第28章

ISRAEL'S JOURNEY

MOHAMMED of Mequinez, the man whom Israel went out to seek, had been a Kadi and the son of a Kadi.While he was still a child his father died, and he was brought up by two uncles, his father's brothers, both men of yet higher place, the one being Naib es-sultan, or Foreign Minister, at Tangier, and the other Grand Vizier to the Sultan at Morocco.Thus in a land where there is one noble only, the Sultan himself, where ascent and descent are as free as in a republic, though the ways of both are mired with crime and corruption, Mohammed was come as from the highest nobility.Nevertheless, he renounced his rank and the hope of wealth that went along with it at the call of duty and the cry of misery.

He parted from his uncles, abandoned his judgeship, and went out into the plains.The poor and outcast and down-trodden among the people, the shamed, the disgraced, and the neglected left the towns and followed him.He established a sect.They were to be despisers of riches and lovers of poverty.No man among them was to have more than another.They were never to buy or sell among themselves, but every one was to give what he had to him that wanted it.

They were to avoid swearing, yet whatever they said was to be firmer than an oath.They were to be ministers of peace, and if any man did them violence they were never to resist him.Nevertheless they were not to lack for courage, but to laugh to scorn the enemies that tormented them, and smile in their pains and shed no tear.

And as for death, if it was for their glory they were to esteem it more than life, because their bodies only were corruptible, but their souls were immortal, and would mount upwards when released from the bondage of the flesh.Not dissenters from the Koran, but stricter conformers to it; not Nazarenes and not Jews, yet followers of Jesus in their customs and of Moses in their doctrines.

And Moors and Berbers, Arabs and Negroes, Muslimeen and Jews, heard the cry of Mohammed of Mequinez, and he received them all.

From the streets, from the market-places, from the doors of the prisons, from the service of hard masters, and from the ragged army itself, they arose in hundreds and trooped after him.They needed no badge but the badge of poverty, and no voice of pleading but the voice of misery.Most of them brought nothing with them in their hands, and some brought little on their backs save the stripes of their tormentors.A few had flocks and herds, which they drove before them.A few had tents, which they shared with their fellows;and a few had guns, with which they shot the wild boar for their food and the hyena for their safety.Thus, possessing little and desiring nothing, having neither houses nor lands, and only considering themselves secure from their rulers in having no money, this company of battered human wrecks, life-broken and crime-logged and stranded, passed with their leader from place to place of the waste country about Mequinez.And he, being as poor as they were, though he might have been so rich, cheered them always, even when they murmured against him, as Absalam had cheered his little fellowship at Tetuan:

"God will feed us as He feeds the birds of the air, and clothe our little ones as He clothes the fields."Such was the man whom Israel went out to seek.But Israel knew his people too well to make known his errand.His besetting difficulties were enough already.The year was young, but the days were hot;a palpitating haze floated always in the air, and the grass and the broom had the dusty and tired look of autumn.It was also the month of the fast of Ramadhan, and Israel's men were Muslims.

So, to save himself the double vexation of oppressive days and the constant bickerings of his famished people, Israel found it necessary at length to travel in the night.In this way his journey was the shorter for the absence of some obstacles, but his time was long.

And, just as he had hidden his errand from the men of his own caravan, so he concealed it from the people of the country that he passed through, and many and various, and sometimes ludicrous and sometimes very pitiful were the conjectures they made concerning it.

While he was passing through his own province of Tetuan, nothing did the poor people think but that he had come to make a new assessment of their lands and holdings, their cattle and belongings, that he might tax them afresh and more fully.

So, to buy his mercy in advance, many of them came out of their houses as he drew near, and knelt on the ground before his horse, and kissed the skirts of his kaftan, and his knees, and even his foot in his stirrup, and called him _Sidi_ (master, my lord), a title never before given to a Jew, and offered him presents out of their meagre substance.

"A gift for my lord," they would say, "of the little that God has given us, praise His merciful name for ever!"Then they would push forward a sheep or a goat, or a string of hens tied by the legs so as to hang across his saddle-bow, or, perhaps, at the two trembling hands of an old woman living alone on a hungry scratch of land in a desolate place, a bowl of buttermilk.

Israel was touched by the people's terror, but he betrayed no feeling.

"Keep them," he would answer; "keep them until I come again,"intending to tell them, when that time came, to keep their poor gifts altogether.

And when he had passed out of the province of Tetuan into the bashalic of El Kasar, the bareheaded country-people of the valley of the Koos hastened before him to the Kaid of that grey town of bricks and storks and palm-trees and evil odours, and the Kaid, with another notion of his errand, came to the tumble-down bridge to meet him on his approach in the early morning.