Zarah the Cruel

“_Narrower than the ear of a needle._”—ARABIC PROVERB.

The Holy Man, motionless, gaunt, his eyes filled with the peace of Allah, the one and only God, stood afar off, outlined against the moonlight, watching two horsemen fleeing for their lives across the desert.

Pursued by a band of Arabs which hunted them for murder done in the far, fair City of Damascus and had hunted them throughout the Peninsula, they headed for the Mountains of Death towering in the limitless sands of the burning desert and cut off from the world by the silvery belt of quicksands which surround them completely.

Uninhabited by beast or human being within the memory of man and the memory of his fathers, and his fathers’ fathers, yet did the wandering story-teller, as he flitted from town to village, from Bedouin camp to verdant oasis, make song or story of the legend which has clung to the pile of volcanic rock throughout the centuries.

A story which either moved the listener to shouts of derisive, unbelieving laughter or held him still, lost in wonderment and dreams.

A legend recounted in this day of grace by the Arabian story-teller to Bedouins, sitting entranced under the stars or the moon, yet which had been inscribed upon a highly decorated vellum by the Holy Palladius in the fifth century of our Lord, which record of early holy church was lost in the burning and sacking of a famous library in the more Christian times of the last ten turbulent years.

The story of a miraculous light, which, so read the vellum, led the Holy Fathers across the sands of death, over which they did most safely pass, to find within the mountains the further miracle of fresh, sparkling water, palm groves of luscious kholas dates, stretches of durra and grass, coarse enough to be woven into shirts, with which to replace, in the passing of the years, the shirts of hair which covered the attenuated bodies of the thirty-odd early Christian Fathers.

There, within the secret oasis, so went the legend, the holy men who fled the temptations and persecutions of the world and sought safety and salvation in penance and pilgrimage, built a monastery to the glory of God, and there, so it was to be supposed, they must have died, with the exception of one, who, following the casting of lots, had been sent forth from the miraculous oasis upon a mission to acquaint the Holy Palladius of the community’s whereabouts.

The vellum had witnessed the Holy Father’s safe arrival at his journey’s end, but of his return to the Sanctuary, as was the poetical name given the place by the renowned Palladius, there had been no mention.

A fair legend to endure throughout the passing of the centuries, a sweet story in a land of thirst and death and dire privation, a tantalizing word-picture to those who knew the shifting sands to be impassable.

The Holy Man pondered upon the legend as he watched the horsemen tearing towards the quicksands and certain death, then, with the beads of Mecca slipping between his fingers, turned and continued his pilgrimage due south, the south where the wind blows hottest and the sands burn the sandal from off even holy feet.

And Mohammed-Abd, accused of the murder of a wealthy, flint-hearted usurer in the fair, far City of Damascus, turned to the handsome youth who, loving him as a brother, had helped him to escape, so far, from the vengeance of the flint-hearted usurer’s relatives.

“The mare faileth, Boy of the Wondrous Eyes! I fear a spear or a bullet shall find its home in her body, or in mine, before she reaches yonder mass of rocks.”

Yussuf laughed and turned in his seat and looked back, shading the beautiful, almond-shaped, long-lashed eyes which had earned him his nickname and had got him into more trouble even than usually befalls a handsome youth in the Arabian Peninsula.

“There is the length of many spears yet between us, brother. Lie upon the neck of Lulah, the mare, so that the wind of her great speed be not counted against her. The swiftest mare in all Nejd, yet in endurance of but little count. Behold is there a light at the foot of the mountains moving this way and that way? Perchance ’tis one who lives amongst the rocks and who watches with intent to succour us. Allah be praised that the sands lie flat under our horses’ feet, though by the wool! would He be thrice praised if, in His mercy and compassion, He were to twist the feet of the horses which follow us and so break their riders’ necks.”

The mountains seemed within spear-length, the quicksands showed one with the desert, silvery, smooth, when the mare stumbled just as a bullet whistled past, singeing the streaming mane.

She was up on her dainty, unshod feet upon the instant, racing for safety with the last effort of her gallant heart, when Mohammed-Abd turned and yelled defiance at his pursuers.

“_Ista’jil!_” he yelled, “_Ista’jil!_”

Everyday words, which merely mean “make haste,” but destined to become a battle cry which, in after years, struck terror in the hearts of those who heard it, from Oman to Hajaz.

In reply came a volley of firing, mixed with derisive and insulting words, lost in the din of shouting and hoofs upon the sand.

“Follow me, brother!” shouted Yussuf, as he pressed his mare with his knees.

Ahead a greenish light danced this way and that, backwards and forwards, and to it Yussuf rode his mare, with Mohammed-Abd close upon his heels.

They followed the will-o’-the-wispish light formed by the gas floating above the quicksands, mixing with the wind when it blew from the south, and fled upon the narrow path over which it danced. A path formed perchance by the top of some mountain chain thrusting through the desert; hidden throughout the centuries by the inch or so, not more, of sand which overlapped it from the treacherous, seething, ever-moving sea of death; a way to safety discovered to the Holy Fathers and the fugitives before the law by Allah the merciful, the one and only God.

Over it they passed safely, with, if they had but known it, barely the breadth of a hand to spare, upon either side of the exhausted mare; they slipped from the saddle and pulled the panting beasts back into the shadows just as, with much triumphant shouting and firing of rifles, the pursuing Arabs, riding in a straight line, plunged, yelling, screaming, down into the quicksands’ suffocating depths.

The miracle of the fifth century had been explained at last.

An hour later, when the stars shone down upon a scene of perfect peace, Yussuf laughed and pulled at the spear hurled by an Arab in one last effort of revenge before sinking to his death.

It did not move. Stuck fast between two rocks it remained for all time, a sign to mark the commencement of the only means of communication between the Sanctuary and the pitiless, burning desert.

“Methinks we are no better off, brother. If, by the grace of Allah, we find again the hidden path by which we crossed this sea of death, yet have we neither drop of water nor date-stone left with which to stifle the pangs of hunger and thirst, of which we surely die if we move not from this ledge of rock.”

He looked up to the top width of a great V which cleft the mountains half-way down the side, and from the narrowest point of which there seemed to stretch a path to where the spear marked the beginning of the secret path.

Then he stretched his hand and touched the rock behind the spear, and with finger upon cracked lips softly called Mohammed-Abd, who came quickly upon tiptoe.

“Let us go warily, brother, yet let us go in search of those who inhabit the heart of the mountains, so that they help us in our need.”

They passed their fingers over the rough cross hacked in the rock as a sign of his return by the Christian who, in the fifth century, had been sent upon a mission to the Holy Palladius; then, hobbling the mares, crept in the shadows from rock to rock, up the path leading to the narrowest point of the great cleft, which made the one opening in the mountains, slitting them to a spot midway between the foot and crest.

Famished and almost crazed with thirst, the two men hid in blackest shadow, listening for a sound, peering for a sight of those who had marked the way up with rough crosses cut upon the rocks; then, alert, apprehensive, stopping to listen at every yard, crept noiselessly to the opening of the cleft. Through it they passed like shadows, and on down a steeper, broader path to a great plateau, on the edge of which they stopped, staring in amazement.

“A mirage!” whispered Mohammed-Abd in hoarse tones, then, crouching, ran across the plateau and fell upon his knees and to his full length upon the bank of a sparkling, rushing river.

Whence came the unknown, miraculous water? It flowed from the eastern side of the mountains; it twisted in the shape of a big S in the middle of the fertile plain; it disappeared through a narrow cleft in the western side with the thundering, rushing sound of water falling into space.

The waters of the Wadi Hanifa which flow through Woshim and Ared more or less abundantly, according to the season, have so far not been traced after they disappear in the fertile district of Yemama. Do they flow below the surface to the Persian Gulf? or on into the terrible desert, to be absorbed in the ever greedy sand? Are these the waters which show above ground for a few blessed yards in the secret heart of the Mountains of Death, cut off by the quicksands from the needy sons of the desert who depend upon the scanty, brackish water of deep wells, and vapours carried uncertainly on certain winds from the Persian Gulf, and which are lost once they pass above the hamads, those red-hot, dust-laden, scorching, terrible limestone plains?

Or does a subterranean river flow through the bowels of some chain of mountains stretching below the surface of the Peninsula from sea to sea, wrapped in the desert sand?

Maybe!

And may not the short mountain ranges dotted throughout Arabia’s deserts be the topmost peaks of that great hidden chain, and the miraculous waters hidden in the Mountains of Death be part of that lost river, escaping through its prison walls in the one spot where the rocks have been worn, during the centuries, by the rush and the fret of the waters below and the wind and the storm above?

Fantastic theory. And yet who knows? Who will ever know?