The Third Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK®

By Achmed Abdullah

Our third collection of Achmed Abdullah's classic fiction presents 15 more great pulp tales, mixing crime, mystery, historical adventure, and romance in exotic settings. Here are:

A WOMAN OF THE BENNI-FUHARA
COBBLER’S WAX
DELIGHTFUL LAN-FANG
FOR THREE CAMELS
MOST JUST AMONG
MOSLEMS
A MATTER OF FACE
HOUND OF THE WILDERNESS
BLACK LILY
AFTER YOUTH
ACCORDING TO HERBERT SPENCER
A FULL HOUSE
HENRI ALWAYS SAYS SO!
THE VICTORY
AS HE REAPED
MONSIEUR LE MARQUIS IS NOT AT HOME

If you enjoy this volume of our best-selling MEGAPACK® series, you can find 400+ more at your favorite ebook store. Just search for "Wildside Megapack" to see the complete list!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alien Ebooks
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781667631707

Book preview

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

PUBLISHER’S INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION,by Darrell Schweitzer

ABOUT THE MEGAPACK® SERIES

A WOMAN OF THE BENNI-FUHARA

COBBLER’S WAX

DELIGHTFUL LAN-FANG

FOR THREE CAMELS

MOST JUST AMONG MOSLEMS

A MATTER OF FACE

HOUND OF THE WILDERNESS

BLACK LILY

AFTER YOUTH

ACCORDING TO HERBERT SPENCER

A FULL HOUSE

HENRI ALWAYS SAYS SO!

THE VICTORY

AS HE REAPED

MONSIEUR LE MARQUIS IS NOT AT HOME

ABOUT THE MEGAPACK® SERIES

Wildside Press’s MEGAPACK® Ebook Series

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

The Third Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK® is copyright © 2024 by Wildside Press, LLC.

The MEGAPACK® ebook series name is a registered trademark of Wildside Press, LLC.

All rights reserved.

PUBLISHER’S INTRODUCTION

Achmed Abdullah might ahve seemed like an odd choice for one of our first MEGAPACK® releases, but I’ve been a fan of his work for decades now, and when I look through the contents of pulp magazines, his is one of the first names I search for. (What other pulp autohrs do I look for? I have quite a few favorites, but here are three more—Raymond S. Spears, Murray Leinster, and Johnston McCulley.)

Abdullah’s work spans name genres. He wrote mystery and crime fiction, Oriental fiction, romance, and supernatural fiction. For this volume, much of the work falls into mystery, romance, and Orientalia (sometimes all at once).

Darrell Schweizter—a World Fantasy Award-winning editor as well as a vastly talented fantasy author—is also a fan of Abdullah’s work, and I tasked him with researching and writing an introduction when we published the first volume. We’re going to repeat it again because it’s the best introduction to Achmed Abdullah’s work ever published. Even if you read it in The First Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK®, no doubt you’ve forgotten the details by now!

Enjoy.

—John Betancourt

INTRODUCTION,by Darrell Schweitzer

Achmed Abdullah. There was a time when his name was synonymous with romantic, exotic adventure. The byline of Achmed Abdullah appeared on numerous magazine stories and books. His English style was excellent, even poetic, but with a voice of authenticity that suggested that maybe this writer was an Arab or some other Oriental. All the better, in an era in which Lawrence of Arabia was one of the first media celebrities and Rudolph Valentino’s portrayal of The Sheik played to every woman’s daydreams.

The truth is more complicated and even more exotic. Those who met Abdullah found him very British in speech, manner and ideas. Indeed, he had been educated at Eton and Oxford (and the University of Paris), and had served in the British Army in the Middle East, India, and China, but he was actually the son of a Russian Grand Duke, the second cousin of Czar Nicholas II. His Russian name was Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff (sometimes given as Romanowski). His Muslim name was Achmed Abdullah Nadir Khan el-Durani el-Iddrissyeh. While the byline Achmed Abdullah was easy to remember and quite exotic, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a pseudonym, and he came by it legitimately. Admittedly Achmed Adbullah was more likely to sell books of Oriental adventure than Alexander Romanoff.

Abdullah/Romanoff was born in 1881 and died in 1945. His birthplace is variously reported as Malta or Russia. What is certain is that after his army service, he embarked on a general literary career, writing novels and stories of mystery and adventure and some fantasy, with much of his work appearing in pulp magazines such as Munsey’s, Argosy, and All-Story. His first novel was The Swinging Caravan (1911), followed by The Red Stain (1915), The Blue-Eyed Manchu (1916), Bucking the Tiger (1917), The Trail of the Beast (1918), The Man on Horseback (1919), The Mating of the Blades (1921), and so on, all the way up to Deliver Us From Evil (1939). He edited anthologies, including Stories for Men (1925), Lute and Scimitar (1928), and Mysteries of Asia (1935).

Among his fantasy volumes, the story collection Wings: Tales of the Psychic (1920) is most recommended by aficionados. His best-remembered and most famous work is the 1924 novelization of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s film, The Thief of Bagdad. As it has been reprinted many times over the years, clearly Abdullah’s Thief of Bagdad is more than a mere typing exercise. It is, after all, the novelization of a silent film, which meant the novelist had to be considerably more creative and invent most of the dialogue.

Abdullah’s connection with Hollywood did not end with a novelization. He had written plays for Broadway, such as Toto (1921) and went on to do a number of screenplays, including Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), for which he and collaborators John Balderston and Waldemar Young shared an Academy Award. The film was based on the novel by Francis Yeats-Brown, but it is clear that Abdullah was eminently suited to the material.

* * * *

Achmed Abdullah’s works are the product of another era, when the British Empire was widely seen as a pinnacle of civilized achievement and native peoples were not supposed to aspire to nationhood. His outlook has much in common with that of H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, or Rudyard Kipling.

Certainly he is an authentic and articulate voice of his era, and a first-rate storyteller. He published his autobiography in 1933, The Cat Had Nine Lives: Adventures and Reminiscences, detailing a real life as eventful as his fiction. He also was one of several authors who embodied the ideal of the adventure writer, who was himself expected to be an exotic figure, a world traveler, whose wild yarns were given a sense of reality from having been lived, rather than merely made up.

ABOUT THE MEGAPACK® SERIES

Over the last decade, our MEGAPACK® ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, Who’s the editor?

The MEGAPACK® ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the MEGAPACK® ebook series? We’d love your suggestions! You can email the publisher at [e-mail]. Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

TYPOS

Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at [e-mail] or contact us through the Wildside Press web site.

A WOMAN OF THE BENNI-FUHARA

Originally published in McCall’s Magazine, Oct, 1925.

FOR the second time the insistent knocking at the outer door, five flights down, splintered the silence. It filled them with a stark terror that was intensified by the brown pall of darkness. There was a candle stuck in a bottle. But they had not lit it since that night, a week earlier, when the two—Mansur el-Andalusi, sheik of the Benni Fuhara tribe, and Atheba, his wife—had come to Algiers and, hugging the shadows, flitting like ghosts across moon-white squares, had sought refuge in this ramshackle, deserted old caravanserai on the outskirts of town.

Dirty and grimy the place. A chaos of broken furniture and rags piled in closets. But Mansur el-Andalusi had said was it safer than the mercy of the French or the Benni Hossayn. It was characteristic of his brittle desert-bred sensitiveness that he had not mentioned the real reason for seeking asylum in the city slums instead of continuing the flight toward the Moroccan border where there was safety in the stone huts of distant cousins. It was characteristic of his wife that she had put this reason into plain words:

We must also consider the child which I shall bear you, O my lord.

Allah grant it be it be a man-child! he had murmured. A man-child to carry on our race.

And our feud against the Benni Hossayn, she had interrupted, and our hate against the French. May the lord God bless neither the one nor the other!

For she was a woman of the Benni Fuhara, and it was a saying wide-blown through the nomads’ black tents that the women of the tribe were a spear’s toss ahead of the men in truculent, ribald lawlessness and readiness to take offense. Indeed it was he who few months earlier, after a dispute over taxes on the tribe’s small, sorrel cattle, had had persuaded Mansur to mount his young men on their swift-footed war dromedaries and to rise in rebellion against the French.

At first they had be victorious. Then the French had swept into the desert with horse, foot, and the guns, and slaughtered the flower of their manhood. They had been helped by the Benni Hossayn, a vulpine race of Bedawin cameleers whose felt tents stippled the wilderness near the Fa oasis.

The few surviving Benni Fuhara had scattered into the dun waste, spreading afar the tale and pity of their doomed, stubborn race, while the sheik, outlawed by the French, his tribe wiped out, had bound Atheba on the saddle behind him and had ridden forth from that reeling wreck of strife, into the North, and had reached Algiers on their way to the mountains of The Scorpion. Algiers is safest, Mansur had argued. "Men of a hundred tribes crowd the streets. All look alike to the roumis, the French."

They had not despaired of the future; and here they were now, in this deserted caravanserai, and there was the loud pounding at the door downstairs, setting every nerve a-quiver to its utmost capacity, suffusing their souls with muffled, shivering echoes.

A moment later, sharp commands rasped out in French and Arabic: "Menhoo—who goes there?"

"Oukef—halt!" Soldiers, doubtless, driving away the curious who gathered from the neighboring slums. Out of the bowels of the tottering old building came their coarse bellow, fraught with cruelty and malevolence, and it chilled the blood of those two up there on the top floor.

They stared at each other across the brown gulf of darkness. They could see no more than their dim contours where they squatted on the ground beside the huge Arab bed. They could feel each other’s eyes; could feel the fear that bloated under the burden of sounds as the pounding was repeated violently. Presently, there came a popping, bursting noise, and then the crackle of steel, the dull, brutish thud of rifle butts, and footsteps mounting the creaky stairs—nearer, ever nearer. Mansur rose. He passed into the moon rays that stabbed through a high, grilled window with a silvery gesture. The moon rays showed him of medium height, stocky beneath his swathing burnoose, the bearded face with just a suggestion, not exactly of weakness but of easy-going submission to a mind more impatient and hardy than his. Mansur—to use his own words—preferred riding with an idle whip and unused spurs. But there had been the cold iron of Atheba’s ambition: ambition to make the Benni Fuhara masters of the desert from the shifting sand gulch called The Meeting of Wild Stallions to the rugged basalt ledge called The Night of Seven Green Stars, ambition to dare the rage of the French overlord; ambition that, ultimately, had brought him here caught like a rat in a trap—a price on his head.

But he loved his wife very dearly. There was no reproach in his heart nor bitterness; not even now, with Fate spreading a grey net across his path. His words asked for no pity; held no self-pity: It is useless to fight, as useless to surrender. Death stands on my left side. On my right stands death’s twin brother. Still— and he spoke in his usual, dispassionate undertone though he unsheathed his sword—I would prefer to die fighting.

It would be more decent, she assented gravely, more in keeping with the traditions of the Benni Fuhara.

Momentarily she was silent. She listened to the ominous rhythm downstairs. And suddenly this savage, primitive creature of ineffable mastery and unconquerable courage covered her face with her hands in a spasm of despair. Forgive me! she sobbed.

There is nothing to forgive, he smiled. Who can escape what is written on the forehead by the Angel of the Scrolls?

"You are great-hearted. But it was my fault. I carry the curse of unstaunched pride. I am—hayah!—a woman of the Benni Fuhara."

She spoke the last words in blame and, too, in excuse of self. Yet perhaps these very words and all they implied in inflexible determination to win out against whatever odds, gave back to her a measure of chilly wisdom.

Put down the sword, she said calmly though hurriedly. You can appeal to it when all else has failed. You must hide.

The holes are only big enough for scorpions, child.

Hide under the bed!

Too obvious! he said while steadily, from below, stammered and grew the threatening, iron surge. They will look there first of all.

They may not—just because it is too obvious.

"No, no! They will find me and wah hyat Ullah!—there will be no room under the bed to clear a blade or strike a blow. My beard will be dishonored. I shall not even be able to die fighting…."

Oh—but the soldiers—listen, listen…. as the voices drew nearer—they are of the Arabs, of the Moslems. Of our own blood and faith! A whispered word in their ears—imploring their help. Please—it is your only chance….

At last, as always, he gave in, saying he had obeyed her during life. So why not in the hour of death?

You will not die, my lord. I feel it—oh— she interrupted herself quick! as beyond the door feet came, feet slurred to a stop, as a heavy fist pounded on the door, as a rough shout demanded:

Hey there! Open!

She kissed him passionately. "Yah zainu l’-alama aleyka salamu llah— she whispered—on thee the peace of God, O beauty of the turban!"

He crept under the bed. Then, slowly, she turned. She faced the door. For a fleeting second terror led her brain to the point where numbness succeeds upon excess of fear. But she regained her self-control with a shuddering effort. She tightened her quivering nerves against the coming ordeal She drew up her face veil. She was a woman of the Benni Fuhara; decent even at a moment of supreme agony.

Crash! Bang! Crash!—the heavy, pounding fist.

Open! Open!—the rough, impatient shout.

A grating, tearing sound as a bayonet was forced into the jamb.

The door splintered; gaped wide open. Somebody held a lamp. A ruddy light flickered; steadied; bored through the brown gloom. A sweep of bearded faces there on the threshold, crimson, blue-tasseled chechias pulled deep over broad foreheads. Uniforms. The gleam of a sword. Black holes of rifle barrels leveled in a straight, minatory line.

An order rasped out: Halt!

A thud of rifle butts dropping punctuations on the floor.

Then a voice from the coiling, purple shadows near the stairs landing: Surrender! and pushing to the front, the first to enter—followed by a young French lieutenant and a dozen Askaris, Arabs in the army of the Republic—was an elderly French civilian in double-breasted frock-coat and high silk hat.

The man introduced himself in excellent Arabic as M. Sevier, the cadhi-el-bhats, or examining magistrate, adding he had a warrant for the arrest of Mansur el-Andalusi, sentenced to death for high-treason, murder, and armed rebellion.

My husband is not here, she replied calmly. Be pleased to go away.

Your tongue is false. Half an hour ago, coming from the bazaar where he bought dates, he entered this house. It is being watched. Nobody saw him leave. Also, standing outside the door. I heard voices. So you see….

I was speaking to God, she interrupted.

Praying for help?

No. 1 was cursing the French. I was imploring Allah to pour out their blood upon the edge of the sword.

She heard a faint, quickly suppressed laugh among the Askaris. A moment earlier, immediately after they had entered, her terror had returned, flooding her with grey, choking waves. Now, hearing that faint laugh, her terror ebbed away once more; once more she felt confident, capable of anything. She swept a glance at the row of soldiers, their faces blurred into indistinct shadows by the crimson chechias deeply pressed over foreheads at the proper, swashbuckling angle. Hayah!—she thought triumphantly—a shrewd head had a hundred hands. And her head was shrewd, very shrewd. Was she not a woman of the Benni Fuhara?

Be pleased to go away, she continued, staring at the Frenchman. This is the harem. And with superb arrogance: It is not fitting for a man, an infidel at that, to enter here with loud words and the clank of strife.

But—look here….

"Goult, Sidi. Ma andi ma n’zid— she said with dry finality—I have spoken, sir. I have nothing to add."

The Frenchman sighed. He felt conscious of an illogical liking and admiration for this savage, fearless woman. There were those stories that it was she who had incited Mansur to rebellion. Perhaps the stories were true. In her own way she was a patriot. Well—he shrugged his shoulders—so was he. There was his duty as an official of the, Republic; and he turned to the lieutenant, telling him to proceed with the search.

Some of the Askaris accompanied the magistrate to the garret. Others, led by the lieutenant, dispersed through the wide, curtainless Moorish arches that connected the room with a sweep of apartments, all dusty and grimy. Electric torches were switched on. Lights stabbed into dark corners.

For a moment the lieutenant reappeared on the threshold. Go ahead, he said to the three soldiers who had remained in the room with Atheba. Remember: three thousand francs blood money to be split—and the lion’s share to the one who gets the rebel—dead or alive!

Oui, mon lieutenant!—the men were proud of their guttural French.

"Three thousand francs the roumis offer for the sacrifice of a Moslem’s head. Wah! What are three thousand or thirty times three thousand francs between children of the same soil?" she whispered.

When he drew nearer she touched the sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve as a Bedawin, running away from the toll of blood feud, touches another Bedawin’s tent rope to claim protection. Behold! she continued. I have alighted at your tent, O son of Adam!

The man did not reply. But he gave a low, mocking laugh. He reached up with one hand, brushing away the chechia from his forehead. And the first thing Atheba saw was the crisscross, purple tribal mark of the Benni Hossayn, the Benni Fuhara’s ancient enemies; and the next moment, as the moon rays slashed across his features as clean as with a knife, she recognized the flaring nostrils, the high cheek bones, the hooded, sloe-black eyes,—and she whispered his name with utter, shuddering incredulity: Zeid ibn Rashid…

Aye! he echoed. I am indeed Zeid ibn Reshid. Ahee—it seems that I cannot escape you, O crusher of hearts. Nor— and again he laughed mockingly—can you escape me.

Silently, she stared at him with the eyes of her body while, to the eyes of her soul, there rose a picture of the past—of a day seven years ago, shortly before her marriage to Mansur, during the time of the er-rabia, the short, sweet spring herbage of the desert, when at night, in the sheiks’ coffee tents, the young men sing of love. Her father’s only child, Atheba had taken his herd to pasturage, and had suddenly found Zeid ibn Reshid standing square in her path. Ho, crusher of hearts! he had shouted, walking up to her with a heavy swagger. By Allah—there are secrets on your lips which I must read.

He had clutched her shoulders. She had tried to tear herself free; he had laughed:

A Benni Fuhara, you? A Benni Hossayn, I? Pah—a pig’s grunt for the difference! What does feud matter when soul speaks to soul and love answers for both?

He was about to drag her off, but, returning from the farther desert where they had searched for a stray camel filly, three youths of the Benni Fuhara had chanced on the scene. They had leaped upon Zeid ibn Reshid before he could draw his crooked girdle-dagger. They had beaten him within an inch of his life with camel sticks and hippo-hide flails, while Atheba had danced about the