The daily pageant of attack was then in progress. The crackle of a volley came from no great distance. Muhammad implored Allah to direct the bullets so as to kill them all, for they were worse than infidels. He did not notice the changed manner of their breathing, nor the new fire which smouldered in their eyes.
At a blow across the face, accompanied by frightful insults, a burly fellow seized Muhammad’s wrists and deftly tripped him. The boy lay on his back bereft of speech. His captor knelt upon his belly, while the others crowded round like cattle interested. He could feel their breath.
“Hear, O my little son! Swear by the Sayyid Ahmad to be civil. It were best for thee.”
Muhammad, with his pride undaunted, answered: “Sinful hog! I swear to have thee thrashed with the nailed whip and then decapitated. O Muslimîn! Do you not know that this is mutiny, an awful crime?”
“Then we must finish him,” remarked his captor, with a sigh. “With his own sword! Here! Quickly, while I stop his screeching.”
The speaker pressed his hand down on Muhammad’s mouth, while another drew the sword and plunged it several times into the prostrate form. They watched until the last convulsions ceased; then piously observed: “Our Lord have mercy on him! There is no power nor might save in Allah, the High, the Tremendous!”
“By Allah, he could bite!” observed his first assailant, shaking blood from his right hand. The palm was bitten through. He stopped to bandage it; and then they made a litter with their spades and so conveyed the body back to camp with wailing.
“The darling of our souls is dead,” they chanted. “Slain by the infidels, whom we repulsed. Our brother, Abdul Câder, too, is wounded in the hand.”
The lie was quite transparent, yet it passed unquestioned. The high commanders shrugged and let it go. There were a hundred men concerned, with Allah knew how many sympathizers. They dreaded a stampede of all the conscripts in the camp.
When Ali, mad with grief, demanded justice, he was told to hold his tongue. The general was profoundly grieved; he shed some tears, and swore that every honour should be paid to the remains. A telegram was sent to Yûsuf Pasha announcing that his son had died a martyr, and that the blessed body was upon its way to Cairo. Within an hour of death it had been dressed for burial. It was carried in a fine procession to the railway, where a special train—a locomotive and an open truck—was waiting. The corpse was laid down in the truck, and covered with some tent-cloth; and Ali sat beside it, while the train sped hooting on past empty villages, where only a few children played upon the dust-heaps, a few women stood in doorways with hands shading eyes, past palm-groves and the fields of cotton and of sugarcane until the citadel rose up before him in the evening sky.
XXXIII
The news was broken gently to the stricken mother. Yûsuf, overcoming his own grief, came in at noon and sat an hour with her, leading her up by little steps to view the glory that their son had died a martyr for the Faith. When the announcement came at length, the fortitude he had assumed gave way. He wept profusely. But Barakah was tearless. She sat rigid, with pale eyes staring vaguely in a face of stone. She asked that Ali, as soon as he arrived, might be sent in to her; and that was all. Umm ed-Dahak came and mumbled on her hand, moaning endearments which she did not hear. Then Ali was announced. At the same instant dreadful wailing filled the house. She drew her head-veil round her face (the movement had become instinctive) when he fell before her, pouring forth his awful story, concluding with the words: “The funeral sets forth this minute, O my lady. His body will not keep with all those wounds.”
And then her anguish passed the bounds of suffering; she moved and looked and spoke, but felt no more.
Her women, half demented, danced around her. They tore their flesh with fingernails, defiled their faces, and raised an endless chant, reviewing all the charms and virtues of the dear one, his mother’s love, the blackness of the world, each verse concluding with a shriek of “O calamity!” It was the triumph-song of death.
Robbed of the corpse, the funeral over, they thronged her chamber, keeping up the ghastly round, the death-chant, in the hope to give her tears. Her petrifaction filled them with dismay. To women who accept with rapture all life’s chances, whose custom is to celebrate each blow that strikes them and magnify it as a witness to the power of God, her stony apathy appeared uncanny. They increased their efforts, while Umm ed-Dahak poured into her ear a song of memory designed to loose the frozen fountain of despair.
“She was the fairest daughter of the seed of Adam. See her now! Her feet, her fingertips dropped perfume. She had the grace of flowers, the voice of turtles. Now behold her! In a moment blind and deaf and dumb and paralyzed. And why? Alas, O thou who askest! it is because the sunshine of her life is fled. We saw her follow his dead body to the grave. As the cow pursues the calf that has been reft from her, so did she follow blindly with a noise of lowing. She has not even strength to beat her face. Her breath is painful, husky like the voice of doves; its sound is all the sobbing of the childless mother. Say, O beloved, what is in thy mind? Dost thou remember his tarbush,
