Читать книгу Don Sturdy on the Desert of Mystery - Stratemeyer Edward - Страница 6

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At that ominous word death Captain Sturdy started from his chair, and Don and Teddy stopped short in their conversation.

“Death!” exclaimed the captain incredulously. “What does he mean by that? It isn’t necessarily fatal to make a trip into the Sahara. Danger, yes. But death? Nonsense!”

“It isn’t the physical dangers of the trip he has in mind,” explained the professor. “It’s just a superstitious idea of his. He says that the City of Brass lies somewhere in that region, and that it would mean death to any mortal who looked on it.”

“The City of Brass!” exclaimed Don. “I never heard of that. What is it and where is it?”

“It’s supposed to be a very great and wonderful city of ancient times that existed in the heart of the Sahara,” replied the professor. “Tradition says that it was built by people who once ruled over all Northern Africa—the ‘Sons of Ad,’ the Arabs called them.

“At that time, the Sahara was very different from what it is now. There were great lakes of fresh water, dense woods and fertile valleys. But, according to the story, the people became so wise and powerful and haughty that after that they defied Allah. So Allah put their land under a blight and wiped out the race. But their great city still stands somewhere in the desert.”

“Allah is great,” murmured Alam Bokaru.

The captain sniffed unbelievingly.

“Just a fairy tale,” he remarked. “One of the legends without any basis that all people have. I don’t believe a word of it.”

“I wouldn’t dismiss it quite so contemptuously as that, Frank,” said the professor mildly. “Of course, we can put aside the idea of death being visited on any one who might catch a glimpse of the city. That’s pure superstition. But it may be barely possible that such a place exists. Enough has already been found to indicate that the Sahara was once the center of a great civilization. Most of the relics of it have been blotted out by the drifting sands. But the City of Brass may have been so located—in a mountainous section perhaps—that it has escaped this general obliteration.”

“What slightest proof have we got of it?” snorted the captain.

“There’s a pretty circumstantial account that in the year 700 A.D., in the reign of the Caliph Abd-al-Malik, an expedition was sent out that found it and brought home a great deal of treasure from it,” said the professor slowly.

“Just an Arabian Nights story!” the captain exclaimed.

“Perhaps,” agreed the professor. “Although the story is told with such remarkable detail that it sounds as though it might have been written by a conscientious modern reporter who had a reputation for veracity to maintain and put things down just as he saw them.

“Then, too, there’s Sir Richard Burton, the English explorer, who lived among the Arabs so long that he became almost like one of them, and even made the journey to Mecca, which would have meant death to him if he had been discovered.

“He says that he talked personally to two men who claimed to have seen the City of Brass. He afterward investigated the stories of three others who claimed to have seen it in a mirage. All the accounts tallied, although the narrators were unknown to each other—the same description of a city with glittering brass or copper towers and buildings shining in the sun. Burton believed the stories were substantially true. And Burton was a pretty shrewd man.”

“He just believed them because he wanted to,” declared the captain. “The wish was father to the thought.”

“Allah is great,” put in Alam Bokaru. “The thing is true.”

The Americans looked at him curiously for a moment, and then the professor resumed:

“Not much more than ten years ago, just before the World War, the Egyptian Government was fitting out an expedition under the leadership of an English explorer to discover, if possible, the City of Brass. The plan was based on information brought by two Arabs who claimed to have entered the city and brought back with them treasures to prove it. These two men agreed to lead the exploring expedition to the place.”

“But you notice they didn’t do it,” said the captain, with a touch of sarcasm.

“That was no fault of theirs,” was the reply. “The Senussi people heard of the project and made such dire threats that the Egyptian Government called the matter off.”

“It stands to reason,” declared the captain, still unconvinced, “that if there really were such a city, some one who could be relied on would have found it before this. Many explorers have crossed the Sahara.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied the professor. “The Sahara isn’t altogether the flat waste of sand that most people think. There are chasms and cliffs and gorges and sunken oases in which hundreds of such cities might be concealed, and, except by the merest luck, an explorer might never run across them.”

“Allah is great,” repeated Alam. “The City of Brass is in the desert. But Allah guards the secret and death will come to him who looks upon it.”

“Ask him what he knows about it, won’t you, Uncle Amos?” urged Don, whose imagination had been greatly stirred by the romance of the story.

“He’s probably got the legend by heart,” said the professor. “He can’t read, but the story is passed along by word of mouth through different generations, and it’s astonishing how retentive their memories become.”

He turned to the impassive Arab.

“How did your people first happen to run across the City of Brass and what did they find there, Alam?” he asked.

Probably flattered by the request, although his features remained immobile, Alam bowed, and began a queer sort of singsong chant. At intervals he would stop, and then the professor would translate what he had said.

The captain listened with a skeptical smile, but Don and Teddy hung breathlessly on every word.

“They drew near the city,” said Alam, after having described the fitting out of the expedition, “and behold, it was, as it were, a piece of a mountain or a mass of brass cast in a mold. And impenetrable, for the height of its walls and bulwarks. It shone out like fire under the sun. So they ascended the highest hill which overlooked the city. When they reached the top they beheld beneath them a city. Never saw eyes a greater or goodlier, with dwelling places and mansions of towering height, with palaces and pavilions and domes gleaming gloriously bright.”

“Regular Arabian Nights story,” muttered the captain dryly, when this had been translated.

“That’s what it is,” admitted the professor. “Alam is telling it just as it has been handed down by countless story tellers. I told you these people have remarkable memories. But truth is often found concealed in tradition. Go ahead, Alam.”

“When they scaled the walls,” Alam resumed, “they found the place filled with the dead. They beheld the merchants sitting on the shop boards, dead, with shriveled skin. Silks and brocades, laden with red gold and white silver, the owners lying dead upon mats of scented goat leather and looking as if they would speak. They traversed a street of pearls and rubies, of emeralds and topaz and other jewels, and shops full of gold and silver. They came upon a palace and in the vestibules stood benches of ivory plated with glittering gold, whereon lay men whose skin had dried up on their bones. For lack of food they had perished.”

“You see,” said the professor, after the pause necessary to put this in English, “the dead had been mummified, apparently by the hot dry air of the Sahara. The place had probably been in a fertile section, but some violent change in climate had destroyed vegetation, and the population had perished of famine.”

“What a fearful death!” murmured Don.

“I should say so,” added Teddy, with a shiver.

“They passed through a corridor,” continued Alam, on a nod from the professor, “paved with marble and hung with veil-like tapestries, embroidered with all manner of beasts and birds whose bodies were of red gold and white silver, and their eyes of pearls and rubies.

“Many marvels they saw, and came at last to a domed pavilion, on which lay the body of a woman. She wore a tight-fitting body robe of fine pearls, with a crown of red gold on her head. There was a golden tablet on one of the steps leading to the couch on which the body of the woman lay, and on this tablet was written——”

Here Alam stopped, while the professor translated.

“Oh, he stopped at just the wrong place!” cried Don impulsively. “I’m crazy to hear what was on the tablet.”

“That’s a sign that Alam is a good story teller,” observed the captain, who was himself by this time almost as breathlessly interested as the boys themselves. “He wants to keep you in suspense. A sort of ‘continued in our next,’ as it were.”

That Alam had not been wholly without guile in this was indicated by his deliberation before he resumed:

“Thus read the tablet:

“I am Tadmurah, daughter of the kings of the Amalekites. I possessed that which never king possessed. Thus lived I many years in all ease and delight of life till Death knocked at my door and to me and my folk fell calamities. There betided us seven successive years of drought wherein no drop of rain fell on us from the skies and no green thing sprouted for us on the face of the earth. So we ate what was with us of victual, then we fell upon the cattle and devoured them until nothing was left. Thereupon I let bring my treasures and sent out trusted men to buy food.

“They circuited all the lands in quest thereof and left no city unsought, but found it not to be bought. They returned to us with the treasure after a long absence. They gave us to know that they could not succeed in bartering fine pearls for poor wheat, bushel for bushel, weight for weight.

“One party, however, came not back—the men to whom had been entrusted the emeralds. Whither they went or why they returned not no one knoweth. Perhaps a storm overtook them and the gods claimed them.”

The captain sat bolt upright as this was translated.

“Emeralds!” he ejaculated. The professor put his finger on his lips, and Alam went on:

“So when we despaired of succor, we displayed all our riches and things of price, and, shutting the gates of the city and its strong places, resigned ourselves. Then we all died as thou seest us, and left what we had builded and what we had hoarded.”

The speaker ceased, and indicated with a gesture that that was all.

“Well, Frank,” said the professor, with a smile, after he had translated the concluding words, “there’s the story. What do you think of it?”

Don expected to hear a scornful repudiation of the tale from the captain’s lips, but he was mistaken. It was evident that his uncle had been shaken from his stubborn attitude by the precise details of the story.

“There’s a certain ring of truth about it,” he conceded slowly. “Either the man who first told it was a painstaking reporter of what he had actually seen or he was a most magnificent and convincing liar. In any case, we have to hand it to him for being an artist in his line.”

“We have to admit that there’s nothing impossible about it, however wild and improbable it seems,” mused the professor. “We know that great cities have sometimes been wiped out by famine. Why might not the City of Brass have been one of them?”

“Allah is great,” murmured Alam. “The story is true.”

“Why did Alam tell you that death would be the portion of any one who should discover it?” asked the captain. “The fellows who first saw it got back safely, according to the story. Why shouldn’t any one else?”

“That’s a later tradition,” explained the professor. “Alam told me that his father and grandfather told him so. And in this country that’s proof enough for anything.”

“Allah is great,” intoned Alam. “To see it means death.”

For a moment the captain kept silent. Then he pounded his fist upon the table.

“I’m going to take a chance,” he cried. “That is, of course, Amos, if you are willing.”

“What do you mean?” asked the professor.

“I’m going to hunt for the City of Brass! I’m going to look for the Cave of Emeralds!”