Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/45

flecked crimson with a purple-nicked edge near the horizon's rim; farther south the sun rays racing in a river of fire and melting into the snows with a sort of rainbow-colored foam. He saw it. He understood it.

Often, in after years, he would speak of it. He would say that his first glimpse of his son, helpless in the mountaineer's grip, at the verge of death, had seemed but another detail; a strange detail; a sudden, evil jest which he could not grasp.

He used to say that even after he had begun to comprehend the reality of it his immediate thoughts had not been of his son's life, but of the waist shawl. He had remembered when he had bought it: in Kabul, in the Bazaar of the Silk Weavers. His son had liked the pattern and the bright blending of colors. So he had bought it, and—

Words had come to him. "Don't! Don't!"—just those words: weak, meaningless, foolish. But he spoke them solemnly, as if he had found a powerful formula, and then his little son gave a frantic, straining kick.

He jerked. His head shot down and his feet up, shifting the weight of the sturdy young body. The waist shawl snapped. Quite distinctly, for the fraction of a second, the hadji saw the broken silk strands. He saw their feathered ends ripping through the pattern, brushing up, then down in the wind which sucked from the precipice—and his son's body fell away from the Red Chief's grip.

It turned a somersault. It plunged into space. Came a dull thud, from far down. Silence.

Dost Ali stood motionless. By the Prophet, he had not willed this—this thing. He had only meant to sport after the manner of the hills; and he had taken a child's life—like a snake or a Hindu.