Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/137

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THE JESTER

Fate wrote the first chapter of this tale before either Zado Krelekian or Mohammed Yar came to New York; long before the transatlantic steamship lines, seeing their European immigration business dwindle, thanks to improved wage conditions, began to invade Asiatic Turkey with agents who spoke the many languages of that motley and illy patched empire, who gave untold promises and were guilty of untold lies, who plastered ancient walls, tumbledown mosques, and battered, crumbling bazaars with garish six-sheet posters that pictured the New World as an immense block of real estate, entirely paved with minted gold and especially protected by the blessed hand of Ali.

Fate wrote the tragedy of this tale when, shortly after Creation itself, it made a compromise with Al-Shaitan the Stoned, the Father of Lies, by planting the seed of hatred in two races, Armenian and Kurd, the first Christian, the second Moslem; a curse which in the swing of the centuries stretched beyond the western vilayets of the Ottoman Empire, across the ragged, frayed basalt frontiers into the Caucasus and Southern Russia, the plains of soft, lisping Persia, west into the yellow, purple-blotched glare of Egypt, and west again … even beyond the sea, following the churned lane of Cunarder and White Star boat,

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