Bara

“ Father can’t live without his flocks and herds, for he’s been used to them all his life. He will die! Arrange it somehow, reverend sir!”
Everyone marvelled at Bára’s unsubdued spirit and refused to believe otherwise than that, after all, it was some sort of supernatural power that made Bára different from other people.
“Never mind, her crest will fall by night,” many of them thought. But they were mistaken. Bára was dejected only until she learned that the peasants had returned to Jacob his work as public herdsman, which the priest had arranged for by giving him his own herd to pasture. ”

“ Though the Bara group live to the north of the Apaporis they have nothing in common with the Uaupes Indians. Both their language and customs resemble more those of the Japura, and they have no intercourse with the surrounding tribes. They are a dark-skinned people, of a low type, and consequently looked down on by their lighter-skinned neighbours. The Maku, also of a low type and dark, are a very nomadic group; in fact all these peoples are wanderers, and the districts here given for their localities must be taken as merely approximate. ”

“ When the snow melts there is excellent pasturage. The climate is pleasant in summer, but bitterly cold in winter. The Bára river with its affluents drains the glens of Tirah. The Aka Khel Afrídís, who have no share in the Pass allowances, own a good dear of land in the lower Bára valley and winter in the adjoining hills. The fighting strength of the above seven sections may be put at 21,000. When they have been able to unite they have shown themselves formidable enemies, for they are a strong and manly race, and they inhabit a very difficult country [17] . ”

“ Lena.—Bara, my head is bursting, please don’t torment me. I didn’t know you could be so mean. You know that it is all in the hands of our overseer, and I shan’t poke my nose into his business.
Bara.—He, gracious lady! He is the cause of the whole business. If he had said nothing about Tony’s escapade—who knows how much of it is really true? Nancy would not have got that three hundred dollars of mine, and Jack would never have thought of her for a wife. The overseer is here today and there tomorrow, and before he goes into active service for good with lady Erna . . . ”

“ No; she is compared to a rose chiefly for the reason that a rose has thorns. The man who tries to pull a Japanese rose is likely to hurt his fingers. The man who tries to win a Bara-Musumé is apt to hurt himself much more seriously,—even unto death. [Pg 106] It were better, alone and unarmed, to meet a tiger than to invite the caress of a Rose-Girl.
Now the appellation of Bara-Musumé—much more rational as a simile than many of our own floral comparisons—can seem strange only because it is not in accord with our poetical usages and emotional habits. ”

“ The streams from Rajgal and Maidan unite and form the Bara River, flowing down the valley of the same name to the Kajurai Plain, shortly before entering which the Bara is joined by the Mastura River.
The Clans The Kuki Khel number some 5600 fighting men, and occupy the Rajgal valley and the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, as far as the Rohtas Hill, which overhangs the fort at Ali Musjid, and also the Bezai Spur—a long underfeature which flanks, but at a considerable distance, the latter part of the railway and road from Peshawar to Fort Jumrud. ”

“ As he searched for the spoor of his prey he searched also for the proper woods for a spear and for bow and arrows, nor were they difficult to find in this forest of familiar trees, but the day was almost done before the gentle wind, up which he had been hunting, carried to his sensitive nostrils the scent spoor of Bara the deer. ”

“ And then it was very quiet once more in the forest.
"It is very cold," said Barbara. "My hands and feet are like ice."
Then the pine-tree and the fir shook down the snow from their broad boughs, and the snow fell upon Barbara and covered her like a white mantle.
"You will be warm now," said the vine, kissing Barbara's forehead. And Barbara smiled.
Then the snowdrop sang a lullaby about the moss that loved the violet. And Barbara said, "I am going to sleep; will you wake me when the prince comes through the forest?" ”

“ In the car, as the train fled through the glory of the sunset, Barbara closed her eyes, the longer to keep the impression of that eager gaze: the lithe, muscular poise of the strong frame, the parted lips, the brown hair curling under the peak of the cloth cap. She tried to imagine him on his backward journey. Now the trolley had passed the rice-fields, now he was striding along the shore road toward Kamakura, where the great bronze Buddha was lifting its face of dreamless calm. Now, perhaps, he was turning back toward the deepening blur of the green island. ”

“ Old Barabbas, the man of ninety, was the first, to express it--the others joined in and the greybeards who had been young together and devoted their whole lives to the cause which to them was the highest in the world, sank into one another's arms, like a body of men condemned to death. ”

“ Strangely enough, in the Tower of Cologne, Barbara was never lame. She always left her crutches leaning up against the steps outside. She could walk and run like anyone else and never even think of crutches. ”

“ Barbara longed to feel those mossy boulders with her bare feet—to splash in that limpid water like a happy child.
"This is the best view," he said simply.
Looking on the endless symphonies of green, it came to her for the first time what fascination could be wrought of mere brown stone and foliage. The effect had a curious sense to her of the unsexual and unhuman. Again, with the odd impression of telepathy with which he had covered his myopic eye, he seemed to answer her thought:
"The Japanese," he said, "sees Nature as neuter. His very language possesses no gender. ”

“ Then Barbara looked at John Gore and he at her.
“We have buried the past,” she said, turning to my lord.
Stephen Gore did not move.
“John and I are man and wife. We have put the past away from us. It is better for us—and for the dead.”
My lord raised his eyes slowly till they rested on Barbara’s face. He saw nothing there but a mist of tenderness and tears. ”

“ Is there any man here? thou shalt say: There is none.
21 So Jahel Haber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and taking also a hammer: and going in softly, and with silence, she put the nail upon the temples of his head, and striking it With the hammer, drove it through his brain fast into the ground: and so passing from deep sleep to death, he fainted away and died.
22 And behold Barac came pursuing after Sisara: and Jahel went out to meet him, and said to him: Come, and I will shew thee, the man whom thou seekest. ”

“ Barrie exclaimed. "Isn't mother—I mean Barbara—gloriously beautiful? She wants me to call her Barbara, and I shall love it. I shall love to do whatever she wants me to do, I'm sure, because she's such a darling. Everybody must want to do what she wants them to do, whether it's right or wrong—though she wouldn't want anything she thought wrong, of course. ”

“ THE TRESPASSER The bishop, and the Ambassador, when the former's call was ended that afternoon, found Barbara with Haru in the garden pagoda. She sat on its wide ledge, Haru at her feet, in a dainty kimono of pale gray cotton-crepe with a woven pattern of plum-blossoms. The oval Japanese face showed no trace now of the passionate anger with which she had fled from Phil's kisses. If it had left a trace the trace was hidden under the racial mask that habitually glosses the surface of oriental feeling. ”

“ No very probable derivation has been obtained for the word Barai, unless it comes from bāri, a hedge or enclosure, and simply means ‘gardener.’ Another derivation is from barāna, to avert hailstorms, a calling which they still practise in northern India. Pān, from the Sanskrit parna (leaf) , is the leaf [193] par excellence. Owing to the fact that they produce what is perhaps the most esteemed luxury in the diet of the higher classes of native society, the Barais occupy a fairly good social position, and one legend gives them a Brāhman ancestry. ”

“ He faced toward the river and looked away into the night where The King's Basin lay—a weird dream-country under the light of the moon. And because it was impossible to think of Barbara's Desert without thinking of Barbara he smiled again, musing that there would be little sleep that night for the girl in Rubio City if she knew what he and Abe were considering. From across the river came the shrill, snarling, yelping coyote chorus and the engineer saw again the body of a dead woman at the dry water hole, an empty canteen, and a big-eyed, brown-haired baby stretching out her arms to him. ”

“ In the two faces, both keenly delicate and sensitive, yet so sharply contrasted—one palely olive under its jetty pillow of straight black hair, the other fair and brown-eyed, crowned with curling gold—the extremes of East and West looked out at each other.
"See, Haru," said Barbara. "How different we are!"
"You so more good-look!" sighed the Japanese girl. "My jus' like the night."
"Ah, but a moonlighted night," cried Barbara, "soft and warm and full of secrets. When you have a sweetheart you will be far more lovely to him than any foreign girl could be!" ”

“ But the Desert waited, silent and hot and fierce in its desolation, holding its treasures under the seal of death against the coming of the strong ones; waited until the man-making forces that wrought through those long ages should have done also their work; waited for this age—for your age and mine—for the age of the Seer and his companions—for the days of my story, the days of Barbara and her friends.
The Seer's expedition, returning from the south, made camp on the bank of the Rio Colorado twenty miles below Rubio City. ”

“ By the arch with its lofty female figure, under the weeping willow, Barbara turned for an instant and looked back. The street seemed to her a maze of reeling lights—a blur of painted lips and drowsing eyes and ghostly sobbing of the samisen. Just outside the gate a pilgrim-priest, his coffin-like shrine strapped on his back, was mumbling a prayer.
The guide spoke complacently: "Japan Yoshiwara are very famed," he said. "I think other countries is very seldom to have got."
"Where do they all come from?" Barbara asked suddenly. "How do they come to be here?" ”

“ Wardor, Clara, Barbara, and Daisy—with Kickup aboard the train, but in a different car—Kickup being only an Indian pony, and the shaggiest kind of one at that. Miss Barbara and "her maid," as she grandly styled the moon-faced Indian sometimes, sat behind Mrs. Wardor and Clara—Clara and Barbara each sitting nearest the window. Clara in deepest black, with the delicate flush on her face, looked, the most interesting of young widows, and whenever she raised her dove-like eyes, was sure to encounter the gaze of the many who stood outside. ”

“ In the month of her return Barbara had been born. A year ago her aunt, to whom she owed the care of her young girlhood, had died, and Barbara had found herself, at twenty-three, mistress of a liberal fortune and of her own future. Japan had always exercised a potent spell over her imagination. She pictured it as a land of strange glowing trees, of queer costumes and weird, fantastic buildings. More than all, it was the land of her mother's life-romance, where her father had loved and died. There was one other tangible tie—her uncle, her mother's brother, was Episcopal bishop of Tokyo. ”

“ The sun sank low in the west as Barbara walked in the alley of yews, so low that the western arch of the cloister was a panel of ruddy gold. The long shafts of the decline came streaming through and through the criss-cross boughs, splashing the trunks with amber, and weaving a checker of light and shadow upon the path. There was no sound to break the silence save the occasional plash of oars upon the river and the faint voices from the tennis-court beyond the house. ”

“ Bartema, writing in the sixteenth century "of Barbara and the Island of Ethiope," offers the following brief description:--"After that the tempests were appeased, we gave wind to our sails, and in short time arrived at an island named Barbara, the prince whereof is a Mahometan. [1] The island is not great but fruitful and well peopled: it hath abundance of flesh. The inhabitants are of colour inclining to black. All their riches is in herds of cattle." ”

“ Barada's a big power down there—political, commercial, and social. An amusing devil in his way, quite capable of inviting you to dinner and after feeding you full of good food passing the wink to have a knife inserted in vulnerable portions of your anatomy as you leave his doorstep smoking one of his cigars—a special article that costs him two dollars apiece. Nothing's too good for his enemies! ”

“ She did not retreat, but fell upon her knees and lifted the head of the Indian up from the ground. Drops of crimson stole down the bronze chest and fell slowly to the turf.
Barbara did not attempt to escape, though she saw at a glance all her danger. The savage who had been her protector was shot through the heart. The sight of so much life and strength smitten down in one instant paralyzed her. She had never witnessed a violent death before, and the shock bereft her alike of hope and fear. ”

“ That is why, my friendt, I said the acgomplice in Baraka's suite could not know much. He could be trusted to carry in a suitcase; he could be trusted to set a fire so that the room of Baraka would be left empty and someone else could get in; but he could not be trusted to know that the liddle monkey had failed! ”

“ He saw himself living the life of these people; renouncing everything that meant "the world" and "life" to him—everything except Barbara; driving burros loaded with wood to town and tramping about its streets with a basket of pottery at his back; saw himself with painted face and nude, smeared body dancing the clownish antics of the Koshare; planting prayer sticks; sprinkling the sacred meal; taking part and pretending belief in all the heathen rites of the pueblo secret religion—and then Barbara sprang out of the house, crying to her father in the Indian tongue, "Wait! ”