Achmed Abdullah

“ But we—we of the North ...”
“We are sixteen pukka devils—without as much as the pig's smell!” softly interrupted Hector to whom the half forgotten lore of bazaar jests and bazaar quips and slang was returning with every minute.
“Good, by the teeth of God!” exclaimed the older man, hugging the Englishman to his thick chest. “Thou art a man after my own heart—a twister of words! A turner of neat phrases! And—an honest man! For only an honest man can twist words for the right purpose! Thou hast a good head on thy shoulders—”
"And a good head has a thousand hands,” suggested the princess. ”

“ Yet—what need will there be of passports and talk and babble of passports to a young prince of the Gengizkhani clan, returning to his own land, vouched for by myself, a respectable and wealthy man and a member of the Legislative Council of the Calcutta Municipality, decorated, deservedly, with the Star of the Indian Empire? A young prince, furthermore, who travels in the retinue of the ruling princess of Tamerlanistan! The jackal—and the pig—will bow their filth-scabbed necks. And the British Raj will also bow—for Central Asia is Central Asia ... ”

“ Expected—to seal the wooing of swords!”
“More mystifying, unintelligible wooing of swords stuff!” thought Hector, while the princess complicated matters yet more by saying:
“These servants can be trusted. They were my father's slaves. They know all about thy blade”—touching its hilt where it protruded from Hector's waist shawl—“and, too, about the other blade!” ”

“ By his side sat the Princess Aziza Nurmahal in a traveling sari of gray- and green-striped muslin, the soft flower of her face “veiled against the inquisitive glances of this stinking Southland,” to quote Mehmet Iddrissy Khan who had bid them good-by on the threshold of his house in the Colootallah. ”

“ Through the stark, swollen, heat-scorched yellowness of Bengal, with fleeting glimpses of blue-garbed natives tilling the fields and patient buffaloes turning the water wheels and once in a while a squat, shimmering city seen vaguely through the delicate tracery of the trees! ”