Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/65

riding astride his nurse's stout hips. It seemed to him as if the flame in his heart was lighting up the uncharted night, as if the thought of home was serving him for an unerring beacon among the slippery timber-falls and the hidden, crumbling rock-slides; on he pushed, toward the higher peaks cooled with the wailing Northern thunder, and, just before the break of day, turning a massive rock crowned with a stunted lone pine, he came upon the village which huddled, dwarfed and shapeless, among the jagged granite bowlders—stretching on toward the North like a smudge of sooty gray below the glimmering band of the eternal snows.

"O Allah!" he mumbled, softly. "O Thou Raiser of the flags of increase to those who persevere in thanking Thee—I praise Thee and I bless and salute our Lord Mohammed, the excelling in dignity!" and again, with rising, high-pitched voice, "O Allah!"—letting loose all his long-throttled love and longing in one great cry.

Then quite suddenly he was silent. He drew back a step. He listened intently. There was a faint stir of dry leaves, a soft crackling of steel and, the next moment, a squat form robed in sheepskins loomed up from a clump of thorn-trees; a wide-mouthed smooth-bore was pressed against Yar Khan's chest, and a raucous voice bade him state his name, the names of his father and grandfather, his race, his clan, his destination and his reasons for coming by night, unasked and unheralded, to The Hoof of the Wild Goat.

"Speak quick, cow maiming-jackal spawn!" commanded the Afghan, with the ready abuse of the hills, and Yar Khan laughed delightedly. This was what he had expected, what he had hoped for, this greeting