Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/15

gentleness of spirit and speech, a soft moving of high-veined hands, well-kept, and finger-nails darkened with henna in an effeminate manner.

He spent many a day in the hills, the Khwadja Hills, called poetically Hill A12, C5, K-K67, and so forth, in the Russian and British survey-maps. There he would shoot bighorns and an occasional northern tiger that had drifted down in the wake of the outer Mongolian snows. This was strange, for an Afghan does not kill for the sake of killing, the sake of sport. He kills only for the sake of food or of feud.

Nor could he explain even to himself why three or four times every month he left his comfortable town house and went into the hills, up and down, following the call of the wilderness; through the gut of the deep-cleft Nadakshi Pass; up beyond the table-lands, pleasant with apricot- and mulberry-trees; still farther up to the smoke-dimmed height of the Salt Hills, where he stained his soft, city-bred hands with the dirt of the tent-peg and the oily soot of his rifle.

Once I asked him, and he laughed gently.

"My mother came from the hills," he replied, "and it is perhaps her blood screaming in my veins which makes me take to the hills, to kill bighorn and snow-tiger instead of killing brother Afghans."

"You do not believe in feuds?" I was astonished, for I was young in those days.

Again he laughed.

"I do," he said; "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. A true saying, and a wise one. But what worth is there to me in killing my enemy if my enemy's son will kill me in the course of time? An unfinished feud is a useless thing. For, tell me, can even the fleetest horse escape its own tail? Can the