omar!”
“What?” the eunuch asked testily.
Then it was too late. More quickly than any man could run, thrown forward by a tremendous stroke of its tail as it left the water and carrying with it a wave half again as large as itself, the crocodile mounted the bank. It was as long as a tree trunk, broader than two camels; gold rings set with rubies pierced its armored head below the ear vents, and bands of pure gold studded with amethysts had been riveted around its forelegs. Its jaws seized the eunuch, who fell with a thud that seemed to shake the entire cavern. Once he groaned; an arm moved, and fell back.
He lay still.
Yet there was no blood, and when the crocodile had dragged the eunuch’s swollen body beneath the water, that body lay near the water’s edge as before.
“Come!” Ali said, and took Zandra’s hand.
Already the time for flight had passed. Again the enormous crocodile rushed from the pool, and before they could mount the first step, its jaws closed about them.
It seemed to Ali then that the darkness grew darker still—darker than he had ever known, darker than he had ever believed darkness and night could ever be; it was a long while, sad hours it seemed, before he understood what had happened, what the dark was and why it had come.
There was no more Allah, not then or ever. He had seldom been in a mosque, scarcely ever recited the prescribed prayers at dawn, midday, and evening; yet he had known Allah was there, always present in his life, like air. Now Allah was gone, and nothing remained of life but the savage fight—a fight that he, small and weak, could never win.
The darkness opened. He saw Zandra’s face and knew he had been wrong.
“O my heart!” Zandra cried. “What is the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” Ali said, and meant it. He sat up.
“First Omar, then you! There’s something evil in this terrible place.”
He was weak, but with her help he was able to get to his feet. “Did you see the crocodile?” he asked.
“A crocodile? No. A crocodile couldn’t live down here, could it?”
“But you saw gold, under the water.”
“I thought I did. Something that gleamed like gold, yes. And the water bubbled. I thought that was strange, and I tried to warn Omar, but he didn’t pay any attention.”
Ali nodded.
“It was as if something you couldn’t see were coming out of the water—coming for Omar. Do you think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know,” Ali told her, and they went over to look at the fat eunuch.
He lay upon his back and seemed not to breathe. Ali touched his chest; the skin was as cold as the mud where he lay, but his eyes opened at Ali’s touch, and he groaned.
“Omar!” Zandra cried. “Are you all right?”
“No,” the eunuch groaned. “Oh, decidedly not, my child.” He put his fingers to his temples. “My head—it throbs most abominably and I’ve had a horrible dream.”
Ali said, “Maybe you’d better lie where you are until you feel better. One of us can go for help.”
“Master!” The eunuch’s eyes flew wide open. “Your slave must not rest while you stand!” He struggled to sit up, fell backward, rolled on his side and managed, with Ali and Zandra’s help, to rise.
“O my master,” the eunuch said when he stood upon his feet at last. “It is you alone who must be our pasha, and not that brute up there. I see it now. I beg—I most humbly beg—your pardon for not having done so previously.”
He bowed, and for a moment Ali feared he might fall on his face.
“Where is my sword? I shall hew him to kabobs, master, in the bedchamber. It is yet early, I believe, and he’ll be still abed. I can manage the other servants for you, never fear. The janissaries must wait your arrival, master, but I doubt you’ll have much difficulty with them. And where the janissaries go the army will surely follow. A few gifts to the Porte should then secure your position.”
The eunuch had been looking about distractedly as he spoke. By using both her hands, Zandra was able to lift the somewhat muddy scimitar and return it to him.
“I dreamed I was a whole man, my child,” the eunuch told her, smiling a little at himself. “Isn’t that odd? I’ve never been one, to be sure—I was only ten. Yet I dreamed I was a whole man, and standing before the gates of paradise. An angel told me—” He shook his head. “Excuse my wandering, I beg, my master, my lady. I’m still not quite myself. And so terribly cold. I shall return to the surface and do as you have bid at once. No doubt the exercise will warm me.”
Ali raised his hand to stop the eunuch, but Zandra pulled it down again. When he was gone, Ali asked her, “Do you think he’ll really do that? Kill the pasha?”
Zandra shrugged. “As Allah wills it, O my lover.”
Together they climbed the stair. They climbed slowly, with Ali’s hand reaching back to grasp Zandra’s, and the eunuch had reached the top and vanished before Ali had mounted the twelfth step. When they stepped out into the sunshine, the sun was only a bit higher than it had been when its first rays had struck the little nightingale. The dew of heaven still lay heavy on grass and bush, and a lark was singing as it flew.
The pink stone shut behind them; and although they have spoken of it now and then, they have never tried to open it again.
“All will be well now, my lover,” Zandra said. “I feel it. And yet it might be wise for you to climb over this wall before someone who doesn’t know it finds you here.”
Ali nodded, and at that very instant Prince Abdullah al Hazik of Baghdad seized him from behind.
“So here you are, guttersnipe! Here you are at last. And you, you little slut.”
He struck Zandra across the face, and Ali, with his free hand, jerked the pistol of Fez from the prince’s sash and shot him through the heart.
Next day, smoking his pipe upon the divan, Pasha Ali ben Hassan ordered that Mullah Ibrahim the Wise be brought before him. The captain of the janissaries did as he was bid, and when the old man stood in the audience chamber in his chains, cast his broken staff at his feet.
“O mullah,” said Ali, “I am informed that there is known to you a certain stone, known also to me, inscribed, ‘Here is the magic of Osiris.’”
The old man nodded without speaking.
“And who was this Osiris?”
“The first king of this country, Great Pasha,” the old man mumbled.
“In the infidel times?”
“In any times, Great Pasha.” Calling thus upon his wisdom seemed to strengthen the old man. He stood straighter and spoke with something of his earlier, proud manner. “The first of the pharaohs, learned and good, beloved of all his people and loving them. Or so it was written long ago.”
“I take it then that he is dead,” remarked Ali, and all his courtiers laughed.
“Long since,” the old man told him.
“I have myself discovered a stone bearing certain infidel signs,” Ali murmured. He described them. “Tell me—and if you wish to keep your life you had better tell me truly—what they read.”
“They form the name of the god Sobek.”
“And nothing more?” Ali asked.
“And nothing more, boy,” the old man said.
The captain of the janissaries raised his whip, but Ali shook his head. “Tell me his legend.”
“After a lifetime of study, I know but little,” the old man confessed. “Sobek was pictured as a man having the head of a crocodile. He was the patron of the throne, and the protector and counselor of the pharaohs. His sacred crocodile was kept in a lake not far from here, where one who sees may see the ruins of Sobek’s temple. I know no more.”
“If this Sobek was the protector of the pharaohs,” hazarded Ali, “he must have been the protector of Osiris.”
“That is so, boy.”
“And what befell Osiris?”
“He had an enemy,” the old man said slowly. “Sutekh. It was well known in those times that crocodiles could steal magic, seizing the magician’s power and dragging it into the river. Sutekh took the shape of such a crocodile—some say of Sobek’s own sacred beast—and stole the powers of Osiris. Thus were his human foes enabled to take his life.”
Ali stroked his chin, feeling the beard beginning to sprout there. “If this Sobek was an infidel god, surely he would take Sutekh’s life for such a crime.”
“Sutekh also was a god,” the old man said. “None but Allah himself could encompass Sutekh’s destruction.”
“Yet he might be imprisoned?”
“As you say, boy.”
From behind the screen behind the divan, Zandra whispered, “Ask him whether our love might destroy Sutekh, Ali.”
“O mullah,” said Ali, “if Allah were to desire the death of this Sutekh, might he not act through love?”
The old man nodded. “It is by that means and no other that Allah acts. Yet what is that, but to say he acts with his own hand? For love is Allah himself, and thus poisonous to those who do evil.”
The captain of the janissaries called, “Hear the wisdom of our pasha, O Moslems!”
Ali asked, “And if Sutekh were to seek to devour love?”
The old man answered, “Sutekh would surely die, boy. Can a small god devour a greater? It was for that reason Sutekh could take only the magic of Osiris. The life of the king fell to the daggers of men.”
“And if Sutekh were to die, the magic of Osiris would pass to another?”
The old man bowed his head. “So once I dared to hope, boy, that I might have eyes once more.”
Ali nodded, though he knew that the old man could not see it. “Mullah, you would have done me evil; yet you did not, and I will not revenge myself upon a holy man, old and blind.”
From behind the screen, Zandra whispered, “Ask him—” Ali shook his head. “Captain, find Mullah Ibrahim a boat. He is to be freed and returned in safety to the city.”
The captain touched his forehead. “I hear and obey.”
On the day before the great wedding of the Pasha of All Egypt to the Lady Zandra, the rais of that boat was carried before him. The poor man salaamed again and again, kissing the tiles in his terror.
“Flower of Islam!” he cried. “Your meanest servant grovels at your feet. Spare his wretched life! He is your slave.”
“The mullah is gone, Great Pasha,” explained the captain of the janissaries dryly. “Dead, unless Allah wills that he live.” He fingered the edge of his scimitar.
“We passed the cliffs at evening,” the unfortunate rais wailed. “A darkness fell upon my miserable craft. When the darkness lifted—”
“Peace,” said Ali. “We will speak no more of these evil things.”
