Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/144

prosperous New York shop-keeper, Mohammed Yar, not then dressed in the slops of the New York water front, and Aziza, the blue-haired girl with the henna-stained feet and the anklets that tinkled, tinkled mockingly.

Three years ago. And one day. And he had tried to forget that day!

Three years rolled back like a curtain. And the happenings of that one day, popping back again into the cells of his remembrance, sitting in a solemn, graven row, and jeering at him because of the pitiful futility of it!

A cold, raw hill day it had been, with cottony snow-flakes thudding softly and with the old mosque of Hajji Ali the Sweetmeat-Seller raised on its broad marble steps as on a base, lifting the apex of its wide horseshoe gate forty feet up in the air, and the gateway—how well he remembered it all, here in the flat, melancholy drab of West Street!—covered with arabesques of mosaic faïence in green and peacock blue and deep rose and bearing its holy message in conventionalized mushakil Arabic characters.

"In the name of Allah, the One, the All-Merciful, the All-Knowing, the King of the Day of Judgment!" read the inscription, and always he had feared it, he and the others of his race, like something terribly pious and terribly ironic, since it expressed the arrogant, harsh faith of the Kurd masters who ruled them, and beat them, and robbed them, and at times killed them because of the sport of it.

Well he remembered how he had trembled—even as he was trembling now—when Mohammed Yar, dressed in sweeping woolen cloak, leather sandals, and