The Swinging Caravan/Bred in the Clay
BRED IN THE CLAY
THERE were at the back of his brain two memories that never left him. They weakened with the years. They changed, somehow, the focus of their influence. But subconsciously they were always with him.
One was the memory of his mother's face, wrinkled, lined, marked by work and deception and failure; chiefly the eyes, age-dimmed, puckered, but still peering eagerly—though her soul knew that life's illusions were already past—to find something beyond the everyday routine, the tilling of the few stony acres, the herding of the half dozen goats, the tending of the lonely milch-camel, the sheer toil of the raw, red clay that was both the right and the burden of her Bedawin inheritance.
The other memory was of Fathma, daughter of Daood, on the day of his going away to the west. It had been at the time of the rahia, the short, sweet spring herbage of the desert, with wild rape and sorrel and pimpernel giving green food and new life to the nomads' small, parched cattle, bloating the camels' dried udders, stippling delicate pastel drops amidst the barren sandstone gravel, covering the shallow rock pools with a thin, silverish film of moisture. She had stood amongst the ruddy glebes of the field of small grained wheat, leaning on a thorn stick, looking with her cold peasant eyes into the hot sinking of the sun, not far from her father's scant flocks: the goats bleating to be milked; the horses whinnying softly; the camels couched in rows, their halters running upon a ground rope stretched between iron pins, their broad, leathery lips moving sideways as they chewed great clots of boiled pulse or long, withered strips of knot grass. He had come upon her as he had each evening these many years, returning from his own toil of herder and husbandman, about to pass her by with a Moslim's decent, decorous greeting of "Allah yeseemliq—God grant thee peace!" There had never been tenderness between them. For life here was too hard and too bitter. It could not rise above the tough facts of the soil. Nomads of meager living and prosy soul, bred to the frowning desert, where there was no foaming plenty of nature, their eyes were always fixed upon the cold congruities of the earth. Even their indolence was austere; their charity stern; their passion chilly. But on that night, perhaps because he was going away, she had seemed strangely intimate to him, as if she were welded to the life that he was leaving behind.
"I go tomorrow," he had said.
"Oh?"
"Yes. With the Meccan traders' caravan to Damascus. Thence"—vaguely—"west."
"You will come back, Hassan, son of Mustaffa?" Half query it had been, half challenge.
"Never. I hate the desert."
"There are dreams shining in it."
"Not dreams to the soul of me, Fathma, daughter of Daood."
"Belike you will find your dreams in the far places that you are seeking with the treading of your feet."
"Inshallah—God willing!"
"Inshallah!" she had echoed.
Suddenly she had kissed him on the mouth; had as suddenly turned away toward her people's black felt tents without another word or gesture, pounding along doggedly, her head downcast, her bare feet dragging through the furrows like the oxen of her father as they pulled against the plow.
"The clay has conquered her," he had said to himself, looking after her. "But it shall not conquer me."
He had stood there staring, thinking how these many years—he was then nineteen, and since his father's death seven years earlier the work of herder and husbandman had been on his childish shoulders—he had beaten his daily, broken retreat before the forces of the earth, with always the long pain of the brown, clogged furrows, and the sun in his face, and the straying of cattle, and an occasional fight with marauding Bedawins; and then one day a small earthenware pot of coined silver turned up by the chance of his spade to keep his mother from want, and his hearing from a wayfaring cameleer that "there be lands to the west eager for young brains and willing to pay for them," and his mother shrugging her weary shoulders and wishing him godspeed.
Thus the two memories—of his mother and of Fathma, the daughter of Daood—that never left him as, deep in his soul, the tang of the desert had never left him.
There came to him plenty of gold almost since the first day fifteen years earlier, when, travel-stained, looped in the folds of his earth-gray, woolen burnoose, he passed beneath the green-tiled Gate of the Father of Utility in this grand Moorish city of Fez; was stopped by the red-bearded, pot-bellied captain of sentinels; was asked in the man's florid Moroccan Arabic whence he came and why; replied in his own explosive, loutish Bedawin speech that he was of "the tribe of the Benni Murra, of the chieftainship of Sheykh Selim es-Sur, from the Jemla oasis, three days' camel ride to the east side of Mecca."
"Words!" commented the Moor. "Meaningless, like the chittering of sparrows in a gutter. Only of Mecca have I heard—blessed be the Prophet! Three thousand miles away from this land of Morocco—across desert and the sea's blue and desert again, eh?"
"Yes. Three thousand miles. And weary their walking."
"What do you seek here—you, a Bedawin, a kalib el-khela—a hound of the wilderness?"
"Gold. Also freedom."
"Gold? Yes. I understand. But freedom?" The captain became suspicious. "This is the country of His Shareefian Majesty, where they hang men in chains from the Gate of Lions for babbling with leaky tongues." He thrust out his red beard like a battering ram. "What freedom, Bedawin?"
"Freedom from the clay, the soil."
"Ah!" The Moor appeared relieved. "Is the hound of the wilderness eager to turn into a gold-sniffling bazaar cur?"
"Perhaps."
"Have you ever heard of the donkey who traveled abroad looking for horns—and lost his ears?"
"They were the donkey's own ears, to do with as he pleased."
"True. But tell me. Why did you not stop on the way, in Egypt or Algiers? Plenty gold there, they say, to be had for the picking up, like camel dung."
"I saw there the heel of the Franceysey and the Engleysey. I did not like the cut of their faces. Nor did they like the cut of my sword. Wah! Foreigners, all! Abu ethnashar kalib—fathers of seventeen dogs! But this is said to be a land of the Moslims. So do not bar my way with your fat paunch and your senseless, unmannerly questions."
"Ahee! Ahoo! Ahai!" roared the other with delight. Here was a man after his own heart, who could wield the whip of sharp words and flavor the sauce of speech with the spice of abuse. "Enter, Bedawin!" He opened the gate with the point of his dagger pressing the lock. "Enter, hound of the wilderness! May you find the gold and the freedom of your seeking!"
Thus then he had come to Fez, Hassan, son of Mustaffa, travel-stained, uncouth, looped in folds of earth-gray wool; and today his hands were white and scented, his voluminous turban of green muslin threaded with silver, his burnoose of silk in delicate stripes of pistache and heliotrope. And there were the greetings when he walked through the streets; grave burgesses bowing, putting two fingers on fore head, lips, and heart, and purring flattering words on his soft-slippered passing:
"Allah hadiq, yah sheykh—may the Lord lead thee, O chief!"
"Ana sahibaq, yah sidi—sir, I am thy very friend!"
"Yuhady weyladey il' ej-jinna—may thy parents reach paradise!"
And the poor, the Jews and Negroes and Mzbites, kissing the hem of his robe and hailing him extravagantly:
"Yah abu 'l jazl—O father of excellence!"
"Yah abu 'l jood—O father of beneficence!"
"Yah abu 'I kamaul—O father of perfection!"
But mostly throughout the bazaars, from the Gate that Opens to the Gate of the Niche of Butter, from the Mosque of Muley-Idriss to the Mosque of Swords, was it the greeting, groveling and envious, of:
"Abu 'l nuzaur—father of gold!"
For he had prospered greatly since that day when chance had led him from the Gate of the Father of Utility to the slate-roofed, purple-shadowed Bazaar of the Southern Traders and up to the booth—staring with his frank, chilly nomad eyes at the rich wares there displayed—of Hamdi el-Andalusi, the wealthy silk merchant. The latter, a typical Saharan Arab, quick of brain to find a shift with any wile, had seen something in the other's naïve greed; perhaps, used to the faithless town Arabs, strutting along with the ruffling urbanity of mincing gait and wanton eyes, he had read honesty and steadfastness beneath the greed. At all events he addressed him, and half an hour later, before a magistrate, had indentured him as apprentice, with a bed to sleep on in the back of the shop, three silver douros a month, and three meals a day.
Hassan's rise had been rapid. He had become confidential clerk, then junior partner. He had married Zobeid, el-Andalusi's only child—tall she was and beautiful, with a sweet curve to her upper lip and a slow, slightly mocking lift at the corners, a warm light burning beneath her waxen camellia skin, and rippling, fair hair that spoke of a remote Gothic ancestry. Finally, on his father-in-law's death, he had inherited the great shop; and today, still young, he was city rich and city courteous. There was nothing left of yokelish Bedawin accent or manners when he pronounced words of wisdom in coffee house or public bath; when he twisted crafty words of barter across the counter; when he whispered honeyed words of passion to Zobeid, his wife.
Her beauty grew with the years as grew his love. Often when he looked at her, he thought, half ironically, half pityingly, of Fathma, daughter of Daood, standing there amongst the ruddy glebes of the wheat field on the day of his going to the west. She had kissed him. What of it? She was a girl of the nomads' black tents where springtime and summer were short between the slender virgin and the withered, unlovely matron of middle age. Daughter of the clay she was, mute as the clay, while Zobeid was a flower, a perfume, a lissom, sensuous thought. For thus he would see her in the evenings on the flat roof-top of his house, with her henna-stained fingers brushing across her one-stringed guitar, her voice cadencing the minor harmonies of some current bazaar refrain:
Nehmet dag gat el-mezraq
Aoodia shooftah barmaq...
He shrugged and sighed. Here the days waned sweetly, gently. There were not here the fathomless spawnings of the sands, the sluggish desert unwinding its stealthy, golden, cruel spell. There were here the scarlets and glowing pinks of the fading sky and the garden bathed in a pale, metallic lustre, with purple and russet twilights washing the deepening shadows, the jasmine and tuberose and musk-flower crying out their insistent, scented message.
"Yah faade'd'deen—O star of my faith!" Words would crowd on his lips as her beauty entered his soul.
She would look at him from beneath her dark, trailing lashes, silent, a strange smile curling her mouth, thinking of the day years earlier when her father had told her that she was to marry Hassan, the Bedawin.
"He is honest and energetic," he had said; and by birth a Saharan Arab who like so many of his race had been a raider athwart the loot of the caravan roads before he had become a merchant, yet even in his respectable dotage had remained contemptuous of city folk and ways, he had added: "He is unlike these street bred Moroccan coxcombs with—w'elah, w'elah!—their boastings on horseback and their deeds on foot. And shrewd? As shrewd as a Mzbite. The wedding is on the day after tomorrow."
There had been another man: Agra el-Mahjub, a young Moor of bluest Shareefian blood, who had talked to her one day when her veil had slipped in the bazaar. Once she had spoken his name to her father, who had laughed derisively:
"A fop! A fool! More ready to perfume his beard daintily before his women at home than to show his fine skin to the tribesmen's speary warring or soil his polished finger nails with honest barter. Wah—I want a man to carry on my breed, and not a gaudy, puffed-up carpet-knight!"
So, when el-Andalusi had mentioned Hassan and marriage, she had submitted. It would have been useless to argue or plead. He would have called her "bad daughter"; might have lashed her across the shoulders with his knotted kurbash.
"Listen is to obey, father!" she had replied.
Only, on her wedding day, she had sent a trusted servant to Agra El-Mahjub's house with the message:
"Allah does not close one door without opening a second."
"Where is the second door, Moon of Delight?" had come her lover's written query.
"The back door,"—she had replied—"the one which leads into the Street of Sidi Busida."
Years passed. The brick threshold of the back door was grooved and slippery with the treading of Agra el-Mahjub's feet. But Hassan knew him only as a casual acquaintance with whom he exchanged pleasant salaams when they happened to meet. And if the gray-beards in the bazaar, solid merchants of purse and paunch, rolled the choice scandal of it over their thick tongues; if, in the boisterous coffee-houses near the Burnt Gate, the young bloods of Fez made ribald comment over blond tobacco and rose-flavored sherbet; if the cameleers, recently drifted into town atop their great, smelly, shuffle-footed beasts, digested the gossip in the acrid smoke of their hasheesh pipes, no word ever reached Hassan's ears. For they were Moslims and Semites, slightly hard, yet tolerant in their way, permitting each to look after his own fate, be it good or bad. Hassan was rich. So they admired him. He was just. So they respected him. But his life was his to make or mar.
"Let every man pull the weeds in his own garden," said Thashir el-Toork, the caravan-master.
"Indeed," agreed Zadiq Amin, the saddle-maker. "Rahmet Ullah—the Lord His mercy! These Bedawins are dangerous folk, as uncertain as a Negro's beard, quick to take offense and to give the swish of the sword when it is red. Warn him? Not I. It is better to slip with the foot than with the tongue."
"He is blind," said Sidi ben Abdallah, the magistrate.
"The greater his happiness!" cynically suggested the green-turbaned priest of the Mosque of Swords.
Thus they reasoned. Besides they were a clannish race, and until the end of the chapter, for all his wealth, for all his carefully acquired Moorish speech and manners, Hassan was to them still the nomad, the outsider, while they were men of Fez, bred close to its tame, warm conveniences and coiling intrigues, with one tongue for their friends and one for their enemies. Agra el-Mahjub belonged to them. They wished him well with his adventuring, since it did not soil their brittle, personal honor. Too, there was amongst them more than one who would have gladly become the late el-Andalusi's son-in-law. Instead Zobeid had married Hassan. Now, somehow, their twisted brains may have felt an elation of vicarious revenge at the thought that one of their own breed was fouling the Bedawin's nest.
The latter, blind where Zobeid was concerned, was not blind in everything.
"Mukarrim el-Bedaw"—he said to himself—"we nomads are full of wiles."
He sensed that, in spite of their gliding flatteries, they considered him an interloper on whom, given the breath of a chance, they would turn like jackals.
But—"gain on dirt rather than lose on musk," he used to quote—he did not care. For he was rich in purse. He was happy in his own imagining and ignorance; and his great love for his wife had burned away the dross of his gloomy youth, the caked, black cinders of his clouting years.
Fainter and fainter grew the memory of the clay; and when the two pictures that were always with him—of his mother's wrinkled face and of Fathma, daughter of Daood—moved subconsciously across the focus of his remembrance, while formerly he had tried to brush them aside as something of which he was half ashamed, these days he welcomed the memories, played with them, kept them alive and green. For they made him relish the more keenly the change that had come over his estate. They made his happiness the greater, his wife the more lovely, his gold the more precious.
He never wrote home. For two reasons. His mother, the simple peasant body, could not read, and he had mastered no book knowledge except to add up his accounts and to sign his name laboriously on bills of sale. Nor did he send much money to her; just a few douros from time to time to buy a brace of goats or a new, blue burnoose, or to hire a hand at harvest. Not that he was stingy. But he knew the desert. There was little use there for the glint and clink of gold. Only their camels the Bedawins reckoned profitable possessions, and, too, their small cattle, since a beast will bring forth a beast; but money they thought barren, passing away in the using, and breeding nothing except, belike, strife. Nor finally did he ask her to spend her remaining years with him. She was too old to travel; would have been frightened of the long road to the west.
Once a pilgrim of Fez, returning from Mecca, had passed through the Jemla oasis. He brought to Hassan word from his mother, humble, almost as though addressed to a haughty stranger:
"Allah ibaraq f'amur sidi—may God protect my lord's life!"
"What else did she say?" asked Hassan.
"Nothing. She hardly looked up. She was busy with her milk-skin, preparing samm."
Hassan thought back.
He recalled childhood days; his mother squatting in front of the black felt tent, rocking the blown-up milk-skin upon her knees till the butter rolled yellow and frothing, and then the butter seething on the fire and flour added to thicken it and she calling to him to come and sup the pleasant, sweet skim with his fingers before she daubed the samm with date syrup and boiled and pressed it into great clots of Heytim curds.
"Eat, O my hero!" he remembered her rare terms of endearment. "Eat, O small piece of my soul! It will make you as strong as a camel-master."
Or perhaps, with the simple hospitality of the Bedawins, she would lift the big buttermilk bowl to the lips of some landloping nomad, saying:
"Drink, son of Adam, for there is the good of Allah—the Lord be praised—and no lack. And coming through the sands you must have crossed much thirsty country."
So his thoughts roamed back until the homesickness was in his nostrils, and the bazaar gold seemed gray and useless dregs; and when a woman of the Moroccans, swathed from head to foot with only the eyes showing, passed his booth, he turned to his clerk.
"They do not wear veils at home in the desert," he said. Then suddenly, he broke into harsh laughter, adding: "But veils cost gold—and I sell veils, eh?"
He interrupted himself as a rich Jewess stopped at his shop, dressed in a voluminous, canary-yellow gandoorah embroidered with a great, golden plastron, her head covered by a kerchief of black satin fringed with seed pearls.
"Have I silks of Fyzabad?" he echoed her question. "Have I silks of Fyzabad, O daughter in Israel?" He spread the shimmering bolts on the counter, extolling their quality and color, breathing florid Moorish compliments, "Look! Heliotrope—ah!—the melting deliciousness of heliotrope! Apple green, like the sweetness of morning—perhaps yellow, tinged with purple for the hushed passions of night—lucky the father of your sons! Or blue. Behold this blue, pure as the laughter of children, pure as your soul! Ten lengths? Make it twenty. Fifteen? Good. The price? What matters silver between you and me? Shall we say fifty douros? Eh—thirty? No, no—may I eat dirt! Forty-seven, O delight? Am I an Armenian that I should haggle? Forty-three? Forty—yes? Good—though I lose money, by my honor! But what would I not do for the sake of one of your eyelashes? Come again, O star in Israeli"
But "O obese pig in Israel!" he muttered into his beard, and when she had walked away he said to his clerk: "There are no Jews in the desert, nor Christians—Allah's curse on all unbelievers! There we have only the Moslims—ahee!—a singularly blessed spot of the Lord God's creating!"
And that evening, on the roof-top of his great house, the harrow drove over his soul.
He thought of his mother; thought of the desert; thought, a little of Fathma, daughter of Daood. Curious thoughts they were, unemotional, unsentimental, but somehow tense and bitter and hurting; thoughts elusive yet terse, detached yet cohesive, ir relevant yet subtly cogent. And when, later in the evening, a merchant called to discuss a business deal, he came back to the things of every day with a start, a sensation akin to pain. He felt cramped, caught, caged in, and he smiled with a sort of melancholy irony when he remembered how formerly the clay of the Jemla oasis had made him feel—cramped, caught, caged in.
And yet—rose the illogical longing—what would he not give to be back amongst the black tents at this moment. How happy he had been—Allah!—how happy!
"Zobeid!" he called out suddenly.
"Yes?"
She turned, rather startled.
"Shall—shall we go home?"
"Home?"
"To my own country."
"But"
"For a short visit, Zobeid."
"You are homesick, Hassan?"
"Perhaps—a little." He smiled apologetically, self-consciously.
"Why don't you go, then?"
"You will come with me?"
"I?" She laughed. "No, no. I belong to the ahl el-beyt, the people of houses, not to the ahl el-heyt, the people of tents. Mine is the walk of the peahen, and not the flight of the eagle."
"Come with me!" he pleaded. "I will arrange everything for your comfort. We can take a ship of the foreigners as far as Jeddah. Thence to Mecca. I'll have a litter for you, slung between two dromedaries. You shall travel in state, like the wife of some great Osmanli pasha."
"No, no. I would be afraid of the desert—the long road—the"
She was silent. She glanced cautiously at her husband, wondering if he had heard what she had: a whistle brushing up from the back door that led into the Street of Sidi Busida—two high notes, followed by a fluting tremolo and ending in a throaty gurgle, exactly like a crane calling to its mate—Agra el-Mahjub's signal. She thought quickly; acted quickly. She put her hands on her husband's shoulders.
"You are nervous, Hassan. Why don't you go for a walk?"
"It is hot."
"I know. But it will do you good. It will rid you of your brooding, homesick thoughts."
"Ah!" He was touched by her solicitude. "You do love me, don't you?"
"Of course."
Momentarily she felt sorry for him. He had always been kind to her. But—she shrugged her shoulders—she did not love him. It was fate. She had been married off, thrust into this man's life, like a chattel. They had not bothered to ask for the benison of her heart, the sanction of her senses. Such had been the burden of her Moslim womanhood. She could not drop this burden. She could only shift it a little, lighten it a little—for there was Agra el-Mahjub whom she loved.
She pulled her straying thoughts into order.
"Go, my lord," she said. "You need the scent of the open."
"You are right. A good, long walk." He kissed her. "Do not wait for me, sweetness. Go to bed. I shall be gone for hours. Good night."
"Good night."
He left. She waited a few minutes, looking out, watching the coiling night shadows swallow Hassan's burnoosed figure. She crossed to the edge of the roof-top; stood there, sharply outlined in the moonlight; raised both arms; listened.
This time the fluting call of the crane was distinct. She hurried down to the back door—there was a whispering of voices in the darkness, her voice charged with a high, driving passion, Agra el-Mahjub's impatient, rather petulant—while Hassan strode through the Street of the Mutton Butchers, past the Mosque of Muley-Idriss, toward the Pearl river, where the ancient Moorish city seemed like one great garden, a thick and intricate grove of palms and olives and mulberry trees and stiff, lanky poplars, clothed with ivy and grapevines.
The streets were deserted. There was little life in the sinuous winding of alleys and passages. It was a June night, with a sort of hushed, dry, tense heat that sent the blood racing through his veins. A lost, slow wind rustled the fronds of the palm trees. He could see their solemn, black and green dance against the golden constellations of the sky, and the silver horn of the young moon shredding the clouds to gossamer.
Then the wind died away with a swift surge and rush as of innumerable small wings The heat be came massive, brazen. He felt it like a stabbing pain. He dried his face again and again. But he kept on, walking rapidly, determined to drive the haunting, nostalgic thoughts from his brain.
After all—he tried to persuade himself—he was happy. How could he help being happy? Was he not rich and strong and still young? And his wife—he loved her, and she loved him. She had been right; he was nervous. That was all. Just nervous. And the exercise would do him good.
So he walked on. Nobody was abroad. The windows of the houses were shuttered against the heat. There was hardly a light, except for the moon that slanted, immense and lonely, across the sky, its horn bloating to full roundness as the clouds dropped below the horizon. Only once in a while a big lantern shone with a brutal, sidewise glare; an oil lamp glim mered above some carved gate.
It was very quiet. The mad, amazing stillness cut through his heart. The snapping of a twig. The click of a pebble. Then such silence that it seemed as if all the world were listening—listening tensely, expectantly—for what?
Not far from the Mosque of Swords that towered black, he stopped to light a cigarette. But as he struck the match he dropped it again, immediately; dropped the cigarette.
For suddenly it seemed to him—it was distinct, because of the swathing stillness—as though, directly beneath his feet, he could hear a muffled, staccato breathing; like the breathing of some huge, amorphous animal, the queer imagining came to him—as if the earth were alive.
It frightened him. He shook his head. He tried to laugh his fear away. He was nervous. There was no doubt of it. And the streets were so deserted here.
He would go to the nearest coffee-house—"nedow-wer el-haky wah el-kahwa—to seek friendly chat and coffee. That is what I need."
He turned to go.
Then, as he was about to pull his left foot after his right, he felt himself trembling; felt himself lurching curiously to one side. He wondered if he were about to faint; was on the point of calling for help.
Already his lips formed words:
"Ba nufrutullah—yah Moslemin ..."
The words remained unspoken. He stopped wondering; stopped thinking. Fear rushed upon him, full-armed.
The balance and adjustment of his physical frame seemed to shift and altar. Suddenly a black haze shot with sulphurous yellow rose in the west and blotted out the moon. The harried stars trembled out of sight. The Pearl river shivered and recoiled. The ground writhed and groaned. A wind sprang up, red-hot as from a gigantic furnace, and rattled all the million leaves.
Then he became conscious of a strange, sinking sensation at the pit of his stomach. He fell, face foremost. Noiselessly, with the speed of summer lightning, an immense, dark shutter dropped across his mind. He lost consciousness.
The first thing of which he became aware when he recovered—he did not know how many hours later—was that the sun was looking at him. He staggered to his feet, rubbed his eyes, and stared. It was morning. The heavens were clear and blue.
He touched his arms and legs,—no, he was not wounded. But what had happened?
He looked toward the river. It ran, sparkling like a floor of emeralds, with lemon lights rippling across it. Peaceful it was, and calm.
He turned. He looked the other way, toward the town. And suddenly he understood. There had been an earthquake. For there were now no houses here, but only a broken, jumbled mass of wood and stone, with pink and scarlet flame tongues licking greedily over it, while behind the palm trees which screened the Mosque of Swords a high blazing, fuliginous whirl of smoke touched the skies.
Then he heard voices, screams. He saw people running about frantically. He stood quite still. His eyes sought the familiar outlines of the hill where stood his house; and with a crash in his brain, he realized that there, too, the buildings lay broken, shivered.
And Zobeid—she must be among the ruins.
With the cry of a wounded animal Hassan stumbled through the battered, crumpled streets. As he passed the Mosque of Swords the whole side of it gave way and came tumbling down in a mad, twisting, smoking heap. A flaming beam grazed his face. But he brushed it aside as he would an insect. He kept on toward the ruins where his home had been, stepping here and there on black, shapeless things which squirmed and writhed and groaned as his feet touched them. The air was torn with the cries of animals, and of men and women and little children.
"Illahi!" came the shrill, agonized shouts. "Ee mudud Allah!"
"Allahumma!"
"Hayah! Yah bint! Yah bint!"
"Fi fubilillah!"
He passed men who staggered as if they were drunk; others squatting on the debris of their houses, vacant-eyed, as if turned into stone. One woman had gone mad. She was dancing among the slow-lapping flames, her skirts kilted to her knees, crooning to the dead babe in her arms. An old Jew, dry-eyed, long-bearded, enormously tragic, was standing erect, his arms raised high, his voice booming out the ancient, guttural Hebrew prayer:
"Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'me rabbo ..."
Quite near, white paws close together, tail curled fastidiously, flat, emerald eyes blinking, sat a cat. It purred contentedly, as if the shattering catastrophe did not affect it one way or the other.
Hassan ran on. There was a choked cry for help from a ruined mass. A woman's bare arm stretched from beneath a pile of jagged, burning wood. The fingers, covered with rings, groped blindly, like the tentacles of an octopus. He did not stop. His eyes saw. His brain registered the stark fact of the thing. But there was no meaning to it. Nor was there pity in his soul. There was only the thought of his wife, up there among the crumbling, smoking ruins.
He reached his home. He saw that nothing was left standing except one wall, and above it, supported by iron corbels which were twisted into the silhouette of some grinning, obscure maw, a balcony swinging crazily from side to side like a gigantic spider web.
He stopped, undecided what to do and how to do it. Of course Zobeid was down there among the jagged stones and charred timbers. But where should he begin his search?
He must begin somehow, somewhere. He fell to work with superhuman strength, tearing off wood and metal like so much paper, lifting massive blocks of stone and tossing them aside as if they were pebbles, attacking with his bare hands beams studded with rusty nails and other beams still hot and smoldering. Hour after hour he worked, stopping now and then to call her name!
"Zobeid! Zobeid!"
And when the sun dropped down to the east and to the evening, he was still there, tearing, jerking, lifting, clawing, pushing, pulling, twisting—with his naked, frenzied hands, while the puverized plaster ran through his fingers like water and his body ached in every bone, and while occasionally a stone which he had braced up with terrible effort tumbled back into place crushing him, wounding him.
"Zobeid!" he called, "Zobeid!"
Quite suddenly there was a shifting and heaving among the ruins. A large mass of masonry slid to one side with a protesting rumble. A hole, black, mysterious, yawned at his feet, and, sticking from it, he saw a torn edge of rose and silver brocade—the wall covering of his wife's bedroom—he remembered how he had sent to Persia for it.
He stopped. He reached down into the hole. Then he gave a cry. His fingers had touched a tangled mass of curly hair.
Why—he trembled—he had found her; she was in there. "Zobeid! Zobeid!" No answer. But—she was in there—perhaps she was still alive—perhaps only stunned. "Allah! Help me!" the prayer surged in his heart; and with jerks and kicks, with hands and feet, feverishly, desperately, he bent to the task, summoning all his love, all his strength, all his pity into a gigantic effort.
There was a crunching, protesting noise—a sudden recoil which sent him spinning backward—broken stones falling with a whistling noise, like musketry fire—and the hole gaping far apart.
He let himself down. His feet touched solid ground. A haggard, indifferent sun ray danced in, as if to show him the way. And there, stretched on a couch, naked, was his wife.
He looked at her. He knew at once that she was dead; and straight through his grief, the immense, fatalistic resignation which is Islam laid upon him its chilly hand.
His lips formed the fatha, the opening of the Koran:
"El-hamdu illahi Rub el-alamin—unto God be all glory, the Lord of the worlds."
He finished the prayer. He bent to kiss her cold forehead. His grief tore his faith to shreds.
"Zobeid!" he cried. "My love—my"
Then he was silent. He drew himself up again. He stood quite still.
For, bending down, he had seen another body, a man's, a few feet away. Perhaps a servant, he thought, come to warn his mistress when the first rumbling of the earth had shaken the house? He walked up to the body, which lay face down; turned it over; looked. He recognized the features. It was Agra el-Mahjub—here in his wife's room. Agra el-Mahjub, his casual acquaintance. Only the day before he had met him. Their greetings had been courteous:
"Es-salaam, yah sheykh!"
"Es-salaam, yah sidi!"
He turned; looked again at the face of his wife. An ecstatic smile was playing about her cold lips—a smile of love—of desire—love and desire for the other man. And Hassan gave a cry, one of the long-drawn, quivering cries in which the soul tries to burst the bonds of the tortured mind and to find refuge in hysteria. But almost at once he controlled himself. He accepted his fate.
"Kismet!" he said in a low, flat voice. "Destiny."
Here, at his feet, was the fact that his wife had been unfaithful. There was no challenging this fact, no cloaking its ugly nakedness. It did not even allow of jealousy. For jealousy is bred by doubt, not by knowledge.
So, dry-eyed, he pulled himself out of the hole and walked away through the crumbling streets, where the frightened people ran about with shouts and wailing plaints, trying to bring order out of chaos with the puny inefficiency of their hands and minds, and about them the gray and drab of shattered houses, the red and orange of slow-lapping flames.
He walked aimlessly, past the Bazaar of the Southern Traders and the Gate of the Father of Utility. The former had escaped the general devastation, while the latter was in ruins. Both were mile stones in his life. He remembered the red bearded captain of sentinels who had wished him luck, who had told him of the donkey which traveled abroad looking for horns and lost its ears; he remembered el-Andalusi, the silk merchant, afterwards his father-in-law, who had spoken to him on that first day when he had come to Fez, a loutish, travel-stained nomad, seeking for release from the clay, for happiness and success.
Success. Happiness. Fifteen years of it. So he had thought. Now he knew that these fifteen years had been a lie; every month of them, every day. They had been fifteen years stolen from his life. At the back of his brain crashed and tumbled these loose fragments of thoughts, forming as yet no cohesive pattern. There was only one knowledge, rather an instinct like that of a wounded dog dragging itself to its kennel; he must go home. Home was the clay. These fifteen years were wiped out. They were not. Never had been.
A passer-by touched his arm. It was Thashir el-Toork, the caravan-master.
"Es-salad, sidi Hassan!"
"Es-salaam, sidi el-Toork!"
He was about to continue on his way, but the other put a restraining hand on his burnoose.
"Your house?" he asked, pointing at the ruins.
"It is no more," replied Hassan; and passionately: "Nor is my wife." He smiled bitterly. "There is nothing left me except my gold. The bazaar still stands."
"Ah"—came el-Toork's pious comment—"tawakkal al' Ullah—place thy reliance upon God, O Moslim! Will you come home with me? The earthquake only destroyed this part of town. I live the other way—near the Burnt Gate."
Hassan shrugged his shoulders. He would have to sleep somewhere, eat somewhere.
"Thank you," he said. "I shall be glad to come."
He spent the next week in selling his business interests; nor, since he was a prosy Semite whose brain was not affected by whatever was going on in his soul, did he make a bad deal. On the contrary, he bargained shrewdly down to the last fraction of a douro. Then he took passage aboard a little asthmatic coastwise steamship, east bound.
Came days that were like cosmic atoms whirling aimlessly, like formless, swarming snatches of dreams with shapes caustic and tragic peeping from behind the corners of the passing hours; and Algiers sinking to the west beneath a sky of jade; Tripoli sliding past at night under a full moon that brought the fierce thrust and stab of a heavy swell; the Suez canal and the Red Sea sweeping athwart the crescent inland horizon; and at last the coast of Arabia coming into view with, off shore, the flaming eyes of a screwpile lighthouse winking its shuttered lids derisively. The next morning the highlands of Jeddah loomed out of the fog with a sort of barbaric splendor. There was no verdure. But under the purple and orange tints of the sky the chalky rocks became heaps of topaz and the sun-scorched ridges masses of amethyst.
As he looked, something hidden seemed to grow within Hassan to a height of abnormal perceptiveness. The sense of a past life, a life which he was dimly remembering again, became magnified with every minute that passed. It lay beyond those ridges, beyond Jeddah and Mecca, in the clay of the Jemla oasis—home—and, at the thought, there rose to his soul a flavor of that utter, sharp freedom which was to him the breath, the reason, the secret heart of the desert as he remembered it.
"Home—and the tang of the home wind!" he thought; and he thought the words in the harsh Bedawin tongue of his childhood, which he had nearly forgotten in the gliding, purring speech of the Moorish bazaars.
He did not linger in Jeddah. He joined a caravan bound for Mecca, arrived there four days later, bought provisions, filled his zemzemyieh, his leathern saddle bottles and, sure of the way, spurred his camel down the trail which led toward the Jemla oasis.
The heart of the desert came to him with yellow and gray, with a carved aridity, an immense solitude, a sterile monotony flowing on vague horizons. It came with rocks corroded fantastically into archaic struts, with a shimmer of peacock-green copper where the waters of a million dead years had deposited a blanket formation of pure metal, and a soil that was a flaggy pavement of sandstone, rippled in the strand of the ancient, planetary seas. It came with the skirts of lonely mountains blown bare by the wind, with a long cornice of coal black lava, some tumbled down in wild ruins of shale and basalt, ending abruptly, like the tongue of a glacier, upon the lower plains. It came with a dewless aurora rising from the waste hills, and never the voice of a living creature spotting the wilderness.
It came at last with the Jemla oasis, green and ruddy athwart the yellow swash of the sands, stippled with the nomad's felt houses, black as the tents of Kedar in Hebrew scripture; and his mother standing at the open flap of her tent, leaning upon a stick, looking with rheumy old eyes as he forced his camel to kneel and jumped from the saddle.
"Who is it?" she asked.
He did not reply at once. He saw before him, in the flesh, the memory that had never left him: the berry-brown old face, lined, marked by work and deception and failure, and the age-dimmed, puckered eyes peering eagerly—as if to find something beyond the everyday routine of field and herd—doubly eager now as she half guessed the answer to her question, as she repeated it with shaky voice:
"Who is it?"
"I, mother—I—Hassan—your son."
She ran up to him. She cast her thin arms about his neck, trembling with age and emotion. She kissed him. She could not speak; could only utter ludicrous, bird-like little noises:
"Oh—oh—oh"
She cried as if her heart would break.
Then, suddenly she pulled herself together.
"Allah! Allah!" she exclaimed. "I am a selfish old woman! Here I am blubbering—and you hungry and thirsty with the crossing of the weary sands! Come—" she pulled him into the tent. "There is buttermilk and samm freshly boiled—the Lord be praised!—and no lack." She placed the big bowl on his knees. "Sup, my son. It will make you as strong as a camel-master."
So he ate; and, as he ate, with his mother hustling about him, crooning and babbling, there cut across his brain the other memory that had never left him; of Fathma, daughter of Daood, standing amongst the glebes, herding the cattle. And he looked up, through the open felt flap, as he heard a faint jingling of bells, a bleating of goats, a barking of nomad dogs; as, over the crest of the hill, pounding along steadily, her head downcast, her bare feet dragging through the furrows, he saw her turning toward her father's tent.
"And Sheykh es-Zur swore by the Prophet—on whom peace—" said his mother, busy with the gossip of fifteen years—"yes—he swore that he would"
Hassan did not listen. He rose. He left the tent, walked up the hill.
Now he stood before her.
As she looked at him, speechless, mouth partly open, folding her arms as if to hold in her clamorous heart, he noticed their strength. There was down upon those arms of Fathma, daughter of Daood, down brown and ruddy like the clay—and Zobeid's arms had been white and smooth. There were little wrinkles about her eyes—wrinkles that had come with the swing of the years and the peering into the naked desert sun.
Hayah!—she was not young. She was not pretty. She was not soft. She was of the clay—and so was he.
He took her into his arms. He kissed her. And he knew he had come home.