CHAPTER XVIII

DESERT MAGIC

He had meant but forty winks, but it had been dark when his eyes closed and he opened them to the unreal half-lights of early dawn.

The sky was pearl; the sands were fawn-colored; the crest of a low hill to the east shone as if it were living gold, and the next instant it seemed as if a fire were kindled upon it. It was the sun surging up into the heavens, and great waves of color, like a sea of flame, mounted higher and higher with it.

Impulsively Billy bent over the little figure sleeping so soundly at his side, speaking her name gently. And Arlee, waking with a start and a catch of her breath that went to his heart, opened her eyes on a wild splendor of morning that seemed the outer aspect of the radiant joy within her.

They looked and looked while the east flamed like a burning Rome, and then the glow softened and paled and dissolved in mysteries and miracles of color, in tender rose and exquisite sh.e.l.l pinks, in amethysts and violets and limpid, delicate, fair greens. All about them the sands were turning to gold, and the rim of the distant horizon grew clearer and clearer against the brightening blue of the sky, like a great circling tawny sea lapping on every side the arch of the heavens.

As they looked their hearts stirred and quickened with that incommunicable thrill of the desert, and their eyes turned and sought each other in silence. The gold of the sun was on Arlee's hanging hair and the morning-blue of the sky in her eyes; her face was flushed from sleep and a tiny tendril still clung to the pink cheek on which she had been sleeping. Somehow that inconsequent small tendril roused in Billy a thrill of absurd tenderness and delight.... She was so very small and childish, sitting there in the Libyan desert with him, looking up at him with such adorable simplicity.... In her eyes he seemed to see something of the wonder and the joy in his. It was a moment of magic. It brought a lump into his throat.... He wanted to bend over her reverently, to lift a strand of that shining hair to his lips, to touch the sandy little hands....

Somehow he managed not to. The moment of longing and of glamor pa.s.sed.

"It's exactly as if we'd been shipwrecked!" said Arlee, looking about with an air of childish delight.

"On a very large island," he smiled back, and felt a furtive pain mingling with his joy. He was just her rescuer to her, of course; she accepted him simply as a heaven-dropped deliverer; her thoughts had not been going out to him in those long days as his had gone to her.... Decisively he jumped to his feet and said breakfast. Where was it? What was to be done?

Directions were vague. They had come south on the edge of the desert, and the Nile lay somewhere to the east of them, and to the east, therefore lay breakfast and trains and telegraph lines and all the outposts of civilization.

To the east they rode then, straight toward the tinted dawn, and as they went they laughed out at each other on their strange mounts like two children on a holiday. Their spirits lifted with the beauty of the morning, and with that strange primitive exhilaration of the desert, that wild joy in vast, lonely reaches, in far horizons and illimitable s.p.a.ce. The air intoxicated them; the leaping light and the free winds fired them, and with laughing shouts and challenges they urged their camels forward in a wild race that sent the desert hares scattering to right and left. Like runaways they tore over the level wastes and through the rolling dunes, and at last, spent and breathless, they pulled back into a walk their excited beasts that squealed and tossed their ta.s.seled heads.

Their eyes met in a gaiety of the spirit that no words could express. When Arlee spoke she merely cried out, "I've read the camel had four paces, but mine has forty-four," and Billy gave back, "And forty-three are sudden death!" and their ringing laughter made a worried little jackal draw back his cautious nose into his rocky lair.

They were in broken ground now, more and more rocky, leading through the low hills ahead of them, and great clumps of grayish _mit minan_ and bright green hyssop dotted the amber of the sands. Here and there the fork-like helga showed its purple blossom, and sometimes a scarlet ice-plant gleamed at them from a rocky crack. Across their path two great b.u.t.terflies strayed, as gold and jeweled as the day.

High overhead, black against the stainless blue, hung a far hawk.

At last the way entered a narrow defile among the rocky hills, and a sharp curve led them finally out upon the other side, looking down into green fields, as straight and trim as a checker board in their varying tints, and off over the far Nile. The fertile lands were wide here, and fed with broad ca.n.a.ls that offered the surprise of boats' white wings between the fields of grain. Not far ahead, before the desert sands reached that magic green rose a group of palms, and near them some mud houses and a pigeon tower.

"Breakfast," said Billy triumphantly, and gaily they rode down on the sleeping village.

Back toward the Libyan hills runs the ca.n.a.l El-Souhagich, and as it curves to the north a reach of sand sweeps down from the higher ground, interrupting the succession of green fields. Several jagged rocks have tumbled from the limestone plateaus above and increased the grateful bit of shade which the half dozen picturesque palms do not sufficiently bestow.

Here the runaways breakfasted upon the roast pigeon, dates and tangerines they had bought from the curious villagers, and here Billy, his back against a rock, was smoking a meditative cigar over the situation. Beside him, tied to a palm, knelt the camels, and before him, nibbling a last tangerine, Arlee was sitting.

"We have to rest the beasts a bit." This from Billy, suggestive of a conscience p.r.i.c.king at this holiday delay. "And then----"

"Then--?" echoed Arlee cheerfully.

"Then, what in the world am I going to do with you?"

"With me?"

"Yes. It's simple enough, I suppose, getting back to the city---but if you don't want your friends to know----"

The quick shadow in her eyes distressed him. "I _don't_," she cried sharply. "At first--I might have made a lark out of it--but afterwards.... No, I don't want to go explaining and explaining forever and ever. Can't I just reappear?"

"You can reappear from Alexandria," he said. "He, himself," his tone changed as he reluctantly brought Kerissen into the beauty of that morning, "has arranged it very neatly for you. You can just have been camping in the desert--and true enough that is!--with those friends of yours whom the Evershams don't know. Only your reappearance has to be--managed a bit."

Very carefully she tore the tangerine skin into very little bits, her head bent over it. Then she flung the fragments far from her with a gesture of rebellion. "I hate fibs," she said explosively.

And then, "But I hate explanations more!" She hesitated, stealing a quick glance under her lashes at his frowning face.

"And some people," she stammered, "might--might not--understand--they would feel that--some people would----"

"Some people are great fools, undoubtedly," Billy promptly agreed.

But back of the some people he saw Falconer in her mind, and Falconer's instinctive distaste of all strangeness and sensation.

"I have a perfect right to keep it from--them," she went on argumentatively, and then with an upward glance, "Haven't I?"

"Good Lord, yes! It was your adventure; it doesn't concern another soul in this wide world."

"You know," said Arlee, locking and unlocking her fingers, "you know, some people wouldn't take it all for granted the way--you do.... And it was very horrid."

"It's over," said he crisply, "except I'd like to pound him to a jelly."

"I couldn't bear to _speak_ of him before," said the girl, "but now it seems all far away and nightmarish.... And I'd like to tell you how it was--a little."

"You needn't."

"I know I needn't." Arlee's tone was suddenly proud. Then she melted again. "But I want you to know. He was--he was trying to make me care for him.... He wasn't really as dreadful as you might think him, only just insane--about me--and utterly unscrupulous. But he did want me to like him and so, when I found out, when Fritzi told me I was in a trap, I tried to play his game. I _flirted_ one day in the garden, at lunch, and made him think---- You see, I _had_ to gain time and try to get word to people. But I hated him so I----" She broke off, the pupils of her fixed eyes big and black with the memory.

"You know I can't--I can't think of you--alone there," came huskily from the young man.

"He never _dared_ to touch me--really--till last night," she said fiercely. "He tried, but I--I held him off. Only he talked to me--Oh, how he talked. Like a river of words.... I hate all those words.... If ever again a man asks me to marry him I don't ever want him to _talk_ about it. I want him just to say two words, _Will you?_" Her laugh caught quiveringly in her throat.

It taxed all the young man's control to keep his tongue off the echo.

"He just raved," she went on after a pause, "and I had to listen--but last night he was horrible. I could never have got to the candles if his hand hadn't been hurt."

"I wish I'd shot his hand off," said Billy bitterly.

"Oh! Was it you who----?"

"When we were in the palace." He told her again about the raid and she nodded delightedly over it.

"It's so wonderful for you to have done all this," she said with sudden shyness. "You had just met me----"

The things on Billy's tongue wouldn't do at all. None of them. What he did say was absurdly stiff and constrained. "You were my countrywoman--and alone."

"So are the Evershams," said Arlee, with sudden bubbling laughter, and then as suddenly checked herself. Her fleet glance at him was half-scared. "You--you are very good to your countrywomen in distress," she got out stammeringly.

Billy contemplated his cigar. It was safer.