Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/47
"Yes," the hadji would say years later as he was wandering through the sun-stained plains of India, from shrine to carved shrine, searching for release from the memory of the thing—"yes,—the Red Chief had prophesied right. Indeed I crept into the shadow of my fallen love, and I whimpered like a dog that has been beaten with thorn sticks!" And, with a flat, tortured laugh, he would add that God seemed to have answered his prayer for peace—"I had asked for Peace, don't you see, and He sent me the final peace—the peace of death, the peace of a hawk's claw and a snake's fang and a hill-bred's heart"
An hour later, at the edge of the cataract, he found his son. Instinctively he folded his feet under his haunches, squatting by the side of the broken body, and his heart's remembrance followed the little crushed life—followed it, followed it back through the narrow span of years, back to the day when the old Yusufzai nurse had come from the couch of his wife and had laid a tiny bundle into his arms—"a son, my lord, may life be wide to him!"
He remembered the first cry of that tiny, white, warm bundle. It had been like the morning cry of a wild bird.
He remembered his son's last cry—strangled, frantic—"Father! Father!" drowned in the Red Chief's harsh bellow. He would never forget it.
And the hadji sat there until the sun died in a sickly haze of coppery brown—decayed, it seemed to him, like the sun on the Day of Judgment—and the moon came up, stabbed on the outer horns of the world, dispassionate, calm, indifferent to the heart of man.