Part 21

The city had changed since Ishmael Ameer spent his youth there. Lifeless and vacant then, it had risen out of the dust of its own decay. On the river's front a line of Western buildings, a college, a barrack, and a palace over which the white crescent and the Union Jack crackled in the breeze together; at the back of these a great open market, with rows of booths and shanties, a native quarter with lines of mud-brick houses, and a handsome mosque; and behind all these an encampment of the tribes in tents, fronting an horizon of sand, empty and silent as the sea.

When Ishmael returned to the city of his boyhood British officials of the Anglo-Egyptian Government, wearing the Crescent on their pith helmets, were walking in the wide streets with Soudanese blacksmiths, Arab carpenters, and women of many races, some veiled in white, others in black, and yet others nearly naked of body as well as face. Two battalions of British soldiers, a British Sirdar, a British Inspector-General, and British Governors of provinces were there as signs and symbols of the change that had been wrought since Khartoum was shrivelled up in a blast of fire.

Ishmael's fame had gone before him, from Alexandria and from Cairo, and both the British and the native population of Khartoum looked for his coming with a keen curiosity. The British saw a man taller and more powerful than the common, with the fiery, flashing black eyes that they associated with their fears of the fanatic; but the natives, to their disappointment, recognised a face they knew, and they said among themselves, "Is not this Ishmael Ameer, the nephew of old Mahmud and the son of the boat-builder?" And that was a discovery which for a while dispelled some of the marvel as well as the mystery which had hitherto surrounded the new prophet's identity.

Ishmael made his home in his uncle's house on the fringe of the native quarter, a large Arab dwelling with one face to the desert and another to the white river and the forts of Omdurman. Besides the old uncle himself, now more than fourscore years, a God-fearing man devoted to his nephew, the household consisted of Ishmael's little daughter, Ayesha, a sweet child of ten, who sang quaint little Soudanese songs all day long, and had the animal grace of the gazelle; an Arab woman, Ayesha's nurse, Zenoba, a voluptuous person, with cheeks marked by three tribal slits, wearing massive gold ear-rings and hair twisted into innumerable thin ringlets; and Abdullah, a Soudanese servant, formerly a slave.

Before Ishmael had been long in Khartoum most of the British officials had made up their minds about his personal character. He was one of those complex beings whom they recognised as essentially Eastern--that mixture of hypocrisy and spirituality, of sincerity and quackery, which they believed to be most dangerous of all in its effects upon a fanatical populace. The natives, on the other hand, began to see that though a spontaneous and passionate man, outspoken and vehement in his dealings with the strong and the rich, he was very tender to the old and to the erring, that he was beloved of children, and trusted by the outcast and the poor.

Before many days had passed the Moslems of Khartoum asked him to lecture to them, and in the evenings he would sit on an angerib which Abdullah brought out of the house, with a palm net spread over it, and speak to the people who squatted on the ground about him. Clad in his white caftan and Mecca skull cap, with its white muslin turban bound round it, the British Inspectors would see him there, on the edge of the desert, surrounded by a multitude of Soudanese, brown and black, and of Arabs, olive and walnut, and holding his learners by the breathless intensity with which he uttered himself.

Yet he did not flatter them. On the contrary, no man had ever so condemned the evils which they had come to regard as part and parcel of their faith. All the Arab soul and blood of the man seemed to be afire, and his wonderful voice, throbbing over their heads far away to the silent desert beyond, carried such denunciations of the corruptions of Islam as the people had never heard before.

"Beware of slavery," he said. "What says the Koran? 'Righteousness is to him who freeth the slave.' Beware of sorcery, of spells, of magic, of divinations--they are of the devil."

Teaching like this might drive away the dominant races but it drew the subject ones, and among others that attached themselves to Ishmael was a half-witted Nubian (an Ethiopian of the Bible), known as Black Zogal, who from that time forward followed him about by day and lay like a dog at the door of his house by night, crying the confession of faith at the end of every hour.

After condemning slavery and sorcery Ishmael came to closer quarters--he denounced polygamy and divorce.

"Beware of polygamy," he said. "It pulls down the pillars of the house. No man would permit another man to join with him in love for his wife. Why, therefore, ask a woman to allow another woman to join with her in love for her husband?

"Beware of divorce, for it brings sorrow and shame. What says the Prophet (to him be prayer and peace)? 'Of all lawful things hated of God, divorce is the most hateful.'

"Brothers," he cried, "I see a house that is full of light. There is a new wife there. She is very happy. But in the upper rooms I hear children weeping. They are weeping for their mother who has been put away. She has done no wrong, she has committed no crime, but while the guests feast and the new wife counts her jewels, the mother's heart is bleeding for the children she may see no more.

"O men," he cried again in his throbbing voice, "night is for sleep, and your children slumber, but in their dreams their mother comes to them. She embraces them and they dry their tears. But they awake in the morning and she is gone. Where is your father's heart, O ye men of righteousness? Has all justice died out of you? Shame on you! May Heaven punish you as you deserve! Divorce shakes the throne of Islam! Wipe it out, that your faces may be whitened before the world!"

After condemning polygamy and divorce, Ishmael came to closer quarters still--he denounced the seclusion and the degradation of women.

"Remove the veil from your women," he said. "At the beginning it was the badge of shame. What says the Koran? 'O Prophet, speak to thy wives and thy daughters that they let their wrappers fall so that they may not be affronted.'

"Dismiss the madness of a bygone age that woman is inferior to man. We are all children of one mother. What says the Prophet? 'Paradise lies under the feet of mothers.' The proverb of our people says, 'The threshold weeps for forty days when a girl is born,' but I tell you the stars sing for joy and the dry wells of the desert spring afresh. Man's dominion over woman is the product of darkness--put it away. O my brothers, woman's suffering in the world is so great that if she does not cry aloud the mountains themselves will groan."

If Ishmael's teaching offended certain of the men, it attracted great multitudes of the women, many of whom laid aside their veils to come to him, and among others that came were a number of black girls from Omdurman who were known to have been the paramours of British and Egyptian soldiers at Khartoum. His bearing towards these girls had that shy tenderness which is peculiar to the pure-minded man in his dealings with erring women, and when some of his followers grumbled at his intercourse with such notorious sinners he told them a story of the Lord Isa (Jesus).

It was the story of His visit to the rich man's house, and of the sinful woman who did not cease to wash His feet with her tears and to dry them with the hair of her head.

"Shall I be less charitable than the Lord of the Christians?" he asked, and the choking pathos of his story silenced everybody.

In his preaching he turned for ever to the prophets--the prophet Abraham, the prophet Moses, the prophet Mohammed, and above all, the prophet Isa. He called Jesus the divine teacher of Judaea, one of the great brother souls.

"Only a poor Jewish man," he said, with a memory of his own that none might share, "only a poor carpenter, but perhaps the greatest and noblest spirit save one that ever lived in the world."

Thus, evening after evening, when the blazing sun had gone down, Ishmael sat on the angerib in front of his uncle's house and taught the ever-increasing crowds that squatted before him on the brown and yellow sand. The heat and flame of his teaching burnt itself into the wild Arab souls of the great body of his hearers, but there were some among his own people who asked--

"Is not this the Ishmael Ameer who denounced the Christians as the corrupters of our faith?"

And there were others who answered--

"Yes, the same Ishmael Ameer that married the Coptic woman who lies buried on the edge of the desert."

And meantime the British Inspectors, suspecting some hidden quackery and fatuity, some fanatical intrigue masquerading as religious liberalism, were whispering among themselves--

"This is a new kind of religious game--what the deuce does it mean, I wonder?"

*CHAPTER II*

Within a month an immense concourse of people had gathered about Ishmael at Khartoum. They came first from Omdurman and the little shipbuilding village of Khogali, on the other side of the Blue Nile, which sent daily through the desert air a ceaseless noise of the hammering of rivets; then they came from Kordofan and still farther south, and from Berber and yet farther north.

A few who had means lodged in the houses of the native quarter, but the larger number encamped in tents on the desert side of old Mahmud's house. Men, women, and children, they flocked in thousands to see the holy man of Khartoum and to drink of the river of his words. They began to see in him a man sent from God, to call him "Master," and to speak of him as the "White Prophet."

At that the Governor of the city, a British Colonel, began to be alarmed, and with certain of his Inspectors he went over to see Ishmael.

"What can these people want here?" he asked. "What bread is there for them in this wilderness?"

"The bread of life," Ishmael answered, and the Christian Governor went away silenced though unsatisfied.

During Ishmael's first weeks in Khartoum his house was open, and anybody might come and go in it; but somewhat later it was observed that he was daily receiving messengers, agents, emissaries, and missionaries of some sort in secret. They came and went by camel, by boat, and by train, and rumour had it that they communicated with every quarter of Egypt and the Soudan. Ishmael appeared to spend the morning of every day in his house receiving and dispatching these people. What did it mean? The British Inspectors suspected the existence of a vast network of fanatical conspiracy, but only the members of Ishmael's own household knew what was going on.

Meantime at noon every day Ishmael, exercising his right as an Alim, lectured in the mosque. What he said in that sealed chamber no Christian might know, and never an echo of his message there was permitted to escape from its hushed and guarded vaults. But still after sunset he sat on the angerib in front of his uncle's house and taught the excited crowds that were eager to catch a word of his inspired doctrine.

His lectures took a new subject. They denounced the spirit of the age. It was irreligious, for it put a premium on selfishness. It was idolatrous, for it provoked to the worship of wealth.

"O my brothers," cried Ishmael, "when Mohammed (to him be prayer and peace) arose in Mecca, men worshipped the black wooden idols of the Koreish. To his earnest soul this was a darkness, a mockery, an abomination. There was only one god, and that was God. God was great, and there was nothing else great. Therefore he went out from Mecca that he might gather strength to assail the black wooden idols of the Koreish, and when he returned he broke them in pieces.

"That was thirteen centuries ago, O my brothers, and behold, darkness covers the earth again. Men are now worshipping the yellow idols of a corrupt civilisation. Moslems and Christians alike are bending the knee to the golden calf. It is idolatry as rank as the Prophet destroyed, and tenfold more damnable because it is done in the name of God."

With that, he called on his people to renounce the things of this world. Its prizes were not the prizes that could enrich them. Time and its shows rested on eternity. The things of the other world were the only true realities. Why struggle for the semblance and form of things and neglect the substance and essence? This poor earth of ours was the threshold of heaven--let them forget the affairs of this life and fix their minds on the life to come.

The people listened to Ishmael with bated breath. Ignorant, unlettered, wild creatures as they were, sons and daughters of the desert, they knew what application of his words they were intended to make.

But the authorities were perplexed. Just as sure as ever of the presence of a far-reaching fanatical conspiracy, and that Ishmael's teaching meant opposition to the Government, some of them said--

"This is the doctrine of the Mahdi, and it will end as it ended before, in destruction and desolation--let us put it down before the storm breaks."

But others said--

"It is the Gospel of Christ--what the dickens are we to do with it?"

Meantime Ishmael's own people had begun to see him not as a poet, a dreamer, but as a prophet with a mighty mission. In moments of rapture he told them of a new order that was coming, a great day when all the religions of the world would be united, when all faiths would be one faith, all races one race, all nations one nation, when East and West would be one world, and there would be only one God in it, one King and one Law.

They saw him with tears in his eyes looking over the desert as he foretold the conquest of the world for God, and listening eagerly to his predictions of a better and happier day, they began to see something God-like in himself, to regard him as a God-inspired man, a man sent down from the skies with a message.

"Our souls lie beneath his sheepskin," they would say, and then they would tell each other stories of supernatural appearances that surrounded the new prophet--how while he preached celestial lights floated about his head, and when he rode on his milk-white camel into the desert of an afternoon, as it was his habit to do, flights of angels were seen to descend and attend him.

The creation of this kind of myth led to trouble, for among Ishmael's secret enemies were certain of the Ulema of Khartoum, who, jealous of his great influence with the people, and suspecting him of an attempt to change the immutable law of Islam, conceived the trick of getting him to avow himself as a re-incarnation of the Mahdi in order that they might betray him to the Government. So three of the meanest of them came one morning to old Mahmud's house, and sitting in the guest-room, under its thatch of corn-stalks, began to flatter Ishmael and say--

"From the moment we beheld thee we knew that thou wert the messenger of God--the Expected One."

"Yes, indeed, Mohammed Ahmed is dead but Ishmael Ameer is alive!"

Ishmael listened to them for a moment in silence, and then with a flash of fire out of his big eyes he clapped his hands and cried--

"Zogal! Abdullah! Turn these men out of the house," and in another moment his two black giants had swept out the spies like rats.

But the crowds continued to come to Khartoum from north, south, east and west, and at length, in fear that many might die of want, the Governor of the city went up to Ishmael and said--

"Send these people back to their homes or they'll die of starvation."

Whereupon Ishmael looked at him and answered--

"Colonel, you are a Christian, and when your Divine Master was on earth a great multitude came to Him in a desert place, and His disciples said, 'Send these people away that they may return to their villages and buy themselves food.' And then your Master answered them, 'They need not depart. Give ye them to eat.'"

Thus Ishmael was irresistible. There was nothing and nobody that seemed to have the power to touch him.

*CHAPTER III*

"To every sun its moon--to every man a woman." Wise and powerful as Ishmael was, people began to whisper that there was a woman who ruled him. He submitted everything to her judgment, and was guided and even governed by her counsel.

Who was this woman? A Soudanese? No! An Egyptian? No! Rumour had it that she was a stranger, totally unknown to Ishmael down to the moment of his coming back to the Soudan--a Muslemah (Mohammedan lady) from India, the sister of a reigning prince of the Punjab, who having been educated under British rule, and therefore Western influences, had revolted against the captivity of the zenana, and broken away from her own people.

Attracted by the fame of the new prophet as an emancipator of women and a reformer of bad Mohammedan customs, this woman had, according to report, followed him from Alexandria and Cairo to Khartoum, where she had settled herself, with a black boy as her servant, at the house of the Greek widow--the same who had formerly been the mistress of Ishmael's first wife, Adila.

The black boy called his mistress "the Lady," and most of the people about her knew her by the same name, but some called her the Sitt-el-beda, the Khatoun (the White Lady), and others the Emirah, and the Rani (the Princess, the Queen), in recognition of what they believed to be her rank and wealth.

It was in the early days of Ishmael's return to Khartoum, when women of all classes were coming to him unveiled, that he met with "the Princess" first. Sitting alone in the late afternoon on the bank of a broad stretch of land which was flooded by the high Nile, and looking across its glistening waters to where the sky was red behind the shattered dome of the Mahdi's tomb in Omdurman, he saw a young and beautiful woman approaching him.

She seemed to him to be a splendid creature under those southern skies--tall, well developed, with shining coal-black hair, long black lashes and brilliant eyes, and a mouth that was full of fire and movement. Her dress was such as is worn by Parsee ladies both in the East and in the West, having nothing more noticeably Oriental than a silken scarf which was bound about her head as a turban and a light, silver-edged muslin veil that fell back on her shoulders.

She came up to him with a certain air of timidity, as of one who might be afraid to be thought immodest or perhaps of being recognised, yet with the proud bearing of a woman who had passed through life with a high step and would not shrink from any consequences.

He rose to receive her, and she looked at him for a moment without speaking--almost as if she had for an instant lost the power of speech, being at last face to face with a man whom she had long thought of and long sought.

On his side, too, there was a momentary silence and a look of enthusiastic admiration which he tried in vain to control. The lady seemed to see this in an instant, and an expression of joy which she could not restrain shone in her face.

Then, gathering confidence, she began to tell him the object of her visit to Khartoum--how, hearing so much about him, she had wished to see him for herself, and now begged to be allowed to serve him in any way whatever that lay within her power.

He listened to her with the same expression of enthusiastic admiration in his face, and it would have been obvious to an observer that the lady was congratulating herself upon the power of the impression she had made. But at the next moment he set her a very humble task, namely that of seeing to the welfare of the women who were employed at sixpence a day by the Government to draw and carry water for the public streets.

The lady looked surprised and a little chagrined, but finding it impossible to recede from the unconditional offer she had made she went away to the work that had been given to her.

It was ugly and thankless work enough, for the water-women of Khartoum were among the coarsest and most degraded of their sex, being chiefly of the black tribes from south of Kordofan, going about bare from the waist upwards and herding like animals in the brown huts that were beyond the barracks outside the town.

After a little while "the Princess" came to Ishmael again, and this time he was sitting with old Mahmud, his uncle, in the guest-room which divided the women's side from the men's side in their house.

She was dressed still more attractively than before, in a gold-embroidered bodice and a clinging diaphanous gown, and was attended by her black boy. Ishmael salaamed and the old man struggled to his feet as, with a certain air of embarrassment, she stepped forward and begged to be pardoned if what she came to ask should displease the Master.

Ishmael looked at her with the same expression of enthusiastic ecstasy which she had observed before, and said--

"No, no, my sister cannot displease me. What is the request she wishes to make?"

Then she told him that the work he had given her was good and necessary, but was there nothing she could do for himself? She had been educated in India by English governesses and could read English, French, and German--could she act as his translator or interpreter? Having lived so long among Arabs of the higher classes she had also taught herself to write as well as speak Arabic--could she not serve him as his secretary?

Ishmael remembered his busy mornings with the messengers, agents, emissaries, and missionaries who came to him from all corners of Egypt and the Soudan, bringing many letters and foreign newspapers; and before he had time to reflect on what he was doing, he had answered--

"Yes, such help is exactly what I need."

If any eyes less dim than old Mahmud's had been there at that moment they would have seen a look of triumph in the lady's face which she vainly struggled to conceal. But at the next moment it was full of humility and gratitude as she bowed herself out and promised to come again the following day.

Hardly had the lady gone when Ishmael's simple nature began to recover itself from the spell of her sex and beauty, but the old uncle's admiration was quite ungovernable, and he began to hint at the possibility of yet more intimate relations between his nephew and the devoted young Muslemah.

"I have always told you that you ought to marry again, a good woman and a believer," he said; whereupon Ishmael, with the ecstasy created by "the Princess's" loveliness still shining in his eyes, answered--

"No! I have always said, 'No, no, by Allah! One wife I had, and though she was a Christian and had been a slave I loved her, and never, never shall another woman take her place.'"

"Ah, well, God knows best what to do with us," said the old man. "But life is a passing shadow and youth a departing guest."

Next morning the white lady came according to appointment, and Ishmael set her to read some European newspapers containing accounts of recent doings in Cairo.

She was translating these newspapers aloud when Ishmael's little daughter Ayesha came bounding into the house, followed by her nurse, the Arab woman Zenoba--the child barefoot as her mother used to be, and with her mother's beautiful, erect confidence as she moved about, lightly clad, with her middle small-girt by a scarlet sash over her pure white shirt--the woman in her blue habarah and with a silver ring in her nose.