CHAPTER XLII

_Naomi’s Story_

[Sidenote: The Philosopher’s Place]

The evening came at last; the burning calm was followed by a breeze breathing of life, and on the sky sailed, as if it were wafted by that gentle breeze, the evening star. The lifeless silence of the desert now began to be broken by a variety of sounds, wild and sad enough in themselves, but softening by distance, and not ill suited to that declining hour which is so natural an emblem of the decline of life. The moaning of the shepherd’s horn; the low of the folding herds; the long, deep cry of the camel; even the scream of the vulture wheeling home from some recent wreck on the shore, and the howl of the jackal venturing out on the edge of dusk, came with no unpleasing melancholy upon the wind. We stood gazing impatiently from the tent door, at the west, that still glowed like a furnace of molten gold.

“Will that sun never go down?” I exclaimed. “We must wait his leisure, and he seems determined to tantalize us.”

“Yes; like a rich old man, determined to try the patience of his heirs, and more tenacious of his wealth the more his powers of enjoyment decay,” said the Jewess.

“Philosophy from those young lips! Yet the desert is the place for a philosopher.”

“That I deny,” said my sportive companion. “Philosophy is good for nothing where it has nothing to ridicule, and where it will be neither fed nor flattered. Its true place is the world, as much as the true place of yonder falcon is wherever it can find anything to pounce upon. Here your philosopher must labor for himself and laugh at himself—an indulgence in which he is the most temperate of men. In short, he is fit only for the idle, gay, ridiculous, and timid world. The desert is the soil for a much nobler plant. If you would train a poet into flower, set him here.”

“Or a plunderer.”

“No doubt. They are sometimes much the same.”

“Yet the desert produces nothing—but Arabs.”

“There are some minds, even among Arabs, and some of their rhapsodies are beauty itself. The very master of this tent, who fought and killed, I dare not say how many, to secure so precious a prize as myself, and who, after all his heroism, would have sold me into slavery for life, spent half his evenings sitting at this door chanting to every star of heaven, and riming, with tears in his eyes, to all kinds of tender remembrances.”

“But perhaps he was a genius, a heaven-born accident, and his merit was the more in being a genius in the midst of such a scene.”

“No—everything round us this hour is poetry. The silence—those broken sounds that make the silence more striking as they decay—those fiery continents of cloud, the empire of that greatest of sheiks, the sun, lord of the red desert of the air—the immeasurable desert below. Vastness, obscurity, and terror, the three spirits that work the profoundest wonders of the poet, are here in their native region. And now,” she said, with a look that showed there were other spells than poetry to be found in the desert, “to release you, I know, by signs infallible, that the sun is setting.”

I could not avoid laughing at the mimic wisdom with which she announced her discovery, and asked whence she had acquired the faculty of solving such rare problems.

[Sidenote: A Daughter of the Desert]

“Oh, by my incomparable knowledge of the stars.” She pointed to the eastern sky, on which they began to cluster in showers of diamond. “I have to thank the desert for it; and,” she added, with a slight submission of voice, “for everything. I am a daughter of the desert; the first sight that I saw was a camel; my early, my only accomplishments were to ride, sing Bedouin songs, tell Bedouin stories, and tame a young panther. But my history draws to a close. While I was supreme in the graces of a savage, had learned to sit a dromedary, throw the lance, make haiks, and gallop for a week together, love, resistless love, came in my way. The son of a sheik, heir to a hundred quarrels and ten thousand sheep, goats, and horses, claimed me as his natural prey. I shrank from a husband even more accomplished than myself, and was meditating how to make my escape, whether into the wilderness or into the bottom of the sea, when a summons came which, or the money that came with it, the sheik found irresistible. And now my history is at an end.”

“And so,” said I, to provoke her to the rest of her narrative, “your story ends, as usual, with marriage. You, of course, finding that you had nothing to prevent your leaving the desert, took the female resolution of remaining in it, and as you might discard the young sheik at your pleasure, refused to have any other human being.”

“Can you think me capable of such a horror?”

She stamped her little foot in indignation on the ground; then turning on me with her flashing eye, penetrated the stratagem at once by my smile.

[Sidenote: Naomi Continues Her Story]

“Then hear the rest. I instantly mounted my dromedary, galloped for three days without sleep, and at length saw the towers of Jerusalem—glorious Jerusalem. I passed through crowds that seemed to me a gathering of the world; streets that astonished me with a thousand strange sights; and, overwhelmed with magnificence, delight, and fatigue, arrived at a palace, where I was met by a host of half-adoring domestics, and was led to the most venerable and beloved of wise and holy men, who caught me to his heart, called me his Naomi, his child, his hope, and shed tears and blessings on my head, as the sole survivor of his illustrious line.” She burst into tears.

The recollection of the good and heroic high priest was strong with us both, and in silence I suffered her sorrows to have their way. A faint echo of horns and voices roused me.

“Look to the hills!” I exclaimed, as I saw a long black line creeping, like a march of ants, down the side of a distant ridge of sand.

“Those are our Arabs,” said she, without a change of countenance. “They are, of course, coming to see what the angel, or demon, who visited them to-day has left in witness of his presence. But from what I overheard of their terrors, no Arab will venture near the tents till night; night, the general veil of the iniquities of this amusing and very wicked world.”

“Yet how shall we traverse the sands on foot?”

“Forbid it, the spirit of romance,” said she. “I must see whether the gallantry of the sheik has not provided against that misfortune.”

She flew into the tent, and, drawing back a curtain, showed me two mares, of the most famous breed of Arabia.

[Sidenote: The Spirited Steeds]

“Here are the Koshlani,” said she, with playful malice dancing in her eyes; “I saw them brought in, in triumph, last night, stolen from the pastures of Achmet Ben Ali himself, first horse-stealer and prince of the Bedouins, who is doubtless by this time half dead of grief at the loss of the two gems of his stud. I heard the achievement told with great rejoicings, and a very curious specimen of dexterity it was. Come forth,” said she, leading out two beautiful animals, white as milk; “come forth, you two lovely orphans of the true breed of Solomon—princesses with pedigrees that put kings to shame, unless they can go back two thousand years; birds of the Bedouin, with wings to your feet, stars for eyes, and ten times the sense of your masters in your little tossing heads.”

She sprang upon her courser, and winded it with the delight of practised skill. The Arabs were now but a few miles off and in full gallop toward us. I urged her to ride away at once, but she continued curveting and maneuvering her spirited steed, that, enjoying the free air of the desert after having been shut up so long, threw up its red nostrils and bounded like a stag.

“A moment yet,” said she; “I have not quite done with the Arab. It is certainly bad treatment for his hospitality to have plundered him of his dinner, his money, and his horses.”

“And of his captive, a loss beyond all reparation.”

“I perfectly believe so,” was the laughing answer; “but I have been thinking of making him a reparation which any Arab on earth would think worth even my charms. I have been contriving how to make his fortune.”

“By returning his shekels?”

“Not a grain of them shall he ever see. No, he shall not have the sorrow to think that he entertained only a princess and a philosopher. As a spirit you came, and as a spirit you shall depart, and he shall have the honor of telling the tale. The national stories of such matters are worn out; he shall have a new one of his own, and every emir in the kingdoms of Ishmael—through the fiery sands of Ichama, the riverless mountains of Nejd; Hejaz, the country of flies and fools; and Yemen, the land of locusts, lawyers, and merchants, will rejoice to have him at his meal. Thus the man’s fortune is made, for there is no access to the heart like that of being necessary to the dinners and dulness of the mighty.”

“Or on the strength of the wonder,” said I, “he may make wonders of his own, turn charlatan of the first magnitude, profess to cure the incurable, and get solid gold for empty pretension; sell health to the epicure, gaiety to the old, and charms to the repulsive; defy the course of nature, and live like a prince upon the exhaustless revenue of human absurdity.”

[Sidenote: The Blazing Tents]

A cloud of smoke now wreathed up from the sheik’s tent; fire followed; and even while we looked on, the wind, carrying the burning fragments, set the whole camp in a blaze. The Arabs gave a universal shriek and fled back, scattering with gestures and cries of terror through the sands.

“There—there,” said my companion, clapping her delicate white palms in exultation; “let them beware of making women captives in future. In my final visit to the tent I put a firebrand into the very bundle of carpets in which I played the part of slave.”

“Not to be your representative, I presume.”

[Sidenote: Forward!]

“Yes, with only the distinction that in time I should have been much the more perilous of the two. If that unlucky sheik had dared to keep me a week longer in his detestable tent, I should have raised a rebellion in the tribe, dethroned him, and turned princess on my own account. As to burning him out, there was no remedy. But for those flames the tribe would have been upon our road. But for those flames we might even have been mistaken for mere mortals; and your spirits always vanish as we do, in fire and smoke. How nobly those tents blaze! Now, forward!”

She gave the reins to her barb, flung a triumphant gesture toward the burning camp, and under cover of a huge sheet of fiery vapor we darted into the wilderness.