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The Eye of Zeitoon

T >> Talbot Mundy >> The Eye of Zeitoon



This eBook was transcribed by M.R.J.



THE EYE OF ZEITOON
By Talbot Mundy

Author of Rung Ho, King--of the Khyber Rifles, Hira Singh,
The Ivory Trail, etc.


CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I Parthians, Medes and Elamites .............................. 1
II "How did sunshine get into the garden? By whose leave came
the wind?" .............................................. 21
III "Sahib, there is always work for real soldiers!" ......... 40
IV "We are the robbers, effendi!" ............................ 52
V "Effendi, that is the heart of Armenia burning!" ........... 74
VI "Passing the buck to Allah!" ............................. 91
VII "We hold you to your word!" .............................. 118
VIII "I go with that man!" ................................... 128
IX "And you left your friend to help me?" ................... 142
X "When I fire this pistol--" ................................ 163
XI "That man's dose is death, and he dies unshriven!" ....... 176
XII "America's way with a woman is beyond belief!" .......... 195
XIII " 'Take your squadron and go find him, Rustum Khan!'
And I, sahib, obeyed my lord bahadur's orders." ......... 211
XIV "Rajput, I shall hang you if you make more trouble!"...... 229
XV "Scenery to burst the heart!" ............................. 243
XVI "What care I for my belly, sahib, if you break my heart?" 257
XVII "I knew what to expect of the women!" .................. 277
XVIII "Per terram et aquam" .................................. 290
XIX "Such drilling as they have had--such little drilling!" .. 303
XX "So few against so many! I see death, and I am not sorry!" 316
XXI "Those who survive this night shall have brave memories!". 333
XXII "God go with you to the States, effendim!" .............. 349




Chapter One
Parthians, Medes and Elamites

SALVETE!

Oh ye, who tread the trodden path
And keep the narrow law
In famished faith that Judgment Day
Shall blast your sluggard mists away
And show what Moses saw!
Oh thralls of subdivided time,
Hours Measureless I sing
That own swift ways to wider scenes,
New-plucked from heights where Vision preens
A white, unwearied wing!
No creed I preach to bend dull thought
To see what I shall show,
Nor can ye buy with treasured gold
The key to these Hours that unfold
New tales no teachers know.
Ye'll need no leave o' the laws o' man,
For Vision's wings are free;
The swift Unmeasured Hours are kind
And ye shall leave all cares behind
If ye will come with me!
In vain shall lumps of fashioned stuff
Imprison you about;
In vain let pundits preach the flesh
And feebling limits that enmesh
Your goings in and out,
I know the way the zephyrs took
Who brought the breath of spring,
I guide to shores of regions blest
Where white, uncaught Ideas nest
And Thought is strong o' wing!
Within the Hours that I unlock
All customed fetters fall;
The chains of drudgery release;
Set limits fade; horizons cease
For you who hear the call
No trumpet note--no roll of drums,
But quiet, sure and sweet--
The self-same voice that summoned Drake,
The whisper for whose siren sake
They manned the Devon fleet,
More lawless than the gray gull's wait,
More boundless than the sea,
More subtle than the softest wind!

* * * * * *

Oh, ye shall burst the ties that bind
If ye will come with me!


It is written with authority of Tarsus that once it was no mean
city, but that is a tale of nineteen centuries ago. The Turko-Italian
War had not been fought when Fred Oakes took the fever of the place,
although the stage was pretty nearly set for it and most of the
leading actors were waiting for their cue. No more history was
needed than to grind away forgotten loveliness.

Fred's is the least sweet temper in the universe when the ague grips
and shakes him, and he knows history as some men know the Bible--by
fathoms; he cursed the place conqueror by conqueror, maligning them
for their city's sake, and if Sennacherib, who built the first
foundations, and if Anthony and Cleopatra, Philip of Macedon,
Timour-i-lang, Mahmoud, Ibrahim and all the rest of them could have
come and listened by his bedside they would have heard more personal
scandal of themselves than ever their contemporary chroniclers dared
reveal.

All this because he insisted on ignoring the history he knew so
well, and could not be held from bathing in the River Cydnus.
Whatever their indifference to custom, Anthony and Cleopatra knew
better than do that. Alexander the Great, on the other hand, flouted
tradition and set Fred the example, very nearly dying of the ague
for his pains, for those are treacherous, chill waters.

Fred, being a sober man and unlike Alexander of Macedon in several
other ways, throws off fever marvelously, but takes it as some persons
do religion, very severely for a little while. So we carried him
and laid him on a nice white cot in a nice clean room with two beds
in it in the American mission, where they dispense more than royal
hospitality to utter strangers. Will Yerkes had friends there but
that made no difference; Fred was quinined, low-dieted, bathed,
comforted and reproved for swearing by a college-educated nurse,
who liked his principles and disapproved of his professions just
as frankly as if he came from her hometown. (Her name was
Van-something-or-other, and you could lean against the Boston
accent--just a little lonely-sounding, but a very rock of gentle
independence, all that long way from home!)

Meanwhile, we rested. That is to say that, after accepting as much
mission hospitality as was decent, considering that every member of
the staff worked fourteen hours a day and had to make up for attention
shown to us by long hours bitten out of night, we loafed about the
city. And Satan still finds mischief.

We called on Fred in the beginning twice a day, morning and evening,
but cut the visits short for the same reason that Monty did not go
at all: when the fever is on him Fred's feelings toward his own
sex are simply blunt bellicose. When they put another patient in
the spare bed in his room we copied Monty, arguing that one male
at a time for him to quarrel with was plenty.

Monty, being Earl of Montdidier and Kirkudbrightshire, and a privy
councilor, was welcome at the consulate at Mersina, twenty miles
away.
The consul, like Monty, was an army officer, who played good chess,
so that that was no place, either, for Will Yerkes and me. Will
prefers dime novels, if he must sit still, and there was none. And
besides, he was never what you could call really sedative.

He and I took up quarters at the European hotel--no sweet abiding-place.
There were beetles in the Denmark butter that they pushed on to the
filthy table-cloth in its original one-pound tin; and there was a
Turkish officer in riding pants and red morocco slippers, back from
the Yemen with two or three incurable complaints. He talked out-of-date
Turkish politics in bad French and eked out his ignorance of table
manners with instinctive racial habit.

To avoid him between meals Will and I set out to look at the historic
sights, and exhausted them all, real and alleged, in less than half
a day (for in addition to a lust for ready-cut building stone the
Turks have never cherished monuments that might accentuate their
own decadence). After that we fossicked in the manner of prospectors
that we are by preference, if not always by trade, eschewing polite
society and hunting in the impolite, amusing places where most of
the facts have teeth, sharp and ready to snap, but visible.

We found a khan at last on the outskirts of the city, almost in sight
of the railway line, that well agreed with our frame of mind. It
was none of the newfangled, underdone affairs that ape hotels, with
Greek managers and as many different prices for one service as there
are grades of credulity, but a genuine two-hundred-year-old Turkish
place, run by a Turk, and named Yeni Khan (which means the new rest
house) in proof that once the world was younger. The man who directed
us to the place called it a kahveh; but that means a place for donkeys
and foot-passengers, and when we spoke of it as kahveh to the obadashi--
the elderly youth who corresponds to porter, bell-boy and chambermaid
in one--he was visibly annoyed.

Truly the place was a khan--a great bleak building of four high outer
walls, surrounding a courtyard that was a yard deep with the dung
of countless camels, horses, bullocks, asses; crowded with arabas,
the four-wheeled vehicles of all the Near East, and smelly with
centuries of human journeys' ends.

Khans provide nothing except room, heat and water (and the heat costs
extra); there is no sanitation for any one at any price; every
guest dumps all his discarded rubbish over the balcony rail into
the courtyard, to be trodden and wheeled under foot and help build
the aroma. But the guests provide a picture without price that with
the very first glimpse drives discomfort out of mind.

In that place there were Parthians, Medes and Elamites, and all the
rest of the list. There was even a Chinaman. Two Hindus were unpacking
bundles out of a creaking araba, watched scornfully by an unmistakable
Pathan. A fat swarthy-faced Greek in black frock coat and trousers,
fez, and slippered feet gesticulated with his right arm like a pump-handle
while he sat on the balcony-rail and bellowed orders to a crowd mixed
of Armenians, Italians, Maltese, Syrians and a Turk or two, who labored
with his bales of cotton goods below. (The Italians eyed everybody
sidewise, for there were rumors in those days of impending trouble,
and when the Turk begins hostilities he likes his first opponents
easy and ready to hand.)

There were Kurds, long-nosed, lean-lipped and suspicious, who said
very little, but hugged long knives as they passed back and forth
among the swarming strangers. They said nothing at all, those Kurds,
but listened a very great deal.

Tall, mustached Circassians, with eighteen-inch Erzerum daggers at
their waists, swaggered about as if they, and only they, were history's
heirs. It was expedient to get out of their path alertly, but they
cringed into second place before the Turks, who, without any swagger
at all, lorded it over every one. For the Turk is a conqueror,
whatever else he ought to be. The poorest Turkish servant is
race-conscious, and unshakably convinced of his own superiority to
the princes of the conquered. One has to bear that fact in mind
when dealing with the Turk; it colors all his views of life, and
accounts for some of his famous unexpectedness.

Will and I fell in love with the crowd, and engaged a room over the
great arched entrance. We were aware from the first of the dull red
marks on the walls of the room, where bed-bugs had been slain with
slipper heels by angry owners of the blood; but we were not in search
of luxury, and we had our belongings and a can of insect-bane brought
down from the hotel at once. The fact that stallions squealed and
fought in the stalls across the courtyard scarcely promised us
uninterrupted sleep; but sleep is not to be weighed in the balance
against the news of eastern nights.

We went down to the common room close beside the main entrance, and
pushed the door open a little way; the men who sat within with their
backs against it would only yield enough to pass one person in gingerly
at a time. We saw a sea of heads and hats and faces. It looked
impossible to squeeze another human being in among those already
seated on the floor, nor to make another voice heard amid all that
babel.

But the babel ceased, and they did make room for us--places of honor
against the far wall, because of our clean clothes and nationality.
We sat wedged between a Georgian in smelly, greasy woolen jacket,
and a man who looked Persian but talked for the most part French.
There were other Persians beyond him, for I caught the word poul--money,
the perennial song and shibboleth of that folk.

The day was fine enough, but consensus of opinion had it that snow
was likely falling in the Taurus Mountains, and rain would fall the
next day between the mountains and the sea, making roads and fords
impassable and the mountain passes risky. So men from the ends of
earth sat still contentedly, to pass earth's gossip to and fro--an
astonishing lot of it. There was none of it quite true, and some
of it not nearly true, but all of it was based on fact of some sort.

Men who know the khans well are agreed that with experience one learns
to guess the truth from listening to the ever-changing lies. We
could not hope to pick out truth, but sat as if in the pit of an
old-time theater, watching a foreign-language play and understanding
some, but missing most of it.

There was a man who drew my attention at once, who looked and was
dressed rather like a Russian--a man with a high-bridged, prominent,
lean nose--not nearly so bulky as his sheepskin coat suggested, but
active and strong, with a fiery restless eye. He talked Russian
at intervals with the men who sat near him at the end of the room
on our right, but used at least six other languages with any one
who cared to agree or disagree with him. His rather agreeable voice
had the trick of carrying words distinctly across the din of countless
others.

"What do you suppose is that man's nationality?" I asked Will, shouting
to him because of the roar, although he sat next me.

"Ermenie!" said a Turk next but one beyond Will, and spat venomously,
as if the very name Armenian befouled his mouth.

But I was not convinced that the man with the aquiline nose was Armenian.
He looked guilty of altogether too much zest for life, and laughed
too boldly in Turkish presence. In those days most Armenians thereabouts
were sad. I called Will's attention to him again.

"What do you make of him?"

"He belongs to that quieter party in the opposite corner." (Will
puts two and two together all the time, because the heroes of dime
novels act that way.) "They're gipsies, yet I'd say he's not--"

"He and the others are jingaan," said a voice beside me in English,
and I looked into the Persian's gentle brown eyes. "The jingaan
are street robbers pure and simple," be added by way of explanation.

"But what nationality?"

"Jingaan might be anything. They in particular would call themselves
Rommany. We call them Zingarri. Not a dependable people--unless--"

I waited in vain for the qualification. He shrugged his shoulders,
as if there was no sense in praising evil qualities.

But I was not satisfied yet. They were swarthier and stockier than
the man who had interested me, and had indefinite, soft eyes. The
man I watched had brown eyes, but they were hard. And, unlike them,
he had long lean fingers and his gestures were all extravagant.
He was not a Jew, I was sure of that, nor a Syrian, nor yet a Kurd.

"Ermenie--Ermenie!" said the Turk, watching me curiously, and spitting
again. "That one is Ermenie. Those others are just dogs!"

The crowd began to thin after a while, as men filed out to feed cattle
and to cook their own evening meal. Then the perplexing person got
up and came over toward me, showing no fear of the Turk at all.
He was tall and lean when he stood upright, but enormously strong
if one could guess correctly through the bulky-looking outer garment.

He stood in front of Will and me, his strong yellow teeth gleaming
between a black beard and mustache. The Turk got up clumsily, and
went out, muttering to himself. I glanced toward the corner where
the self-evident gipsies sat, and observed that with perfect unanimity
they were all feigning sleep.

"Eenglis sportmen!" said the man in front of us, raising both hands,
palms outward, in appraisal of our clothes and general appearance.

It was not surprising that he should talk English, for what the British
themselves have not accomplished in that land of a hundred tongues
has been done by American missionaries, teaching in the course of
a generation thousands on thousands. (There is none like the American
missionary for attaining ends at wholesale.)

"What countryman are you?" I asked him.

"Zeitoonli," he answered, as if the word were honor itself and explanation
bound in one. Yet he looked hardly like an honorable man. "The
chilabi are staying here?" he asked. Chilabi means gentleman.

"We wait on the weather," said I, not caring to have him turn the
tables on me and become interrogator.

He laughed with a sort of hard good humor.

"Since when have Eenglis sportmen waited on the weather? Ah, but
you are right, effendi, none should tell the truth in this place,
unless in hope of being disbelieved!" He laid a finger on his right
eye, as I have seen Arabs do when they mean to ascribe to themselves
unfathomable cunning. "Since you entered this common room you have
not ceased to observe me closely. The other sportman has watched
those Zingarri. What have you learned?"

He stood with lean hands crossed now in front of him, looking at
us down his nose, not ceasing to smile, but a hint less at his ease,
a shade less genial.

"I have heard you--and them--described as jingaan," I answered, and
he stiffened instantly.

Whether or not they took that for a signal--or perhaps he made another
that we did not see--the six undoubted gipsies got up and left the
room, shambling out in single file with the awkward gait they share
in common with red Indians.

"Jingaan," he said, "are people who lurk in shadows of the streets
to rob belated travelers. That is not my business." He looked very
hard indeed at the Persian, who decided that it might as well be
supper-time and rose stiffly to his feet. The Persians rob and murder,
and even retreat, gracefully. He bade us a stately and benignant
good evening, with a poetic Persian blessing at the end of it. He
bowed, too, to the Zeitoonli, who bared his teeth and bent his head
forward something less than an inch.

"They call me the Eye of Zeitoon!" he announced with a sort of savage
pride, as soon as the Persian was out of ear-shot.

Will pricked his ears--schoolboy-looking ears that stand out from
his head.

"I've heard of Zeitoon. It's a village on a mountain, where a man
steps out of his front door on to a neighbor's roof, and the women
wear no veils, and--"

The man showed his teeth in another yellow smile.

"The effendi is blessed with intelligence! Few know of Zeitoon."

Will and I exchanged glances.

"Ours," said Will, "is the best room in the khan, over the entrance
gate."

"Two such chilabi should surely live like princes," he answered without
a smile. If he had dared say that and smile we would have struck
him, and Monty might have been alive to-day. But he seemed to know
his place, although he looked at us down his nose again in shrewd
appraisal.

Will took out tobacco and rolled what in the innocence of his Yankee
heart he believed was a cigarette. I produced and lit what he
contemptuously called a "boughten cigaroot"--Turkish Regie, with
the scent of aboriginal ambrosia. The Zeitoonli took the hint.

"Yarim sa' at," he said. "Korkakma!"

"Meanin'?" demanded Will.

"In half an hour. Do not be afraid!" said he.

"Before I grow afraid of you," Will retorted, "you'll need your friends
along, and they'll need knives!"

The Zeitoonli bowed, laid a finger on his eye again, smiled and backed
away. But he did not leave the room. He went back to the end-wall
against which he had sat before, and although he did not stare at
us the intention not to let us out of sight seemed pretty obvious.

"That half-hour stuff smacked rather of a threat," said Will. "Suppose
we call the bluff, and keep him waiting. What do you say if we go
and dine at the hotel?"

But in the raw enthusiasm of entering new quarters we had made up
our minds that afternoon to try out our new camp kitchen--a contraption
of wood and iron we had built with the aid of the mission carpenter.
And the walk to the hotel would have been a long one, through Tarsus
mud in the dark, with prowling dogs to take account of.

"I'm not afraid of ten of him!" said I. "I know how to cook curried
eggs; come on!"

"Who said who was afraid?"

So we went out into darkness already jeweled by a hundred lanterns,
dodged under the necks of three hungry Bactrian camels (they are
irritable when they want their meal), were narrowly missed by a mule's
heels because of the deceptive shadows that confused his aim, tripped
over a donkey's heel-rope, and found our stairway--thoroughly well
cursed in seven languages, and only just missed by a Georgian gentleman
on the balcony, who chose the moment of our passing underneath to
empty out hissing liquid from his cooking pot.

Once in our four-square room, with the rags on the floor in our especial
honor, and our beds set up, and the folding chairs in place, contentment
took hold of us; and as we lighted the primus burner in the cooking
box, we pitied from the bottom of compassionate young hearts all
unfortunates in stiff white shirts, whose dinners were served that
night on silver and laundered linen.

Through the partly open door we could smell everything that ever
happened since the beginning of the world, and hear most of the elemental
music--made, for instance, of the squeal of fighting stallions, and
the bray of an amorous he-ass--the bubbling complaint of fed camels
that want to go to sleep, but are afraid of dreaming--the hum of
human voices--the clash of cooking pots--the voice of a man on the
roof singing falsetto to the stars (that was surely the Pathan!)
--the tinkling of a three-stringed instrument--and all of that punctuated
by the tapping of a saz, the little tight-skinned Turkish drum.

It is no use for folk whose finger-nails were never dirty, and who
never scratched themselves while they cooked a meal over the primus
burner on the floor, to say that all that medley of sounds and smells
is not good. It is very good indeed, only he who is privileged must
understand, or else the spell is mere confusion.

The cooking box was hardly a success, because bright eyes watching
through the open door made us nervously amateurish. The Zeitoonli
arrived true to his threat on the stroke of the half-hour, and we
could not shut the door in his face because of the fumes of food
and kerosene. (Two of the eggs, like us, were travelers and had
been in more than one bazaar.)

But we did not invite him inside until our meal was finished, and
then we graciously permitted him to go for water wherewith to wash
up. He strode back and forth on the balcony, treading ruthlessly
on prayer-mats (for the Moslem prays in public like the Pharisees
of old).

"Myself I am Christian," he said, spitting over the rail, and sitting
down again to watch us. We accepted the remark with reservations.

When we asked him in at last, and we had driven out the flies with
flapping towels, be closed the door and squatted down with his back
to it, we two facing him in our canvas-backed easy chairs. He refused
the "genuine Turkish" coffee that Will stewed over the primus. Will
drank the beastly stuff, of course, to keep himself in countenance,
and I did not care to go back on a friend before a foreigner, but
I envied the man from Zeitoon his liberty of choice.

"Why do they call you the Eye of Zeitoon?" I asked, when time enough
had elapsed to preclude his imagining that we regarded him seriously.
One has to be careful about beginnings in the Near East, even as elsewhere.

"I keep watch!" he answered proudly, but also with a deeply-grounded
consciousness of cunning. There were moments when I felt such strong
repugnance for the man that I itched to open the door and thrust him
through--other moments when compassion for him urged me to offer
money--food--influence--anything. The second emotion fought all
the while against the first, and I found out afterward it had been
the same with Will.

"Why should Zeitoon need such special watching?" I demanded. "How
do you watch? Against whom? Why?"

He laughed with a pair of lawless eyes, and showed his yellow teeth.

"Ha! Shall I speak of Zeitoon? This, then: the Turks never conquered
it! They came once and built a fort on the opposite mountain-side,
with guns to overawe us all. We took their fort by storm! We threw
their cannon down a thousand feet into the bed of the torrent, and
there they lie to-day! We took prisoner as many of their Arab zaptiehs
as still were living--aye, they even brought Arabs against us--poor
fools who had not yet heard of Zeitoon's defenders! Then we came
down to the plains for a little vengeance, leaving the Arabs for
our wives to guard. They are women of spirit, the Zeitoonli wives!

"Word reached Zeitoon presently that we were being hard pressed on
the plains. It was told to the Zeitoonli wives that they might arrange
to have pursuit called off from us by surrendering those Arab prisoners.
They answered that Zeitoon-fashion. How? I will tell. There is
a bridge of wood, flung over across the mountain torrent, five hundred
feet above the water, spanning from crag to crag. Those Zeitoonli
wives of ours bound the Arab prisoners hand and foot. They brought
them out along the bridge. They threw them over one at a time, each
man looking on until his turn came. That was the answer of the brave
Zeitoonli wives!"

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