Achmed Abdullah

“ At his feet a cuplike valley devoured by sunshine; farther up the slopes the lean mountain pasture, smooth and polished with the faint snow haze, and slashing through, straight as a blade, the caravan road which leads to Kabul; the caravan road which, centuries ago, had echoed to the footsteps of Alexander's legions—the caravan road which is as old as strife and older than peace.
Dost Ali was a short, wide-shouldered man, with gray, ironic eyes, high cheek bones, his beard dyed red with henna juice. ”

“ REPRISAL He had kept his oath, Hadji Rahmet used to say, for wrong—or for right. He would give to the latter word the emphasis of a slightly lowered voice. For, clear beyond the depths of even subconscious sophistry, he knew that he had done right; and the hills knew it—and perhaps Dost Ali, the Red Chief.
The happening itself? What did it matter? Nothing mattered except the right and wrong of it. Besides, the last word was not yet said; perhaps never would be. It was bigger than his life; bigger than Dost Ali's life; bigger than the hills themselves. ”

“ Also, Dost Ali was a superstitious man. He could imagine the hadji's ghost, after the death of the body, squatting on a mountain top like a lean, red-necked vulture, looking down at the Raven's Station with flat, gray, indifferent eyes—perhaps smiling, perhaps still croaking about Peace.
Should he rob him? And what was there to rob? A muslin shirt, a rough khilat, a sheepskin coat, a pair of grass sandals—not enough to satisfy the greed of the meanest dancing girl from the south.
"Ho! man of great feet and small head!" ”

“ His lips twisted oddly, and had the hadji looked up he would have seen a tear in the mountaineer's beady, puckered eyes—a tear which, strangely, seemed to lift what was abominable into something not altogether unworthy; to overshadow, somehow, the drab, cruel, sinister fact of the broken body down there by the cataract of the Kabul River.
"Hadji!" the mountaineer called again. Then, as the other did not look up, did not reply, hardly seemed to breathe, he walked away, shrugging his broad shoulders. What was done was done, he thought, and he would pay blood money as the Koran demands it. ”

“ The blind mullah who ministered to the scant spiritual wants of the Raven's Station had brought word of the stranger: the Kabuli merchant who, after his wife's death, had bidden farewell to the mosques and bazaars of the city and had come to live in the hills—"to forget," as he had told the sneering mullah, "to live mated to the clean simplicity of the hills, to bring up my little son away from the noisy toil of the market places, away from the smoke and strife of the city streets, here in the hills where there is nobody but God." ”

“ The stallion jumped back, and the little boy fell on the ground, flopping grotesquely—and something reached out and touched the hadji's soul, leaving the chill of an undescribable uneasiness.
He bent to pick the boy up. The little body lay still, lifeless.
He looked. He saw a blue mark across the lad's windpipe where the steel chain had pressed—and he thought that his own son was dead, and that dead was the Red Chief's son. He thought that the hand of man had killed the former, the hand of God the latter, thus evening the score. ”

“ Ho, thou, my hero!" And then father and son would run through the gray old rooms of the castle, playing like children, frightening the women over their cook pots, screaming and yelling and laughing.
Dost Ali was easily moved to laughter—laughter cold as the hill winds—and he laughed loud and long when early one day, with the valley still waist-high in the clammy morning mist, he saw Hadji Rahmet wander down the slopes, driving a herd of sheep with a crooked staff, and followed by his little son. ”

“ There he sat himself on a sugarloaf-shaped hill, built a rough castle, and put his descendants, straight down to Dost Ali, on a pedestal to represent the power and arrogance of a race that will never grow old, that will never emerge from the sunlight of brazen freedom into the thrall and gloom of civilization. ”

“ For he had decided to kill the Red Chief's son, and he knew that, while sharp eyes would detect a stranger wandering up the slopes to the Raven's Station, none would bother about a bullock—in a land where bullocks mean money and food and clothes—nor would sharp eyes, looking from above, see a man clinging to the bullock's shaggy belly, his hands buried in the thick pelt of the wabbly hump. ”

“ His voice was steady; and then, even in Dost Ali's slow-grinding mind, rose the conviction that this man—this man who suffered the most deadly insults without fight or flight—was not a coward. And his hatred grew apace. For he did not understand.
A man who fought—yes! Also, a man who feared and fled. He had met both sorts, had handled both sorts. But here was a man who neither feared nor fled. It was a new experience to the mountaineer's naïve brutality—a new experience to crush which he would have to devise new means. ”

“ They turned and stared at him out of their flat, stupid eyes, helpless without the point of the staff to marshal their feeding.
"Peace!" came the word again—a strange word here, and to Dost Ali it seemed an affront—an affront to the sweep of the hills, an affront to his own free breed, to the Raven's Station which had always gar nered strife and fed on strife. Yes, an affront, and the Red Chief stepped square into the hadji's path and shot forth his hatred and contempt in a few sharp-ringing words: "Ho! Abuser of the Salt!" ”

“ 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 does me harm, may I be permitted a full measure of revenge. May I cause his hands to drop away, and his feet. May his life pass into the dark like a sheet of foam. ”

“ Where was the satisfaction in killing a man who did not resist, who did not answer steel with the song of steel, flash for flash, and strength for strength? It would leave the mystery still unsolved, the riddle unread, the grape impressed. ”

“ The mists of the hills—the mists in his soul! They echoed this day to the scream and toll of the death gongs, and from his heart there beat up a sob which all his faith could not still.
He sat the next night through and watched the hiving stars swarm and swirl past the horizon. He watched them die one by one. He watched the young sun shoot up, racing along the rim of the world in a sea of fire, with shafts of purple light that put out the paling moon. He watched a long streamer of north bound birds, wild parrots tumbled out of their southern home by the moist sweep of the Punjab monsoon ”

“ That night Hadji Rahmet turned thief. He stole a tiny trotting bullock belonging to Ram Chander Dass, the Hindu who picked up a scant living by lending badly chipped silver rupees to the hillmen and, as the mullah said, by praying every night for the swag-bellied and bestial god of the Hindus, which same god is the guardian angel of Compound Interest. ”

“ He used to say that even after he had begun to comprehend the reality of it his immediate thoughts had not been of his son's life, but of the waist shawl. He had remembered when he had bought it: in Kabul, in the Bazaar of the Silk Weavers. His son had liked the pattern and the bright blending of colors. So he had bought it, and—
Words had come to him. "Don't! Don't!"—just those words: weak, meaningless, foolish. But he spoke them solemnly, as if he had found a powerful formula, and then his little son gave a frantic, straining kick. ”

“ Moreover, such is the Afghan code with its strange niceties of honor and prejudice, that unless he who is insulted respond immediately with the point of the dagger, the consciousness of moral rectitude rests with him who insults; and so Dost Ali was shocked, morally as well as ethically, when the hadji stood there and smiled; in spite of the fact that he had called him a beggar, a cut-off one, the son of a, burnt father, a foreigner, and a Yahudi ”