Part 8 (1/2)
The goatherd smiled. ”The Presence is welcome to keep it if he likes. I can get plenty more in the old city.”
Once again, in speaking to the man, his eyes, askance, were on the girl.
She started. ”In the old city,” she echoed, ”Jim! do you hear that--then you know where the old city is?”
The goatherd almost laughed. ”Wherefore not, malika sahiba (queen-lady). Have I not lived in it always?”
”Lived in it! Then where is it?”
He swept a bronze hand in a circle which clipped her and him and the distant horizon.
”Here, queen-lady.”
”Here,” echoed Jim Forrester, incredulously; ”but there are absolutely no signs of a city here.”
”Plenty, Huzoor!” replied the goatherd, ”if the Protector of the Poor will only use his eyes. Look yonder, how the ground rises to meet the curve of the sky; yonder, sahib, where the sunset red dyes deepest.”
The young Englishman looked and frowned, but the girl gave a quick exclamation, and laid a hasty, surprised touch on her lover's arm. ”He is right, Jim,” she said; ”why didn't we notice it before? It stands out quite clear--an even rise all round centring on the unseen sun. How very curious! Ask him his name, Jim, and all that, so that father may be able to get hold of him. Fancy if we find the buried city--it would be as good almost as the gold coin, though somehow it makes me feel creepy.” She gave a faint s.h.i.+ver as she spoke.
”The queen-lady should not remain in the wilderness when the sun has set,” came in swift warning from the goatherd; ”there is a fever fiend lurks in it and brings strange dreams.”
Something almost of familiarity and command in the liquid yet vibrant voice made Jim Forrester frown again and say, shortly, ”Yes; we must get back; it grows quite cold.”
The girl looked half bewildered first to one and then to the other of the two tall figures that stood between her and the fast-fading light, against which she still saw clearly that faint swelling domed blue shadow, as of some other world forcing its way through the crust of the visible one.
So she stood silent, vaguely disturbed while the few questions necessary to identify the man who answered them were asked.
She did not speak, indeed, until with faces set on the right path for their camp and civilisation generally, they paused on the top of the first sand-rippled wave to look back. The shadowy dome was still there, swelling towards the vanished sun, and from its side the figure of the young goatherd rose into the darkening dust haze. He was calling to his flock, and the words of his old-time chant were clearly audible:
”O, seekers for Life's meat, Your course is run!
Come home with weary feet, Rest is so sweet.
What though one day be done?-- Another has begun.
The flock, the fold are one, Where long years meet!”
”I hope he told us his real name!” she said, suddenly.
II
”My dear child, all your geese are swans--and so were your poor mother's before you,” said her father. And then his eyes grew dreamy, perhaps over the intricacies of some new coins he was cla.s.sifying; though, in truth, the memory of the young wife who had left him alone with a week-old baby in the days of his youth had somehow come harder to him during the last few happier, more home-like years since his daughter had returned to take her mother's place as mistress of the house; for the girl was very like the dead woman.
She had brought her father his afternoon cup of tea to the office-tent, cleared for that brief recess of the cloud of clerks and witnesses, who through the wide canvas-wings, set open to let in the air, could be seen huddled in groups among the spa.r.s.e shadows of the stunted kikar trees amid which the camp was pitched. They could be heard also, since in the limited leisure at their disposal they were hubble-hubbling away at their hookahs conscientiously; the noise in its rhythmic, intermittent insistency seemed like a distant snore from the sleepy desert of sand that stretched away to the horizon on all sides.
”Of course,” he went on, ”you could hardly be expected to know--though really, my dear, you have all your mother's quickness of perception regarding people and places--but the mere fact of that goatherd fellow giving his name as Khesroo, and admitting he was low-caste, should have made you doubt his a.s.sertion. I confess I had little hope, for such knowledge as he professed to have is generally in the keeping of the priesthood only.”
”But Jim was there--I mean Mr. Forrester,” she began. Her father coughed uneasily.
”Because I call my personal a.s.sistant, whom I have known as a child, Jim, that is no reason, my dear Queenie, why you should contract the habit. I don't think your poor mother would have liked it. Besides, though he is an able young man--very much so, indeed, and when he grows older will make an excellent officer--Mr. Forrester--ahem!”