Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/34

shrines, true to the worship. Assiduously he had repeated the ninety-nine excellent attributes of Allah, and all his thought had been of forgetting, and of devotion to Him. He had wandered from the Khyber snows to the sour, sluggish swamps of Ceylon. He had talked with ascetics of many faiths in that land of many faiths. He had done bodily penance, gradually subduing his physical Self. But his memory had remained: an inky scrawl across his mind.

"For memory," said the hadji, "is of the soul, and not of the dirt-clouted body. …"

Also there were the tongues—the tongues which can crush though they have no bones, the tongues of Afghan traders who drift through the passes into Hind. They would babble of the thing, back yonder in the glitter of the hills. …

It started with the day on which Hadji Rahmet crossed the Red Chief's path for the first time. Perhaps even—though that is a question for ethnologists to decide—it had started many centuries earlier, when one of the hadji's ancestors traveled from Persia through Seistan into Kabul, there to trade with smooth silk and flowered Kisbah cloth, to plant the damask roses of Ispahan, to give a soft philosophical twist to the harsh lessons of the Koran, and to break his heart—here—in the stony north; while the Red Chief's ancestor, driven out of Tatary by squat, flat-nosed warriors who recognized no God, who fought on horse back, and who tore like mastiffs at lumps of raw flesh and quaffed down curdled milk poured from human skulls, crossed into Afghanistan from the north. There he sat himself on a sugarloaf-shaped hill, built a rough castle, and put his descendants, straight down to Dost Ali,