Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/211

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BLACK POPPIES

Delicately, with nervous, agile fingers he kneaded the brown poppy cube against the tiny bowl of his pipe, then dropped it into the open furnace of the lamp and watched the flame change it gradually into amber and gold.

The opium boiled, sizzled, dissolved, evaporated. The fragrant, opalescent smoke rolled in sluggish clouds over the mats, and Yung Han-Rai, having emptied the pipe at one long-drawn inhalation, leaned back, both shoulders pressed well down on the square, hard, leather pillows, so as better to inflate his chest and keep his lungs filled all the longer with the fumes of the kindly drug.

The noises of the outer world seemed very far away. There was just a memory of street cries lifting their hungry, starved arms; just a memory of whispering river wind chasing the night clouds that clawed at the moon with cool, slim fingers of white and silver.

A slow smile overspread Yung Han-Rai's placid, butter-yellow features. He stared at the rolling opium clouds. They seemed filled with a roaring sun set of colors, fox-brown and steel-blue and purple; like the colors of his past dreams moving and blazing before him, changing into his future dreams.

That evening he had smoked thirty-seven pipes,

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