Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/51

manna bush. There was nobody about the inner courtyards this time of early day. The watchmen were pacing above, on the crenelated, winglike battlements that flushed out sharp and challenging under the rays of the young sun, farther on, where the sun had not yet penetrated, melting into the great pine woods that poured down the steep slopes and running together into a single sheet of purplish black, stippled white here and there with a sudden glisten of snow.

The hadji stood still and listened. There was no sound except the occasional click-clank-click of a metal scabbard tip dragged along the stones of the battlements or the creaking of a grounded rifle butt.

The watchmen were looking across the valley. It was there that, a week earlier, the Red Chief had lifted the slate-blue, mottled Kabuli stallion belonging to Jehan Tugluk Khan, the great naib of the Uzbek Khel; it was thence that the Uzbek Lances might pour toward the Raven's Station to take toll. The sentinels had seen the bullock dance up the paddock, stamping and lashing and roaring. But what harm was there in a bullock, mad with spring fever?

Hadji Rahmet looked about him. To the left, separated from the paddock by a stone wall, was a garden, transplanted painfully tree for tree and shrub for shrub from the Persian lowlands, and challenging the eternal snows in an incongruous, stunted, scraggly maze of crotons and mangoes, teak and Mellingtonia, poinsettias and begonia creepers—all frozen, homesick, out of place. The Red Chief had slaughtered a hundred head of cattle and sold their hides to pay for the exotic plants on the day when his little son had first repeated after him the words of the Pukhtunwali, the ancient Afghan code of honor and conduct: "As to him who