“Stay, O my eyes, and let me rub them with a salve!” she cried again with seduction; for, contrasting his gait with the tones of his voice, she knew that he lied.
“May thy wealth increase!—there is no need,” he answered, striving to quicken his step.
From a rhythmic bellying of the skirt of his long robe, as well as from the manner of his going, Nûr made a shrewd guess at the nature of his embarrassment.
“He walks like a she-goat whose udders are overfull,” she thought, laughing to herself; “there is something heavy and cumbersome in the sack of his trousers.”
That he was loth to linger or speak of the matter afforded her more light.
“By the Quran, it is the treasure of Mustafa he carries thus for safety, lest one should rob him of it! He would not trust me so much as to let me know, and he bears his punishment along with him. Allah is just!”
And in the midst of her grief for the old beggar she chuckled most heartily out there in the moonlight, pointing the finger of scorn after him with keen and friendly relish of his avarice.
XXVIII
That was a ghastly night for Saïd—a night full of strange faces, of awful whisperings, and of the shadow of death. His first thought on leaving the city was to find some shelter where he might sleep within call of his fellow-men. To that end he sought the coffeehouse of Rashìd, thinking to find a welcome there now that he was again on cordial terms with Selìm. But as he went, in the tremulous shadow of the trees and the moonlight between, he grew more and more afraid, until the bump of the treasure against his shins and the patter of his own footsteps were separate terrors.
It was almost within hail of the tavern, in the gloom of some apricot-trees, that he blundered upon something soft, yet tight, like a body or a full waterskin. He drew back aghast. A shapeless mass rose before him with a horrid groan. Catching up the sack of his trousers he ran for dear life. Far from allaying his terrors the lowing of a cow at his back lashed him to fresh exertions. He knew it for the angry voice of a jinni cursing him.
For hours he fled on by shadowy ways, pursued by a host of devils. Foul shapes flitted and danced behind him; dread hands were stretched out to stay him and clutch his treasure; a flapping of huge wings filled the welkin. Pale faces he had seen in death that day grinned at him from the ground, from the sky, from the gloom of the trees. Even the dwellings of men—a sleeping village half-seen between the trunks, flat-roofed hovels and pleasure-houses bosomed in foliage—were sinister, the abode of unknown fears. Fiends rollicked over the whole earth. The vista of his life was packed with them—a gruesome throng. From his youth up he had been their sport. In the hour of his prosperity, whenever wealth had seemed within his grasp, they had appeared to balk him. His flight from his native town, the loss of his donkey, the robbery which had deprived him of the price of his horse—he saw plainly the cause of all his misfortunes. Then, as now, he had been the butt of evil spirits.
Of a sudden it occurred to him that the whole night was a procession of ghastly, pallid shapes, moving silently as one man. It seemed that he had a moment’s insight into the hidden mysteries of earth, that this gliding march of a vast, fiendish army, unsuspected of men, had been going on ever since the world began, and would continue unbroken till the Last Day. The horror of it was not new to him. He had experienced it before many times, but could not remember when or under what circumstances.
Was not Abdullah himself an evil spirit? And the soldier who had lifted his donkey—was he not an afreet in disguise. There was no doubt of it now as he recalled their faces.
In his despair he thought lovingly of Hasneh. Why—oh, why had he cast her off? To his fevered brain she seemed desirable as on the day when he had first beheld her, a young girl, at play with other maidens on the seashore. He would have given the half of this treasure which was killing him for a touch of her hand, for the sound of her voice.
Once he stood still in an open place. He had a mind to lighten his trousers by flinging all his wealth upon the ground. It was for that the hordes of darkness were tormenting him. He cried aloud that all of them might know his purpose, and bade them swear a solemn oath that they would let him go in peace. But there came no answer; only a jackal’s cry out of the distance, ending in three short yaps. It rang derisive—very like a laugh. At that Saïd grew dogged. Since not a jinni of them all would swear, it was their lookout and he would keep the treasure. For two seconds he felt courageous and knew that there were trees about him rustling peacefully in the moonlight.
Fear breathed hot on him again and he ran, a hideous whisper in his ears. The balm of the silky Eastern night had no sweetness for him. Shifting the sack of his trousers from aching hand to hand, striving to keep his mind intent upon the name of Allah, he fled on. The trees thinned about him; the gardens gave place to vineyards; the vineyards thinned in their turn with spaces of waste land between; the wide plain rolled out before him with soft undulations to some low hills on the horizon floating in pale haze. The boundless silence throbbed in his ears like the pulse of a living creature. The plain whitened in the
