LITMIR.BIZ

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“it is the Black Magic he knows. Don’t let him come. He is going out of the house,” he shrieked, “he is coming—no, he is going the other way towards the moon and the grave. He has the Black Magic with him, which can raise the dead, and he has a murdering knife, and a spade. I cannot see his face, for the Black Magic is between it and my eyes.”

      Weston had got up, and, like me, was hanging on Machmout’s words.

      “We will go there,” he said. “Here is an opportunity of testing it. Listen a moment.”

      “He is walking, walking, walking,” piped Machmout, “still walking to the moon and the grave. The moon sits no longer on the desert, but has sprung up a little way.”

      I pointed out of the window.

      “That at any rate is true,” I said.

      Weston took the cloth out of Machmout’s hand, and the piping ceased. In a moment he stretched himself, and rubbed his eyes.

      “Khalás,” he said.

      “Yes, it is Khalás.”

      “Did I tell you of the sitt in England?” he asked.

      “Yes, oh, yes,” I answered; “thank you, little Machmout. The White Magic was very good tonight.

      Get you to bed.”

      Machmout trotted obediently out of the room, and Weston closed the door after him.

      “We must be quick,” he said. “It is worth while going and giving the thing a chance, though I wish he had seen something less gruesome. The odd thing is that he was not at the funeral, and yet he describes the grave accurately. What do you make of it?”

      “I make that the White Magic has shown Machmout that somebody with black magic is going to Abdul’s grave, perhaps to rob it,” I answered resolutely.

      “What are we to do when we get there?” asked Weston.

      “See the Black Magic at work. Personally I am in a blue funk. So are you.”

      “There is no such thing as Black Magic,” said Weston. “Ah, I have it. Give me that orange.”

      Weston rapidly skinned it, and cut from the rind two circles as big as a five shilling piece, and two long, white fangs of skin. The first he fixed in his eyes, the two latter in the corners of his mouth.

      “The Spirit of Black Magic?” I asked.

      “The same.”

      He took up a long black burnous and wrapped it ’round him. Even in the bright lamp light, the spirit of black magic was a sufficiently terrific personage.

      “I don’t believe in black magic,” he said, “but others do. If it is necessary to put a stop to—to anything that is going on, we will hoist the man on his own petard. Come along. Whom do you suspect it is—I mean, of course, who was the person you were thinking of when your thoughts were transferred to Machmout.”

      “What Machmout said,” I answered, “suggested Achmet to me.”

      Weston indulged in a laugh of scientific incredulity, and we set off.

      The moon, as the boy had told us, was just clear of the horizon, and as it rose higher, its colour at first red and sombre, like the blaze of some distant conflagration, paled to a tawny yellow. The hot wind from the south, blowing no longer fitfully but with a steadily increasing violence, was thick with sand, and of an incredibly scorching heat, and the tops of the palm trees in the garden of the deserted hotel on the right were lashing themselves to and fro with a harsh rattle of dry leaves. The cemetery lay on the outskirts of the village, and, as long as our way lay between the mud walls of the huddling street, the wind came to us only as the heat from behind closed furnace doors. Every now and then with a whisper and whistle rising into a great buffeting flap, a sudden whirlwind of dust would scour some twenty yards along the road, and then break like a shore-quenched wave against one or other of the mud walls or throw itself heavily against a house and fall in a shower of sand. But once free of obstructions we were opposed to the full heat and blast of the wind which blew full in our teeth. It was the first summer khamseen of the year, and for the moment I wished I had gone north with the tourist and the quail and the billiard marker, for khamseen fetches the marrow out of the bones, and turns the body to blotting paper.

      We passed no one in the street, and the only sound we heard, except the wind, was the howling of moonstruck dogs.

      The cemetery is surrounded by a tall mud-built wall, and sheltering for a few moments under this we discussed our movements. The row of tamarisks close to which the tomb lay went down the centre of the graveyard, and by skirting the wall outside and climbing softly over where they approached it, the fury of the wind might help us to get near the grave without being seen, if anyone happened to be there. We had just decided on this, and were moving on to put the scheme into execution, when the wind dropped for a moment, and in the silence we could hear the chump of the spade being driven into the earth, and what gave me a sudden thrill of intimate.horror, the cry of the carrion-feeding hawk from the dusky sky just overhead.

      Two minutes later we were creeping up in the shade of the tamarisks, to where Abdul had been buried. The great green beetles which live on the trees were flying about blindly, and once or twice one dashed into my face with a whirr of mail-dad wings. When we were within some twenty yards of the grave we stopped for a moment, and, looking cautiously out from our shelter of tamarisks, saw the figure of a man already waist deep in the earth, digging out the newly turned grave. Weston, who was standing behind me, had adjusted the characteristics of the spirit of Black Magic so as to be ready for emergencies, and turning ’round suddenly, and finding myself unawares face to face with that realistic impersonation, though my nerves are not precariously strong, I could have found it within me to shriek aloud. But that unsympathetic man of iron only shook with suppressed laughter, and, holding the eyes in his hand, motioned me forward again without speaking to where the trees grew thicker. There we stood not a dozen yards away from the grave.

      We waited, I suppose, for some ten minutes, while the man, whom we saw to be Achmet, toiled on at his impious task. He was entirely naked, and his brown skin glistened with the dews of exertion in the moonlight. At times he chattered in a cold uncanny manner to himself, and once or twice he stopped for breath. Then he began scraping the earth away with his hands, and soon afterwards searched in his clothes, which were lying near, for a piece of rope, with which he stepped into the grave, and in a moment reappeared again with both ends in his hands. Then, standing astride the grave, he pulled strongly, and one end of the coffin appeared above the ground. He chipped a piece of the lid away to make sure that he had the right end, and then, setting it upright, wrenched off the top with his knife, and there faced us, leaning against the coffin lid, the small shrivelled figure of the dead Abdul, swathed like a baby in white.

      I was just about to motion the spirit of Black Magic to make his appearance, when Machmout’s words came into my head: “He had with him the Black Magic which can raise the dead,” and sudden overwhelming curiosity, which froze disgust and horror into chill unfeeling things, came over me.

      “Wait,” I whispered to Weston, “he will use the Black Magic.”

      Again the wind dropped for a moment, and again, in the silence that came with it, I heard the chiding of the hawk overhead, this time nearer, and thought I heard more birds than one.

      Achmet meantime had taken the covering from off the face, and had undone the swathing band, which at the moment after death is bound ’round the chin to close the jaw, and in Arab burial is always left there, and from where we stood I could see that the jaw dropped when the bandage was untied, as if, though the wind blew towards us with a ghastly scent of mortality on it, the muscles were not even now set, though the man had been dead sixty hours. But still a rank and burning curiosity to see what this unclean ghoul would do next stifled all other feelings in my mind. He seemed not to notice, or, at any rate, to disregard that mouth gaping awry, and moved about nimbly in the moonlight.

      He took from a pocket of his clothes, which were lying near, two small black objects, which now

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