Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/94

He remembered how, years ago, when he had been a naked, sun-burned child with a red turban cloth wound about his shaven poll, his father, Sabihhudin Achmat, had been guide to a Kashmere rajah who had come North to hunt the thick-pelted, broad-headed tigers that drift into Kafiristan in the wake of the Mongolian snows. The rajah had brought a large retinue of servants, and one evening they and their master and his father had whispered together.

They had set to work, under the rajah's guidance. All night they had worked, with little Ebrahim looking on open-mouthed, using odd bits of steel and wire taken from the rajah's voluminous baggage, and wood and stones and spliced ropes and rattan.

About midnight they had sneaked out of the house and through the sleeping village, to the bank of the River of Hate, carrying between them a strange contrivance that seemed round and heavy. Hours later, his father had returned, drenched to the skin, but triumphant.

Today, Ebrahim Asif knew that the strange contrivance the Kashmere men had fashioned that night and which his father had put in a hole of the Black Rock, below the surface, was a water wheel to change the main current of the whirlpool, for since then he had seen many such wheels.

And when the next drouth had shrunk the river and the khirli fish had returned from their spawning, when the people of the Red Village had swept the whirlpool of the Black Rock, day after day, they had caught no more than a lean handful of skinny, smelly dagger-fish, while the men of the White Village, wondering, yet obeying their chief's command, had gone down to the northern bank where the fishing rights