Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/33

REPRISAL

He had kept his oath, Hadji Rahmet used to say, for wrong—or for right. He would give to the latter word the emphasis of a slightly lowered voice. For, clear beyond the depths of even subconscious sophistry, he knew that he had done right; and the hills knew it—and perhaps Dost Ali, the Red Chief.

The happening itself? What did it matter? Nothing mattered except the right and wrong of it. Besides, the last word was not yet said; perhaps never would be. It was bigger than his life; bigger than Dost Ali's life; bigger than the hills themselves.

"The hills!" he would repeat in a voice tinged and mellowed—by distance, as it were. They seemed to play a personal part in the telling; neither in the back ground nor in the foreground, but hovering enigmatical, fabulous—in a way, naïve. It had an odd effect—his speaking of them, here, in the tainted, brooding heat of India; as if, by speaking of them, he was being carried out of a perplexing present into the austere simplicity of the Himalayas; as if, by leaving them, he had lost some of his own crushing simplicity. Yet, leaving them, he had not been actuated by that complicated emotion called Fear—in spite of Dost Ali's threats, in spite of the leaky tongues of the Kabul market place.

The man did not understand fear. He had gone into the plains to find spiritual release from the memory of the thing. So he had visited the many