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.
"The hills!" he would repeat in a voice tinged and mellowed—by distance, as it were. They seemed to play a personal part in the telling; neither in the back ground nor in the foreground, but hovering enigmatical, fabulous—in a way, naïve. It had an odd effect—his speaking of them, here, in the tainted, brooding heat of India; as if, by speaking of them, he was being carried out of a perplexing present into the austere simplicity of the Himalayas; as if, by leaving them, he had lost some of his own crushing simplicity. Yet, leaving them, he had not been actuated by that complicated emotion called Fear—in spite of Dost Ali's threats, in spite of the leaky tongues of the Kabul market place.
The man did not understand fear. He had gone into the plains to find spiritual release from the memory of the thing. So he had visited the many shrines, true to the worship. Assiduously he had repeated the ninety-nine excellent attributes of Allah, and all his thought had been of forgetting, and of devotion to Him. He had wandered from the Khyber snows to the sour, sluggish swamps of Ceylon. He had talked with ascetics of many faiths in that land of many faiths. He had done bodily penance, gradually subduing his physical Self. But his memory had remained: an inky scrawl across his mind.
"For memory," said the hadji, "is of the soul, and not of the dirt-clouted
Also there were the tongues—the tongues which can crush though they have no bones, the tongues of Afghan traders who drift through the passes into Hind. They would babble of the thing, back yonder in the glitter of the
It started with the day on which Hadji Rahmet crossed the Red Chief's path for the first time. Perhaps even—though that is a question for ethnologists to decide—it had started many centuries earlier, when one of the hadji's ancestors traveled from Persia through Seistan into Kabul, there to trade with smooth silk and flowered Kisbah cloth, to plant the damask roses of Ispahan, to give a soft philosophical twist to the harsh lessons of the Koran, and to break his heart—here—in the stony north; while the Red Chief's ancestor, driven out of Tatary by squat, flat-nosed warriors who recognized no God, who fought on horse back, and who tore like mastiffs at lumps of raw flesh and quaffed down curdled milk poured from human skulls, crossed into Afghanistan from the north. 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.
Symbolic? In a way.
And that Hadji Rahmet should come into the Red Chief's life was also symbolic—and necessary: like the shadow in a light, to emphasize its harsh brightness.
Take the Red Chief up there in his stronghold, the Mahattah Ghurab, the Raven's Station, as the hill folk called it.
Above him the jagged, bitter rocks of the higher mountains where scrub oak met pine and where pine—to use the chief's words—met the naked heart of Allah. Still higher up the hard-baked, shimmering snows of the Salt Range, hooded and grim like the gigantic eye brow of some heathen Pukhtu god, a god mourning the clank and riot of the days before the Arabs pushed into Central Asia and whipped the land into the faith of Islam—alone there with his pride and his clan; clear away from the twitter and cackle of the city marts, from the turrets and bell-shaped domes of Kabul, from the strangling lash of the Ameer's decrees; sloughing his will and his passion as snakes cast their skin; brooking no master but himself and the black mountain thunder.
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.