# In the Dwellings of the Wilderness/Chapter IV

CHAPTER IV
"The Woman Tempted Me"
HE camps settled down for the night, with occasional gusts of conversation from the men's quarters,—an altercation over a kettle of stew or a game of dice. Holloway strolled up to where Deane and Merritt sat smoking, after supper, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette between his teeth. Deane had a wet cloth bound around his head, and looked dissipated. Merritt was placid and thoughtful, resting contentedly in the memory of a good day's work behind him. This is greatly conducive to ​bodily and mental comfort at nightfall when the springs run down.
Holloway said casually:
"Which case have you packed the mummy in for shipment?"
"Haven't packed it at all yet," Merritt answered, tapping the bowl of his pipe against his boot. "There was no time to-day, between Deane's doings and the rest of it. It will be safe enough in the tomb until the morning. These Affejs would not touch it for unlimited backsheesh—and anyhow Ibraheem is on guard to see that they don't go monkeying around."
"Not packed it?" Holloway repeated. His voice held a faint inflection of surprise. "Well, it's not in the tomb. It's gone."
​Merritt straightened up and looked at him.
"How's that?" he demanded.
Said Holloway patiently:
"I thought you must have packed it, because it is not in the tomb. I was there not fifteen minutes ago. And Ibraheem was not there. He was eating his supper with—what's his name—Hafiz, the cooky. I'll bet those beggars have swiped it to loot the jewels."
Deane and Merritt answered nothing. Simultaneously they rose and made for the trenches. Holloway went after them leisurely, his hands in his pockets. Halfway down he met the two returning. Both were ejaculating profanely.
"Well?" said Holloway. "Was I right? Now there'll be the devil to pay."
​"Right? Yes!" Merritt snorted. He gained the level, shouting for Ibraheem. The three seated themselves in solemn tribunal, out of earshot of the camp. Ibraheem came, serenely innocent. Merritt questioned, in the vernacular.
"You stood watch, Ibraheem, after we left the tomb?" His tones were honeysweet.
"Ow yaas, saar." Ibraheem's voice was bland. Also he persisted in his English.
"For how long?"
"Ontil ne supper. My bellee he cry for goat-stew and cakes. Saars, he roar. So I went. Say I to me, eat a leetle bite and come back queek. Be not gone not long. I go; I am back queek. Not er minnut am I gone."
​Merritt turned to Holloway.
"Was he there when you first went to the tomb?"
"No, sir!" Holloway answered promptly.
"How long were you there?"
"About an hour, as nearly as I can judge."
"Had he returned when you left?"
"No, sir."
Merritt's grey eyes transfixed Ibraheem, who quailed.
"While you were away from your post, in direct disobedience of orders, that mummy was stolen. Now it's up to you to find it. Do you understand, or shall I say it again in your lingo?" He repeated his words in the vernacular. "It shall be your business to find it. You ​shall question the men, examine the ground to see if it has been buried, look through all the camp. Until it is found, your wages are cut off. Also you get no backsheesh, and no gift when we return."
Ibraheem, prepared for anything save a loss of gold, became pitiable. His grief was childish; he wept, he implored forgiveness.
"I will find it, saar, mos' vurry damn queek. It is the men did got it, and from them I take it fierce. But give me gifts, or I die me dead of hongry. I am mos' poor men, vurry poor—I respectfully need gifts, saars!"
"Oh, stop your drooling and get to work!" Merritt growled, and turned his back on him. Ibraheem crept away, to ​fasten guilt, collectively and individually, upon every member of every gang. His progress through the camp was marked by a storm of wrathful protestations of innocence, of appeals to high Heaven for damaged reputations, of furious denials of complicity.
Merritt laughed shortly and lay down on his back.
"Don't you think all this rumpus might—er—frighten the thief into making off with the property?" Holloway wished to know.
"He couldn't make off very far," Merritt retorted grimly, and waved a hand at the surrounding desert. "If he tried it, we'd miss him from among the men, and be on him quicker than jumping. But it may scare him into quietly ​returning it, when he finds the secret is out."
But the next day the mummy of the Princess had not been returned, nor the next. Always the work went on, diligently, with varying success. More trenches were run deeper into the mound. Basketfuls of tablets were found, made of finest clay, many in a state of perfect preservation; also terra-cotta vases, instruments in copper, some corroded out of all shape; an altar to a god whose name had been erased, bearing marks of sacrifices. The courtyard of the palace was dug out, a wide and open space, with fragments of brick pavement and the remnants of its surrounding rooms. Of these architectural details Deane drew careful plans, noting their dimensions, the ​average height and thickness of their fragmentary walls, their drainage and ventilation. Squeezes were taken of inscriptions which could not be removed; the ground was carefully surveyed, the buildings photographed and described, preparatory to carrying the excavations to a lower level, where Merritt believed relics of a greater antiquity could be found. Again, other days were barren, and it was then that Merritt became sore over the loss of the Princess. When things went right he forgot her, in joy over some fresh acquisition; when things went wrong, he reverted to her, and mourned for her inconsolably.
"I was going to give the thing to the National Museum in Washington," he lamented bitterly. "And now, through ​the infernal greed of a fool of an Affej, it's lost. What's going without your dinner a time or two, when a thing like that is in the balance?"
But the fool of an Affej still held the centre of the stage, and was minded to make the most of it. Deane caught him one evening, purloining wax wherewith to plug up a gruesome gash, after the manner of desert surgery, and bound up the wound himself in proper style. So that Ibraheem, feeling himself sadly illused and outcast since the day of his disgrace, became grateful, and—always in his painful English—informed him that the night before a workman had disappeared, not returning with his gang at sunset, and that the man who had seen him last was in the camp, very sick.
​All this Deane dutifully reported to Merritt, and Merritt grunted sleepily and said:
"The fellow's gone to sleep behind one of the mounds. He'll turn up in time for breakfast, never fear."
But he did not turn up in time for breakfast, and the sick man was sicker, and wished to die. Asked by curious comrades as to the cause of his distress, he replied that he would not tell, and did not wish to talk; so that he received scant sympathy, and his attendants dwindled. It was upon this night that Deane dreamed of being again a prisoner in the tomb, with the living eyes in the dead face watching him as he fought his way to air and life. Only this time the face seemed not all dead; the skin was brown and ​drawn tight across the bones, but in the face there was expression; lust and cruelty, and a triumph which was of evil. He woke bathed in sweat, with a feeling of suffocation such as had choked him on that unforgotten day in the airless tomb. For the first time he was struck with a sense of impending evil; though, when he woke again, this had vanished wholly in the brave morning light.
It was within a day of this that a certain uneasiness made itself manifest among the men. In the evening a deputation visited Merritt, and set forth their troubles at great length. They made Ibraheem their spokesman; he revelled in the chance of exploiting his English, and made the most of it.
"Saar Merritt will not forget nat it is ​accursed citee, accursed by Lord-God in vurry long time ago. Nere may be bad affairs, vurry bad, which we shall see. It is not good to unbury what is bad. Nare is a altar of so most wickit Lord-God which men says shine all night. Spucks are here—all, all around. We did got vurry great lot spucks in nis land. The mens don't not like him. Hafiz, he cook, see a ting, las' night. Make um vurry seek."
He pulled forth Hafiz by the tail of his short and dirty cotton garment. Hafiz was unwilling, but seeing himself surrounded, hearing himself bidden to speak, spread out his hands and said rapidly:
"It is a thing, oh, my masters, which comes from the mounds at night-time, swaying as the corn sways in summer, ​very light, beckoning men to follow. Tarfa, he who went and came not back, saw and said it is the god of that altar we have profaned. The desert has swallowed him; for it is three days since he hath gone." Then he called Allah to witness—for he was a good Mohammedan—that he intended no meddling with unseen things, that he was forced to obey orders, and that he was a flower in Allah's hands.
"I don't understand what's got into the brutes," Holloway said fretfully.
"They're just a bit nervous," Merritt assured him. "It seems as though this place always had a bad name, from the earliest times. The men are superstitious, and they don't know exactly what they're up against. I think Tarfa is responsible for the mummy, and invented the tale of ​the shining altar before he left, to throw us off the track. Yes, he's undoubtedly the thief. But he wouldn't be such a fool as to cross northward without water or provisions—and cooky says he took nothing from the stores—and the only other practicable route would be southward. So when we go back that way, we'll find him—or what's left of him—and it."
"But the Rocks? Suppose he makes for them?" Deane suggested.
At this idea, however, Merritt scoffed.
"Why should he go there? His main wish, I take it, would be to get into the track of caravans, where he might find help. He'd throw the mummy away in the desert, and hide the jewels in his shirt. Among the Rocks, he might as well go north and be done with it. No caravans ​pass within fifty miles of the place, and then rarely; and fifty miles is no joke to an exhausted man without food or water. Oh, we'll get the Princess back yet!"
The next day came a flurry of disturbance. A digger came to Merritt and told him, quite hysterically, that he, Moussa, had seen a man slipping away among the mounds, following a thing which went always on ahead; and the man was Hafiz, the cook, who had been with Tarfa and had later wished to die. And Moussa, shuddering, told what the thing was, as he had seen it.
"Master, it was near to dark, and I and Hafiz took food and went to the shade of that mound and ate." He waved his hand at a hill of upturned earth and rubbish at a distance upon the left. ​"And just as the sun sank, in that moment before night fell, there came a breath of air from the gardens of the blessed souls in Paradise, slow and soft as the whisper of women's voices, and It came, slowly, around the mound, and looked upon Hafiz, and beckoned. And the desert was no longer a desert, but as a garden filled with the scent of roses and the song of bulbuls. And it was a woman, master, as Allah lives, a woman, here in this place, where a woman had not been before, and her eyes were dark and her mouth red. She stood swaying just in the shadow of the earth, and beckoned; and I cried out in fear, but Hafiz would follow. And when I would have held him back, he cursed me, and went, following that woman who laughed and ​beckoned, for the sweetness of her was in his nostrils, and her will was to be obeyed. And when I, fearing greatly, went around also, I could not see them, for the darkness of night had come. Eh, masters, but she was beautiful, and very evil, and her jewels were such as none had ever seen before upon the earth."
Merritt turned sharply upon Ibraheem, who stood behind him.
"Did I not tell you that liquor was not to be brought along for the men? By Jove! we'll have them seeing sacred pythons and jumping lizards next!"
"Not got um liquor, saar," Ibraheem interrupted. "Not um drop er whiskey in er camp. Sun touch um here." He tapped his forehead significantly. Merritt grunted in unbelieving disgust.
​That night the three sat late, unwontedly silent, watching the desert night and the pulsing stars. Holloway was the first to break a pause of many minutes.
"These men aren't children, to be scared of shadows. I think this thing ought to be sifted. And when you come to think of their point of view, this is a pretty weird sort of a place. There's a-plenty to cook up a rattling good ghost story out of; this old cursed city, the altars to unknown gods where human sacrifices were offered; that mummy Princess, with her 'devil-soul' and her jewels and her story painted on the walls of her own tomb; and now the disappearance of our men, one by one. Well, I'm glad you two fellows are here, anyhow. If I were alone, by George, I shouldn't wonder if ​I'd get to believing in Ibraheem's spucks myself. I'd end by cutting loose and running away."
Deane smiled at the boy through a cloud of tobacco smoke; and Merritt said, with a dry affection which only Holloway, with his spirits, his light-heartedness, and the unexpected contradiction of an imagination more torrid even than Merritt's own, could wring from him:
"Oh, yes! I have seen you run like that before, you young dare-devil. They'll forget about all this in a couple of days. They merely think it's their duty not to let one trip go by without stirring up something sensational."
Holloway sighed portentously.
"Well, you can search me!" he said with frankness. "I give it up. This ​country gets beyond the depth of my philosophy. Upon my soul, if I stay here much longer, I'll be ready to believe anything you tell me of it."