Blue Magic/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
THE SLUMBER-SONG OF THE NILE
WHEN the people who had been ashore boarded the yacht again, they were quickly summoned aft by an excited voice. Fen pulled himself up in his chair and leaned on his elbow.
"Oh, such a wonderful thing has happened to me!" he cried. "A Djinn—a Blue one—came here, an' his name is Siddereticus, an' he made scarabs come out of the air, an' a slave, with a fuz on his head, an' a sword, that fought with an in-vis-ible demon, an' he told me about the temples, an'—"
His mother reached out her hand, quietly and rapidly passing it over Fen's forehead and cheek and the back of his neck; then taking his hand, she held it in hers. Turning to her husband, she said quickly in a low voice:
"He isn't at all feverish!" Then she said, "Now, dear, don't talk quite so fast. Tell Mother all about it."
Fen lay back among the pillows and looked rather helplessly at Sally and Larry, who were gazing at him with varying degrees of astonishment. They themselves had little imagination, and this seemed to them a wild enough fancy.
"Truly, it was a Djinn," he said, looking up into his mother's face; "and here are the scarabs."
He got them out of the pocket of his dressing-gown and laid them in her hand.
"Well of all—look, Hal!" she cried, turning to Fen's father, who came to her laughing and holding out a bit of paper on which was penciled:
My dear Mr. Norvell:
In case you may imagine your boat to have been visited by the supernatural this afternoon, it may be just as well to supplement Fen's version of the tale. My father was Dr. Roger Thornton, who knew your father very intimately, I believe, so when I found that this was your yacht, I decided to call and renew acquaintance in the second generation. I am sorry to have missed you, but I spent a very delightful afternoon with your son. Please remember that I am known as Siddereticus, a Blue Djinn, and not as
Yours most sincerely,
Sidney R. Thornton.
Mrs. Norvell handed the note back to her husband with a rather bewildered smile, and then, turning to Fen, said:
"So he gave you these, dear? But you look so tired! I think I'd better send for Mammy to put you to bed."
"But, Mother," said Fen, "he just got them out of the air!"
Fen had been for some time in bed, but partly because he was thinking about Siddereticus, and partly because his back hurt, he was not asleep. Larry, who shared the same cabin with Fen, always fell asleep the instant that Mammy turned off the light, and he had done so to-night with his usual promptness.
Fen could see one star through the porthole, and he could hear the soft wash of the river against the side of the yacht. Upstream, the crew of an anchored dahabiyeh were singing a sort of endless chantey:
They sang it over and over again, their voices rising in a shrill and prolonged wail at the end, before they took up for the hundredth time the strain of "Amanuseh, Amananeh."
Suddenly, across the distant song of the boatmen, and seemingly very close to the yacht, came a soft chord struck from a stringed instrument. It was a minor chord, and it trembled away into the silence, for the sailors on the dahabiyeh had abruptly ceased their chanting and everything was still.
Then, quite low and mysteriously sweet, came a man's voice, singing, while the faint curious chords blended in harmony. This is what the voice sang, and what Fen heard, as he lay breathless beside his porthole:
- "Looming into the mighty sky,
- The Memnon sing in the dawn,
- And a thousand gray storks wake and fly
- Over the Nile to the sun; but I
- Sing when the sun is gone.
- "Stars are hung in the emerald gloom,
- Lamps for the temple door;
- Into the mystic darkness loom
- The portal columns of Pharaoh's tomb,
- Hard by the river shore.
- "The river singeth sweeter far
- A slumber-song than I;
- Be then your night-lamp yonder star,
- And the Nile, on whose ancient heart you are,
- Whisper your lullaby."
The song ceased as suddenly as it had begun, there was a momentary ripple, and all was as silent as before.
Fen, hardly believing himself to be awake, struggled to sit up enough to look out at the port-hole, but he only fell back upon the pillow with his back aching worse than even
"Of course it was Siddereticus," he thought; "nobody but a Djinn could possibly make up songs on purpose for people and sing them out of nothing in the middle of the water. Oh, Siddereticus!" he whispered suddenly, "can you hear me? You're a Djinn, you must be able to! It was such a beautiful song! Thank you, dear Djinn!"
After a time of gazing through the porthole, he murmured drowsily:
"That was the star it meant, about being my night-light. Think of Djinns telling—stars—to be my—night-light!"
The Nile murmured past, and the star shone on, but Fen was fast asleep.
The elders having been occupied with dinner on the other side of the yacht, Fen was the only one who had heard the slumber-song of the Nile. Being a rather lonely and very sensitive person, and having met with a good deal of skepticism from his cousins upon reporting the doings of Siddereticus the day before, Fen said nothing to any one of what had happened that evening, but he thought about it constantly. This gave him a more than usually preoccupied air, which annoyed Sally.
"I s'pose you're thinking about that old Djinn," she remarked. She was marching up and down the deck to the accompaniment of tinkling bangles and necklaces, having several layers of these ornaments—souvenirs of the bazaar—on her person.
"There isn't any a such thing, anyway," said Larry, who was trying to shin up a stanchion.
"There used to be," said Fen, rather hotly, for him, "an' why couldn't there be now—specially in an awfully old ancient place like Egypt?"
"Well," pursued Larry, "if he is one, why don't he look like one, 'stead of like just any old person?"
"I've told you lots of times how he 'splained to me about it," said Fen; "an' I think it's nice of him not to frighten all the people by his greenish face an' all. 'Sides, he doesn't look like 'any old person'; he 's quite queer an' diff'rent looking—all brown an' thin."
"Well, anyways," retorted Larry, "I don't b'lieve there's any a such thing, nor I won't b'lieve it till I see him doing magics myselluf."
Fen was on the verge of tears, and Sally, whose heart was really in the right place, gave Larry a rather hard kick, and said to Fen:
"Well, maybe there are lots of Djinns here (of course you wouldn't see 'em in America, Larry), and I hope your one will come and see you soon again. Fen, for he must be a wonderful thing."
Larry, whose shin smarted from his sister's vigorous hint, went off to the engine-room, while she repaired below to find a book, and Fen was left alone to his thoughts.