The Lion of Petra | Page 8

looked me up and down as the quartermaster eyes a new recruit, and
nodded in that exasperating way that makes you feel as if you had been
ticketed and numbered. If Grim had not told me that the Sikh had been
first to suggest taking me to Petra I would have insulted him
painstakingly there and then; but you learn a certain amount of
self-restraint, I suppose, before such a man as Narayan Singh ever
approves of you for any purpose.
He undid the parcels on the dining-room table in the governorate, and
the next half-hour was spent in rigging me up as an ascetic-looking
Indian Moslem, with the aid of a white turban wound over a
cone-shaped cap, great horn-rimmed spectacles, and the comfortable,

baggy garments that the un-modernized hakim wears over narrow
cotton pantaloons.
Over it all they put a loose, brown Bedouin cloak of camel-hair such as
any man expecting to travel across deserts might invest in, whatever his
nationality; it was hotter than Tophet, but, as the Arabs say, what keeps
the heat in will also keep it out. It gives you a feeling of carrying your
home around with you on your back, the way a snail totes its shell, and
there are worse sensations.
"Now consider yourself a while in the mirror, sahib," said Narayan
Singh. "When a man knows how he looks he begins to act
accordingly."
Have you ever stopped to think how true that is? There was a
full-length mirror upstairs in de Crespigny's bedroom, left behind by a
German missionary's wife when the Turks and their friends stampeded,
and Narayan Singh watched while I posed in front of it. Before many
minutes, without any deliberately conscious effort on my part, gesture
and attitude were molding themselves to fit the costume, in somewhat
the same way, I suppose, that a farm-hand from Montenegro shapes
himself into a new American store suit.
"But it is necessary to remember!" warned Narayan Singh. "We should
have done this sooner. There should be a photograph to carry with you,
because a man forgets his own appearance where there are no mirrors
and none others resembling himself. Henceforward, sahib, sleeping or
waking, be a hakim! There is a chest of medicines downstairs."
By the time I had got down Grim had already changed into Bedouin
dress--stepped simply out of one world into another. All he does is to
stain his eyebrows dark, put on the clothes, and cease to resemble
anything on earth except a desert-born Arab. I don't know how long he
was learning to make the transformation, but no man could learn the
trick in twenty years unless he loved the desert and the sinewy men
who live in it.
He looked me over again narrowly, and then decided I must return

upstairs and shave my head. "The only chance you've got of not being
pulled apart between four camels, or pushed over a precipice, is to look
like darwaish. Have Narayan Singh stain the back of your neck with
henna--not too much of it--just a little--you're from Lahore, you
know--a university product."
By the time I had carried out that order I could not even recognize
myself without the turban on. "No matter how many mistakes now,
Sahib!" grinned the Sikh. "None but a crazy Moslem would travel in
this sun with his head shaved. Better put a cloth inside the cap, thus, for
greater safety."
The only other thing Grim did to me was to throw away my toothbrush.
"They're suspicious in these parts," he said. "They'd figure it was
hog-bristles. You'll have to make shift with a chewed stick, and pick
your teeth between times with a dagger the way the rest of us do. Hello!
Here she comes. You do the honors, 'Crep; we're in the game from now
on."
De Crespigny went to the door and Grim and I squatted cross-legged in
the window-seat. I tried to feel like a middle-aged native of the East
under the rule of that twenty-six-year-old governor; but it couldn't be
done. I don't know yet what the sensations are of, say, a bachelor of arts
of Lahore University who has to take orders from a British subaltern. I
expect you have to leave off pretending and really be an Indian to find
out that; otherwise your liking for the fellow himself offsets reason. No
white man could have helped liking young de Crespigny.
He came in after a minute perfectly self-possessed, leading a young
woman who took your breath away. I have heard all the usual stories
about the desert women being hags, but every one of them was pure
fiction to me from that minute. If all the rest were really what men said
of them, this one was sufficiently amazing to redeem the