Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/48

He sat there silent and stony, while some friendly hillmen carried his son's body away, decently wrapped in a white fringed death shroud, a kindly old woman's blue turquoise beads forced between the rigid little fingers so that the hand of Ali, which had not protected his body during life, might protect his fluttering soul after death.

He sat there till the wind came driving the dusk toward the East; till the sky flushed with the green of the tropics, like a curved slab of thick, opaque jade; till the afternoon sun glared hot and golden; till once more the mists of evening rose and coiled. The mists of the hills—the mists in his soul! They echoed this day to the scream and toll of the death gongs, and from his heart there beat up a sob which all his faith could not still.

He sat the next night through and watched the hiving stars swarm and swirl past the horizon. He watched them die one by one. He watched the young sun shoot up, racing along the rim of the world in a sea of fire, with shafts of purple light that put out the paling moon. He watched a long streamer of north bound birds, wild parrots tumbled out of their southern home by the moist sweep of the Punjab monsoon; they flopped about the lank pines, screeching dismally, their motley finery of feather bedraggled with the snow chill of the Himalayas.

A scout bird detached itself, flew down, then up, flanking the packed crowd of its comrades in long, graceful evolutions, finally leading them toward the Raven's Station, which etched the sky line, peaked and hooded, jeering like a face, extending its somber, scarred walls like a grim jest hewn out of stone, evilly infinite, like the very stronghold of the night and the