Chapter X: Allan's Adventure

Evil tidings travel fast in these our days of electricity, and true it was that the unfortunate Allan Graham had fallen into the hands of the Bedouins, but nothing more was known.

He had disappeared from Matarieh!

When his detachment marched into headquarters, Sergeant Farquharson reported that the Master of Aberfeldie had left the village for a ramble in the vicinity one evening, so far as could be known, and had not returned. After a careful search by the Highlanders at a certain spot, a cigar-case which had been given to him by Cameron of Stratherroch had been found, and in the immediate vicinity the soil bore the impression of foot and hoof marks, as if a struggle of some kind had taken place. If killed he had not been killed there, as his body could not be found.

Beyond these meagre and unsatisfactory details nothing more was known, save that the Bedouins, intent on plunder and outrage, had been daily hovering about in the vicinity of the mounds and ruins of Heliopolis.

Allan had felt very lonely after the loss of his friend Cameron, all the more lonely and full of tender interest for the general circumstances of his life and fate, and thus--as the sergeant reported--he had rambled from the village where his men were cantoned, a little way into the vicinity to smoke and to ponder over the past and future.

After Cameron's catastrophe he felt himself more disposed to think of Olive, and to think kindly and tenderly, and of his mother's explanatory letter concerning the extraordinary conduct of Holcroft and Olive's love and grief; for we are told that 'among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring; when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring tide,' and in childish affection had the love of Allan Graham and Olive Raymond begun.

He lay stretched on a patch of grass, where two or three banana-trees grew near a ruined wall. The setting sun shed its red light far along the desert that stretched to the land of Goshen, with its luxuriant plains--yea, to the far horizon--and Allan, a thoughtful and a well-read man, as he looked around him, reflected, as he often did, how strange was the land where just then his duty led him--how strange that the Egyptians were there, without a tradition of a parent stock or of another land; that it was only known that a few generations after the Deluge they had become a great nation. In the words of Apollonius Rhodius:

'Oldest of mortals they who peopled earth,
Ere yet in heaven the sacred signs had birth.
. . . . . . . .
Ere men the lunar wanderings learned to read,
Ere yet the heroes of Deucalion's blood
Pelasgia purpled with a glorious brood;
The fertile plains of Egypt flourished then,
Productive cradle of the first of men.'

Allan thought as he manipulated and lit another cigar, that the Egyptians of Arabi Pasha must be of different and inferior stuff from those to whom the poet of the Argonauts referred.

And there, but a little way off, lay Heliopolis and Matarieh, two places of great and solemn memories--Heliopolis, where Herodotus sought the wisest men in Egypt; where Strabo says they pointed out the house of Plato, where he then resided; where Potiphar lived, who bought Joseph from the patriarch; and Matarieh, a spot where the Blessed Virgin, St. Joseph, and the Holy Child Jesus tarried, including a well under a withered sycamore in which--according to the legendaries--the Holy Mother washed her Divine Infant's linen; a spot the turbanned Mussulmans still view with respect; and thereby was the piper of Allan's company playing 'The Evening Retreat,' and from the distance, over the flat ground, came the sound of his pipes, as he played 'The Birks of Aberfeldie.'

Perhaps it was that his reflections were not of a very lively nature, or that he was wearied by a long reconnaissance that morning in the direction of El Khan-Kah, but he, perilously for himself, dropped insensibly asleep, all unaware that a party of Bedouin horsemen, with hoofs muffled in the soft sand, had formed a kind of semi-circle round him, cutting off all chance of escape.

He could not have been asleep more than five minutes when the little prick of a lance which drew blood roughly roused him. He started to his feet and found himself confronted, surrounded indeed, by some twenty dusky sons of the desert, with hawk-like features, eyes that gleamed, and teeth that glistened exultantly.

The adjective had rather an unpleasant sound just then, so Allan said,

'And if not ransomed?'

The Bedouin slapped the butt of his Remington rifle and grinned, showing all his pearly teeth, with fierce signification.

'Who is your leader?' asked Allan, after a pause.

'That you will discover when you see him.'

'I trust he will spare my life, at all events.'

'What does your life, or the lives of all the accursed Franks in the world, matter?' exclaimed another Bedouin; 'may you all perish by the hand of God by drowning, as Pharaoh and his host perished, or by His causing the earth to open and swallow you up, as, the Koran tells us, happened to Korah!'

Whether a rumour had reached them of the sharp manner in which Colonel Warren overtook and punished the Arabian assassins of Professor Palmer and his companions in misfortune, Allan knew not. One fact was evident, that they were resolved to lose no time in carrying him off to their tents among the sandy recesses of Jebel Dimeshk.

They ambled on their way so fast, keeping him at a species of run, that he was on the point of sinking, and besought them to spare him a little; so, at the command of their leader, they halted for a little time in the starlight, and, weary and worn with toil and many emotions, he threw himself on the ground to rest.

He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to think over his new and calamitous position, and the chances of achieving an escape from it. If money was required--unless the sum demanded proved too enormous--he could produce a ransom, and he turned uneasily on his sandy couch as he thought over all his chances of success.

How like a horrible dream--a nightmare it all appeared--as those terrible hours spent in the vault at Dundargue had done.

What would be thought of his disappearance by the regiment, and at home, and memory flashed back to his soldierly father and tender mother--for, with all her aristocratic pride, tender she had ever been to him--so his first thoughts were of her. 'In the man whose childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues;' so--a captain now, and in such savage hands--his first ideas were of his mother's grief, rather than of poor, repentant Olive.

He might be butchered in the desert, and never heard of again, for his life was at the mercy and caprice of the most lawless people in the world.

His disappearance as a mystery would soon become public property at home. There would, he knew, be all manner of newspaper paragraphs, suggestions, and surmises for a few weeks, and then, when these ceased, his story and his fate would be as much forgotten as last year's snow.

Again his captors began their march towards the mountains; and times there were, as he struggled forward to keep pace with them, when, in fierce revolt against the whole situation and its dreadful uncertainties, he felt as if his heart would burst, and a kind of agonised hopelessness crept into it.

The Bedouins conveyed him some five and twenty miles or more into the mountains, till they reached a kind of oasis, where their tents, which were very numerous, stood. Day was on the point of breaking, and Allan was utterly worn out. However keen excitement may be, Nature will demand her due, so he slept on a dirty Bedouin _barracan_, and ere he did so, so great was the mental and bodily toil he had undergone, that he felt a kind of pleasure as drowsiness came upon him--a happiness to find oblivion--oblivion for a time even. To forget was a species of joy. And so he slept, despite those plagues of Egypt, the gnats, mosquitoes, and sand-flies.

In the morning he was informed that the chief of the tribe, who would be the arbiter of his fate, was as yet absent; and that, if he made the slightest attempt to escape, he would be shot down without mercy.

'God is great,' added his informant, who, like most Mussulmans, interlarded his conversation with pious allusions and quotations from the Koran; 'and whatever He has decreed will and must come to pass.'

For breakfast they brought him a few dates soaked in melted butter, a little sweet milk and curds. So simple are the habits of the Bedouins that one can subsist for a whole day on such a repast, and deem himself happy and luxurious if he can add a small quantity of corn-flour or a little ball of rice. Meat being usually reserved for the greatest festivals, they rarely kill a kid, save for a marriage or a funeral, though some tribes eat the flesh of the gazelle and the desert cow.

A couple of days on such food, with rough usage and toil--for they compelled him to groom their horses--a toil degrading to a man of spirit, rendered Allan somewhat faint.

He learned incidentally that there was another Frank a prisoner in their hands, who no doubt, like himself, was anxiously awaiting the return of the Bedouin chief.