Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/44

mercy. He would drive him into the shadow of his love and cause him to whimper like a beaten dog—like a dog well beaten with thorn sticks.

This babbler of meekness had no fear of the Red Chief, no fear of the hills, but—"Pray!" laughed Dost Ali, "pray to me, a man of strife, O thou fool of peace! Fray, or thou shalt moan like the Bird of the Tamarisk which moaneth like the childless mother!" And with a quick gesture of his great hands he picked up the hadji's little son by the waist shawl.

He held him high—the child was rigid with fear—he walked over to the edge of the precipice where, deep down, the lower mountains lay coiled and massive, offering their immense stillness to the fiery face of the sun. Still farther down the cataract of the Kabul River fluffed like some waxen, blatant tropical flower.

"Father!" screamed the child.

The hadji turned and at the moment of seeing he seemed to be struck blind. The second before, straight through the fervor of his prayers, he had vaguely realized the world about him—the peaks and the sunlight and the cold glitter of the snows.

Now, suddenly, a nothing—black.

All that was bright and light and good seemed to have leaped back. There was nothing—just a scream in the dark: "Father!" and the chief's harsh bellow as he swung the lad by the twisted waist shawl around his head, with that savage, hairy strength of his.

A moment later vision returned to the hadji's eyes. He saw everything. Absurdly, incongruously, the first thing he saw, the first impressions which his eyes graved on his brain, were the details, the petty, contemptible details of inanimate nature: the eastern sky, serenely cloudless, running from milky white into gold-