The Eye of Zeitoon | Page 5

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