Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/56

had a vague memory of a sentinel challenging him, of a bullet whistling above his head, of how he went down the path scudding on his belly like a jackal to the reek of carrion. He remembered how, as he reached the valley, the western tower of the Raven's Station seemed like a spire away on the world's rim—a spire of hope and lost hope. He remembered the sudden gusts of snow coming down like hissing spears, with the moon reeling above him through the clouds like a great, blinding ball of light and with a lonely southern peak pointing at the mute stars like a gigantic icicle, frozen, austere, desolate.

He remembered vaguely how he traveled day and night, day and night, and it was only gradually, slowly, as his mind jerked free from fleshly thrall and buffeted its road back through the mists of passion to God's Peace, that there came to him knowledge of why he was fleeing from that thing in the glitter of the hills as from a thing accursed.

It was not fear of the Red Chief. Nor was it remorse that he had mutilated the dead body. For the hadji was an Afghan, and there was no worth nor dignity to him in a lifeless thing.

What weighed on his soul, like a sodden blanket, was the doubt of what he would have done had he found the Red Chief's son alive.

He had gone to the Raven's Station to kill. But would he have killed? Would he have broken God's covenant of Peace—and, killing, would he have done right or wrong?

The doubt was on his soul like a stinging brand; and so the hadji took stick and wooden bowl and lived on alms and went through the scorched Indian plains,