Achmed Abdullah

“ Desire—envy—jealousy—hate—resolve! Like ghosts they were about me—all day, when I hurried through the streets, my black-leather bag filled with money and commercial paper, when I saw the rich Pell Street merchants in their houses and shops, and at night, when I lay in my little room above Soey Kwai’s bank. Yes—desire and hate and envy—jealousy—resolve—and ruthlessness! Like ghosts! At first these ghosts—gray ghosts, crimson ghosts—had but the faintest spark of life, stirring me up so little that they left no more than a blurred, indistinct impression upon my soul. ”

“ The great, man-clouted, man-eating riddle of stone and steel and concrete looms out of the morning mists, with screaming lungs of brass—the dull rubbing of tackle and rope and crate, the whirr of the Elevated, the metallic rattle of street-cars and motor-cars, the symphony of more tongues than Babel ever knew of; with the pulse-beat of its immense, foolish, ridiculous, generous heart, bidding welcome to all the world, the dreamers and doers of all the world; thoroughly human—human in its virtues, its sins, its snobberies, its vagaries, its fetid aroma of tar and sewer-gas and petroleum. ”

“ I realized it, even at that moment, with the two dead men at my feet, one with his features, oh, set in an astonished sort of smile, as if wondering at the dark blood which was running lazily from the split skull to the floor; the other dead man’s face like a grinning Tibetan devil mask, with the lips drawn back a little over the gleaming, white teeth in an eerie grin, like the fangs of a wolf who sees the victim, jumps, then finds himself in a trap, smells death in the trap in the moment of killing! ”

“ And, clear through, he had the strange impression that it was not his hand which was the blade's master, but that the blade was directing his hand, was stiffening or crooking his arm as he lunged to the attack, or estrapaded sideways, or feinted to parry clumsy, ineffectual blows and kicks. The hilt throbbed and quivered in his hand, while the point of the dagger danced a mad, swishing, triumphant saraband, there, in the reeking, sordid London night, with the gas jets hiccoughing sardonically, as if the weapon's ancient, turbulent, wicked soul had awakened from the clogging sleep of centuries. ”

“ The horse panted, breathed heavily, staccato. But something of the man's unconquerable spirit seemed to flow into the animal consciousness. It was tired. Tired to dropping. Its muscles pained. Its lungs, tortured, extended, then suddenly contracted, quivered as the motion of the legs pumped the air through.
But the mare stretched her magnificent, long body. She was a thoroughbred—like the man who rode her.
Again a burst of sound, to the north this time, thundering to a portentous, smashing, roaring climax, and just for a moment Tom felt something clutch at his heart with clay-cold fingers. ”

“ Even in death there was still in that bullet-shaped head the coiling brain which had ruled Chinatown, which had made of the other a failure and a mock and a stench in the nostrils of Pell Street, which had robbed him of the one dream that once, for a moment, had flashed in Mu Lan’s eyes, had flashed across the drab of his life with the pageantry and the brilliancy of far skies—never attained, never more to be attained.
He hated Ho Tin Yu. But most did he hate the dead man’s brain, mazed, powerful, pertinacious. ”

“ The roofs of the city were bathed in a purple light. The windows flashed with a thousand dazzling reflections. The whole was Calcutta on a perfect day in late summer; a city of brass and copper and gold, hard, shimmering, like the legendary town the Titans once forged out of the molten fragments of a forgotten world.
So the Kashmere steamed up that chained, or rather unchained, monster named the Hoogli, which every once in a while rises kittenishly, gnawing at the water front with sharp teeth, and strewing the surrounding landscape with the torn, battered carcasses of great ships.
Asia! ”

“ As he looked, something hidden seemed to grow within Hassan to a height of abnormal perceptiveness. The sense of a past life, a life which he was dimly remembering again, became magnified with every minute that passed. It lay beyond those ridges, beyond Jeddah and Mecca, in the clay of the Jemla oasis—home—and, at the thought, there rose to his soul a flavor of that utter, sharp freedom which was to him the breath, the reason, the secret heart of the desert as he remembered it. ”

“ She knew the lore of the Red Village and of the White, the old feud, the bitter, sullen enmity; but, somehow, Ebrahim Asif was neither of the Red Village nor of the White. He seemed to her the very spirit of the land, serenely brutal, resolutely pagan to the core of him, but a man!
"A man of men!" she said to him one whirling, golden afternoon when she met him amongst the frayed basalt ridges of the farther hills and lay panting in his crushing embrace. "A man of men—with the bowels of compassion of a striped tiger!" ”

“ Vikramavati turned slowly and walked toward the palace.
"To-morrow," he said over his shoulder, in an even, passionless voice, "you shall die a death of lingering agony."
Madusadan laughed lightly.
"There is neither to-day nor to-morrow nor yesterday for those who love," he replied. "There is only the pigeon-blue of the sunlit sky, the crimson and gold of the harvest-fields, the laughter of the far waters. Love fills the cup of infinity." ”

“ This Hill—wrongly so called—was an enormous defile, cleft between towering black walls, and in the centre of it a great, seething, rock-lined caldron of flames, perhaps three miles across, fed by the pride of unjust men and fallen Angels.
Hard was the road up the defile to the stepping of Ahmed’s feet. Stronger and stronger, as he toiled upwards, his lungs heating like a hammer, the heat from the caldron,, as he approached it, sucking through the defile as through a chimney and scorching his face, grew the temptation to return, to give up this pilgrimage. ”

“ And my hatred of Africa, it nearly choked me! And the loneliness! The loneliness which lay across my heart, my soul, my body, like a sodden blanket, and the fear that I would never reach home.
I lost all track of time. A week to make the coast, I had figured; and here it was at the very least the tenth day, and still my paddle went, still the river slid before my eyes like a watered-silk ribbon, still Africa unrolled like an odorous, meaningless scroll, still at my back rode horror and fear. ”

“ Now this new soul of Ahmed, the Thief of Bagdad, faced once more the old facts of life; this new soul felt like an alien amongst the old facts of life.
He looked to the West.
There leagues of beach wood poured down the slope of the hills in an enormous cataract of green and black-green foam, smothered farther down in an exuberance of blue and golden flowers. Beyond it stretched the desert; and across the desert cut a narrow caravan trail—the road to Bagdad. ”

“ Ho, Kali! Ho, Devi! Ho, Doorga! Help us cross the Vaitarami, the dread stream of death! Help us over the horrors of the outer darkness Tamisra, across the sword-leafed forest of Usipatra Vana!”
Then the high-priest raised his hands to command silence; and he broke into a chant, between speaking and singing:
“Hail, Mother! Hail, six-armed goddess of horrid form, around whose neck hangs a string of human skulls, a precious pendant! Hail, malign and blessed image of destructiveness! Listen Thou to my Mantra!”
“Ho, Kali! Ho, Smashana Kali!”—the worshipers prayed and chanted and groaned. ”

“ The sinister pages in my Book of Life are but the fault of the black-haired generations from the sun-kissed lands which stream and riot in my blood. These I shall now cast aside and denounce, and I shall only remember the silver-souled men from the North, the men with the blue eyes of the North, the men with the purity and the good, clean, wise conscience of the North. ”

“ I love you. You are in my heart. You are in my soul. You are in the soul within my soul, where the world has not been spotted by dirt and lies, but is pure as the laughter of little children; where there are no fetters of the flesh nor galls of earthly restraint; where the winds roam in the pathless skies of outer creation, with none but the Buddha's will to check their vagabond waywardness. ”

“ Even as Stuart McGregor dropped to the floor, dying, he knew what had happened.
A little, venomous snake, an African fer-delance, that had been curled up in the inside of the drum, been numbed by the cold, and had been revived by the splintering heat of New York. Yes—even as he died he knew what had happened. Even as he died, he saw that malign, obscene squint in the eagle’s eye. Even as he died, he knew that Farragut Hutchison had killed him—from beyond the grave! ”

“ At the bottom of the lake you will find a cave—a cave made of the shimmering, opal tears of man’s grief, with windows made of the milk-white crystals and bright-green emeralds of man’s laughter, and a gleaming red door, like an immense ruby, made of the heart’s blood of all those who have loved and who have suffered and sacrificed greatly for the sake of their love. ”

“ Walking through the maze of Chinatown, with a night of glowing violet vaulting above the sad drab of roof top and the crude palette of impromptu, bird's-nest balcony and a nostalgic, Western moon growing fainter and fainter and slowly fading into the vast cosmos of dawn as if trying to escape the reek of sewer and opium and sweat that rose from the packed, greasy wilderness of Pell Street, with Miss Rutter's hectic, guileless, silk-gloved hand pointing out the sluttish sights, he felt his heart muscles contract with a certain nameless dread. ”

“ He was a man who paid his enemies with the crackle of steel and slaughtered cattle and the red flames licking over hut and byre; a man who had scarred the valley for a week's journey with torch and cord, and whose greatest trust—greater than the fierce desert Prophet by whose name he gave oath—was the Khyber sword, curved like the croup of a stallion. ”

“ But Cobbler’s Wax preferred remaining a live cripple to a corpse buried in the state of a mandarin of the second class. He was not a Westerner, given to dissecting his soul and screwing his emotions into test-tubes. Had he been, he would have discovered that it was pride which kept him from joining the spirits of his sires by an act of his own hands—pride, though his body was shrunk and his soul growing wizen and mean as the days swooned into weeks and the weeks into the pitiless swing of years. ”

“ Oneypore!
The sacred city of Hindustan! The holy soil where the living descendants of the gods had ruled for over five thousand years—and one of them dead, on unclean, foreign soil—buried in unclean, foreign soil!
An outcast! He, the descendant of Rama, an outcast!
Oneypore! And it was a fascinating town, with crooked streets and low, white houses, cool gardens ablaze with mangoes and mellingtonia and flowering peepul-trees and, in the distance, a gigantic palace, built out of a granite hillside, and descending into the dip of the valley with an avalanche of bold masonry. ”

“ And Bibi Bear rose on her hind feet, fir needles and moss sticking to her pelt, belly sagging loosely, perspiration rising from her nostrils in a gray flag of steam. Straight toward the tree she walked, forepaws wide extended as if to embrace the fir and the miserable being who was clinging to it for dear life.
Something like a slobbering grin curled the brute's black, leathery lips, and Mortazu Khan watched. His skin seemed to shrink. Blue wheels whirled in front of his eyes. A hammer beat at the base of his skull. ”

“ Who will say that there is not an eye with which we pierce the night? To each of these two sitting in the utter dark there came a vision. Imagination became more real than reality. He saw his ideal of the woman, that picture which every man carries in his heart to think of in the times of silence, to see in every void. And she saw her ideal of manly power. The dark pressed them together as if with the force of physical hands. ”

“ Here was a man after his own heart, who could wield the whip of sharp words and flavor the sauce of speech with the spice of abuse. "Enter, Bedawin!" He opened the gate with the point of his dagger pressing the lock. "Enter, hound of the wilderness! May you find the gold and the freedom of your seeking!"
Thus then he had come to Fez, Hassan, son of Mustaffa, travel-stained, uncouth, looped in folds of earth-gray wool; and today his hands were white and scented, his voluminous turban of green muslin threaded with silver, his burnoose of silk in delicate stripes of pistache and heliotrope. ”

“ So he led us through halls and rooms, up and down stairs worn hollow and slippery with the tread of naked feet, along corridors, on and on, with here and there a stop, a whispered word from the Brahman to keep perfectly quiet, a silken rustling of garments in some nearby room where people were still awake, with once in a while a hushed, distant voice, and twice the steely impact of a scabbard-tip bumping the stone flags as some unseen, prowling watchman of the night passed somewhere on his rounds; on and on we passed, and we never met a single human being. ”

“ Daily, as he sat by the window, he approached nearer to that center of cosmic life where outward activity counts for less than the shadow of nothing. Daily he felt the tide rise in his secret self, trying to blend with the essence of eternity. Daily, beyond the dirty clouds of lower Manhattan, beyond the Pell Street reek of sewer-gas and opium and yellow man and white, he caught a little more firmly at the fringe of final fulfillment. ”

“ Ishkashim was a shimmering maze of flat, white roofs; and they pulled into Balkh, silvery as lepers with the dust of the road, traded their horses for lean racing camels, which had a profusion of blue ribbons plaited into their bridles as a protection against the djinns and ghouls of the desert, filled their saddle bags with slabs of grayish, wheaten bread and little hard, golden apricots, and were off again, crossing the Great River at the shock of dawn, the princess at the head of the cavalcade, by Hector's side. ”

“ The words came back to Jabez Massingham’s memory. A great sob rose in his throat and choked him.
Broadway! The jungle of Broadway—following the road of his feet!
He could feel it stretching, reaching, growing, bloating, breathing; steadily gathering strength and momentum; crawling on with a huge, brooding force; slow, irresistible, and, somehow, inhumanly precise; like a man, tremendously confident of himself, keeping a tryst with all eternity to wait in. ”

“ Gently his fingers trembled across the strings of the lute. The accompaniment rippled in white tone-waves, silver-flecked; it quivered on a high note, spreading a network of infinitely delicate tone filaments, then brushed out with an abandon of throbbing cadences, like tiny, drifting ghosts of spring tinkling their girdle gems of fretted jade.
"I love you," he sang. "Daily my love for you echoes through the vaulted halls of my dreams, my life; echoes in smiles and tears and hopes of fulfillment. Daily the thought of you comes to me with flute songs and flowers. ”

“ In this valley dangers of all kinds were as thick as hair in the tail of the blue-faced Vindhya monkey. Here were slippery rocks and timber falls and jagged precipices; impetuous torrents flashing down their beds of black stone; and no path except a fugitive track through the undergrowth, hardly discernible, wiped by the poisonous breath of the jungle into a dim, smelly mire which bubbled and sucked—seemed to reach out for those who dared tread its foul solitude.
Ahmed gripped his sword and steeled his will. He walked on. ”

“ A human cry, calling for human help; rising to an intolerable note of appeal, half choked, accompanied by a rattling and crackling of steel, a crunching and stamping and snorting—curious, flat, dragging noise—and for a moment the hadji's heart was as still as freezing water. "Father!" came the cry again, and again: "Fa——" cut off in mid-air. Like his son's last cry, the cry of a dead soul trying to span the gulf of consciousness to the living heart! ”

“ It runs its way like a shuttle through all the broad lands of the earth, waving an eternal, unbreakable fabric. Time and again, in the past, the Mongol power has gone down before the gathered strength of other races, snatching at and taking the luring jewel of dominion. Time and again we returned to the attack; we shivered the fetters; we enslaved the enslavers. Time and again, in the future, the Mongol power shall go down before the gathered strength of other races, snatching at and taking the luring jewel of power. ”

“ The next moment, even as Yung Long jumped forward with a hoarse cry of rage, the point of the cripple’s knife gleamed again in the yellowish half-light like a crescent of evil passions.
“Love is a flower,” he said. “When it is withered it is hay, and the oxen eat it.” He struck his own heart with a straight, downward blow of the dagger.
He fell across Si-Si’s body.
Cobbler’s Wax lay there dead, with arms outstretched, as if to protect his dead love against Yung Long, against the reek and riot and cruelty of Pell Street. ”

“ So, there I was, holding that little Hindu girl in my arms—and—why, man, I loved her—unless the repetition of that detail bores you—my arms touched the soft curves of her young shoulders.
It was quite dark, as I told you. But there, resting on my left arm, was her little face, like an opening flower. Only a slip of a girl, her youthful incompleteness just a lovely sketch for something larger, finer, more splendid—just a mass of happy, seductive hints, with the high-lights yet missing. ”

“ Fainter and fainter grew the memory of the clay; and when the two pictures that were always with him—of his mother's wrinkled face and of Fathma, daughter of Daood—moved subconsciously across the focus of his remembrance, while formerly he had tried to brush them aside as something of which he was half ashamed, these days he welcomed the memories, played with them, kept them alive and green. For they made him relish the more keenly the change that had come over his estate. They made his happiness the greater, his wife the more lovely, his gold the more precious. ”

“ He had been in the habit of taking whatever sensations and emotions he could—until he had met Josephine Erskine up there in that sleepy, drab New England village where, for a generation or two, her people had endeavored to impose upon the world with a labored, pathetic, meretricious gentility.
Heretofore, woman had meant nothing to him except a charming manifestation of sex.
Then suddenly, like a sweet, swift throe, love had come to him in Josephine's brown, gold-flecked eyes and crimson mouth.
He had told her so quite simply as they walked in the rose-garden; but she had shaken her head. ”

“ This is the season when I speak of love!"
"Whose love—yours or the girl's?" smilingly asked Madusadan, captain of horse, a man ten years the king's senior, with a mocking, bitter eye, a great, crimson mouth, a crunching chest, massive, hairy arms, the honey of eloquence on his tongue, and a mind that was a deer in leaping, a cat in climbing. Men disliked him because they could not beat him in joust or tournament; and women feared him because the purity of his life, which was an open book, gave the lie to his red lips and the slow-eddying flame in his hooded, brown eyes. ”

“ Some were half mad with excitement, and every once in a while one of them would jump up with a throaty yell, swing into the open space in front of the pedestal with a whirling, gyrating motion, and dance before the jeering, black statue with horrible gestures—and over all the sullen, palsying din of the drums and cymbals and tomtoms—and the red, floating, swirling wreaths of incense smoke—until at last, through sheer, physical exhaustion of the worshipers, the ceremony came to an end. ”